Hey, if it’s a choice between the occasional dizziness/annoying, squeezing pain and hot flashes, I’ll take the former, believe me. At least the Excedrin still works for those.
Knock on wood, no hot flashes so far.
The only thing that bothered me* was that a shoulder injury turned out to be possibly, not assuredly) brought on by lowered hormone levels. Insidious onset adhesive capsulitis.
Apparently I could have fixed it by taking hormones. There are “good” hormones and “bad” hormones. I decided I’ve had enough of those hormones and went to a physical therapist for three months.
*Actually the night sweats aren’t that great either, simply because they wake me up. Oddly enough I’m not hot, just sweaty–hence I need to find the covers so I don’t freeze. I may be having hot flashes; I seem not to be the coldest person in the room less often these days. But not only would they not bother me, I would appreciate them.
My mother was on HRT for 20 years starting way back in the 80s, thought it was the best thing since sliced bread–until she suddenly cropped up with a whole bunch of scary breast cysts a couple years ago, in her 70s, just about the time the medical establishment was saying, “Um…maybe HRT isn’t the best thing since sliced bread after all…”
So I made the decision to go through menopause hormone-free, and after 2 years of it, you learn coping strategies.
It helps me to think of it as a hormonal storm, as I lie there at night unable to sleep. “Your endocrine system is having a temper tantrum, is all it is,” I tell myself. “This too shall pass.” The worst part of the night sweats is not so much “hotness” as it is the waking up because you’re cold. You’re having a hot flash, and you’re too hot under the covers, and you sweat, and you fling off the covers in your sleep, and then you chill, and that’s what wakes you up. I invested in a light-weight cotton bedspread, which is midway between “sheet only” and the quilt,. And then that gives me 3 layers to work with in different combinations–sheet, sheet and bedspread, sheet and bedspread and quilt, depending on what I need at the moment. From one minute to the next, too. And some nights it’s a real dance, I’ll tell ya. I’m thankful the Better Half is a heavy sleeper, because I’d be driving a light sleeper nuts, with the constant flinging off and then pulling up of the various covers.
I also found that you sleep better at night if you absolutely do not take a nap the previous afternoon. No matter how sleepy you are, stay awake. And don’t go to bed at 9 pm, because you’ll wake up at 1 am completely unable to go back to sleep. You gotta stay up till 10 or 11.
I did find I could take a 5-minute cat nap in the afternoon by sitting bolt upright in bed with all the lights on (don’t get comfortable, IOW) which gets me through the 3 p.m. crunch of the “I just cannot stay awake another minute” blues.
The hot flashes, night sweats, and insomnia–for me–are made much worse by caffeine, any kind of caffeine, even what’s in chocolate, even the tiny amount that’s in decaffeinated coffee (except Folger’s Crystals). And herbal stimulants, even things as innocuous as Red Zinger tea, licorice candy, and also, of all things, root beer if it has “natural flavors”.
What helps me is soy protein–eating a BIG cereal bowl full of cooked TSP chunks for lunch every day really helped. However, that gets old after a while, so I switched to a soy supplement called Nature’s Resource Soy Balance, which does work.
What else helps a LOT is regular exercise. When I slack off and get out of the habit of my daily 20-minute walk, the symptoms get worse. When I go back to my daily walk, they get better.
I also observe that the symptoms fluctuate according to my background level of anxiety. Bad ongoing things at work mean the symptoms got worse, but when things lighten up at work, symptoms get better.
As far as missed periods, I am here to tell you that you can’t go by “missed periods” to try to calculate whether you’re “peri” or “post” or whatever, because after a year or so of irregular and skipped periods (after a lifetime of regular periods every 29 days like clockwork), I went 18 months, yes, that’s eighteen months, without a period, and I thought I was done. Then I had another period last August and I thought it was cancer, but a hysteroscopy proved otherwise. Just not done with menopause yet, apparently. Sometimes your body can be really annoying, ya know?
And my head hair got thin; the Better Half reports that he can see my scalp. And I’ve got a small bald spot right in front, same as my grandmother had. And my leg hair all of a sudden got really thin, not that that’s a bad thing.
But freakiest of all is that my pubic hair all of a sudden is thin, with bald spots. That’s REALLY weird. The gray hairs I can handle, but looking at it in the mirror, the “little girl” hairless mons veneris is just…weird.
Anyway, the best thing to do is just take it one day at a time, and don’t keep looking at the calendar, trying to figure out where you are on the Menopause Timeline, because it’s a continuum without waypoints.
ETA: My cold tolerance also plummeted–I spent last winter wearing, at times, TWO pairs of sweatpants around the house, plus a silk jacket over the sweatshirt and a t-shirt, just because with the thermostat set at 68, I was COLD.
I just had a bout of adhesive capsulitis this spring. It came out of nowhere. This makes more sense now, knowing that it could be hormone-related.
(Deepest sympathy on the AC - I have never known pain like that before. I have never cried and screamed from pain like that before.)
Huh. I also had adhesive capsulitis in my shoulder this year. I guess it could be linked to my hysterectomy 3 years ago, even though I kept my ovaries.