Living off of yesterday

[crazysoph]

Because today hurts. The period's arrived. Twenty-four days after the previous one. Boo! (I thought once every 26 was bad enough. I'll have to ask the GP if they get closer together pre-menopause, before they begin the final slide into past tense

Comments

[yonmei]

*sends sympathy*

My period is normally a 26 day cycle, but over the past two or three years I've been getting periods arriving from two to ten days early often enough to make me step up the amount of iron I eat. (It was particularly annoying the last time it happened, as it meant my next period happened not a good week after I got back from the US, but just after I'd got back from the Canyon to stay with my friend in Arizona.)

I'm 37. I keep meaning to ask my mum when she went through the menopause, and if this happened to her before that, but I don't know if she ever kept regular charts, and I haven't actually seen her outside my dad's company for a while. (I feel that challenging the assumption that you don't talk about "women's troubles" in front of a man is not worth doing when the man is your own father and when my mum actually agrees with this assumption.)

[crazysoph]

Thanks for sympathy...

I feel that challenging the assumption that you don't talk about "women's troubles" in front of a man is not worth doing when the man is your own father and when my mum actually agrees with this assumption.

and sympathy back. I just lost all patience with my parents, when too many of those assumptions bollocks any hope of real communication with either of them. Fortunately, I got reasonable information about when menopause began for my mother before we stopped talking. (Alas, no such help from my dad - even if we were talking, he'd not likely know that info for his mom, who died over 20 years ago.)

I'd come off the Pill, so I am suspecting some form of re-adjustment is also influencing matters.

Crazy(and wondering if she'll open a file called "bloody calendar!")Soph

[yonmei]

Yes, well. When I was living at home with my parents and my mum used to take me aside and whisper that she didn't think it was fair to my dad to expect him to put sheets with blood stains on in the washing machine, this assumption annoyed me. (Back when there were five in the live-in family, my mum had an efficient laundry system going: everyone did their own clothes, and ironed what suited them, and there was a row of laundry baskets for sheets, whites, woollies, and I think a couple of other categories that I now can't remember, which made sense to be done collectively. I objected to the idea that I should quarantine my bedsheets for five days out of 26.)

But now I'm not living with my parents, the fact that my mum belongs to a generation where you didn't talk about That Kind of Thing in front of men (and my dad does, too) is not really something that matters to me very much.

Crazy(and wondering if she'll open a file called "bloody calendar!")Soph

I have a Word doc file on my desktop just called Blood....

More sympathy...

[juliebata]

While my periods aren't any more painful or close together than they've ever been, in the last few months they've become unbelievably heavy. Quite annoying to go through 6, um, "girl plugs" (as I call them) in 12 hours!
I'm just about 39. I can't really ask my mom about a menopause timeline, she had a hysterectomy in her early thirties due to some fibroid tumors. She doesn't have any sisters either, so I have no family history to go by. I'll just have to put up with it till my "past tense" finally arrives...

Clutching ovaries in sympathy...
-Julie

Re: More sympathy...

[crazysoph]

Girl plugs!! Yes!! LOL!!!

I'll be 42 in a month. My mom's own history is that when she had a hysterectomy at (if I recall correctly) 56, her menses were only beginning to get a little erratic. The "chop" was to deal with some pre-cancerous cells that had been discovered in the course of a regularly scheduled pap-smear. (Moral of the story, girls...) So she went from being slightly dis-commoded, to full-on cold-turkey, as they'd removed the ovaries, too.

Since I'm not going to get in touch for more details, I'll be playing it by ear. As I mentioned to another commenter, I had come off the Pill in recent history... and I'd been on it for rather a long time.

And, anyway, I'll get "there" in the end, anyway, so I'm mostly interested in how long the journey will last.

Crazy(and if I can avoid the hot-flashes! Guess it's time for tofu...)Soph

Re: More sympathy...

[rdkeir]

Soph, you are one of the friends (along with Mary) who has left me with very little illusions about ... that. Clearly, you've never heard of the don't discuss it in front of men taboo. Not that there's anything wrong with that!