Tag Archives: PMS

In lieu of real content, I tackle the subject of The Curseâ„¢.

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In which I’m going to go on and on about “women’s troubles,” so depending on who you are you may just want to stop reading right… about… HERE.

This morning I felt noticeably better than I did yesterday.

At first I attributed my calmness and clarity to my recent daily intake of Vata tea, but then The Curse™ arrived so I attributed my lack of misery to the fact that I was starting a new cycle.

Within two hours of the arrival of The Curse™ I had peed five times and probably weighed five pounds less. WATER RETENTION SUCKS, OMG, SO VERY MUCH. YOU CANNOT EVEN BELIEVE IT. Until it’s happened to you, it’s just one of those weird and stupid symptoms you only know about from Pamprin commercials. But until you yourself have gained twelve pounds in a mere two days, you simply have no idea what it feels like to suddenly wake up one morning in what is arguably the wrong damn body.

Every second or third cycle my body decides to bloat up, and for two weeks when I get out bed in the morning my feet feel like they’re going to split open when I step onto them. All my joints feel swollen and scratchy. I have to avoid salt, alcohol, and caffeine, and stay hydrated even though I’m already FULL OF WATER, because that’s what all the home care articles say to do… and I’m nothing if not dutiful when I’m verging on miserable.

And I am. Kinda miserable, I mean. During my luteal phase, at least. All my discomfort – the annoying tendency toward anxiety, those effing palpitations, and the damned stupid bloating – happens after ovulation. This makes no sense to me since the older I get the lower my progesterone levels are, but I’ve been charting long enough to know that it’s true: I hate my freakin’ luteal phase these days.

I feel fantastic the first half of my cycle – just fantastic! I have energy, I exercise, I start projects! I feel like myself. Then an egg no one even cares about explodes out of a follicle, and it’s all downhill from there: fatigue, lethargy, anxiety and panic and their attendant mild depression, water retention, and what has to be nothing other than dissassociation. I feel literally heavy: simply moving around is a chore.

And if that weren’t enough I’m far too inward, too: I more or less quit paying any kind of real attention to my environment and coast through on autopilot. I’m lucky that I’m smart or I’d have a hard time passing for normal. And I get so spaced out it’s amazing I don’t get hit by cars. I become absorbed with my thoughts and my internal bodily perceptions, and weirdly detached from the actual external world.

Maybe I feel better during the first half of my cycle because my estrogen is highest then? I don’t know. What I do know is that up to half my life these past two years since the PMS started in earnest is unacceptably blah, and there doesn’t really appear to be much I can do about it that I’m not already doing.

In the window
Please enjoy this totally unrelated
image of orange star-shaped lamps.

My diet is good. I quit smoking, I quit caffeine (well, mostly: I still eat chocolate). My alcohol consumption has lessened dramatically. I do my sun salutes. I walk every single day. I’m mindful of my sodium intake. I have a good attitude about my body. In short, I CAN’T TRY ANY HARDER WITHOUT BECOMING A RENUNCIATE.

And it keeps getting worse. Gah.

I’ve officially decided that I’m coming back male in my next life, and that’s all there is to it. I realize that males are simple creatures, many of whom can probably only perceive the middle range, but at least they don’t have to put up with the bewildering and fucked up “miracle” of female fertility. They appear to pretty much feel the same every day unless some outside force intrudes. Day after day! Consistently! And for that, I envy them. Lucky ducks.

Maybe being female is worth it if you actually use a female body for what it really does, but mine was pretty much bad out of the box. Apparently this body just doesn’t function that well reproductively, and I’m tired of having to live in it when it’s being stupid.

Female fertility is ineffably complicated. (It’s amazing people manage to get knocked up at all, really.) From menstruation through ovulation you’ve got your rising levels of estrogen and your follicle stimulating hormone. There’s your luteinizing hormone. There’s your testosterone and progesterone from ovulation through implantation. And several other hormones I can’t even remember, all doing an intricate, weaving dance in month-long cycles.

Frankly, it’s a mess.

And even if it mostly works (I do ovulate, for instance, have no luteal phase defect, and have been, for most of my fertile years, nice and regular with no pain or PMS whatsoever) it can still be just broken enough to cause quality-of-life-affecting symptoms like mine.

Actually, nothing’s “broken.” Not really. This is just what they call perimenopause. As a(n ex) smoker who has never delivered a baby, I am – hooray – statistically likely to begin perimenopause earlier and have more severe symptoms for longer. Go me.

And for some perspective: I’m not in pain, I’m not sick, nothing’s really wrong… it’s just that sometimes I don’t have any enthusiasm, I don’t feel engaged, and I don’t want to do anything. During those two weeks each month, my tiny life is almost unmanageably large, and all I do is live in my grandmother’s attic in a redneck town people only know of because its name is a joke! I have very little to accomplish, and I barely manage to get even that much done. Which sucks. And that’s what I’m bitching about, really.

I’m fairly certain that I had my first hot flash the night before last, in the evening, while sitting at the kitchen table. AND THERE’S NOTHING I CAN DO ABOUT IT.

I’m beginning to suspect this is, if not just something really good to complain about, also a journey of surrender. As in, “Oh, yeah. Human body? Idiotic bag of fluid, amazing they work as well as they do, turns out I’ve located mySelf as an entity other than my wacky body after all. Lovely day then. Cheerio. And by the by, it turns out that Self transcends gender after all! Hah!”

The Curse

Blurbs, ,

In which it’s way better this way, but still not ideal.

I think my ability to perceive the glass as half full is actually a character flaw.

I think this because I can slog through a fairly unacceptable life and yet still be convinced that I’m happy, even when I’m patently not. I learned this about myself when I was married: I was terribly unhappy for years without realizing it. Even developed a panic disorder, that’s how deep in denial I was about not getting my needs met…

But that’s a whole other post. I’m probably not, in point of actual fact, living a life that is unacceptable: it’s probably just PMS.

I love not bleeding for 29 days out of every 30. It’s awesome. It’s fantastic. I’m frantic with joy that I no longer have to fear my life is leaking out of my uterus. (Rollerball ablation has been very, very good to me.) But. I still get evil, wicked PMS and I hate it. Bloating is evil! No one should have her ankle bones disappear every month! Feeling despondent, tired, and quasi-depressed for a third of every month is just plain sucky.

I remember when I was young and bullet-proof I thought women who complained of PMS were just complaining for attention. Now I realize the truth: hormones are hell.

Maybe I’ll luck out and be born male next time. While males may have shorter life spans, at least their reproductive processes are eleventy-hundred times less complicated!

Imaginary Peasant Ancestress, or Too Much Time and the Ills Of Abundance

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In which I give you entirely TMI about my uterus, and wonder about modern life’s impact on health.

When I’m feeling shitty, I often compare myself to an imaginary peasant ancestress to give myself some perspective. I think about the crap she’d have had to suffer through in her life, all without days off or medical care. She wouldn’t have had the wealth of free time that I have to dwell on things.

If she had the kind of period I’m having right now, she’d have just sucked it up and gone to do whatever it is that imaginary peasant ancestresses did. Milk cows and work in fields, I suppose. She wouldn’t have had Pamprin or modern feminine hygiene products; she’d be stuck with herbs and cloths. She wouldn’t have a brain full of basically unnecessary facts gleaned from the Internet that had her freaking out when she woke up in the morning, rolled over, and flooded a maxi pad in forty seconds with a frighteningly huge gush of blood. [Basically, I slept in one position all night. When I rolled over this morning, ten hours worth of blood came out at once. Sorry if that’s way TMI, but it happens.]

She wouldn’t have thought, “I read that if you don’t stop bleeding by yourself, they have to do surgery to take out your uterus.” And she wouldn’t have worked herself into a panic by the time the bleeding leveled off minutes later. Hell, she probably wouldn’t have even known about “panic,” since that’s something of a modern symptom.

anatomy_uterusI’m thinking about her because I’m having a period from hell. I’m not in pain this month, which is a blessing, but I’m bleeding and bleeding and bleeding and after my last miscarriage any heavy bleeding utterly freaks me out. I think that she wouldn’t have worried and panicked and obsessed that maybe something was wrong with her; if she passed out, then she’d know something was wrong and that would have been that. She’d have been walking, too, not sitting in her climate controlled car like I was this morning. She just wouldn’t have the time to freak like I do.

In other words, I know I’m not bleeding to death. So there’s nothing to freak out about. But knowing this doesn’t seem to stop me from freaking. My hormones are whack. I’m really moody and freaked and tired and tense. And if all that wasn’t enough, my right eye was stuck shut when I woke up. So there I am, half blind, bleeding like a stuck pig, and feeling very much like the world is coming to an abrupt and total fucking halt even though in truth I’m warm and comfortable in my Sleep Number bed and I’m well-fed and sleek and I’ve got so many blessings it would probably take an entire day to count them so who the hell am I to be feeling so sorry for myself? Where’s my freaking perspective? I’m not even in pain, fer chrissakes. My idea of what’s tolerable seems to be utterly out of whack because, well, nothing really truly bad ever happens to me. (Knock on wood.)

When I think about my imaginary peasant ancestress and compare her life to mine, I see that she was truly poor and I’m loaded by comparison, but I wonder about the real effects of so much rich food, leisure time, and lack of heavy labor. The human animal has only been living like this for a very brief while; we’re optimized for a completely different lifestyle than the ones we’re actually leading.

Which may be why we’re all fat and crazy.

The result of this rapid change seems to be a variety of physical and mental imbalances… so many people are on meds for depression or anxiety. So many of us just feel bad much more than I think we should.

Sometimes I wonder if my imaginary peasant ancestress might not have had it better than I do, at least in terms of peace of mind. She wouldn’t have had the time to dwell on the minutiae of how she felt; she’d have been working to live. And she wouldn’t have thought of it as work, it would have been life. The conceptual division of ‘work’ and ‘free time’ is a relatively new one. Perhaps the lack of that artificial differentiation would have kept her from feeling as resentful as I sometimes do; I have my mind set up to ‘enjoy’ my leisure activities and ‘dislike’ my chores, but the truth is it’s all simply stuff to do — there really isn’t that much qualitative difference, in terms of comfort or interest, between doing the laundry and knitting a fucking slipper, both are easy and climate-controlled and simple, it’s just that I like knitting and I don’t like laundry.

It strikes me as being utterly arbitrary that I make these distinctions, but I can’t help doing it. I imagine her distinctions would have been harsher: hurts, doesn’t hurt. Is dangerous, isn’t so dangerous. Can kill you, probably won’t kill you. The little shit comes out in the wash, when your life is harsher.

My imaginary peasant ancestress might even have been healthier than I am, too, barring accident or congenital defects. She’d be hauling around less fat than I am, she’d be in better cardio-vascular shape. She wouldn’t have spent even a fraction of the time I have, sitting on my ass in front of a computer digesting twice the calories I need for the day.

I realize it’s sloppy hippy-type thinking to idealize the past; there were no good old days of perfect peace and health. My imaginary peasant ancestress would have been to many, many more funerals than I have. All of her women friends would have lost children. There were no sulpha drugs, no modern dentistry, no contact lenses. No central HVAC. No warm, cozy vehicles. I’m not idealizing the past. I’d hate to have fleas or bed bugs or to see babies die from malnutrition or the measles. But I do believe that the rapid changes our species has encountered in the past few hundred years are really showing up in our headspace and drug intake. So many of us are only mildly uncomfortable but we react to it as if it’s the end of the damned world. I’m doing it myself, right now, because I have the time to do so.

Our bodies want us to live differently than we do, and there appears to be a price for all this wealth and ease. Maybe poverty and strife is actually a better way to live… providing you’re one of the lucky ones who survive, that is.