Moods, hormones, sleepless nights and being 45!!
When my son hit was 3 and the baby/toddler fog had lifted, that I was still extremely moody, angry stressed, thinking the worst all the time….basically I wasn’t myself. I resented everything and everyone, even my beautiful son. Hot flushes were getting unbearable and I was getting very little support from my partner. I had my own home made preserve business and also a cat sitting business that I mainly ran from home so I coped.
When it got too bad I went yo the doctors and she prescribed HRT which, like the pill, sent me loopy la la. I was not only getting hot flushes and forgetting everything and bumping into everything, breaking stuff from intense clumsiness, I also had an itchy lower back (just like from the second I felt pregnant) and itchiness in my arm pits.
She then prescribed me anti depressants and after 3 weeks I suddenly became myself again. I was still clumsy as fuck but no hot sweats and I wasn’t stressed, moody or angry at the world. I had/have no sex drive.
I stopped taking the happy pills around 1.5 years ago as I ‘sensed’ it was all over, just like I had sensed my first pregnancy was over at around 6 weeks but my body held onto it for a further 5 weeks and I knew from my itchy lower back, every other time I got pregnant.
It was then that I started to talk to other women about their menopause and their experiences and realised that I was normal and had probably been going through peri menopause for years but failed pregnancies and then a full term pregnancy and then baby fog….disguised it…..or maybe because I and never known about it or no one had ever talked to me about it in any detail, I hadn’t noticed or realised what I was going through.
I remember my Mum going through it and my older sisters also but we didn’t talk about it.
All that has changed now as I have mission to make sure we all talk about it and share. I encourage any woman who thinks she has started peri menopause to talk to others, the listen to our stories, to go to a nutritionist/reflexologist/herbalist but also go to the doctors. And not to suffer just because it’s a ‘woman’s thing and natural. Cancer is natural.
My last period was December 2018. My son’s dad and I split in October 2020 and aside from going mental from lack of physical contact with friends and missing hugs and social gatherings like you would not believe, I am a happy post menopausal woman, who is constantly knackered being a geriatric Mum of an intensely lively 5.5 year old!!
To any woman reading this….peri menopause can be a bitch. It affects everyone in different ways, it can be treated in so many ways, left to run its course on its own, treated with herbs or blasted with happy pills (anti depressants), you will only find your.own way of dealing with it by knowing about and listening to other woman.
Thanks for reading this.
Rachel Carter
Ages 51
DOB 12.1.70
LAST PERIOD December 2018
Proud Mum of Lex da Fonseca DOB 13.7.15