Is It Just My Life or Is It Perimenopause?

I just finished speaking with a woman deep in the throes of perimenopause. She is in the third of the four stages I have delineated in my work — a stage I call Turbulence. This is a bright, well-informed, intelligent woman, someone who had already read my book, The Fifth Decade: Is It Just My Life or Is It Perimenopause, cover to cover. And still, she had succumbed to the many varied troubles this challenging and often unpredictable transition can inflict.

Knowing It, and Believing It, Are Not the Same Thing

On some level, she “knew” that her symptoms were connected to her fluctuating hormones. She had read the research. She had read my book. And yet none of that knowledge had been enough to hold back the spiral of doubt — the fear that something more serious might be wrong. By the time we spoke, she was in the process of booking appointments with no fewer than four separate medical specialists.

This is one of the more difficult truths about perimenopause: information does not always translate into reassurance. A woman can understand, intellectually, that hormonal turbulence explains what she is experiencing, and still find herself frightened by her own body — because the symptoms themselves do not feel like hormones. They feel like something is wrong.

What the Conversation Gave Her

We spoke for quite some time — time that brought her real comfort. Yes, perimenopause can be solely responsible for the full range of what she was experiencing, with one caveat I always include: any continuing concerns deserve to be ruled out by a physician. Reassurance without vigilance is not my aim. But neither is vigilance without reassurance.

At one point, in a tearful moment, she told me what she really wished for: a doctor who would look at her as a whole person.

The Gap Between Specialties

As I write in my book, medicine too often fails women at exactly this juncture. Doctors are trained, understandably, to focus within their specialty — and in doing so, they can miss the interplay between the body's different systems, especially where the psychological and the physiological intersect. A cardiologist treats the palpitations. A psychiatrist treats the anxiety. A gynecologist treats the cycle changes. Rarely does anyone step back and ask whether all of it might be one story, told in different languages by different organs.

Perimenopause is, if nothing else, a whole-body, whole-person transition. It asks to be met that way.

Ahead of Her Time — Still

She noted that when I first published The Fifth Decade, I was ahead of my time.

Sadly, I fear I may still be.

Women continue to arrive at my door — informed, capable, often having done more research than the clinicians they've seen — still searching for the one thing that shouldn't be so hard to find: someone willing to see the whole picture.