I was too young for menopause...wasn't I?

by Maria
(Lisbon, Portugal)

About ten years ago, I entered menopause - without a bang, for sure, but with many a sweaty night. At forty, it was relatively early, so every male in my family was quick to blame stress, overwork and even PMS for my all-too-swift mood changes and prevalent irritability.

My son was a teenager back then and his fits, all that housework and a full-time job did seem like credible scapegoats, so I took some weeks off.

I went out of town and did everything I could to try and relax, but to no avail. It felt as if my head was being constantly gnawed at from the inside. It didn't hurt at all, but it bothered me greatly, and at the end of those three weeks of improper rest I couldn't believe I had to go back to the daily grind.

All this made me overlook some other, rather obvious signs that something big was happening. It all came together in my mind one day, quite early in the morning. I called my mum and shared my feelings with her. She reassured me, however, that it could not be. Just like my husband and son, she blamed it all on a busy lifestyle I was sure I could still handle for another decade, at the least.

It took another week of flushes, memory lapses and absolutely no sex drive to make me grab a phone and dial my faithful physician.

The conclusion was obvious, but the point is that my family's influence and my own dubious relationship with aging kept me postponing this really important visit to the doctor's office for quite a bit.

Nowadays, I'm pretty comfortable with it all, but it was certainly a big change for me. I felt old, all of a sudden. Old, spent and useless. And I was too wrong.