#LivingInLockdown
Day 23 – Tuesday 7th April
A bit of a scary night last night. I woke up drowning in my own sweat with my heart racing. I thought ‘shit! I’ve got a fever!’ It’s one of the first signs. It’s bad enough being in the grumps and now I’m paranoid as well. Took me over an hour to get back to sleep worrying the entire time. This morning I woke up feeling fine. Grumps totally gone, like a weight had been lifted. No fever, no cough and breathing fine. I went to the toilet to find out it’s that time of the month again. My periods have started. Duh! I should have realised. Just goes to show how totally tied up we are with this bloody virus.
Let me explain (the men amongst you may wish to stop reading now). I’m a middle aged women going through the peri-menopause: the bit that precedes the menopause when you have much of the symptoms but are still ovulating. To be honest, for my age, I should already have passed the menopause by now. Why I got blessed with so many eggs, I have no idea. It’s a bit late to do anything with them now, so enough already body, let’s get this over with please.
My symptoms include getting emotional (which freaks me out because I’ve never had PMT before and crying for no apparent reason whilst reading something pleasant is just plane weird), night sweats, dry skin and migraines. I only suffer these symptoms when I ovulate and during menstruation. The rest of the time I’m fine, so it’s fairly easy to plan ahead. I have been peri-menopausal for about 3-4 years, so you’d think I’d be used to it, but the fact is I haven’t had any of these symptoms since last summer. This is when I started to get intense pains and cramps completely out of sync with my cycle and only on one side of the body.
My doctor referred me to a gynaecologist and asked me to come off the pill so they could see if hormones were playing a part in the problem. I have been on the combination pill since I was 15 because I suffer incredibly painful periods. People have tried to take me to hospital before because they couldn’t believe I was just menstruating. Anyway it turned out that the peri-menopause symptoms all went away once I stopped taking the pill. Unfortunately the painful menstruations returned and they were all over the place anywhere from one week to 5 weeks apart and seriously heavy.
The gynaecologist diagnosed me with a uterine polyp and two uterine fibroids. I was operated on in January and they removed the polyp (super easy operation ladies, so if it is recommended to you go ahead and do it). The hope was that the pain and bleeding was caused solely by the polyp and that my ovulating days were at an end. Unfortunately this is not the case and in early March they put me back on the pill, though one with lower doses of the two hormones. I started taking this, funnily enough, on day one of this quarantine. You have to take different coloured pills on different days, so all the days are written on the pack. I’m probably one of the few people who hasn’t lost track of what day it is for this reason.
We’re only on day one but I have to say the new pill seems to be working. The excessive bleeding has gone and the pain has been significantly reduced. Unfortunately it seems the menopause symptoms have returned (except for the migraines thank God), but I’ll take a day of grumps and a couple of sweaty nights over the pain any day.
Welcome to the world of being female. It has its ups and downs. But today on the whole is an up. It seems the weather agrees with me because the sun came back out :-). Life is good!