The Menopause Alien

Raise your hand if you’re a woman in your 40’s and your body recently or not-so-recently, has been invaded by aliens. You’re crying and randomly spewing rage at anyone within a 50-foot radius for no reason. Maybe you aren’t feeling as excited in the bedroom with your significant other as years past. Your favorite jeans now fit like something out of a hair metal band video from the 80’s, the scale is rising higher than the Empire State building, joints are hurting or maybe even swelling, and if you’re really lucky, insomnia is now your uninvited bed buddy.

Or, if you’re like me, you drop your phone on a daily basis, accidentally tossing it like an uncoordinated toddler, and words that you’ve used a million times for your job, now just poof, gone like your bank account during a Lululemon shopping spree.

So, what now? How do we evict the aliens?

The truth of a woman’s biology is that we can’t. What we can do instead, is to reframe these unwanted symptoms from an invasion to an assimilation.

(More on how to assimilate the alien in the next post.)

If you have already been to a doctor looking for answers and have walked away feeling less than satisfied or maybe even downright angry, you are, unfortunately, not alone.

• Last year, the World Health Organization reported that more than 1 million women are in menopause per year.

• According to the North American Menopause Society, an estimated 1 billion women will be in post-menopause by 2025.

This is a staggering number of women simultaneously going through a universal physiological event at this very moment. The American medical establishment, as it stands now, is not remotely educated or experienced enough, or in my experience, not always current on research, to handle 1 billion women who are and will be seeking treatment in the next five years.

My Story:

My own story is similar to many. In 2020, I found myself very sick with, what my naturopath would later describe as, “adrenal fatigue crashing head-on into perimenopause.” I was having severe heart arrhythmias, debilitating breathlessness, repetitive UTI’s, and a left knee that would swell for zero reason. I went to a gynecologist, urologist, and three different cardiologists (with one even saying that I had to live like this because this was “normal”) and not one could tell me what was going on. The urologist casually said that I had developed Interstitial Cystitis but then never bothered to explain it to me. I had to research it on my own. Not one of them said the words, “perimenopause” or “these are symptoms of...” They only looked at a narrow data set from my labs without looking at how that data fits into the bigger systems of the body. I was asked no exploratory questions, nor did a single practitioner make any connections with these symptoms to my age. If I’m being honest, it was obvious that none of them cared a whole lot that I was a competitive athlete who was now only capable of laying around on my couch because I was too sick to do much else. All I kept hearing was, “your resting heart is 47 so normal meds for arrhythmias won’t work.”

Where did this leave me? I’ll tell you: with zero answers and debilitating symptoms. However, my story is just one of thousands.

I found my naturopath, Dr. Overland, one desperate morning after my 5th trip to urgent care in 3 months, after yet another UTI. I called her crying. I knew immediately during that triage call, that I was in the best, most competent hands available to me. And I have never looked back. She listened, actually listened, asked a million questions, did the most thorough hands-on wellness exam I’ve ever had, then proceeded to order the most comprehensive series of labs I could have asked for. She included many tests I had never heard of, like homocysteine factors. Also a licensed acupuncture doctor, Dr. Overland treated me with herbs, needles, moxibustion, and many different supplements over the next two years. The treatment plan I received after each new round of supplements came in my email as a pdf. I am almost positive that some of them doubled as a doctoral thesis, they were that long, and that detailed. She explained everything. She described every single lab, what the data meant and how each was associated with the data of another test and why this means this, or how this lab informs this lab’s values. She never prescribed a new treatment protocol without describing the purpose of everything I was taking and doing.

It's been a long three years. My arrhythmias (I was diagnosed with both PVC’s and PACs) are entirely silent. The breathlessness comes and goes but I am not nearly as crushed by it as I was. We are dealing with the occasional UTI these days and reoccurring Interstitial Cystitis. For those of you unfamiliar with the blessed event that is IC, it is an inflammation of the bladder wall. It can come on after sex, it can be trigger by spicy food, alcohol, excessive sugar, the blowing of the wind, fireworks, thinking about ice cream, you name it. It comes on when it wants if you didn’t catch that. It causes excessive pain, urination, discomfort, loss of sleep, difficulty standing for long periods because standing for long periods makes the pain worse.

After the urologist sent me out of his office with nothing more than a, “don’t call us, we’ll call you,” I was exhausted by all of these appointments and baffled as to what to do with this IC I was told I had. He gave no explanation, no strategies for management, nothing. Needless to say, it was wholly unsatisfying.... until Dr. Overland began her battery of tinctures, supplements, and teas, all specifically designed to lessen the inflammation and bladder wall spasms, and to finally heal the issue. While I still deal with it intermittently, I know I have Dr Overland’s steady hand to guide my recovery.

I understand that I am privileged and so blessed to have the finances to afford Dr. Overland. She is very expensive, as are the supplements, tests, and in-office visits. The travesty is that many insurance companies, most, in fact, do not cover much outside of standard allopathic medical care. Yes, my family and I have military insurance but when I have gone to those doctors in the past, I had to fight to be heard and validated when I requested anything beyond the standard tests. Most doctors are very hesitant, even outright refusing to even do a hormone panel on a woman over 40. It's considered unnecessary. But as you read this now, aren’t you saying to yourself, “why is it unnecessary??” Something is happening in our bodies that is specific to our hormones.

When you're anemic, iron and ferritin blood work is ordered to determine where the levels are so the proper diagnosis is made and the correct iron supplement dose can be prescribed. We are asked to get pap smears every year until age 40 so there is always a baseline that warns of any changes in vaginal and cervical cells over the years. Why not get a baseline hormone panel for women over 40 so we have working hormone levels from which to compare from year to year? This would go a long way to establish trust within the healthcare industry and would give female patients validity (for once) for their mystery symptoms.

Seeking Answers:

What strikes me in this process is that women’s health medicine is reactive, rather than proactive. We are yelling for anyone to hear us but we are consistently ignored until we are so sick that we cannot be turned away. Think endometriosis sufferers like Bindi Irwin who publicly recorded her own journey on Instagram which eventually led to extensive surgery where her surgeon said that the damage was so much more extensive than he could have imagined. She spent YEARS begging anyone to listen, all while in desperate and debilitating pain. That surgery, while desperately necessary, was reactive after years of inaction and improper care by medical doctors.

With little, if any help from the medical community, I realized while in grad school, that there is a vacuum in education programs out there for women experiencing menopause transition symptoms.

If we are not going to get proper education or treatment from the medical establishment, we need to seek it out ourselves, using trusted sources from which to learn how to manage and treat our symptoms.

From the lack of reliable sources came my passion project, “DeMystifying Menopause: The good, the bad, and the ‘What the heck??’” It is an 8-week workshop conducted entirely over Zoom, written and developed by me, a woman in her forties, FOR women in their forties and fifties. As a group for one hour each week over 8 weeks, we cover everything from the anatomy and physiology of our hormones to nutrition, fitness, medical testing and bio-identical hormone replacement therapy (HRT), acupuncture, supplements, and all of the research behind how lifestyle choices can help us get through our symptoms. Everything I present is the most current research available, as well as everything I have learned through my training as a Menopause Coaching Specialist and interviewing doctors and non-allopathic practitioners.

You deserve to know what is happening to you. I hope my program will help you learn what you need to know to take care of yourself and to advocate at any future appointments with your practitioners.

In future posts, I will cover more specific aspects of the menopause transition so you can be more informed and can use that information to decide how you can best proceed.

Menopause is a normal biological function that has long left women feeling as if what’s happening to them is in the same category as leprosy. The shame, secrecy, fear, and stigma that surrounds something that 50% of the global population is, and will go through, has left women to suffer in silence. And now there is no reason to feel shame or embarrassment. We’re all going through it. Come to my workshop. Let’s talk about it. Share stories with each other. Tell your friends over wine about your hot flashes. You might be surprised who needs to be given an opportunity to tell her story. After all, women are communal creatures.

We are not meant to do things alone. There’s a reason that women in indigenous cultures have historically given birth as a female-driven collective. We aren’t meant to do life or its many seasons, separately. Menopause is no different.

I hope my blog posts can help you to step out to educate, alleviate, and advocate for your health. Let’s learn from our indigenous sisters and do this as a collective of fierce women who laugh, love and lift each other up. You are not alone.