women minds

I hear women, in hushed tones, talk about feeling disconnected from their bodies. They don’t feel like themselves and don’t know why. They feel anxious, awkward, sexless, depressed, or what I call “flatlined” — you don’t feel depressed but you don’t feel joyful either. You’ve “flatlined” and feel somewhere from mildly ambivalent to — dead inside.

I knew about this change only in the most basic sense— “sometime in my early fifties I’ll stop menstruating and then I’ll be in menopause.”

But no one talks about the period leading up to menopause. Who talks about perimenopause?
When I told my general practitioner I felt dizzy, anxious, bloated, nausea, faint, and as if something was seriously wrong with me, and “could it possibly be hormonal?” My doctor told me I was too young. At the time, I was forty-three years old and, as I’ve come to understand, perimenopause begins in the early forties— for some women perimenopause starts as early as thirty-five. 

Several of my friends have also been told by doctors that they’re too young to be perimenopausal.

What’s wrong with women’s healthcare?

My own situation peaked my curiosity about my mother’s experience. I never knew that, just like me, her major symptom was heavy menstrual flow. For me, it was the most concrete symptom, the one I could talk about with assurance that what I was experiencing was indeed a gynecological concern. The other symptoms could be attributed to something else, or worse — they might be “all in my head.” For my mother, the heavy bleeding was unbearable. At the age of forty-seven, the age I am now, my mother consulted with her doctor.  He recommended a hysterectomy.

Removing her uterus did stop the bleeding and my mother went into immediate menopause. Hysterectomies are still a common “cure” for many gynecological concerns. Removing a woman’s ovaries and uterus (what’s medically accurate to call, “castrating”) is still advised for women who suffer a variety of perimenopausal or post-menopausal symptoms.

This needs to change.

Maybe we need to be the ones to talk about perimenopause — so the next generation of women will too.

~ From Wikipedia:

According to the National Center for Health Statistics, of the 617,000 hysterectomies performed in 2004, 73% also involved the surgical removal of the ovaries. In the United States, 1/3 of women can be expected to have a hysterectomy by age 60.^[6]

In the UK, one in 5 women is likely to have a hysterectomy by age 60, and ovaries are removed in about 20% of hysterectomies.^[7]