PMS Dance Party

The days of miracles have returned!  I am the living, breathing recipient of a freaking miracle!  PRAISE BE TO EVERY GODDESS ASSOCIATED WITH THE FEMININE CYCLE!! For the first time in over 8 years, my period is LATE!!!  (insert Hallelujah Chorus here)

It has been almost 5 weeks since my last cycle.  To some women - this is a nothing, a bit of fluff in the great scheme of things.  Some women have long, irregular cycles as a matter of course.  Not I.  Lately, I was down to the 15 or 17 day cycle.  Now every time I go to pee - knowing that I'm past my 'regular' cycle, I do a spot check.  Seriously.  "Am I bleeding?  Now?  "How 'bout now?"

This means that for over a month I haven't had to be drugged!  Well, not for this.  I have a spring in my step, a swagger in my walk, a smile in my speech - all the time.  Well, most of the time.

Yesterday, I might have wanted to kill all living things in my house.  Blinding rage when they had the nerve to ask me how my day was, or whether or not one of them had time for a dentist appointment today.  "Why should I know, what YOUR schedule is?!?

I went driving and had to stop myself from forcing idiot drivers off the freaking road.  "Oh, you had to turn there?!?  Do you know what a fucking turn signal is?!?  DO YOU, YOU YELLOW RAT BASTARD?!?"

I was packaging books to ship and became so stressed that my angina kicked in.  I cried in the parking lot after buying food for dinner.

That's when it struck me that my behaviour was not in the normal range. Disproportionate emotional response to stimuli, weepiness, revenge fantasies... this was PMS.  REALLY BAD PMS.  Crazy-ass PMS which apparently has me teetering on the edge of The Cliffs of Insanity.  Worse PMS than usual.  Is that the trade-off?  Longer periods, but I might get arrested for manslaughter?  I can't believe I'm saying this, but I might prefer the saner, shorter periods.  Seriously.  If I'm going to turn into an emotional fuck nut who is pissed off at the world - who scares her spouse, child and pets... I'll take a little more blood, more frequently and just spend those first two days drugged out of mind.

How long can you tread water?

Underwater photography by the amazing Rafal Makiela

I'm making the effort.  My head's above the surface... but there are days....  Days when, honestly, it would be easier to go under and stay under.  Suck in water and sit at the bottom of the pool.  Instead, I drown proof.

I've been fighting my body for as long as I can remember.  Since I was a kid.  But the last 6 years have been particularly challenging.  72 Months.  2190 Days.  Some of those days I just want to raise the white flag.

I am a walking, talking bundle of symptoms.  Every new doctor has a new theory.  I suspect that many of their theories centre around me being a hypochondriacal fuck-nut.  I'm not crazy.  There are times when I just want to do my best Barbra Streisand and yell at the top of my lungs "I WON'T BE NUTS FOR YOU!!"

My mother says I'm "sensitive," that I'm 'in tune' with my body.  I'm pretty sure she says this, while inside, she wonders where the hell I came from.  Migraines, Hypoglycemia, Peri-menopause, Hashimoto's Disease, and Microvascular Angina.  I am so tired of being tired.  And when I'm this exhausted the bitter twins gang up on me: ennui and entropy.  They make me want to sit... and eat ice cream.. and weep,  instead of purposefully walking out into the fresh air.  They turn me into a peevish sheep.  I HATE being a peevish sheep!  Meh.

And I know, I KNOW that I'm fighting symptoms that I really can't control.  People ask me how I am and, for the most part, I lie.  Because they don't want to know... not really.  I don't want to be the girl who whines, but she's there inside me, just itching to get out.   The thyroid crap and the peri-menopause alone can make a gal wiggy, but it's the attending depression on the periphery, hiding just out of sight, that terrifies me.  I lost 2 years of my life to it when I was in my 20s.  I don't ever want to go back.

So I sit up a little taller.  I take in a breath.  Sometimes I cry.  I distract myself with the wonderful.  And often, when another day has crept above the horizon - it's better.

Doesn't that jiggle when you run?

I said to David, as I watched him in the bathroom this morning.  He was in his boxer shorts, shaving in the other mirror,  and it struck me how loose they were and that they wouldn't give a guy ANY support for his manly bits.  That's why I asked.

He looked at me, confused for a second.  I made a downward glance.  "You know.  Your penis.  Does it hurt when you run without a jockstrap?"

That's when Rissa walked in to the bathroom.  She rolled her eyes at us, said "PARENTS!" deposited her toothbrush back in the toothbrush glass and then left.

David and I shared a glance. "I think that was a flounce," said David.  "I think you're right," said I.

David continued shaving.

"Seriously," I said.  "Isn't it uncomfortable?"

David shrugged.  "Not really.  You kind of get used to it.  When you're wearing shorts, you can kind of tuck it."

"Tuck it?!?"  I'm trying to figure out the logistics of that.

"You know, if the shorts are tight enough," he says.

I continued looking at how baggy the boxers were.  It just didn't seem right to me.  Then I looked down at my own boobs and did a size comparison.

"Oh, I get it!!  Your penis is nowhere close to the size of my boobs and it's lower to the ground."

"Huh?"  He looked a little insulted.

"Your regular, every day penis, when it's not, excited - not as much extra flesh to bob around, as say," I grab my boobs, "THESE."

When in doubt, if you've wounded a man's ego - distract him with breasts.

Why CAN'T you 'spot lose' your inner thigh fat?

I know.  I know.  We've been told... and told again.  You cannot 'spot lose' weight.  Like, say, if your body is in great shape, except for your inner thighs, or back fat, or armpit pudge.  There are NO exercises that you can do to get rid of the extra flesh in one specific area.    You lose weight from all over your body when you drop the poundage.

Thing is?  I'm pretty sure that you lose it from your extremities first.  Which is why I have astonishingly delicate wrists, ankles and cheekbones for a girl of my bodaciousness.  Which would be awesome if I were completely covered from neckline to ankle, but summer's coming up and that means it's bathing suit/camisole/shorts season.

My worry is this... if I lose the extra 30 pounds that the BMI says I should lose - so that I get rid of the inner thigh, back and armpit fat - won't that mean that my wrists, ankles and cheekbones will give me the look of a cadaver, or at the very least Vera Ellen in White Christmas?

Why, oh why, can I not view myself with my spouse's eyes?  David's eyes... that love every ounce of me.  The eyes that waggle their eyebrows when he sees me bend over to do anything...  Hyper-critical Heather focuses on the back fat and the crazy-ass veins in my hands and the face wrinkles and he... he calls me beautiful.  And not only does he call me beautiful he actually believes it!

So as I sit, having had an extra helping of apple crisp after dinner, near to tears because I did not walk on the treadmill today, feeling like a slug,  I'm attempting to see myself through David-Perspective Glasses.  I just have to get through this pathetic, wallowing moment and then I can make better choices tomorrow.  There.  (deep breath) I have shaken this off and am now revelling in my delicate extremities. 

Check out the ankles on me!!

You can't die from these, right?!?

Heather the Valkyrie
Deviant Art
(helmet acquired from the artist Lodin)

It's been more than two weeks now, suffering from the Nachtschweiß.  I feel the German phrasing is warranted  because night-sweat effects are near-Wagnerian.  I am THIS close to grabbing a winged helmet and shrieking from a mountain top.  

Sunday morning, I was doing the dishes naked.  I'd had a bathrobe on, but when that burst into flames, I dropped it. David really wanted to take a picture of me at the sink like that, "You are ADORABLE!" but didn't want to get arrested for promoting pornography.  Rissa just shook her head.  "You are naked ALL the time!"

If only I could use this power for good.  Like Johnny Storm.  "FLAME ON!"    Although in my case it might be "SWEAT ON!"  I could emit a shower of sweat from my body and drown criminals in it.

But if I go around naked, I just get cold.  Too hot - then too cold.  I need Open & Close Clothes so that I can just open up when I'm hot and close when I'm cold.  Wait, I think they have that already - it's called a trench-coat.  Maybe flashers are just men having hot flashes...

I've been taking a sleeping pill every third evening, so that I can occasionally get a full night's sleep, but not get addicted to sleeping pills.  The after-effects of the pill stay with you for a bit, but so totally worth it to be able to sleep for more than 45 minutes at a time.     I've been walking around like a freaking zombie.  I can't do caffeine - because it's bad for hot flashes.  At turns, I'm grumpy and weepy... my family just has to guess which version of me they'll find.  It's like having a new baby or a puppy in the house.  I'm 44 frickin' years old.  Rissa was a baby a dozen years ago - I didn't  have the energy for no sleep when I was 32, I certainly can't pull an all-nighter now.  I can't stay up past 10:00 pm - unless I'm reading a good book.

I am praying with every fibre of my being that when my calcium channel blockers kick back in, this spate of Nachtschweiß will settle down.  If not, my mother assures me that "This too shall pass."  WHEN?!?  WHEN shall it pass?  "Well, my hot flashes stopped by the time I was... maybe... 63."   I can therefore optimistically say that it won't be two full decades of suffering then - just 18 years.   See, there's always a silver lining.

They'd get scared off by the smut...

I highly recommend Megan Hart's erotica

Friends want me to join them on "Goodreads."  I would, but I worry that they'd get scared off by the smut.  I read smut.  And lots of it.  I could varnish the truth and say I read romance, but really, it's smut.  I'm not dog-earing pages in these books to re-read passages for their pithy wording or great insights into philosophy.

That's not to say that I don't also read lit-ruh-cha... (please read that with a poncy upper class British accent).  I do.  I've read and continue to read Pulitzer Prize, Governor General and Hugo award-winning books.  Shakespeare's my guy!  It might be surprising to realize, but there is smut out there that is well-written.  And no, I ain't talking Fifty Shades of Grey.  I did a whole other post about that last summer.

It's just that I'd feel bad, say, if a friend who might have wanted a closer bond with me by looking through my "want to read" section, then panics when s/he discovers many of my titles might involve... threesomes featuring strong men with single syllable masculine names like Nick, or Zach or Jake spending all their waking hours pleasuring a woman whom they both love and worship.  Though honestly?  Most of the time I read for escapism and what better way for me to escape ... then to imagine two men making sure that my breasts are warm?  A gal has two breasts, she might as well have a mouth on each of them... I'm just saying...  But To Kill A Mockingbird is still totally my favourite book.

ps.  Thank you to Badger for reminding me of Tom Leher's take on SMUT

JK Rowling got it right...

A respectful deviation on Wingsdomain Art and Photography's - Quoth the Raven Nevermore

Picture, if you will, a raven.  Now imagine that raven on the inside of your skull.  Imagine that raven has its claws firmly around your eyeballs.  Your optic nerves haven't been severed... yet... but you can actually feel the claws around the eyeball.  That is what a migraine feels like.  Raven claws around your eyeballs."RAVENCLAW" The perfect description for an ocular migraine.  JK Rowling must get them.


Am I right?  Can I hear a "TESTIFY!!" from all the other ocular migraine sufferers?  It doesn't take the pain away, but knowing exactly how to describe it?  Gives some measure of comfort.  And it makes me feel like I know JK Rowling just that much better.  She's probably an asthma sufferer too - I mean, come on... HUFFLEPUFF?!?   I'm not saying that I'd fist bump her or anything upon sight, but I think we'd give each other this knowing, yet pained, looked.