The menopause symptoms nobody warned me about
If you'd asked me at forty what menopause was, I'd have said hot flushes and a fan. That's the leaflet version. Nobody mentions the rest, so when the rest turned up, in what I now know was perimenopause, I didn't connect it to anything. I thought I'd developed six separate problems in one year and was simply unlucky.
I hadn't. It was all one thing. Here's the list, in the order it ambushed me.
Itchy ears
The inside of my ears started itching. Not a tickle. A deep, maddening itch you can't get at, that arrives at 11pm and makes you consider a knitting needle. I thought it was an infection. It wasn't. Nobody, in all the things I'd read, had mentioned ears.
Sinus problems, overnight
One day I was fine. The next I had the sinuses of someone who'd lived in a damp cellar. Blocked, pressure behind the eyes, that thick-headed feeling that makes you sound like you've got a cold you don't have. Overnight. I still wait for it to go. It mostly doesn't. I now sound permanently like a woman announcing a train cancellation.
Food intolerances that arrived from nowhere
This is the one that made me feel bat-crap crazy. Things I'd eaten my whole life started to disagree with me. Bread and pasta left me bloated like a beached whale. Dairy did the same. Then eggs joined in, but only half of them: the yolks are fine and the whites are not. Try ordering that in a café without sounding like you've made it up.
I only worked this out because I'd started writing down what I ate and how I felt the next day. On paper, the pattern is obvious. In your head, it's just a bad week.
Hives and rashes
Blotches on my arms and chest, out of nowhere, gone by the afternoon, back the next day. I don't want to think about the money I spent on this one. Every washing powder on the shelf, then back to the first one. Creams that did bugger all. Lotions that did slightly less than bugger all. It was never the washing powder.
Heartburn, or so it turned out
I had never had heartburn in my life, so when a burning pain turned up in my chest I did what any calm, rational woman would do: I decided I was having a heart attack. Being me, I didn't keep this to myself. There was a lot of hand-on-chest, a lot of "no, I'm fine, I'm FINE", and a certain amount of chaos for everyone in the vicinity. It was heartburn. Another thing that calmed down when I changed what I ate, and another thing I'd never have linked to the change if the notes hadn't done it for me.
Sugar cravings
I have never been a pudding person. Then, in the space of a few months, I'd have fought you for a brownie. It wasn't greed, it was a craving with teeth, usually at night. And, surprise, the nights I gave in were the nights I woke at three. That one's in the first post. The brownie lost.
Bloating
Not after a big meal. All the time. Jeans that fitted at breakfast had to be unbuttoned by four. I started buying trousers for the woman I'd be at teatime. I put it down to the bread, then to the dairy, then to age. It was, of course, all of them, plus the one thing underneath all of them.
The famous menopause symptoms, which still floored me
For the record, the well-known ones happened too, just not the one I expected. No hot flushes at all, to this day. Instead I got brain fog thick enough that I once forgot how to drive an automatic, a temper you could light a barbecue with, losing words mid-sentence in front of people, and anxiety I had never known before. The full ugly list is at the top of the home page. I got the full set, basically, minus the one they put on the leaflet.
It's not just you
I've written all this out because every single one of these, I thought was separate, and I thought it was me. Read back as one list, it isn't separate and it isn't me. It's the change, doing what it does, in a body that's working harder than anyone gives it credit for.
Nobody warned me, because nobody is talking about the ears and the egg whites. So consider yourself warned. Your list will have things on it that mine doesn't, and it's still the same list. Write it down, take it to someone who can help, and the next time something odd turns up, you'll know exactly who to blame. Your ovaries. They've had a good run.
Hot Mess is a tracking aid, not a medical device, and none of this is medical advice. Itchy ears, rashes, heartburn and chest pain can have other causes, so if something is new or worrying, get it looked at. Chest pain especially: ring someone, don't blog about it.