Like, Not Even a Little

The medical report began as follows:

Hillary had an ultrasound scan today which confirmed…that the uterus is very normal. The ovaries show no evidence of activity at all and I suspect that Hillary is quite close to her last period…

I shoved my laptop under my arm and ran to tell John. My eyes filled with tears as I burst into the kitchen. John glanced up from his yogurt and Grape Nuts, raising an eyebrow.

“What’s so funny?”

I sputtered over my words, reading aloud as my face turned into that overused laugh-til-you-cry emoji. Not that I found it funny that my ovaries had all but gone kaput, mind you. That was kind of big news. It was the way my gynecologist announced that my organs had completely checked out that had me rolling. It wasn’t enough to say that my ovaries were inactive. No, those suckers weren’t just lazy. They were doing absolutely nothing……”AT ALL“. Like, zero. Nada. I mean, those babies weren’t just wandering off dreamily into the sunset; they’d already cashed out their 401K’s and were sipping Mai Tai’s in The Maldives. Adios, Amiga! Au Revoir, Ma Chère! Ciao, Bella! Sayonara, Sister!

The report continued:

…she is at the end of her ovarian estrogen production…which means that overall things so far have gone very smoothly in what is usually regarded as the most troublesome time around the menopause…

Touché to my ovaries (cue a slow clap). They’d dropped the mic before I knew I was supposed to be listening for a punchline. I wasn’t just starting, but at the end of menopause? Leave it to me to pass through one of the most momentous events of a woman’s life without even knowing. Genius. But it occurred to me; just because I hadn’t been aware of what had been going on in my body, perhaps my doctor was giving me too much credit for me having gotten through it “smoothly”. Had I missed the obvious?

While I’m sure that this is the point where I come off as a complete idiot (a totally fair assessment, by the way), hear me out.

As I thought back over the past few years, I realized that there were a few clues to this mystery that had unfolded somewhere south of my belly button while I ignorantly carried on. For starters, I’d had the most famed menopause symptom for over 18 years. My hot flashes started soon after my third kid was born, and just kind of stayed. I was told by my obstetrician at the time that it wasn’t necessarily common but that it could happen. And I just happened to be one of the unlucky winners of that postnatal door prize. After muddling through almost two decades in moisture wicking spandex, the daily streams of sweat were hardly a red flag to this flashy mama.

And then there was the advice from my former gynecologist, the one who I had always made time to visit over the holidays when we travelled back to the states from our current home in England. Up until last year I regularly squeezed in a checkup between last-minute shopping and cheer with family and friends. While I’d given up on most of my American creature comforts and had even stopped hoarding stuff like Q-Tips and Ziplocs to bring back to the U.K., I hadn’t yet mustered the courage for anyone in London to check out my girlie bits (plus, nothing says “Happy Holidays!” like a Pap smear. Why mess with a good thing?). When I’d last seen my former doctor two years ago, I mentioned that I was feeling sluggish, bloated, and generally yucky. She ran some blood tests, deemed me “super healthy,” in fact “nowhere near menopause,” and told me to keep up the good work. I took “nowhere near menopause” to mean that I was “light years away” from having to worry about it, and completely put it out of my mind. I decided that my feeling crappy must be because of something I was doing to myself. I started by assessing my diet, contemplated the sheer volume of dairy I consumed in a day, and decided that I’d try laying off cheese and whole milk latté addiction for a bit and see if that did the trick.

That worked for a little while, or at least I convinced myself that barista oat milk was The Answer To All Things. Looking back, though, I was all but ignoring the fact that, despite all of my life tweaks, over that couple of years I never felt genuinely great. Or even a little good. Of course I had a logical explanation for each of my ailments: I was lethargic because I live in England, where the rain and 100 days of darkness don’t make it especially motivating to pop out of bed and tackle the world most days, let alone the laundry. I was depressed because my second son had followed his older brother and fled my nest, and a totally empty roost loomed as I looked towards my youngest kiddo’s high school graduation. And when we started hearing that this Covid-19 “thing” might be a real THING, it was easy for all of us to blame pretty much everything on that. As we worried about keeping our cupboards stocked and our bums wiped, I didn’t think twice about my anxiety going through the roof. I mean, everyone was freaking out, right? I’m pretty sure I wasn’t the only one who woke up every morning, assessed my level of ick, and wondered, “Coronavirus or Hangover?”

And speaking of Covid, it was because of the pandemic that I wound up going two years without a checkup “down there”. Last December, when I realized that I’d forgotten to book the appointment with my American gynecologist during our trip back, I thought, “No problem! I’ll just drop by this summer!” And, poof, there was no summer. When I finally came to grips with that fact that going back to the U.S. wasn’t going to happen any time soon, it was clear: I needed to put on my Big Girl Britches, dust off the handwritten referral from from our London GP that had been tucked away in my desk since we moved to England almost 7 years ago, and finally let a local gynecologist “sort me out.” So that’s what I did.

Two years after understanding that I was light years away from menopause and a week after the initial assessment with my new doctor, I once again found myself with tears in my eyes when she brought me back into her office to explain the results of my blood work. But this time, my tears weren’t from laughter at her description of my exhausted ovaries. Nor were they from sadness that my ovaries had retired without giving me a chance to say farewell. They were tears of relief. As the doctor listed symptom after symptom – many of which I had felt but never acknowledged – and what she could do to help each one, a wave of comfort flooded over me. It wasn’t my diet, it wasn’t anxiety, it wasn’t a pandemic; heck, it wasn’t even my consumption of cabernet. All the oat milk in the world wasn’t going to fix me. It was my hormones (or lack thereof) that had made me feel rotten all along. And there was something that could be done about it. This holiday, instead of consolation from a magnificent mammogram or beautiful blood work result, receiving the missing pieces to the puzzle that had eluded me for so long was a pretty amazing gift.

The doctor’s final report contained gorgeous words like normal, reassuring, and satisfactory. It confirmed that the book was officially closed on my ovarian estrogen production. All’s well that ends well. But it also contained one last phrase that gave me a final chuckle:

…Having spoken to [Hillary], I think she has actually been very stoic with a lot of her symptoms that have been gradually creeping in…

Now, while I appreciate the compliment, when I think of the word “stoic”, the picture that comes to my mind is that of a decorated war veteran who put life on the line to save countless others, not a middle-aged, menopausal mom in leggings and a puffy vest who gave up an occasional cheese plate and 3-a-day whole milk latté habit. And though it makes me giggle when I think about my doctor’s choice of words, I can’t help but reflect on all that time I muddled through my days feeling awful and be optimistic as my body becomes more and more inhabitable. I’m glad to have re-learned the lesson at age 50, that if something doesn’t feel great, there’s probably a reason. And there’s likely something I can do about it. I need to put those Big Girl Britches on every day. And I need to pay attention to what’s going on in my body and have the humility and perseverance to press for answers when it’s telling me something’s wrong; even when I’m distracted by kids, a husband, or a pandemic. My body is a lot more useful not just to me but to all of us, and dare I say more pleasant to be around – and in – when everything’s working as it should.

Do I regret being on the other side of menopause without being clued in to having gone through it? Sure, I might have been less hard on myself over the past couple of years had I known what was going on. I’ll admit that I would have benefitted from more self love. On the other hand, if I had focused on what was happening I probably would have dwelled on it and been more annoyed. And as for leaving my childbearing years behind, that’s fine too. While it would’ve been nice to have a fourth baby, I couldn’t be more humbled that my now oh-so-tired ovaries produced three spectacular humans. They’ve earned their rest; their work is done. And they did pretty well, if I do say so myself. So, no. I’m not mourning a thing. Not at all.