KNOWING THERE WAS A GOOD possibility that I might just actually lose my mind without some kind of intervention, I started looking outside the box for things I could do to try to resolve some of the issues I was experiencing.
As much as I wanted to feel elated, to feel some kind of relief, I simply couldn’t. I was tired, angry, frustrated, unhappy, unhip, relentlessly sad, chronically depressed, overwhelmed, anxious, foggy-brained, under stimulated, and way over my head emotionally.
One of the best moves I made was to get my hormones checked.
[Yes—those fucking hormones again]
For someone in, let’s just say the prime of my life, I knew that all the misery I was feeling [self induced or not] could not possibly all be blamed on circumstance. I kept looking for something else—for an easy solution that would resolve some of the crap floating around in what was left of my once vibrant mind.
Note to self:
Flush the mental toilet after every meltdown as to eliminate any discernable or indiscernible clogs. This is not the time to go with the adage of “if it’s yellow-let it mellow”.
Menopause does not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, sexual preference, or political beliefs when it comes to screwing you physically or mentally. It does not care whether you’re a complete schmuck or the perfect angel.
Once your hormones are altered there’s no going back, at least not without some kind of medical intervention. A simple blood test [which I’ve been doing every year since I hit fifty] revealed that there was no, none, nada, estrogen left in my body.
Holy shit! I’d finally caught a break!
My gynecologist’s office called me just a few hours after they tested my blood and told me I should come in immediately so they could give me some gel to rub on my arm; gel that would replace my depleted hormone system and hopefully bring back some of my long lost pleasure.
Halaluliah! Praise be to whoever!
There was finally something I could do to change the path I was on.
I had no body fluids left that would maintain my happiness factor. It wasn’t entirely my fault or my daughters fault that I was so bloody miserable!
Not that this was the best news though. It also meant that I was on the other side of the fence gliding slowly towards old age; but, at least it was a good place to start.
The simple fact is this: I’m a woman, and this shit happens. Women have been graced with so many breakable parts it’s no wonder we start losing our minds as we enter mid-life. It feels like there’s no rhyme or reason to this portion of our journey with the exception of this—
Everything fucking changes!
Just when we think it’s safe to go back into the water there’s another great white shark hovering just below the surface waiting to take yet another bite out of our ass—ala—lack of these much needed hormones.
Now, l love, love, love my medical doctors to death, but my brain kept screaming for a more natural solution. I’d heard all the news about hormone replacement and their ugly statistics, which were good, bad, and ugly. I had to decide whether I was willing to take the chance of developing some horrendous heart problem, or developing an ugly case of breast cancer, or any other cancer for that matter. Statistics are statistics and my breasts are lumpy enough as it is. [Thank-you very much mom!]
So, I did what I do best. I started talking to other women to see what route they chose, who their doctor’s were, and based my decision on those results.
I chose bio-identical hormone replacement because it felt like the right thing to do. My gynecologist thinks bio-identical hormones are a crock because of the inexactness of the compounding formula’s, but I didn’t care. I couldn’t wait to get on board.
On the recommendation of several very intelligent women friends, I sought out one particular doctor because this was her specialty and they all swore by her.
I was of course shocked and disappointed that I’d have to wait nearly two months to see her, but at least I had a plan. There was a light at the end of the tunnel, and this time it wasn’t a train barreling down on me!
When I finally did see her we talked, she wrote shit down, she asked me a million questions, and wrote more shit down. By the end of the hour [which cost somewhere in the area of $350 bucks but worth every penny] I started feeling human again, even hopeful, because she said that all women go through this period in their life. I was not unusual, or special, and I was also not doing this to myself...I was without a doubt now—hormonally imbalanced.
As an added bonus she threw in testosterone to help boost my libido, which had also fallen prey to the dying off, getting old, deterioration process as well.
She said many women had regained their desire for sex by adding this to their therapy but then, she also warned me that many women she talked to after they’d been on testosterone for a while, and were indeed feeling sexy again, said they wanted to screw anyone except their husbands. Hmm…I thought to myself. That could be interesting!
This of course peaked my curiosity a tad because I had long since stopped looking at other men as sexual objects. They seemed more like unnecessary calories. I was, let’s just say, dead in the water. The thought of men becoming eye-candy once again was intriguing to say the least! Not that I was going to go there, but having the option available was not such a bad thing.
I watched for the mailman every day after my appointment with her because the compounding lab was located in Arizona and they’d be shipping my bottled happiness directly to me.
Could it get any simpler?
When I saw him approaching my mailbox a few days later with a little white box in his hands, my feet hit the ground running. When he saw me and realized I looked out of my mind and was heading straight for him, he tried to beat me to the mailbox, to get whatever was in his hands out of his hands.
I guess the crazed look on my face warned him that whatever was in that neatly wrapped little package was uber-important and he was not willing to risk getting injured in the line of duty. I got to within two feet of him and hissed out the words “give it to me now or die”! He tossed the box at me along with the other mail, then hightailed it back to his truck.
Well—okay—it didn’t exactly go down like that [except in my mind] but when I got my hands on that neatly wrapped box, I turned into one of those ugly animals that can rip anything apart with their teeth. I shredded the packaging until I found the prize, and—there they were—two adorable little brown bottles with dropper tops. I wanted to put them on a shrine, pay my respects to them, but of course I didn’t. I knew the quicker these suckers hit my blood stream, the quicker I’d feel better.
I knew the mailman was still sitting there in his truck, most likely with his finger on the trigger of his pepper spray. I knew he’d be shaken from my outburst. I smiled at him, to reassure him I was okay, and that he would be okay, then casually turned and walked back towards my house as though nothing happened. Poor bastard!
Note to self:
Remember to include big tip this Christmas to make ammends for this assault!
“Two drops of estrogen under the tongue in the morning and two drops at night. One drop of testosterone in the morning and nothing at night”—those were my instructions.
Nothing more-nothing less!
Well, I cracked open the testosterone first and watched carefully in the mirror as the white liquid fell from the dropper to the spot inside my mouth right under my tongue. I closed my eyes and waited. Then I waited some more. I was expecting that at any moment it was going to kick in and I’d probably have to rub my own nipples when the wave of horniness hit, but, that never happened.
What the?
I can be very patient when I need to be, but this was pushing my patience button. I wanted some kind of magic to happen, some kind of immediate reaction, but there was nothing. No tingling groin, no immediate need for a hug—nothing!
I looked at myself in the mirror expecting to see some kind of transformation, a softening of the lines around my eyes, a soft tangle forming in my hair giving me that come hither look you get right after a tumble in bed, but nothing changed.
I still looked pissed off and frenzied.
Where was my horny?
I stood there trying to reason with myself and figure out why nothing was happening. Maybe I’d screwed up. Maybe I was supposed to take the estrogen first, you know, so I’d be calm and happy before the juices started flowing. You know, before that tingle down there started to rise like the beast I was trying to conjure up.
Maybe I should have just rubbed my nipples for luck anyway.
Maybe, just maybe, I’d gone about the whole process all wrong. So, I cracked open the other bottle and put two drops under my tongue in the same fashion. Again, I closed my eyes and waited, and waited, and waited, but I still didn’t feel anything.
Had I trained my brain so well nothing would crack open the happiness vault?
Was I subconsciously holding on to the past because it had become my comfort zone?
I looked down at the tattered box and that’s when I saw a little sheet of paper tucked neatly inside the part I hadn’t shredded. I picked it up and read the short little paragraph that explained that it would take up to three weeks for the hormones to really kick in.
Crap!
I wanted to feel something now. Something that would make me feel—at the very least—hopeful, horny, and at ease.
How is it that we live in such a fast paced world where we can obtain just about anything immediately, but when it comes to mental relief or possibly a mind fucking, toe curling orgasm, we have to wait? We always have to fucking wait.
“Bide your time young lady”.
God! I can almost hear my mother saying that out loud. “Good things come to those who wait”.
Hell I didn’t want to wait—
I wanted to come!
Why do we have to suffer like that?
We can send a man to the moon in one day, but we can’t pump up our hormones without a delayed reaction.
The one thing I wanted the most to have, immediate gratification, was not going to happen. Believe me, I tried to trick my brain for the next hour but alas, it was not going to be fooled this time. I guess the reality was, I was actually going to have to bide my time.
CRAP!
Yeah I know. Listen to your mother.
Good things come to those who wait, good things come...! Blah, blah, blah…
Fucking hormones!
