This afternoon I was digesting my lunch and updating my knitting entries over at Iowa Chicks Knitting, in between processing Evergent emails, when suddenly I felt a rush and I was extrememly dizzy, my palms were sweating, and my heart was racing. My chest hurt. My vision was fuzzy, spotty around the edges. I thought I was going to pass out, or that I’d just had a heart attack. I felt nervous, freaked out, amped, and supremely scared and uncomfortable.

It was sort of like doing a big fat line of coke, only it wasn’t fun.

I started to breathe deeply, then I worked up the balls to check my pulse. (Yup, still beating. Too fast and too hard, but it’s still beating. At least the dizziness isn’t the result of no fucking blood flow to my brain fer chrissakes!!!) I got up and walked around the building for awhile, breathing. Then I went outside and walked around the block, breathing and letting my mantra roll around inside my head. I tried to return to my desk five or six times before I could actually stay seated. I was tingling, practically hyperventilating, and saturated with adrenaline. I wanted to crawl out of my skin and take a nap in a corner somewhere.

(By 2:07, my heart rate had slowed down to 106 BPM. All I was doing was sitting here in an office chair, copying emails and pasting them into a Filemaker database, and my heart rate was so absurdly high that it took time for it to slow down to 106.)

I googled “rapid heart beat” and got all kinds of scary shit about cancer and anxiety disorders. (Bad news is *just* what I need when I’m in adrenaline hell. Yay.) But then I read that this exact experience is one had by – are you ready? – periomenopausal women.

Periomenopause? Hello! I’m 36! I’m not that old. Is it possible that I will quit bleeding as early as 38? (Do people do that?) Are the majority of my symptoms (as my Well Woman care provider has repeatedly suggested to me) “simply” symptoms of periomenopause? Is this shit really all normal fucking aging?!?!

Look at this list. I’ve experienced all of these in varying degrees over the past two or three or four years (although not all at once, thank God):

fatigue
insomnia
exhaustion
anxiety
infertility
miscarriages
panic
hair loss
weight gain
brain fog
gritty eyes
palpitations
rapid heart beat
air hunger
dizziness
headaches
temperature intolerance
depression
mood swings
dissassociation
low libido
irregular cycle
heavy menses
PMS
sore breasts
cramps
tingling extremities

And to top that off, I spend a little time every month or so thinking that I might actually be dying. I don’t mean abstract thoughts about eventually expiring, I mean a convincing and gut-level fear that I could very easily be about to drop dead Real Soon.

This does not strike me as being a high quality of life. If I’m supposed to go through ten more years of this, I will become a drug addict. I guarantee it. I’d rather it be periomenopause than a thyroid disorder, but honestly it doesn’t matter because either way I’m still feeling like shit, and I’m too young for any of it.

When I first started noticing the arrhythmias, I went to a doctor. He told me he didn’t hear anything weird, that my heart sounded strong and clear and fine, that there were no whooshes or slurries or other sounds one would associate with a physical defect, and that no doctor at that clinic had ever been concerned enough to note anything in my chart about my heart. All he could do, he said, was to send me home wearing a monitor, which would tell him what I’d already told him: that my heart rate elevated or uneven. Which, apparently, wouldn’t help him diagnose or treat anything.

Kathy told me that arrhythmia was a common periomenopausal symptom and not to worry about it. She agreed that my heart sounded great; healthy and normal.

At 2:24 this aftrnoon my heart rate was down to 96 BMP, but there’d been a few ‘spikes’ since the last reading. Now, at 2:55, I’m down to 84 BPM with only a couple of skipped beats. I don’t feel like I’m dying. Any more.

I spent some time lurking at a board for menopausal women, and I’ll be damned if what these 50-year-old women say doesn’t sound a lot like what I’m going through. (I don’t know if all this shit is worth it, just to get rid of AF! Sure, it’s a nuisance, but bleeding for a few days is better than feeling like shit every day.

Many women only endure six months or so of this; I’m on year three of it… already. The details are changing, yes, but it’s not getting better overall. Six months ago I was exhaused and depressed; today I’m intense and insomniac. I prefer intense and insomniac because it fits my self-image, but it’s not imperically better. The women on the boards I surfed carry Zanax and Paxil and Zoloft around in their purses, to use when the shit gets really bad.

Am I the only one who didn’t know that nearly every woman over 45 is carrying meds in her purse because menopause fucking sucks so much?!

Right now, my heart is beating 78 times per minute. That’s my normal resting rate. The adrenaline has passed, I’m not dizzy or anything… I’m a little frustrated and somewhat pissed off–oh, and I just became really really hot, in a wave across face and hands and shoulders. I guess it is a hot flash. How can I be having hot flashes at 36?

Fuck this. And the horse it rode in on.
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