hormonal rollercoaster ride
posted July 25, 2005 at 05:49 pm
I've been on a weird up and down mood ride of sorts over the last few weeks which has had me pretty worried about myself. The ride started with the echo of music; by the weekend after posting that entry, I was so emotionally exhausted from trying to keep myself strong that I instead ended up at the bottom of a dark well of tears that just would not stop. Things that day were really bad for me, so much so that I finally ended up calling a friend to come over and keep me from sinking too much lower.
Thankfully, he never hesitated and immediately rode to my rescue. He comforted me, stroked my hair, hugged me a lot - and then proceeded to knock some much-needed sense right back into my head.
The combination of a crying catharsis and an affectionate but blunt lecture had a positive effect - for the next couple of weeks after that day, I felt happy, strong, and confident. But I also noticed a rather manic edge to these feelings, and the best analogy I can come up with is that I was "overclocked". (The geeks out there will understand that term; for the rest of you, overclocking means forcing your computer's Central Processing Unit to run much faster than it was intended to be run. The CPU is the most critical element of a computer system, equivalent to the brain in a human body.)
The upswing in my mood after letting out all that negative emotion was so drastic that I even had trouble relaxing enough to fall asleep at night. I felt constantly on guard, fearful that the bad feelings would come sweeping back in again. I worked like a demon, then played equally hard - probably trying to exhaust myself mentally in an entirely different way (i.e., denial, suppression, avoidance) by doing things which weren't really inside my (admittedly loose) range of normal behavior.
In simple terms, my personal CPU was operating at a speed waaaay faster than that for which it had been tested and approved. Overclocking may be a popular and effective technique for getting more performance from a system, but it can literally fry your CPU if you get too ambitious.
And that's exactly what happened to me: I crashed and came to a screeching halt in another overly dramatic way. At first, I seriously started to think that I had some weird bipolar disorder, or worse, I was just quite literally losing the last remnants of my grasp on reality.
But this time, I noted a different element which I hadn't been paying much attention to, one of the more hormonal variety: within a few hours of the last crying jag, I discovered that Mother Nature had abruptly dropped Aunt Flo off at my door, a full week before I was expecting her to show up. And she didn't just sneak in like she gradually does, she came in at full force, pummeling me with near excruciating cramps and lower back pain. WTF?
Traditionally, this particular visitor has arrived on a predictable schedule, always with a few days of subtle warning signs before she arrives. But hey, didn't she also make an unexpectedly early appearance within a few days of the last round of bottoming out? Hmmmmm, that got me thinking about some other things I've noticed over the past eight months or so since I stopped taking birth control pills.
Waking up hot and clammy, even though I sleep naked with the A/C cranked up. More intense signs of PMS, which has never been much of a problem for me. Insomnia and restless, erratic sleeping patterns. Irregular, inconsistent and frequently downright painful periods. Anxiety attacks, accompanied by the sensation that my heart is pounding so hard it will burst from my chest. Fuzzy thinking and forgetfulness. Frequent feelings of depression and a sense of being overwhelmed. And now, this disturbing pattern of dramatic mood swings with low points that verged on hysteria at times.
Put all that together with the upcoming milestone of a 40th birthday, and it started to dawn on me that I might know exactly what's going on: my body is likely preparing for a pretty significant change that all women of a certain age face. (Um, no, I'm not quite menopausal yet, thank you, but there is a transitional stage which can occur up to ten years ahead of time.) Because I no longer take the birth control pills which would keep these things more level, I suspect my body and psyche are just dealing (rather poorly) with the stress of hormones gone wild.
I've always known that my body needs the balance of those extra female hormones. I just wasn't paying attention this time around, until well after the point where I should have started to question why I've been acting in a way that just wasn't like me. Now I'm kicking myself with regret, because my erratic behavior over the past few months has put a big ugly mark on a relationship which was very important to me.
Of course, because I realize that self-diagnosis isn't always accurate (and because if I'm right, I certainly can't prescribe a cure for myself), I've made an appointment with my gynecologist to see what she thinks about all this. 9:45 a.m. Thursday morning.
Here's hoping her answer isn't a dismissive "No, sorry, you really are just a nut case after all."
Comments
Heh. Do gynecologists really talk to their patients like that?
I was going to say something along the lines of "up here on the other side of 40 it's bad enough, with the vision and the hearing both going fast, but at least my bloodstream isn't making me crazy," when I realized that of the smart and wise post-menopausal women I know, every one said, when she finally made it through, "whew, now I feel saner and calmer and happier than I ever did before," and I'm not going to go completely blind and sit around yelling "huh? speak up, and enunciate better, you damn kids! but at least I feel calm and sane, even though I can't see or hear you little bastards!" Sure, you've got to make it through some time cursing me and everyone else on the face of the earth, while you 'glow' like it's 300 degrees in the middle of the night, but it's not forever, just for a while.