I don’t think I was ever prepared for how absolutely RUBBISH perimenopause can get. Even when I realised I was probably in it (thanks to a hormonal based breast lump that thankfully turned out not to be cancer after a biopsy), I still wasn’t prepared for… whatever the heck this week has been.
I have had constant daily hot flushes, absolutely drenching night sweats, and I feel like I’ve been dragged backwards through a car wash while holding a plugged in toaster. In between all of that, it’s somehow managed to convince my body I’ve got a virus.
I’m exhausted. I radiate heat from the inside while the outside of me is freezing, then five minutes later I’m shivering. My digestive system has apparently resigned. My brain fog has been so bad I haven’t written a single thing all week.
Then there’s the emotions. Oh, the emotions. I have cried. I have raged. Not JUST over life changing events, obviously. Over things like supermarket packaging, the seventeen posts I randomly read on Instagram, and kale, of all things.
In hindsight, some of it is genuinely funny. At the time, though, I would have happily declared war on a 150 g bag of vegetables. Actually, I still think I had a very good point with that. I’ll probably write a whole post about it at some point. It’s a very strange experience to be furious about something while simultaneously thinking, “This is RIDICULOUS... and yet I’m still absolutely LIVID”.
It has affected my mental health, my eating disorder recovery, and my patience. I haven’t exactly been much fun to be around.
The Annoying Problem With Perimenopause
Perimenopause, despite the fact that a really high number of the population will go through it, can actually be really isolating.
As soon as you mention you’re struggling with perimenopause, a woman rushes in from nowhere to tell you how, “Well, I sailed through it, didn’t notice it and didn’t even need hormones. I also really don’t think you should be speaking about this because you’re scaring women, when actually it’s a beautiful, transformative time.”
My beautiful transformative time hasn’t quite looked like that, Sharon. Let me tell you about Biscoff the Bear.
I’ve mentioned him on my blog many times before. He’s my recovery emotional support bear and I sleep with him every night. My son often brings him into the living room because I forget to rescue him while I’m wandering around in my medication induced stupor seeking nothing but caffeine. My son doesn’t want either me or Biscoff to get lonely.
The other night I had severe drenching night sweats. It was really bad. My hair looked like I’d just come out of the shower, my pyjamas were about fifteen shades darker than when I went to bed, and my sheets and duvet looked like someone had emptied a bucket of water over them.
I mentioned to my son that I’d barely slept because of the night sweats which also caused really bad realistic nightmares.
AN HOUR after I got up, he wandered into my room, retrieved Biscoff from his watery duvet prison, came back into the living room and asked,
“Why is Biscoff’s foot SOAKED?”
I had to explain that Biscoff’s foot had become completely sodden after spending the night marinating in my excreted hormone water.
“EW. THAT’S DISGUSTING.”
“Yes. Yes, it is. Thank you. I feel like I haven’t showered for two weeks. I regret having a shower and doing my hair last night. It was an absolutely POINTLESS exercise.”
It is not a beautiful transformative time, for me. Thankfully, my son, as blunt as always (one of the many things I love about him), finally gave me permission to feel what I’d been told not to.
That this is, instead, disgusting.
Sure, there has been some transformation. Thanks to the women on social media enthusiastically running N-of-1 trials on themselves, I’ve tried just about everything thanks to them. I take creatine, electrolytes, fish oil, magnesium and protein. I lift weights. I am not even a gym person. It is not something I EVER imagined myself doing especially with my conditions, but here we are.
Transformation out of necessity because, unfortunately (and I HATE that this is true), these things actually do help.
I just wish they helped more. It’s not like I can do all of it when I’m EXHAUSTED. Still being consistently inconsistent still seems to help.
Mind you, there was also the period where another woman informed me that I didn’t need any of that because it was all a scam. Just “women doing anything to avoid ageing when actually it’s beautiful” Apparently you only need electrolytes if you’re running a marathon. I believed her for a while and stopped taking them.
Turns out I sweat MORE than if I’d run a marathon, Sharon. They’re actually extremely useful when your body appears determined to expel every molecule of water and salt it possesses.
As soon as the heatwave hit, I started taking them again, and I swear every single cell in my body collectively sighed,
“THANK YOU FOR PROTECTING THE ONE WATER AND SALT MOLECULE WE HAD LEFT.”
I don’t know what the deal is with telling someone who’s struggling that you didn’t notice your perimenopause. I’m genuinely pleased for you if that’s your experience.
But me talking honestly about mine doesn’t take anything away from yours. It just means the next woman who wakes up to discover her emotional support teddy bear is still wet an hour later might realise she isn’t completely alone.
I guess my body is doing womanhood wrong again. Not the first time. And, even at 42, apparently not the last.
The Effect on Recovery
Being in eating disorder recovery and heading straight into rapidly worsening perimenopause is a ride.
When I relapsed, I lost my periods for a long while. I was already in perimenopause before I relapsed, and losing my periods seemed to put it on pause. If I am being entirely honest, it was a relief because I felt a bit more like myself again. It was one of the variables that left me feeling stuck in my relapse. I didn’t want all those symptoms to come back.
Obviously they did come back because I entered recovery this time last year. When I gained weight and regained my periods, every month since it’s been progressively getting worse. Faster than it had before I relapsed.
It’s almost as if it is “catching up” with where I was supposed to be in perimenopause while I didn’t have any periods. I have no idea if that’s true, and there’s literally no science on it. It hasn’t been studied at all. For my own N-of-1 experience, it has been far faster than perimenopause is supposed to be, and this unpredictability and speed have been absolute hell physically and psychologically, especially when you’re recovering from a severe mental illness and living with others alongside it.
People in recovery often celebrate their periods returning as a sign of healing. I did when I first recovered at 28. It is a completely different experience to have them return this time only for your ovaries to loudly inform you it’s almost over.
On my worst days, it became difficult to remember why recovery was worth it. No one’s reasons to recover include experiencing night sweats so bad, every night, that they give you intensely vivid nightmares, leave you barely sleeping, and cover your bear in excreted hormone water. To have hot flushes so severe and so frequent you think you must have sepsis (OCD is dramatic and also has got TERRIBLE thanks to hormones) and are about to keel over. To have brain fog so bad you can’t write.
When recovery started to feel like this, I became willing to try almost anything that might help. All of the things I’ve done, by the way, recovery communities tell you NOT to do. You can’t even mention protein without someone accusing you of “not being in recovery.”
As if that wasn’t enough, another symptom appeared. I think it was last month that I suddenly developed Burning Mouth Syndrome. I’ve definitely written about it somewhere on the blog, but time is an illusion to me at this point, so good luck finding it. Whenever it actually was, it has been here to stay ever since. It made food not just psychologically difficult, but physically difficult too. It’s hard to enjoy food when your mouth feels like you burnt it on hot pizza.
I find myself thinking, “If I’m going to gain weight, I at least want to enjoy the food I’m eating.” It’s this weird eating disorder thought that catches me every time because I genuinely believe it in that moment. I am not gaining weight if I can’t fully enjoy what I’m eating.
I drink three or four iced decaf coffees a day because they’re one of the only things that help, along with my quark bowl. I put the quark in the freezer for ten minutes before eating it so the consistency becomes the same as Mr Whippy ice cream. It’s amazing. I’d happily eat that for every meal, but I’d also be eating over 300g of protein a day and not much else.
I am not The Rock. I do NOT need 300g of protein.
I guess I’m just really struggling with it all, and this week has been particularly terrible. The constant hot flushes mean I just don’t feel like myself at all. I look in the mirror and, despite having a full shower earlier, I look unkempt, exhausted, unwell, my teenage spotty face is back and I look like I haven’t showered in two weeks.
I’d do my hair, but drying it gives me hot flushes so bad I need another shower afterwards. It’s really important in recovery to pay attention to yourself. To reconnect with your body. To look after yourself. It feels almost impossible to do that when your body suddenly feels unfamiliar.
Oh, this nice new top I bought? It’s now fifteen shades darker with sweat before I’ve even left the house.
Great. Such a wonderful healing time.
What Now Then?
Well, it’s taken me LITERALLY all weekend to write this post. But at least I could still write it. I guess that’s how I’m approaching perimenopause and recovery too. After all, I feel like some sort of pioneer existing in a situation where no science exists. When I got heavily into physics, I naively hoped I’d understand how the Universe works, instead I’m discovering what happens when you have hypothalamic amenorrhea half way through perimenopause. Not as exciting but it does have the same amount of unknowable.
I know I should probably discuss this with my GP at some point, but I’m very worried they wont take me seriously because I’m 42. Despite the fact all of the women in my family went through it early.
At least Biscoff has recovered from the night of the ridiculous sweating. I still haven’t though, waking up that wet repeatedly always makes me remember how rubbish the movie Waterworld was.
The song I used to dance to as a younger person, and now as a 42 year old I have hot flushes to.
Absurd Universe 