Tuesday 19 June 2012

The heat is on. Maybe.

When I started this blog, the idea was to write about weird stuff happening to me that may or may not have to do with being perimenopausal. Because it's sometimes hard to know, you know? Like those obsessive self-diagnosers who consult Dr Google for every ache and twinge and always come up with cancer, it can often be difficult to know if what you're experiencing is a perimenopausal symptom or just nothing and I don't like jumping at shadows. I like to be sure.

But these are uncertain times in this little body and I'm not sure.

I'm writing this at 5.50 am, having been awake since about 4 am and up since 5 am.  Like many nights in the last few months, I woke up feeling hot. Not running with sweat or anything, just overly warm. I find myself sticking my legs out from the doona to get the cool night air, sometimes even throwing the doona aside altogether.  This could be perfectly normal or it could be the start of the dreaded hot flushes (or is it flashes? perhaps that's a debate alongside color/colour. Who knows?). Anyway, the thing is, it's winter. And it's cold. So chucking the doona off in the middle of the night, when it's coldest, seems a bit odd.  Especially for someone who's always been a bit of a lizard and 'lives cold'.  Mind you, at this stage it's not unpleasant, just a bit frustrating. I've always been a big sleeper and waking up in the middle of the night, or at stupid o'clock is weird.  Yet several times in the last five or six weeks I've found myself up and even working before 5.30 am. What's that all about?

I'm guessing that this is probably the start of it. I'm not quite sure what to expect next though. Soaking sheets with night sweats? Can't wait for that. Is that something that happens to everyone though? I wonder sometimes if like puberty, do some women sail through menopause fairly easily with only a few inconvenient hiccups here and there while others suffer cruelly with everything menopause has to throw at them, or do all women pass through the dreaded night sweats, hot flushes/flashes and associated other stuff to about the same degree? That would seem a lot fairer to my mind!

I once worked with a women who was clearly going through menopause. Clear, that is, to everyone except her.  She would sit at the front desk sweating like she was in a sauna. She would complain that she felt like the top of her head was about to explode and would draw a line around her head with her finger to show where the heat band started. She would cry inconsolably at the drop of a hat. It was both fascinating and repelling (sorry, gotta be truthful here, it really wasn't nice). Yet when anyone suggested to her that she might want to visit her GP and get something to help with her clearly menopausal problems, she'd go off her nut. Denial can be a funny thing.

now that looks like bliss!

I love my sleep and I'm not keen on waking up hot unless I'm on holidays somewhere tropical. I wonder how long this will go on for?

1 comment:

  1. Madame, I feel your pain.
    Doona on, doona off, doona on, doona off.
    I have even been known to wander outside in the middle of the night. No really bad sweats yet, but I am worried it will happen.That and the irrational emotional outbursts you mentioned. They haven't happened, at least I don't think they have (denial?) but am I destined to become that alternately screaming and crying person you hear about all the time? It cant be nice to feel like that all the time.
    I don't want it.
    But I do wonder how much control we really will have over it.

    ReplyDelete

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