Much as I love summer, it has been compromised for me by my physical condition, which makes me intolerant to the very heat that I love. I have written about menopause before in this Electron's history. I was assured that in a few years, the symptoms would abate. But instead of getting better, they have gotten worse. How long will I have to wait? For some people, they never go away.

Hot flashes are a perennial joke, at least to people who don't have them. Just listen to comedians and you will be provoked to laugh about menopause, which has the same kind of bitterly amusing indignity for older women that "not getting it up" has for men. Hot flashes are one of the reasons why women have been considered unfit for high public office. Supporters of a well-known woman candidate have been called by journalists the "hot flash crowd." Go ahead and laugh…after all, a woman should be hot, right? She's a real hottie!

I have put up with this now for five years. I've tried soy pills, soy milk, vitamin supplements, herbal remedies, acupuncture, and even antidepressants. Nothing has worked, at least for very long. Every hour, sometimes every 40 or even 30 minutes, I am immersed in boiling water for three minutes, during which I cannot continue whatever useful thing I was doing but must stick close to a fan or push my head into my refrigerator's freezer or, during winter, go outside in frozen weather with no coat on. It disrupts my work and scrambles my brain, and it takes me long minutes to remember what it was I was working on. At night it doesn't let me alone, but semi-wakes me so that I toss and turn and throw the blankets off. In cooler weather, it is briefly better, and then some mechanism re-adjusts and returns me to the boiler. Sound familiar, old gals? What a chuckle!

There's a little blue pill (or any number of pills) for men's indignity, and untold billions of them are sold, counterfeited, and sold again. There's a treatment for this scourge of older women, but it is deemed so risky that few doctors will prescribe it. My doctor refuses to give me any hormone treatment. But what if the quality of life deteriorates to such an extent that I lose work, lose sleep, lose sanity? Be a tough old bag and suck it up? Sorry, you lost the evolutionary race!

Posted at 8:30 pm | link