by Deb Joiner
I had my first menstrual cycle when I was 13. I didn’t know the word “menstruation;” it was known to my virgin ears only as “The Curse.” The way our health class teachers explained it was no preparation for the reality. “Your body is going through changes,” they told us. “You will feel cramps and see blood.” They talked about it as though it would unfold as straightforwardly as a 15-minute slide show presentation. But I had no warning. No cramps or anything. All I got was the embarrassment of bleeding in my seat during a class in 7th grade. I had to wait for class to be over and ask the teacher if someone could go get my coat, which I wore to the nurse’s office, praying the boys in the hall wouldn’t notice.
Now menopause: What was that? They didn’t talk about your period ever ending in health class! I never heard the word “menopause” until I was well into my 20s; never fully understood what it meant until I learned in my 40’s that I was “perimenopausal.”
Well, now, I can tell you I do know about it, because for the last 10 years I have been dealing with the night sweats, the sleepless nights, the mood swings, the irregular bleeding—all the things every woman who ever lived this long must have experienced, but none of them ever talked to me about.
These things are not menopause. They are just the symptoms that force you to make decisions about it and how it affects your life. Being in that place in your life where you have to make decisions—like whether or not things are so bad you have to have a hysterectomy—is what menopause truly is. Having to figure out what it means not having to worry about wearing white pants or getting p regnant during sex, but needing to worry about the acceleration of osteoporosis and heart disease-that’s menopause.
But menopause is also about taking the time to accept the change.
I was already used to having to do that. In my 20s, I remember feeling miserable and not knowing why until I was finally diagnosed with multiple sclerosis (MS). I had to figure out on my own how to fit my life to the disease and vice versa. No one could tell me how to do that then, and no one can make decisions for me about the kind of person these physical conditions are trying to mold me into, whether it’s the MS or spinal cord injury (SCI) or the perimenopause now.
Suffering from osteoporosis is bad enough for women who aren’t in a wheelchair. Having to deal with both at the same time is a unique problem, to say the least. I am fortunate. I’ve been warned and educated in the past two decades about what lies ahead, and have the experience to know that the 15-minute slide show that predicts it is never enough. You have to go beyond that and find the alternatives for yourself in order to be prepared, because if you don’t, you wind up sitting in that chair, waiting till the end of class for someone to help you deal with the consequences of the change, like I did when I got my first period.
These conditions challenge us every day with new problems, and how we deal with them shapes our whole idea of ourselves. Am I the kind of person who avoids thinking and preparing for problems and just figures the doctors know what they are talking about? Do I let others make the decisions for me? The decisions about treatments are not going away. They still have to be made because the disease is not going away. It’s ganging up on me with the menopause and I have to figure out how far, and in what ways, I can continue to fight back.
As long as I’m fighting, I’m still here and that doesn’t mean the fight or the disease or the menopause is the only thing I can have while I am here. Those things are not me. How I make decisions about them is me.
Deb Joiner, a veteran of the United States Air Force, lives in Syracuse, New York.
