Perimenopause, menopause, and hormones are three dreaded words. Perimenopause is the time before a woman’s menstrual cycle has ceased. Your cycle may be sporadic, irregular, extremely heavy, extremely light, but if you are still bleeding, you are in perimenopause. Menopause is the period of time after a woman has stopped bleeding.
We have all heard about some of the symptoms perimenopausal women experience. These include hot flashes, irregular bleeding, depression, anxiety, fatigue, and mood swings including severe sadness. I once had a friend who was 52 years old who bled for 12 weeks before the doctors could get the bleeding to stop. But what I want to talk specifically about today is the anxiety and depression that can accompany perimenopause. For many women who were essentially happy, upbeat, intelligent women with drive and emotional stability, things change quickly and drastically when perimenopause appears. The best way I can describe it is being consumed by emotional distress. A woman may suffer panic attacks over things that never bothered her before. As well, she may have never before had a panic attack in her life. The anxiety can sometimes get so bad that it is hard to breathe. Horrible feelings of doom that just cannot be shaken are common. Also, she may feel unrelenting worry about everything (loved ones, death, health, being alone, being with other people). Losing the desire to do pretty much everything such as socializing, keeping yourself looking good, cleaning your house, eating, etc., is another perimenopausal problem. It can make a woman afraid to go out or be with others or drive or go to work.
You can go to your doctor for help who will undoubtedly refer you to many other doctors who will perform many tests on you. If they all come back negative, it probably means everything you are feeling and experiencing emotionally and physically is due to perimenopause and hormones. And there’s a huge debate in the medical community about hormones and hormone replacement therapy. I asked my OB/GYN doctor if there was a hormone test (such as FSH) to show where my hormone levels were at and she snapped at me and said there are no tests and there is nothing I can do. She told me she already knew my hormones were out of whack because I was bleeding excessively. I felt like saying thanks for the compassion and understanding and help, but instead I cried and cried uncontrollably.
I now believe it was for these reasons that years ago women were sometimes committed to mental institutions if they could not keep up appearances as though they were functioning normally. I think we tend to listen to our mothers or grandmothers who have gone through this, but don’t realize the severity until it hits us. It is my hope that in this day and age we as women speak out more as we experience the sometimes very distressing symptoms of perimenopause. It would be helpful for the medical community to really dedicate some time and effort to obtain a better understanding of this issue and what can be done to help women in this condition. Perhaps if the doctors were all female and over 40, it would get a higher medical priority.
