Menopause. Change of Life. Midlife Crisis. My personal favourite: Grand Climacteric. I don’t care what you call it, it sucks. There is nothing “grand” about it!
My teeth are falling out, and so is my hair. My skin is a wreck. I bloat to the point where I look 14 months pregnant. I pee like I’m 14 months pregnant, too. I love everything! No, no, wait, I hate everything. OK, maybe everything makes me cry — no, no. everything really, REALLY pisses me off — and I can’t sleep!
I would tear my hair out, but there’s so little left.
Then there’s the “personal summers”. We’re not talking 60-degree-San-Francisco-summers; we’re talking 129-degree-Saudi-Arabian-desert-summers. When a hot flash hits, it’s like someone is stoking a furnace inside of you. If I could harvest the heat that I generated, I could probably keep the town warm all winter.
Not anymore. The hot flashes were an easy fix for me.
My solution? Black Cohosh. An herb used for medicinal purposes by the Native Americans, Black Cohosh has also been used to treat hot flashes in women since the 1950s. Bought over-the-counter at the pharmacy, I simply followed the recommended dosage for a few months and the hot flashes were gone.
Of course, everything has side effects, warnings, yin that goes with yang, so I’ll provide a couple of links where you can read all about it and decide for yourself, or speak with your doctor to determine if it’s right for you.
Since my internal temperature is under control now, I’ll move on to other things. I’ll probably go trip my husband for not putting toilet paper on the roll and then cry about it for an hour.
National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM)