Menopause: the ignored epidemic

There's a good reason menopause both sucks and blows.

Women are set up for a rocky transition because modern life bombards us with unrelenting stress, added toxins, and a low-nutrient, processed food, diet. This keeps most of us in a hormonally fragile state from adolescence to perimenopause anyway.

This is the part that sucks.

Then, when menopause hits, we often have trouble because this was a delicate balance at its best, and now several major production plants have collapsed. So we go to the doctor, and get offered anti-depressants. Because they are so afraid of giving women hormones. Even if there might be thyroid and adrenal issues happening along with the known estrogen and progesterone deficits.

This is the part that blows.

No way to escape

Perhaps there is a more neglected patient on the face of the earth than the middle-aged woman. I'm not belittling the challenges faced by those without health insurance, adequate income, or even a shortage of health professionals where they live.

But if we polled the people in physician waiting rooms across the country, the one question I would ask is: "Are your health concerns taken seriously?"

we thought it would be a safe spot

In one 1992 study, the reactions of women to menopause broke down like so:

• 25% of women experience no noticeable changes except the cessation of menstruation
• 50% of women experience some menopausal symptoms, varying from mild to moderate
• 25% of women have more severe symptoms

It seems to me that this is an extraordinary piece of information.

Aren't we told, over and over again, that this is a "natural" thing for our bodies to do and so we are just carrying on about nothing? Why, then, do three-fourths of the women dealing with this "natural" transition have symptoms that are, at best, annoying, and at worst, leaving them unable to lead a normal life?

When I began grappling with insomnia, mood swings, and exhaustion, both my primary physician and my OB/GYN (male) took the patronizing "heh heh, this is what happens when we get older" route. They said it would probably pass shortly. I should get more sleep, try to reduce stress, and make sure I "ate right."

So I tried. I took to the web to form a more detailed plan, based on a consensus I gleaned from big, mainstream kind of sites. Sure enough, these sources expanded on what my doctors had told me. Saved! I had been plucked from my stormy ocean, put on a boat, and delivered to Conventional Wisdom Island.

Here's what the natives on the island were told to do:

• cut back on meat and fat and substitute whole grains
• drink a lot of soy milk
• increase their exercise, especially cardio
• begin stress-reducing routines like meditation and yoga
• become vegetarian
• go to bed earlier

And I was ready to get back in the boat and paddle out to sea again.

I've been there -- vegetarianism had made me fat and sick. Soy milk is not healthy. Yes, it's a source of estrogens, but the wrong kind that can lead to estrogen dominance in the absence of progesterone. All the cardio in my past had aggravated an old hip injury, I couldn't do it any more.

I'd been in a meditation class for two years already, and I was quite good at it. I went to bed early, it was waking up at midnight and not getting back to sleep until five in the morning that was the problem.

Fear of effective treatment

For a year, I tried to wait it out. This was a transition and it was supposed to end.

I took herbs to help regulate my hormones. I tried over the counter, vegetable, forms of estrogen, but they tore up my stomach like a Roto-Tiller. I felt my coping skills, formerly hovering in the high 80's, had plunged into the single digits. I'm normally a cheerful and cooperative person, but now my frustration would boil over in an instant and I'd want to destroy things. With an axe. While screaming.

I started using apps and other electronic devices for both home and work because my memory would short out on me. The last straw came when I forgot some backups at work. I'd been an IT professional for decades and this was as natural as breathing. There was no harm done, but I felt horrible and panicked. I made an emergency appointment at my OB/GYN.

I'll never forget the way the woman PA kept rolling her chair back and back as I launched into my litany of misery. At one point I do believe flames shot from my eyes.

She declared me a "five alarm menopause emergency." And offered me Prozac.

I was starting to get that axey-screamy feeling again. In short, clipped, words, I said that she'd just explained I had an endocrine problem. I wanted an endocrine solution.

And then, because I had demanded it, because I shot flames from my eyes, I got a prescription for an expensive combination of hormones extracted from PREgnant MARe urINe.

It was the end... of the beginning.

So it all started when...

When I was a teen, struggling with what turned out to be a challenging adolescence, I figured that by the time I got to menopause, science would have figured it all out.

I was terribly, utterly, ludicrously wrong.

To explain my feelings, visually, in an artistic metaphor

I began menstruating in the 1970's and I got terrible cramps, and was told that would "go away when I had my first baby." There I was, mid-teens, not sure I even wanted children, and even if I did the solution to my problem was about ten responsible years away?

It was my first inkling that the world of adult authority is not based on The Scientific Method. In fact, many decades later, I've decided it more closely resembles a bunch of well-meaning, but inebriated, people with a dartboard.

Nonetheless, I managed, until some mid-life medical decisions plunged me into hell. And the world of medicine, which was instrumental in getting me into this state, turned out to be no help at all when it came to getting me out.

It took the World Wide Web. well-honed research skills, my innate tenacity, and a desperate willingness to try almost anything. The miserable part was quite the incentive all by itself. But there was also the fact that the timing was downright evil.

I was just getting a lot of obligations out of the way, I had some wonderful projects I wanted to work on, I had built up a base of skills and understanding. And I can barely get out of bed? I can barely get through the day? There are times when I have trouble thinking? And I can't sleep?

I became driven to not only regain my health, but to surpass my previous state. Now I have to live a long life because this half belongs to me.

I was able to put a lot of pieces together. I'm still in the process. There's a red barn, with most of its roof, and you can tell it's in a field. There's a crow, but it's hard to tell what it's sitting upon.

I know we're supposed to do the edges of the puzzle, first. But, sometimes, things don't work that way.