Member-only story
Twenty Years of Perimenopause
I started perimenopause when I was thirty-nine. No, that’s not a typo. 39 years old. I’ll be fifty-nine later this year. So almost twenty years of this hell.
At the start, I had terrible night sweats. I felt as though my internal thermometer broke. I was living in Tucson at the time. I remember sitting outside in 110º weather, wearing a sweater, wrapped in a blanket, and still shivering. I would completely sweat through the sheets twice a night.
Of course, my (male) doctor at the time wouldn’t listen to me or my symptoms. He insisted that I was too young to be in perimenopause. He dismissed everything I had to say, with a thinly veiled hint that I was being overly dramatic and perhaps even slight hypochondriac. (There are times that I want to go back and find that man and just slap him silly.)
So I didn’t get any help. And I continued to decline. While the night sweats and bad thermometer would come and go, the scariest part for me was the creeping brain fog. I was no longer as sharp as I once had been. It was getting more difficult to write. I was physically getting sicker as well.
I was afraid I was going to have to go on disability or something. My world was closing in on me.
