Why Didn't Anyone Tell Us

Men, move along. This is not for you. This is for the women.

I was forty-five when I began menopause. It is pretty young for that to be going on in a woman’s life, but I had undiagnosed PCOS, my entire life. Thank you to all the gynecologists I had seen my entire life. That in itself should encourage women to keep seeking second opinions, especially when you are not getting correct answers or any at all.

Having been raised by a man, and no mom in my life, I knew only the basics. The usual suspects they teach you in school, which is basically how to have sex, not what happens to a woman’s body throughout her life, does not cover much, and certainly the important things. I am not sure what the guys learned when they were set apart for their portions of the class, but I know it wasn’t what girls would possibly experience and endure in womanhood, a failure on the educational system for sure.

Menses for me started at age 12, oh joy. I was the first girl in sixth grade who got her period that early, got her boobs and developed hips. The boys loved it, and I didn’t have to go to a dance alone, but I hated every single moment.

I don’t think any of us like it really. What’s to like, bleeding like you have a wound that takes a week to heal, the cramps that start before only to be followed by more painful and intense cramps during the debacle, or fear that someone might know or see an accidental spotting? No.

Mine were severe. Midol was a thing back in the age of the Paleolithic era , when I was growing up, and that little miracle pill took those cramps away, but made me comatose after taking them. I missed quite a bit of school in the early years.

I was never regular, owing to the PCOS, and so I constantly had to worry if I would one day be humiliated in front of my classmates. This unpleasantness is not usually discussed with us as girls, and I am sure by the lack of maturity in boys, at that age, they too went uninformed about the difficulty girls would have at that time. My lack of regularity should have been an indication of something amiss, but not one medical professional ever went digging for causes.

“It’s normal. Some women are irregular.” was what I got every time.

It wasn’t until I was eighteen, that I found out birth control helped with not just the overflow some of us experience, but it shortens the duration from a whopping eight days (which was my monthly sentence) to a mere three. All three of those days were a cakewalk in comparison. For me, the cramps were minimal while on contraceptive.

As an adolescent woman and young woman, contraception, the pill was great on that front, with the normal benefits as well, but as an adult woman, in my thirties and forties, contraception, or having taken it that many years, began to have adverse effects on me. The normal pill contraception would make me have severe depression and even suicidal thoughts. I am not sure what changed, but that was not okay.

I stopped taking them. I was getting married and we had discussed children, so we would allow the natural order take its course. My sanity was preserved and probably my life too. I had no way of knowing how deep into those horrible thoughts I would travel, and I didn’t want to know.

After several attempts at a viable pregnancy, I finally had a baby. The three miscarriages before our son, which were probably also due in part to PCOS and I we finally succeeded. We will never know, if PCOS played a part in the lost pregnancies, since no doctor was astute enough to question it.

After childbirth, I decided to try birth control again, but by then, the ring had been available, a silicone ring with hormone somehow magically embedded in the soft substance.

At first, it seemed to go well for me, but a couple months into using it, I was back to the unpleasantness of monthly depression with bad thoughts. My wonderful husband made the decision to fall on the sword, or rather under the knife, for me. He didn’t want me to be a science experiment for my doctor to test medications, and he sure didn’t want me depressed, so he too the responsibility, and I was able to get off of the contraceptives.

I did contemplate different methods of pregnancy prevention, before the final decision was made. I did not want some little metal or plastic thing stuck inside me for years at a time. The ring was out, the pill was out, and the depo shot was not something I wanted in my body either.

I was thirty eight when I had our son, and since my eggs were not getting any younger, the risks of complications and disabilities for a baby, were high, we decided one child was enough.

Something else they don’t teach boys or girls in school, is the toll miscarriages take on the man. I never suspected that he suffered as much as I did, when we would lose and baby. Another educational failure. How many is that so far? Let’s move on.

Ladies, if your teacher of sex ed or your gyno has not told you that the years of trying to have a child is limited, and that as you age, your eggs age, meaning the dangers of problems with a babies constitution increase, then here is the wake up call.

Ideally, we could go through life like men, and have reproductive abilities until we die, but we do not. We get a set number of eggs. that is it. You eventually run out and stop producing them. When or at what age, the end of egg production occurs, in the baby making factory happens, is anyones guess. For me, it was at age forty-five. So think long and hard about what you want in life, and when you want it. You could decide to wait and come to find you can’t.

Menopause. A nice non threatening way of describing a major change in not just your life, but your body. I never had the usual symptoms some women experience. Maybe because of the PCOS, I was spared. My sister sure wasn’t, but she didn’t have PCOS. The usual things you see in movies is about right. The gynecologist might even warn you about what to experience, but all women are vastly different.

I had always joked in my earlier years, that I could not wait for it to come so I would not have to have periods, but that silver lining was overshadowed by the other nasty little things that happened to my body. I found it disturbing and still do, that no one talks about what happens, aside from the often comedically portrayed, hot flashes.

Physically, your body then will treat you like it’s unwelcome and like it is going to make you pay for the years of fun, with years of misery. Not all will experience the same issues, but I was told by my doctor that what I described to her is common and the usual. The usual, and no one ever thought to mention it. Shocking.

First is the issue of the labia. The labia minora, changes. It shrinks in size, almost disappearing completely, in comparison to before the change. Along with it goes the clitoris. It shrinks as well, and as drastically. They shrink in fear of the coming onset of menopause, So if you are one of those women blessed with larger clitoris and labia, take heart, it goes away. The disdain for its abundant size will surprisingly change to mourning when it’s seemingly gone.

It doesn’t stop there, as our bodies revolt and show us who’s boss. The years of pleasant intercourse, come to an end. The vagina itself becomes dryer, think Sahara with sand included. What I mean by that, is that our body doesn’t not produce the lubrication that was normally produced in arousal. It stays dry. This in turn makes intercourse painful, painful in a way that you can imagine intercourse with sandpaper would feel. It will slam those brakes on nookie, like a driver trying to avoid an imminent crash with a deer. Buy stock now in any of the makers of lubricants, because you will be buying it by the case. Keep Amazon on speed dial.

The lubricants while somewhat effective during short romps in the hay with your husband or partner, will not handle much more than that, and you will need to apply it liberally more often. Think parched desert getting its first rain in centuries. No joke.

Since you no longer will require tampons, you might not think about the issue of some tiny little diameter insertion tube for a medication (think light flow days tampons), but even that will become the most excruciating difficulty as well. That little tube will feel line a 120 grit phallus.

Now some of you will gripe about what I will suggest you ask your medical doctor about, but you need to consider it. Hormone replacement, yes that buzz kill treatment, is the or was my saving grace. These days the amounts that they have come to find, are effective in solving vaginal dryness, is minimal. The side effects are minimal as well, I have none, and the dangers are not what we were taught to fear. Even more encouraging, is the fact that if you still don’t want to take the estrogen and progesterone, there is a topical solution to your desert oasis. There are estrogen creams that can be used that are not systemic.

A tiny plastic inserter, hence the light day tampon analogy, is used to put a very small amount or cream inside the vagina. Trust me when I say it will hurt. When I was almost at a screaming fit using it the first week, I found out that I didn’t even need to insert the cream. You can literally put a pea sized amount on the tip of your finger and swipe it on the vagina opening depositing it there, before bedtime. The vagina absorbs the magic potion and by morning it is gone and you feel more supple. With in a couple weeks. sex is no longer painful, you are back in the saddle again moisture wise, allowing you to enjoy your partner again, and allowing your partner, to dismiss the idea that he doesn’t do it for you anymore.

I had suggested to my sister, that she ask her lady doctor about the cream, when she told me she was experiencing pain during sex. She got the cream, tried the inserter and had the same issue with pain, so when I told her the pea size dollop on the tip of the finger trick, she tried it and was a changed woman.

I still use the cream, and it is used twice a week. It’s forever, unless I decide to abstain from sex altogether, but I don’t see that happening. The cream is cheap and worth every penny.

I did manage to begin hormone therapy too after a year or so. Menopause gave me the added bonus of decreased libido, as in dead. I was too young to put my female parts on the shelf and call it a day, so I agreed to take it and see if it helped me. It did. So while I am older and the libido should be in hibernation, I feel randier now than I did at thirty. How’s that for irony.

I often think that if my gynecologists had known I had PCOS and placed me on the hormone pills, I might have avoided many years of trauma from thinking my body was betraying me, and I might not have gone through menopause at such a young age. Who knows?

In any event, ladies, ask questions, ferret out every solution and discuss, discuss, discuss with your medical doctors every detail of any issues you are having, or any you want to know about, because no one will tell you otherwise. And for goodness sake, talk to your daughters out of the gate on what to expect in every era of their sexual lives. The ignorance and lips sealed thing is for movies, not life. Educate our future young women, so they won’t be shocked into reality like so many of us were and still are.

#women #medicine #menopause #reproductivehealth