An Amalgamation

Ah, perimenopause, you are amazing! You combine all the standard menopause issues such as:

• Pain during sexual intercourse
• Fatigue, night sweats, osteoporosis, hot flashes, or sweating
• Early awakening or insomnia
• Absence of menstruation or irregular menstruation
• Hair dryness or loss of scalp hair
• Anxiety, dry skin, irritability, moodiness, reduced sex drive, or vaginal dryness

With all the standard menstrual issues such as:

• Bloating
• Cramps
• Mood swings
• Fatigue
• Sore Breasts
• ETC.

PLUS, you have the added benefit of IRREGULAR periods!!!!! Shortened cycles, lengthened cycles, skipped cycles. Will you be early, will you be late, will you miss one month? two months? four months? You’ll never know for certain until you have 12 full months sans period and are officially in menopause, too old to be of value to society! Well, unless you have grandchildren, of course, because then you can babysit. (And if you never had kids, well, you may just as well die to conserve resources for others.)

Now, as you can probably deduce from the number of exclamation marks I used in the first sentence of the above paragraph, this blog was inspired by the PSOF – Perimenopause Special Operations Forces. Their motto: stealth, surprise and there will be blood! (the last part was shamelessly stolen from P.T. Anderson, just as I did with Kubrick for my title today, so I can’t really throw stones.)

So, imagine it, it’s 10pm and you’re tired. Didn’t sleep well last night, or the night before – the standard drill for peri. You get into bed and lie there, unable to sleep. Overheated, staring at the ceiling, doing breathing exercises and sleep meditations. Bored, because according to science (who is lovely and amazing), if you read a book or look at a screen, you will never, ever sleep again, EVER. Finally, sometime after 3am, you fade into a restless slumber.

And you wake up in a war zone. Blood everywhere. “I love the smell of copper in the morning” levels of carnage. You lie there, afraid to move, because if you sit up, there will be another surge (as if there wasn’t enough blood, already). And you start calculating…

What route do I take to the shower to minimize the collateral damage to my bedroom? Do I have enough peroxide left to treat these sheets? How long until the sharks appear?

And the answers to those questions today are: you don’t, no and now I have to go buy some fairly quickly, and 8 minutes (the makos show up first because they’re the fastest, just in case you’re wondering).

And with that, I’m off to the store!

P.S. WordPress can take a long walk off a short pier for suggesting the word “perimenopause” is spelled incorrectly!