herbal remedies

You wanna hear something?  Promise not to laugh?  Seriously, I'm really sensitive and hate it when people laugh at me, laughing with me is okay but don't laugh at me, okay?

Okay, here goes...

I've been exceptionally emotional lately...



You promised not to laugh...



Are you still laughing?  This is starting to get old...

Okay, here's the deal.  I am perimenopausal (pre-menopausal).  Hey! I'm a 52 year old woman, that's not unexpected.  I've been having some hot flashes off and on over the past several months.  I had some last spring and then they went away and about a month ago they started up again.  What I didn't realize, silly me, is how severely my emotions would be effected at the same time.  Looking back I can see how they have been effected for several months now.  It's just that at the time I believed I was having difficulties adjusting to my broken wrist and my recovery process, the stress at home, the stress at work, you name it.  In retrospect, I can see the mood swings began before then.  I'm usually a pretty laid-back person, not given to a whole lot of extreme emotion except in times of great stress.  I was different in the past but I have been working on not being a hot-tempered bitch and I felt I had that under control.  But there have been several major stressors in my life recently and I have not reacted well to any of them.  In the past I have taken the termination of a relationship hard but not quite as hard as I am taking this one.  I think that's for 2 reasons, 1)  I didn't have the same emotional investment in those previous relationships and 2) I wasn't peri-menopause at those times. 

I have not slept more than 2 or 3 hours a night for the last 2 weeks.  A great deal of that is attributable to the breakup but I've been doing some reading on perimenopause and boy did I have a lot to learn.  Hot flashes, night sweats, mood swings, irritability, anxiety, craving sweets and/or carbs, heart palpitations, fuzzy thinking, headaches and insomnia are only some of the perimenopause symptoms I have been experiencing.  That explains a lot.  It explains why my behavior was running away with me, it explains why I haven't been sleeping, it explains why I have been crying for hours and hours.  Once I figured that out I needed to find out what to do about it.

I started an herbal remedy a couple of days ago.  It's not hormone replacement therapy and it's all natural (I despise taking medications.)  Anyways, I am already seeing relief of some of my symptoms.  I am not having as many hot flashes and my mood is much more mellow, the irritability and mood swings are disappearing.  And I slept well last night.  And since it's 11:30 now and I need to be up by 8 tomorrow morning I think I'm going to sign off for now and see if I can sleep.  I have a lot more I want to write about, a lot of stuff happened today, some good, some bad, some I want to write down so I can think about it.