Why Is Mid-Life Mooching Your Mojo? Solutions to Banish Fuzziness and Fatigue Forever!

Introduction

IS MIDLIFE MOOCHING YOUR MOJO?
Welcome Mojo Girlfriends!

“Vaginal atrophy,” she snorted with indignation. “What god-awful thing is that?”

I was sitting across the desk from a 53-year-old postmenopausal woman. She was in my office seeking help for fatigue, low libido, hair loss, weight gain, and insomnia. Lauren had been to many doctors looking for ways to cope with these issues.

“I’m not done living!” Lauren despaired. “Why do so many doctors keep making me feel like a loser?”

Like a lot of us who live into our 40s and 50s and beyond, Lauren was not lazy, crazy, or finished. But doctors had made her feel that way. Just because every woman goes through menopause does not lessen the devastating impact it can have on our health and lives. Few women talk about it, and if they do, it’s often the butt of a joke or casually dismissed.

Transitioning into menopause can be a nasty slap in the face for many of us. Here we are buzzing along through life. The kids are finally at an age where we can complete a thought. We’re hitting our stride in our career, perhaps at last earning a respectable income and professional respect.

And then what happens? Bam! Suddenly the periods come every two weeks in torrential gushes, or whenever they please. Hot flashes threaten to ignite our thinning hair, and now we need to shave our faces? Just when we’re commanding respect at work, a mysterious fog shrouds our brains, slowing function to a crawl. Memory is contained on Post-it Notes and iPhone calendar alerts. Strange ‘demons’ periodically possess us, and we yell, cry, or both for no particular reason. Sex hurts, but who wants to do that anymore anyway? It’s like the Sahara Desert down there. And sleep. Oh, we long for precious sleep, but here we are wide-awake in the wee hours of the morning, night after night. Sneeze, laugh, or chug some water and we’re wetting our underwear. New layers of fat turn up in the oddest places (back fat, really?), taking the fun out of wearing clothes. Weird things start popping up at checkups, like high blood pressure. To add insult to injury, the hair salon recommends a product for aging hair, and the eye doctor says it’s time for bifocals.

And here’s the thing – we cope, we manage, we smile, we pretend we are OK. We pick up the pieces of our health and carry on. We look perfectly normal while shopping at the grocery store, and yet it seems like our body is slowly disintegrating, slowly developing strange new symptoms. How concerned do we need to be? Will anything help? Doctors tend to dismiss our complaints with prescriptions for antidepressants, anti-anxiety meds, and sleeping pills. These solutions rarely help. But we know; deep down we know this is not who we are, this is not how it’s supposed to be. This is NOT OK!

If men went through menopause, a national emergency would have been declared long ago! Hundreds of millions of dollars poured into research, and the topic would be headline news. Every hospital would have a menopause wing; millions would bravely participate in menopause fun runs and proudly wear little menopause ribbons, blood-red maybe. Retired football players would do menopause ads on TV. We’d talk about it with a serious tone at Starbucks. But no, as women we are too often dismissed, ignored, or even ridiculed. Sometimes our husbands divorce us, or doctors send us on our way with an ever
expanding list of prescriptions.

I’m painting a pretty dire picture, even though I left out a lot of symptoms. I know that a woman can suffer from extreme menopausal symptoms and still patch together a pretty decent life. Plenty do, because women are incredibly strong by the time we hit midlife. It’s kind of like labor and birth. Only this time the pain and discomfort are drawn out over many years. Older women in our lives pat us on the back with a compassionate smile and assure us we will get through this. Things will get better, we’re told, but they never really do for a lot of women.