I'm 43. Now technically the average age of menopause is 51 in the US and technically it doesn't officially start until 12 months after your last period, but I've been getting my hormones in little brown bottles for a while now so I figure all bets are off on me being average about anything. Hot flashes are slowly becoming more and more of a thing in my life, compounded by the Rogue Valley deciding not to do fall this year in any noticeable way. Again.
So last night I went to bed at about 9:30. It being a Sunday night I didn't take my evening anti-inflammatory because the week-end always throws my schedule off. Skipping Sunday night resets it nicely and usually I'm asleep by the time the morning dose wears off, so I don't even notice.
Not last night.
At 10 I decided I was tired enough to
At 11:30 I had my first hot flash of the night.
Of course I immediately pulled off my night shirt and every cover I owned and tried to cool off. Then I remembered that Smokey, our 14 year old bastard of a cat, tends to have nightmares and wakes up fighting, When he does he'll bite anything living, including any uncovered human limbs. So I had to pull the
I spent the next two hours a) sweating and b) trying every combination of pillows I could find to attempt to not wake with a crick in my neck and shoulder. I wake with said crick every morning and have for decades now. But of late said crick has been disturbing me. It use to be that I'd wake with the crick, stretch my shoulder down and back, and feel a joint somewhere around my shoulder or collarbone kind of slide back into place with a "thunk". At which point the crick would go away and I'd go about my business. But about a month ago it didn't go away and so I kept wiggling and I found that if I pushed down on my collarbone right at the nape of my neck a bone/joint in the back of my neck, aka my spine, went "thunk" back into place and made the crick go away, Ever since it's been two thunks every morning, which is an easy fix but one in the spine simply cannot be good. Last night every combination hurt my neck, which seemed likely to lead to The Crick, so I kept trying new ones.
The one thing I was not doing this time was sleeping.
I finally gave up, got up, remembered to put milk in my oats for later today, ignored the slugs on the floor (This has been a thing this summer, Waking up to 2-4 slugs around the kitchen. Still haven't figured out where they're coming from.) and checked the thermostat. It was 78º in our house at 1 in the morning in October. I cranked it down to 60º, then decided that the adult thing would be to not freeze the AC over by overworking it, again, and put it back to 65º before attempting to sleep once more.
It was only because I had sweated through the sleep braces I was wearing and they were stuck to my arms that kept me from hauling my shotgun out and shooting down the air ambulance that buzzed our neighborhood right about then.
At 2am I sent my husband a grumpy e-mail saying that if he woke me when his alarm went off at 4 (Mine was set for 3:30. Not a chance this side of hell.) he'd be sleeping in the laundry basket with the other cats, but then I realized that breakfast comes with a side of anti-inflammatories so I got up.
Total sleep: 2.5 hours
During the process of getting dressed I realized that the Sunday bra really doesn't work for Mondays. The Sunday bra doesn't have any holes, so I'm loathe to throw it out (I wear my clothes to rags, and then turn them into quilts if I can. It's a Puritan thing,) but it doesn't support anything so it's only good for preventing headlights while lolling about on the couch and knitting. Given that I did that yesterday today my kitchen looks like a bomb went off and support is needed. So I went to the laundry closet to fetch a better bra. This took me right past not one but three open windows, in full view of the back yard.
In my childhood I used to be scared of the dark. I would never look out a window at night, convinced that if I did I would see creepy little alien things with big heads and long, skinny arms set about on mysteriously evil alien errands around our neighborhood. And what's more, they would see me, and come after me because I knew something somehow. So I never dared look out. I figure I saw something once and it stuck with me in a strange way. Odds are this was either a hallucination caused by medication (I took a lot of phenobarbital as a child.) or I saw some relatives of a sort off doing illicit things and buried the memory. No desire to sort it out now, as an old friend Zeke once said if you don't remember you probably don't want to remember.
This morning I stood there in front of open windows, looking out over the dark of the backyard and thought that if the aliens were really that interested in my flabby, sagging, middle-aged menopausal, sleep-deprived tits they could come in and have a good look. I was entirely out of fucks for aliens.
I consider this a sign of mental health.
That said the cats are currently whispering in the corners, which either negates the previous sentence, means I really need more sleep, or both.
I'm going back to bed. Wish me luck.
No comments:
Post a Comment