Peri-menopause and Menopause

The trick is to go back to the first room..

Who are you people, and why am I wearing this bathrobe?

You should have smoked the pot with him and chiilllllled, Aidan.

I sympathize with the memory stuff. I'm still mostly OK with names, and I don't forget what I went after, at least not very often. Those don't bother me so much. It's when I'm in the middle of correcting some student who has used a really pitiful word choice in their writing, and suddenly, as I'm talking to them, the right word is just...gone. It's like it just...uh...

um......

Oh, sheesh...I forgot what I was gonna say. (sigh) Again.

It's really embarrassing.

I've called the dishwasher the refrigerator, the lawn mower a broom, the sofa a chair, getting the names of items twisted. Then there's the complete brainlock where, in the middle of a sentence, I simply forget the next word. It makes me crazy but the same kind of thing happens to my friends so, we just shake our heads at one another and commiserate.

I know exactly what you mean.

oh yeah....

then I'll get frustrated and say "You know! That thing!"

Oh, eoe, I do the exact same thing. Total aphasia, and it doesn't help when I'm rushing to get the word out. I end up listing things and discarding them. Or RP will help, e. g.

"I am gonna go on Amazon and order, uh, what's it called?"

"Tomato paste?" No
"Chicken broth?" No. It's not food.
"TP?" No.
"Socks?" Maybe.

Yeah, Alex tells me to quit using pronouns Sometimes the word just isn't there.

I can remember forgetting what I was going to bring up in conversation back in my twenties though. I blame this all on my not very linear mind. You could call me scattered or you could call my mind playful. Let's say it flits about hither and yon making connections as a regular conversation is going on. Once in a while I'll start to bring up the connection, and then blank on it... usually the connector pops back up a little bit later. I suppose this phenomenon is worse now, but it was not entirely new in my menopause years.

On words - since I'm not working in landscape design anymore and am in a new state where my local planting vocabulary is on the spare side, my much larger old planting vocabulary is getting rusty. Even some general cultural names are dropping like flies. For example, the other day I was trying to remember the guy who opened the aqueduct to LA with the words "There it is. Take it." Started with M. First I thought of Mallinkrodt, an old chemical company. Then Marshall. Then what, I dunno, but several other M words. I refilled my coffee cup and came up with it. Mulholland. Brrrr, I call this word outflow.

Which reminds me, anyone read the fascinating description of what it is like for a writer/poet to lose his word access because of a glioblastoma brain tumor? I read this within the past week or so. Too bad I didn't keep a link, as I don't remember where I read it. I guessed the Guardian, but can't find it there.

Aha, it's in the Observer - I take it the Sunday edition of the Guardian.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/nov/07/tom-lubbock-brain-tumour-language

One of my favorite jokes:

Two lifelong friends met for their customary Thursday lunch and spent an hour happily discussing the past week's ups and downs. When the check came, one lady looked at the other and said, "You know, this is really embarrassing. We've known each other for 30 years, and I know absolutely everything about your life, but for some reason, I can't recall your name!"

Her friend looked at her, first in shock, then in anger. She slowly drummed her fingernails on the table, staring at her. Finally, she looked around, leaned over and whispered...

"How soon do you need to know?"

Below is a link to a great page! It's all about hot flashes (with angle for women who have had breast cancer)....
http://www.breastcancer.org/tips/menopausal/facing/hot_flashes.jsp

<sigh> One of my ovaries just quit. I had a blood value that coincides with menopause. I have a follow-up in the beginning of January.

This is all woo hoo to me.

Woohoo as in break out the champagne?

I should have explained. I think of you as young, at kind of a great age, and the business about finding your menopause status by a blood test is news to me. I suppose I should have known that hormone output (or whatever marker) is measurable, but I haven't known that it is a routine option. So, woohoo, as in the science of medicine can be amazing to me.

On a related matter, there's news today from the San Antonio Breast Cancer meeting about a week ago - Review Suggests Benefits in Estrogen -
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/14/health/research/14hormone.html?hpw
Benefits for some, that is.

I'm not sure how reliable the random, in terms of my cycle, blood test is. I looked it up. The blood test is supposed to be done on the third day of one's period. My blood test wasn't done then. The range for this number is from 4 to like 100. Normal youthful numbers are very near the 4 end. My number was very near the 100 end. I dunno if that means that the ovary that was supposed to fire this month is sapped, or what else the number means.

I do know there can be complications from early menopause.

I'll know more in Jan when I get in to see the gyno.

Was it an fsh?

yes, fsh. Any comments?