Peri menopause

CalmLittleBuddha said...
Hi everyone, just wondering if anyone is in or has gone through peri menopause?

Me.

My initial life altering symptoms began at age 39. I noticed hormonal changes and wondered if hormones were part of my problem.

My Lyme symptoms went full-blown at age 45. I don’t remember exactly when I started missing periods, but I went through a long period of peri-menopause. I demanded my gynecologist to test my hormones. He argued and said I was not in menopause. The results came back clearly menopausal. Oddly, when tested again a couple years later, my results were not as indicative of menopause.

I don’t want to say anything discouraging, but peri-menopause was extremely atypical for me and basically caused big flares of Lyme/co symptoms instead of the “normal” menopausal symptoms.

I did have breast tenderness that lasted weeks at a time, but it felt completely different than what I had experienced before with normal periods. It felt more like stiffness in the chest wall or bartonella rib tightness or the MS hug. I had occasional hot flashes, but that was no big deal.

Instead of PMS mood swings, I had extreme irritability and rage. I think it messed up my HPA axis really bad.

If you can find a functional practitioner who understands hormones, adrenals, and HPA axis, they can probably help you manage it much better with proper supplements or hormone therapy.

I used topical progesterone for a while. It helped some things, but not enough, and if I increased the dose, it made other things worse. Most likely, I should have been using a combination of hormones and not just progesterone.

I also used Estrosense for a good while. I found it helpful. I used Vitex very briefly - 2-4 weeks. The hardest part of peri-menopause is trying to keep a balance. During peri-menopause, hormones want to swing hard in both directions. At least they did for me. Not the same for everyone. My cousin told me she never had PMS symptoms or menopausal symptoms. I had a hefty dose of both.

A good resource for information about hormones is https://www.larabriden.com

Praying for you.🙏

Judging from my PMS symptoms I would assume I had estrogen dominance, but I had no way to know. I never had any help from doctors.

I never had ovarian cysts or endometriosis or PCOS or anything like that. I just had moderate PMS symptoms. My mother always told me she experienced the same things and made me believe that was normal. I never even knew that all women didn’t have PMS like I did until I was almost 30.