(Photo credit: tejamen1947)
For the past couple of weeks I’ve been filled with a mild anxiety. Am I perimenopausal? Men? Come back, come on back, it’s ok. I’m not going there. I wondered this because every evening for the past couple of weeks, I began to feel flushed around 9pm and could not understand why. I was downright hot and had to turn on the ceiling fan in whatever room I was in. Then the gasp. Oh my God is this a hot flash? Do women become hot all of a sudden? Is this it? I tried to calm myself down thinking ok I’ll research menopause and see what I have to do. There must be something I can do I thought, as I fanned myself furiously. I figured that I would need a game plan to come to terms with early aging and all that entailed. One thing I knew for sure is that I would not take hormones. Didn’t they say wild yam helped? Or edamame? There was so much to look up!
Then the other day I came home and instead of walking into the kitchen with my mail as I usually did, I saw my cat in the dining room and went in to scoop her up. As I did, I passed the thermostat. 78??? How is it 78 degrees in here? It didn’t feel like 78 degrees and was “in recovery” trying to get back down to 74 degrees. I have a programmable thermostat and in the spring and summer leave it on 74 degrees all the time. I never even thought to check the thermostat when having these “hot flashes” because I knew I had it set to 74. Lo and behold! I looked through the schedule and it had re-set itself to 83 degrees at 8pm. No wonder! So by 9pm the whole house was hot, it was not me! It also dawned on me that approximately 2 weeks before we had had a huge storm and the electricity had been out while I was at work as evidenced by the microwave and stove blinking the time at me. Ah, so the power outage caused the thermostat to reset. I see. Wait for it….Oh! That means I’m not having hot flashes after all! Yippeeee!
How funny it is that one life event can have us re-evaluating it all. That’s it, I’m old! This is the beginning of the end! I’m going to fight it every step of the way. Oh the joy when I realized that fight would be for another day, hopefully a long time from now. At least for now, homeostatis, hormones and my thermostat are holding steady.
A Serene Scribe 