One Night

One night, I woke up at exactly 4am boiling hot. It was just as if my internal thermostat had broken, in an instant. From then on, for the next six years the heat would come over me with no warning. Like a whoosh, like a flare, like a furnace. Slowly, confusingly, I stopped feeling like ‘myself’. I couldn’t pin it down or put it into words, just a feeling that I was outside of myself or just not in touch with my old self. Then I put a layer of chunky fat on around my waist in almost no time at all. From then on I felt I had become old and (worst of all) invisible. I couldn’t work out what was real or imagined but I knew for sure that I really disliked my new self. Grumpy, short-tempered, anxious. The best GP I saw told me I was coping extremely well with a very difficult set of symptoms and made me cry with his kindness. I was never dismissed or belittled. I tried a mild tranquilliser (gave me tummy ache), HRT patches (brought back bleeding) and black cohosh (pointless). Then in a period of revelation and enlightenment, I joined the gym and upped the aerobic exercise. Over the next few weeks the flushes stopped, my mood lifted, I dropped a couple of pounds and the ‘old me’ gradually came back. Rachel, 59, Kent
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2019/aug/25/i-miss-what-i-used-to-be-like-womens-stories-of-the-menopause