DOCTOR, HEAL THYSELF

The New York Times posted an article recently about 10 Simple Ways To Improve Your Brain Health. It was a list compiled by a group of neurologists and I was happy to read that I am already doing most of the things on their list. I always wear my helmet whether it is for the scooter or the bicycle. I floss every day. If I was the one mowing the yard, I’d wear headphones. I take daily walks and mostly stand at my desk. I am doing the things required for managing my cholesterol. Look, I even convinced Michael to eat a tofu meal this week. I am putting so many healthy vegetables and beans into our weekly meal plans. I feel like I’m winning at something. 

There’s like two things on the list that I’m not doing and one of those things is not my fault. The Neurologists recommend masking on smoggy or smoky days. I know I should do this, but I spend so much time inside that it is something that just doesn’t dawn on me to do. But this does bring up a point about how I should be masking when I’m out in public spaces, particularly when tuberculosis cases are increasing in my area. People don’t know this is happening because the government department in charge of public health just got gutted and there’s not one really staying up to speed on daily cases. You have to do an extensive search for the data and since most everyone I know gets their medical advice from TikTok, extensive searching is not happening. Bottom line is that masks save lives and I should be wearing one. 

I’m going to do better.

Number ten on this list is “Sleep Well”. I love how it is so simply stated as if one can just tell another to “sleep well” and it just happens. There are nights when I think I’m sleeping well because I only woke up twice in the middle of it all. I have no idea what it is like to wake up because my alarm clock actually went off and my alarm is set for 5:15 AM. At this point, I set the alarm as a fail safe just in case I don’t wake up in time. On weekends, I sleep in until 6:45. Why 6:45? See me shrug. That just happens to be the time when I look over at the clock and then say to Josephine “Let’s make you breakfast so I can go get my own breakfast.” My Saturday morning breakfast haunt opens at 7:30, so this gives me plenty of time to be there when they are unlocking the door. Is this sleeping well? Maybe, if I’m going to bed at 9 PM on Fridays but I am not. I refuse to go to bed until I have folded the last of the three loads of laundry I start when I get home from work. Doing some basic wine math will tell you that it is well after ten or eleven before I am crawling into bed.

But this is under normal circumstances.

The week before my period should not be considered normal circumstances. During this week, my dreams are vivid and wild. They are cinematic but also make no sense. Rapid hormonal fluctuations are equivalent to tripping on acid. Or what I believe it would be like to trip on acid. I do not know. I did want to try this at some point, but TV has convinced me the fentanyl is in everything and this will kill me. At some point in the night, I get hot and throw off all the blankets only to start shivering two minutes later. I’ll pull the covers back on and in an hour I will wake up because my neck is sweaty. MY NECK. A part of my body that is not even really covered with blankets. Is sweating. 

Finding ways to improve your time spent sleeping, and the quality of that sleep, can go a long way toward helping you stay sharp and fend off dementia, Dr. Feldman said. -Mohana Ravindranath, NY Times

I wonder what my odds are of fending off dementia if I do everything on their list but this one. Because what I’m gathering from the lore of women passed around the witches cauldron on full moon nights is that what is happening to my body in regards to sleep is normal or at least not a unique experience. If anything, these are mild conditions compared to some women's experience. The third witch to the right of the cauldron tells me that I am damn fortunate that my sleeping experiences are not worse. And I will agree with her. I am sleeping and I feel like the times in the night when I am sleeping are quality sleep moments. Just, according to neurologists, I need more of those moments. 

Ugh. Really?!?

The Cabbage and I were having a great discussion on tampons and menstrual flow last weekend. They were complaining about how rough their periods were and how they’re still a bit random. I told them about my nineteen year old self and birth control pills and how modern medicine smoothed out those menstrual wrinkles. Then I told them how they will have years of ‘regular’ cycles and this will lull them into a false sense of reality. Because eventually you will go right back to rough and random. You will look back fondly on all of those years when you could predict to the very hour when the first drop of blood of the month will hit the pad. Those restless nights will come from daily life worries instead of rapidly fluctuating hormones. I tried to end on a positive note, something like it’s great! You’ll be alive to tell the tale and continue passing around the lore of women.

But honest to a god, human bodies are just weird. Actually body weirdness is not limited to humans. I see enough at work to know that structures involved in living any life are just bizarro. Some time maybe I’ll tell you about baby coral and their mucus cells or how I know so much about the planarian manus. Biological life is interesting. We are gross in an interesting way. But I guess the most important takeaway of this ramble is to be a regular flosser of your teeth (not the dance move), always wear a helmet, mask up on smog days, eat your veggies, be little a bit of a social butterfly, take a walk and sit on the floor, have your eyes checked out, make sure you’re getting enough oxygen to your brain. 

And if you do all those things, maybe you can wear yourself out enough to sleep well at night.

THE STATE OF THE BODY

Right now, the ads in my Instagram feed are either for needle work kits or curing plantar fasciatus. Occasionally the algorithm throws in an ad for somatic yoga for women over fifty because the internet thinks I’m eighty. I’m cool with that. I’ve stopped getting the ads for magic elixirs that cure perimenopause, though that may change after today’s post. I stopped taking the progesterone/DHEA stuff that I had ordered from the internet about a month and a half ago. It was time to renew my three-month supply and I put a big pause on that order for some reasons. The biggest reason was because of cost and I could not get my insurance to cover any of it. So I figured I would pause treatment, make notes on how I was feeling, and then take all of this to my doctor.

And I did that today.

I am going to start by saying that I really like my gynecologist. She is the same age as I am and doesn’t think I’m crazy. She walked into the room with a smile and a “Welcome to Perimenopause!” because the nurse had already given her a briefing on my erratic periods and my weight gain. To be fair, I did step onto the scale with my keys and wallet in my pockets, plus my Nikes. I’d like to think that added about five pounds to the number, but really I have no idea. The only time I step on a scale is at the doctors office because if I start doing this at home, I start obsessing and stressing out about numbers which leads me down a very unhealthy rabbit hole. My doctor only barely mentioned the weight and I said that I think I’ve reached a place where I’m okay with it and this is just my body. She nodded her head in agreement and said “Yes! I completely agree with you!” Then she told me that her favorite lubricant is olive oil and we swapped friendship bracelets. We didn’t really swap friendship bracelets, but olive oil is her favorite lube choice second to coconut oil.

I explained to my doctor how I felt taking the online stuff and how I was feeling now that I’m not, which isn’t great. I’m back to not sleeping for more than two hours at a time and my body has gone back to barrel shaped. My right foot hurts all the dang time, but I’m still doing all of the things. 10,000 or more steps a day. Yoga. I’ve added weights to my yoga practice. Standing all day at my desk. I’ve swapped out my tofu scramble with plain greek yogurt to get more protein. I told her that I basically have one of two stages: rage or sobbing. I’m either going to punch someone in the throat or melt into tears. Then she said “I’m here to support you and let’s talk about ways to do that.” So of course, I burst into tears. We talked about options in relation to the current state of my ovaries, which are still doing something even if they’re only spitting out low quality eggs. Then she prescribed a very low dose birth control pill with instructions to give this a good three month try. The idea is that this will even out and regulate things.

We’ll see.

It is turning out that three truly is the magic number. I was on the other stuff for three months. Now I am to give the new stuff a three month chance. At least this treatment is fully covered by my insurance and familiar. I took a birth control pill every day for twenty five year. I am excellent at remembering to take this pill. I have hopes that this will work but not high hopes. Just like my weight, I think I’ve finally started to come to terms with this is just how my body is right now. I make sure to not walk around carrying knives and always have a package of Kleenex in my pocket, which is probably just a good habit for any stage of life. Sort of like Hitchhiker’s Guide To the Galaxy and always carrying a towel. Except a woman would most likely never hitchhike because bears don’t drive cars or if they do, don’t pick up hitchhikers.

This is more of The Transportationally Responsible’s Guide to Perimenopause.

THANKFUL FRIDAY

At the beginning of this week, I posted tales about the state of my body that many found relatable. Women friends have reached out, nodding heads in agreement and sharing their own personal experience. This was exactly my intention behind that entry. I am infuriated by the taboo of conversing above whispers in regards to our female bodies and well over the idea that I should feel shame about the normal things that happen to my female body. And because of the lack of interest from the medical industry, we (women) must come together and share, share, share in hopes of navigating our way through this highly uncertain phenomena of perimenopause/menopause.

Chad sent me a TikTok story about Rosalind Franklin and how Watson and Crick stole her research, which ended up winning them the Nobel Prize in 1962. This story is not new to me. All female scientists know this story. My first education on Watson and Crick though told a different story. They didn’t mention stealing any work or ideas from Franklin, but they made sure to talk about how disagreeable Franklin was to work with and, one would say, a bitch. The reality is that Rosalind Franklin was standing up for her research and herself. Watson and Crick would never have figured out the helical structure of DNA without Rosalind Franklin’s work. So instead of allowing a woman to get the credit for this discovery, they villainized her. They projected their fragile male egos and jealousy into writing a false narrative of a contentious woman.

Psst…this isn’t the first time in history fragile male egos and their jealousy has been projected to vilify a woman.

Some of you are probably wondering what the story of Rosalind Franklin has to do with woes of perimenopause. Trust me. This is all linked together. For far too long women have been pigeon holed into a projection of what men have wanted us to be and in doing so this has lessened us. Our bodies, our thoughts, our appearances are all gender constructed for the man. Deviations in said construct are not to be tolerated and should be ignored, thus putting our basic needs in the backseat and our contributions outside of childbearing, something to be stolen or unnoticed. I did not intend to set off to write yet another rant on the never ending reach of the patriarchy, but I can’t ignore that the lack of research and information around women’s health is directly linked to the patriarchy. Women have been relegated to barely even whispering words such as vagina or bleeding because men find those words unappealing or offensive, while there are whole industries built around glorifying the male ejaculation. A cock and balls is probably the most popular choice for graffiti artists and it is usually placed near the mouth of the model on the poster.

Where is the graffiti artist drawing vulvas in the mouths of poster models?

This is not a sermon for the choir kind of post. I wrote all of this on Wednesday and usually writing down my rage helps to dampen it. Instead, all I managed to do was pour gasoline all over my rage. I spent the day feeling prickly and stabby. But after another fitful night of sleep, I thought about what many of the women in my community had said about what they are going through. The most common phrase written in my comments is “I thought I was going crazy.” Of course we think this; we’re all tired and doctors wont listen to us. The number of comments I read that started with “my doctor didn’t believe me” or “three doctors later..” was ridiculous. Not only are we dealing with changes in our bodies that start with messing up the very foundation needed for basic living (which is sleep. sleep and rest are the most important things for our bodies), we are doing so while still, STILL, fighting to be the women we want to be and not the women men (or society) may want us to be. I want you to know that I am grateful for your voices and your continued hard work in this daily battle. We all deserve naps.

Let’s all go take naps!

DESPERATELY SEEKING

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about a lot of different things. Things I want to do. Things I want to write. Things I want to buy. Things I want to change. Things that may be too expensive for me to keep. All of this is surrounded with questions. Should we get another dog? Should we try to rehab the chicken coop? How do I get someone to repave my driveway for a reasonable price? Can I remove the bushes in front of the house and have a porch installed? Am I ever going to do something about my kitchen? Should I enroll in electrician school and learn how to rewire my own house? I think I should teach a yoga workshop about shoulder anatomy and straps?

That last sentence doesn’t really read as a question, but when I say it out loud I tend to illicit a questioning tone.

I am restless. Truly, restless. Even when I am supposed to be sleeping and resting, I am lost somewhere in my own thoughts. Just last week I was so lost in my own thoughts while on my morning building walk, that when I made it back to the first floor I didn’t know what floor I was on and could not remember walking all of the second floor. I am now up to three different wake up times in the night. Sometimes it is because I had that dream where I have to use the bathroom in an unconventional bathroom setting but mostly it is because I heard a noise and then I have to spend the next hour trying to go back to sleep while thinking about the noise. Before I know it, Josephine is tapping me with a paw and it is almost about time for my alarm to go off. Last week, Josephine started tapping me exactly one hour earlier than the alarm in anticipation to the time change. I am sleeping. I am just not sleeping well.

This is probably why I have finally fallen for one of the many hormone treatment ads that I am bombarded with on a daily basis. I poked around on the company website and then I went in search of some non-sponsored reviews. As a result, I discovered a community of women who all had similar stories of restlessness, no sleep, scattered thought and mood swings (I didn’t really mention those but…). This community had some very insightful and helpful reviews in regards to the product I was considering and after reading through many discussions, I was convinced. I filled out the survey, had a very brief chat with an online doctor and am currently waiting the arrival of an estrogen body cream along with a dietary supplement of DHEA. If I see some significant changes, I plan to contact my regular doctor to see about getting this stuff through my insurance.

I’ve been slow to admit to myself that my symptoms were not all in my head, a perfect example of how the medical industry has been gaslighting women since there was a medical industry. It doesn’t help that perimenopause is the great unknown of medicine with confusing symptom descriptions like “frequent or infrequent periods.” Perimenopause and Menopause are the epitome of Voldemort, He Who Must Not Be Named. No one wants to talk about it. No one wants to dole out grant money to research it. No doctor wants specialize in it. No one cares about a woman’s body unless it is still capable of reproduction. Perimenopause is that gray timeline where a woman could still have a baby. While there’s a whole lot reasons why a could is not a should, no one’s going to do anything that would exclude the possibilities. Women in America do not have rights to their own bodies.

I’ve had four periods since the start of the year. Yes, that’s two a month but so far zip all nothing but an occasional right ovary cramp for this month. I don’t think I’m having hot flashes, but experience moments when I feel hot. It’s nothing dramatic. I get hot, take a layer off and five minutes later I’m so cold my teeth start chattering. I have no energy yet I still do all of things. And since I have no idea what forty eight is supposed to feel like, I chalked it all of this up to seasonal depression and inefficient heating and air systems. Honestly, for all I know those things could be the problem. I guess I’ll find out soon enough once my prescription arrives.

I’ll keep you posted. Meanwhile, I’ll be over here looking at puppies.

THE BIG SQUEEZE

I wonder if Josephine would wear these clothes

5 Likes, 1 Comments - Cindy Maddera (@elephant_soap) on Instagram: "I wonder if Josephine would wear these clothes"

Last week, a coworker sent out a group email announcing the birth of their second child. I had no idea him and his wife were expecting another baby, but was glad to hear that all was well with mom and baby. He attached a photo of their new little girl and when I opened the picture, I fell over. She's perfection. Sometimes when I'm feeling stressed or anxious, I find myself opening that picture to stare at her sweet, sleeping face and feel my ovaries cramp up. Not long after his announcement, another couple I work with who recently had twins had their babies up in the office. They are about sixish months old now and rolly polly and drooling and adorable. The mom handed one of them over to me so I could smell her head and then we all marveled at the evolutionary design of babies. 

At birth, babies secrete a hormone that makes everybody in the room love them. They also look like their fathers. This ensures their survival or at least it keeps the dad from eating the young. The father sees this delicate tiny version of himself and is hit with that love hormone, thus sealing the bond between baby and Father. Even the helplessness of babies is part of evolutionary design. In a paper released in Proceeding of National Academy of Science in 2016, Steven Piantadosi and Celeste Kidd present an evolutionary model of a positive feedback loop where humans are born early to accommodate larger brains. This in turn gives rise to helpless newborns and caring for these children requires more intelligence and thus larger brains. This is how we evolved to our current level of human intelligence. Large brains means helpless babies who need parents with large brains to care for them. I think, in this case, the word 'intelligence' refers to a relative intelligence. Like knowing that fire is hot or that stepping on the sharp end of something is going to hurt. Because we all know that person who flunked out of high school and now has seven children.

You know, I thought all these years that the main reason I didn't want children was because I didn't have what it takes to raise a good human being. Now I'm wondering if it's really because I didn't think I was smart enough to have a child. I've always lacked confidence in my intelligence. 

In the past few years, the sight of babies has stirred feelings in me that were not normally present when I was younger and in childbearing years. I have uncontrollable urges just to hold a baby and talk in a ridiculous baby babble with them. I think about finding ways to bottle that new baby smell so that I can spritz the room with it. I see baby clothes in shop windows and want to buy them, thinking that maybe I could get Josephine to wear them. My body twinges at the sight of their gummy infectious smiles. I try to distract myself by looking at puppies but this inevitably leads to me looking at the adoptable dogs on Petfinder. There may be room in my heart for another dog, but there is not room in our house for another dog. There might be room in both places for a goat. We do have a big backyard. 

I was talking about all of these new babies to Michael and he looked at me sideways and asked "Do you want a baby?!?" I did not hesitate in my answer. I said "Of course I don't want a baby. I'm FORTY TWO YEARS OLD!" I mean, even if I managed to give birth to a healthy baby without genetic abnormalities, what on Earth would I do with it? That new baby smell transforms from something lovely to something very funky in no time. Every time I smell soured milk, I think of my nephew Thomas who was a terribly cute but stinky baby. Also, I am going to retire at a normal retirement age. I cannot afford to retire and put a kid through college all at the same time. So, at least I am smart enough to know that the baby ship has left the docks and is probably sinking somewhere in the Atlantic. And I am really truly okay with that. 

Those stirred up feelings are my body's last ditch effort to remind me of the choices I have made. They are coming at a time when I am also experiencing other symptoms related to perimenopause. My body is taunting me in a way that makes me doubt my decisions even while I mentally stand by those choices. I still come from a generation of women who were taught that having babies defines us as women. Ovaries and eggs. These are the things that make us female. At least, biologically speaking. What are we then when our ovaries are no longer working? There was a time when the older a woman became, the more invisible she became. I don't want to be in the limelight, but I certainly do not want to become invisible because of my age.

I am lucky enough to be moving into this transition during a time in history where there has been a shift in how we view older women. Or that we view older women at all. The forty and over woman is represented in fashion ads and media, not as homely grandmothers baking cookies, but as strong, beautiful and running the business. I'm not saying that cookie baking grandmothers is a bad thing. It's just an unrealistic image for someone like me. The women I know who are my age and older are running businesses. They are strong and beautiful. I was just in a yoga workshop filled with women my age and older who were doing the most intense and demanding yoga poses without blinking an eye or breaking a sweat. We have finally, FINALLY, reached a point in time where ovaries and eggs are not our most defining feature. 

I still might buy that baby sweater I saw the other day and convert it into a dog sweater for Josephine. 

THE FACE OF A TEENAGER

Friday

11 Likes, 2 Comments - Cindy Maddera (@elephant_soap) on Instagram: "Friday"

My face has decided to break out as if I am fifteen years old. For the last two weeks, I've been using a mixture of ground flax seed and tea tree oil to wash my face with every night. I was going to tell you all about how it's doing wonders for my skin, but I woke up this morning with a giant painful zit in the middle of my cheek. I've sat at my desk all day thinking about how I was going to pop it when I got home from work. It will be the second thing I do when I get home (the first is to let Josephine out and baby talk to her about what a good puppy dog she is). The pimple could be the result of a clay max I used on my face the day before, ironic since it was marketed for acne prone skin. 

Two weeks ago I woke up with large welty bug bites all over my body. There's a bite on my neck that I at first thought was a hickey. I got kind of thrilled about that since I'm forty one years old and I've never had a hickey. It is a bug bite. Not a hickey. Since I was the only one being bit, I decided that I had scabies or bed bugs or both. This was also around the same time that we found two ticks on Josephine and I washed one tick off my body in the shower. I treated the dog with her flea medicine, washed all of the blankets and vacuumed my mattress. I've started coating myself in lavender oil before going to bed. I smell like someone's crazy old spinster southern aunt. Her name is Aunt Myrtle and everything in her tiny bungalow is floral print and covered with lace doilies. There's a vase of dead roses on the side table in the foyer.  

The bug bite thing happens to me every Spring, even before I had a dog sleeping in my bed. If you look back through my Google chats with Talaura, you will come across multiple conversations where I fret about bed bugs and Talaura talks me off my psychosis ledge and assures me that I do not have bed bugs. Or scabies. I am just that blood type that bugs find to be delicious. It might be because I've avoided DEET products for years because DEET on my body produces a wicked itchy rash. My skin has been sensitive since birth. The acne thing though is fairly new. I mean I've been known to get a pimple here and there and I sure do love those Biore strips, but the current version of acne is new to me. Oh, I am fully aware that this is a thing that starts to happen at my age. It is just one symptom of a few others that started showing up about a year ago. 

I know what this teenage brand of acne is signaling and it doesn't include a ticket to prom.