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The 'Pause
The menopause podcast with unfiltered conversations about the symptoms you hate, the changes you didn’t see coming, and the hilarious moments midlife can bring. You've got questions and we've got the experts to answer them.
The 'Pause
Menopause Is Better Together: How Girlfriends Make the Journey Easier
Every woman's perimenopause journey has unique twists and turns, but one thing remains constant we shouldn't have to navigate it alone. This heartfelt episode brings together host Val Lego, menopause expert Nisha McKenzie, and Val's longtime friend Lauren for a candid conversation about the power of friendship during hormonal transitions.
The trio dives deep into the mysterious symptoms that leave many women questioning their sanity, from waking up at 2 AM with racing thoughts to suddenly forgetting words during important presentations. Lauren shares her frustration with brain fog that interfered with her public speaking as a city council member, while Val recounts her journey to hormone replacement therapy despite initial fears.
Nisha illuminates the science behind these experiences, explaining how our bodies contain over 400 estrogen receptors affecting everything from sleep patterns to joint health. She debunks common myths about hormone testing and treatment, offering practical guidance for women confused by conflicting information. Her explanation of how declining estrogen causes increased inflammation helps explain the mysterious "frozen" joints that suddenly appear without warning.
What makes this conversation truly special is the authentic friendship on display. Lauren and Val demonstrate how having someone who understands these changes provides essential emotional support and occasional reality checks during "tire-slashy" moods. Their easy laughter about ordering Girl Scout cookies during 3 AM insomnia reveals how shared experiences normalize this challenging transition.
Ready to find your own perimenopause support network? Come join our Pause Diaries Facebook group, where women just like you are sharing stories, asking questions, and supporting each other through every twist and turn of this journey. Because as this episode proves, perimenopause isn't the end of anything, it's the beginning of a new chapter, and it's always better with friends by your side.
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Join our private Facebook group, The Pause Diaries, where we dive deeper into all things perimenopause and menopause—without judgment, just real talk.
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Until next time, stay curious, stay empowered, and never hit pause on your wellbeing.
Welcome to the Pause, the menopause podcast, with unfiltered conversations about the symptoms you hate, the changes you didn't see coming and the hilarious moments midlife can bring. I'm your host, Aal Lego, and I've been a dedicated health reporter for 25 years and I wanted to normalize something that every woman goes through menopause. So together we're going to talk about it the Peri, the Meno and the Post. Welcome to the Pause. Hi friends, welcome back to the Pause, the podcast where we get real about what it means to feel good in our skin, especially during one of the most confusing and transformational times in our lives perimenopause.
Val:I'm your host, Val Lego, an accredited health reporter with more than 25 years experience talking about health and lifestyle. So once I hit perimenopause, I knew I had to talk about that too, which is why I created this podcast to get real answers to questions we all have but we just can't seem to find the answers to. In today's episode I'm really excited about because I'm not flying solo and I'm not just talking about having my fabulous co-host and nationally certified menopause provider, Nisha McKenzie, who's back to drop some more serious hormone knowledge bombs, but I'm also bringing in one of my besties, my ride or die, Lauren. We've been through just about everything together except this, and now we are on this journey together as well. Yeah, why don't we just do this?
Lauren:together.
Val:Let's get on that perimenopause bus, cause it's at our stop. Beep, beep, here we come. Yes, oh my gosh. So like I really want to let everybody know that you you were in part, one of my inspirations to start this podcast, because we were talking about, oh my gosh, the weight gain and I feel bloated when I drink beer and this, that, and I'm cranky and I'm ragey. And then we realized it was a thing and it was perimenopause and it was here. It was never going to happen to us when we were teenagers, but unfortunately it did find us.
Lauren:Well, I don't think anybody even talked about it. When we were teenagers, like to be honest with you, I think my mom was on the birth control pill until she was in menopause. Like they didn't tell her, hey, maybe you should get off the birth control pill or anything. She was just didn't want to get pregnant and of course you know, you know, had her first child when she was 18 years old and you know it was just out birth control pills and honestly I don't know what that did to her system, but she didn't have one single symptom.
Val:At least I'm like good for you, not what, not one that she talked to you about or that, like she realized, you know so anyway, it's just been like this whole big thing where we're like we're not going to sit in silence anymore, we're going to get out there, we're going to talk about all of the uncomfortableness that we feel and the feelings that we have.
Val:And I know you were often like I just want to know this. You know you've got a bazillion questions but like sometimes you're just like why is this happening? Have you read about this? And I know you've always got stuff to talk about.
Lauren:So I mean, I feel like, honestly, val, like you know, we scroll on social media and things get thrown our way because of our algorithms telling, you know, facebook world, that we're, you know, 57 years old, and so I feel like I'm being fed things all the time. I'm being fed things on like pills. I should be taking exercises, I should be doing massages, I should be taking part in mushroom coffee. I don't know and I just don't know what the answer is and if anything works, but I feel like I want to buy it all, I want to do it all, but I'm also scared.
Val:I know, because there's a lot of stuff out there that you probably shouldn't be trying, but you know, I've got my co-host, nisha, here. She's going to answer all your questions. One of your things I know is that you've been on the birth control pill and you're like what do I do? Should I stay on it? Should I not stay on it? We touched on this on another podcast, but you know, nisha, it never hurts to revisit this for those that are listening now.
Nisha:Should you stay on it? Yeah, you know, I mean, if you're doing well on it and you don't mind being on it and you don't, you know it's all the environment we're adding it to. So if there's not other risk factors like high clotting risk factors and that type of thing, then yeah, I mean you can stay on it if you'd like. If you want to try to get off of it and see if you can move through perimenopause and menopause with less synthetic hormone in your body, then you can try that. You just also have to be careful. You know, if you have sperm in your life that could potentially, you know, meet with a little egg and cause a problem for you. If that were to be a problem for you, then you know we would have to find another method of contraception.
Lauren:So this is this is what this is my question. Because I was meeting with my doctor, I was having my normal pap smear and doing all of that, and I said I feel like I want to murder someone all the time. And his suggestion at the time was to get on birth control pill and to just give that a try. I don't need to be on the birth control pill I, you know, I'm not in that world right now. Long story short, I had the ablation thing. You know, my husband is fixed. I'm not worried about getting pregnant, but that was a suggestion he had for me. I don't know that it really did much for me. Oh, and so you did it. You went on the birth control pill. Yeah, Can I?
Nisha:ask you a question that maybe some women don't feel comfortable sharing Do you mind sharing your age when you went on it?
Lauren:I was probably 49-ish.
Nisha:Okay, yeah, I mean it's not wrong to go on where your period's pretty heavy, or no.
Lauren:Well, I have the ablation, so I fixed all of that, yeah.
Nisha:Yeah, I mean it's probably. It is an option Like this is informed consent, right? We're supposed to tell people, here's all of your options, so that should be on the option list. It would have been lower on my presentation of the option list for you, but it is an option. It's not usually something that I would say if you're moods, if you're feeling, I just call it tire slashy. If you're feeling tire slashy, then you know, we find out. Are you feeling tire slashy cyclically or are you just feeling like you know, sunday through Sunday? Are you tire slashy?
Lauren:right. I'm probably like. I probably haven't kept track of it enough to realize it probably had everything to do with I'm still having my cycle. I just don't know exactly when I'm having my cycle because I have the ablation.
Nisha:Sure, sure. So that's a time sometimes I'll tell people you know you could, if you wanted to, if you know tires aren't going to be slashed in the meantime, you could start monitoring and seeing if you can see a pattern. But you also don't have to. One of the first questions I might have asked you is how are you sleeping at night?
Lauren:Yeah, so honestly, lately fine, but for a good long time I was definitely getting up for at least a couple hours every night, where I'd wake up at two o'clock in the morning and couldn't sleep until five o'clock in the morning.
Nisha:Oh, oh, and that's when the tires are getting slashed, right.
Lauren:Yes, probably.
Nisha:Everybody else is sleeping.
Lauren:Nobody's going to see.
Nisha:And do you know what was waking you up? Were you waking up because you were warm? You were waking up because you were drenched. You were waking up to pee. Were you waking up because your mind was racing?
Lauren:No, like I would wake up and then I just couldn't fall back to sleep. Yeah, it wasn't even like there was that much on my mind at the time, so really it just felt like some sort of hormonal swing of some sort Isn't it bizarre.
Nisha:You could be in a deep sleep and then all of a sudden bing your eyes are open.
Val:You're like, wow, I know what am I going to do. I often thought a really great thing to do would be to like drop products from like 1 to 5 in the morning, from like 1 to 5 in the morning, and then say see you at 1.15 am for this wonderful product drop because you're going to be awake and you're going to be scrolling.
Lauren:So instead I ordered Girl Scout cookies online in the middle of the night. Right, right, that's valid.
Nisha:Sounds delicious. Call me next time I'll be up.
Val:Only if I don't take my progesterone then I'll be up, but I probably would have offered you some progesterone yeah, that is one of the things that, like, lauren, you're like interested in the HRT and you're like I don't, you don't know enough about it and whether or not that's something that you know, you're still like, you're scared so, like a lot of women are, even when I was finally just said, i'm'm doing it, you know, whatever it's like, we have to understand that the research was flawed, that literally 0.6% of women were getting the increase of breast cancer, and so that's another topic for another podcast that you can download, because we've done one on that Women's Health Initiative.
Val:But I just I'm like I'm doing it and I felt like it was life changing for me. Now I had my honeymoon period of like three months and now I I'm like I'm doing it and I felt like it was life changing for me. Now I had my honeymoon period of like three months and now I'm kind of like, all right, maybe I need to make some adjustments, but I still would not, would not go back, I would not go back. But what is it, lauren, that you're like you get a little concerned about?
Lauren:how do you test to know what you should be on? What kind of what should I be asking my doctor, or what kind of information should I be giving my doctor to say, you know, like what levels am I getting a blood test? Is it a urine sample? Is it? I mean, what is it? How do we know what I need to be on?
Nisha:So first is and I'm kind of like a word police, which is really annoying to my teenagers, but like the should word there's nothing that you should be on necessarily. So you can. You just have a lot of choices and there isn't necessarily a test. There's not a test for perimenopause. The way that we test for perimenopause, or the way that we diagnose it, is how old are you? What are your symptoms?
Nisha:If you're in your 40s Val's heard me say this, I don't know, umpteen times today, probably but if you're in your 40s, you're in perimenopause. That's just. It's just the time around menopause. We know that everybody that's born with a uterus and ovaries, that progesterone level starts to decline in our 30s. So by the time you're 49, you don't have much progesterone left. I don't need to check your level to know that. Okay, so if we add in some progesterone, the really cool thing about progesterone is, even though you've had an ablation, which means for the people listening who don't know what an ablation is Even though you've had an ablation, which means for the people listening who don't know what an ablation is it's we go inside the uterus and heat up the inside lining of the uterus so that the cells can't respond to the hormones that you know the ovaries are naturally producing, still saying, hey, build up in this part of the month and then now shed in this part of the month.
Nisha:So ideally after an endometrial ablation people don't bleed. Commonly people will, but maybe just a little bit lighter, and then on occasion they don't work at all for people. But even if you don't bleed at all after an ablation, meaning that all those cells got hit and with that heat whatever type of heat was applied there they still could potentially build up with some estrogen and they need something to help protect them from that unopposed buildup of estrogen. So if you did do hormone replacement therapy or menopausal hormone therapy down the road, you would need to have a progestogen of some sort on board, something to protect your uterus in case you did add an estrogen down the road.
Lauren:Okay.
Nisha:But so that part we do know, like there's a should If we're going to use the word should. There's a should. If you have estrogen and you have a uterus you not should you have to be on something that will protect your uterus. Because it's basically like we're giving you estrogen, which is kind of like the beginning of the menstrual cycle, and so then the lining is building up. But if we don't have the end of the menstrual cycle where the lining sheds, then it just builds and builds and builds, and builds and builds and then those cells can kind of start to lack differentiation and they can turn precancerous and cancerous. So we want to make sure that we're protecting your uterus and setting you up for success down the road.
Nisha:But because that progesterone is low, we can give you progesterone right away, you know, in perimenopause, whenever. That is because one of the first things that leaves of the three hormones estrogen, progesterone and testosterone is progesterone, and one of the first things that perimenopausal women commonly experience is difficulty with sleep, night sweats, racing mind, mood swings, agitation, tire, slashiness. So when we give progesterone orally it's metabolized through the liver, which I'll leave out all the boring sciencey stuff but it basically turns into a metabolite that interacts with the GABA receptor in the brain, and that's the one. That's the reason that progesterone can help with sleep, and it can help with mood and cognition and all of those things, in addition to protecting your uterus. So you need it to protect your uterus.
Lauren:Let's talk about that cognition, because I feel like the thing that bothered me the most, or has bothered me the most, is that foggy brain feeling, the idea that, okay, um, last. So I've been on city council in the city of saugatuck, I was mayor last year and I felt like there were times I didn't want to speak publicly because I couldn't find the words. Is that common?
Nisha:yeah, so common okay.
Val:yeah, I've had that happen too, where I'm, you know, mid sentence and then I have to kind of like take a pause or redirect, and it's just, I think everybody I think everybody has it and it just leaves it just like boom it's gone.
Nisha:You walk into a room and it's gone. Why did you walk in? You stare at your kid and you're like what the hell is your name?
Lauren:Yeah, well, and I just go okay. Is it old age? Is it I got too much on my mind? Is it this, is it that? And I'm like no, I am telling you I cannot find the words and my train of thought when I'm speaking publicly is not good. I was just feeling really frustrated by that.
Nisha:Yeah yeah, that's part of perimenopause for many, many people.
Val:And does the hormone replacement therapy help that?
Nisha:It can. I mean I would say indirectly right, if part of that brain fog can be I'm not sleeping well and then you're not resting and digesting Things aren't repairing when you're sleeping. You're foggier, you're more jumbled. During the day anxiety can get worse. That can jumble things in the brain. So if we can kind of calm some of those things by better sleep, positively affecting that GABA receptor, then yes, some of the brain fog can improve.
Val:So like the progesterone, can that help that?
Nisha:Yeah, absolutely there's. Also there's difference too between brain fog, kind of like foggy cognition, you know, women not taking the hormone replacement therapy and an increase in dementia and the fact that estrogen does have that huge effect on the brain.
Val:So that was one of the things that really pushed me to say, like you know what, even if I am scared, I'm getting on it because I want to protect my brain.
Nisha:Yeah, we've got hormone receptors all over our brains and there's the data on the dementia and hormone data. Dr Lisa Moscone is doing a lot of really cool research on this right now and we have a little bit. We don't. You know, we all want more, of course, so we need a little bit more data there. But loosely kind of like what we see right now is if we can start hormones within five years of menopause and that's 12 months after your final menstrual period if you are having periods if we can start hormones within five years of that, we're more likely to help prevent dementia, cognitive decline Hormones have not been shown to be great at treating cognitive decline and dementia, but this brain fog part that's probably part and parcel from not sleeping well and from increased anxiety and just frustration over, like, what the hell's going on with my body, that kind of stuff yeah, progesterone absolutely can help that For most people. Most people do, sorry, go ahead, yeah, go ahead.
Lauren:One of the things that I keep hearing about or reading about, or maybe being cited to me on social media, is this idea of during perimenopause or menopause, that there's like this cortisol poisoning that's happening and that's why we're gaining weight. Is that a thing?
Nisha:Boy, that's harsh, that's terrifying. I know I think I cringed. All my sphincters went.
Val:I know you shouldn't see their faces by cortisol and I have heard that too and I know that I have talked to some, um some functional medicine, um, naturopaths and they, you know, they say that if your cortisone levels are out of whack, you, you know, trying to adjust those. And sometimes it's eating more protein at nighttime with your dinner, like all of these things you know supposedly lowers the cortisol level. As we know, cortisol does cause you to gain weight around the waist. So you know.
Nisha:I mean my take on this. I'm not a functional medicine person so I don't come at it from that viewpoint. I'm not a functional medicine person, so I don't come at it from that viewpoint.
Nisha:But my take on this is I don't think that there is a single American that does not have an elevated cortisol level and we are going to our threshold of opportunity to tolerate that during perimenopause is going to be a lot slimmer, right? So, yeah, we're all too stressed out. None of us do good self-care. None of us walk around embodied, right, we all walk around in our heads, not in our bodies, and so some of these things there may be some good science behind, but some of them might just be hey, if you're going to eat more protein, it's because now you're paying attention to your body, and maybe that in itself, like the idea, the mind frame of hey, I need to give my body some self-love. Maybe that's what actually brings down our cortisol levels.
Lauren:Okay, I don't know.
Nisha:There's no science there either. That's just my thought process on that. It's your two thoughts.
Val:But I also feel like there's no harm in exploring that option.
Nisha:Absolutely the only thing I tell my patients. They'll come to me all the time and they'll say Nish, can I do this? I had a patient not too long ago come in and say all right, I know you want to get these labs on me Now. Don't look at me like I'm crazy, nish. She said. But I'm seeing a functional medicine doctor and she wants me to have my blood drawn 17 days after the next full moon for my hormones. And then she said she followed up very quickly with don't worry, I'm not going to dance naked in the moonlight.
Nisha:And I said, listen, you can draw your blood whenever you want to draw your blood. I mean data's data. If it gives your functional medicine doctor something to go off of, great, go right ahead. The only thing that some of these things can hurt is your bank account right, like if you want to do that, if you want to eat more protein, if you know, certainly if we could eat more whole foods and take better care of ourselves and actually practice self-care.
Lauren:We're going to benefit from that something. That is this over-the-counter vitamin thing. I don't want to say the name, but it's out there. It seems like that's constantly being thrown at me. What is in that and is that safe? And what's the difference? Or should I worry about that one?
Nisha:So safe is a really tricky word here. I think right, because ultimately what we do know is there are some things that hormones can prevent Some of the chronic diseases, some of the heart diseases, the cognition right, dementia, bone osteoporosis and then the morbidity and mortality. So the death and disease that happens from those diseases. We know hormones can prevent that. These supplements they're not going to prevent that. So is it safe to not prevent? Right, if I give you estrogen, like we said a minute ago? Right, if I give you estrogen and you have a uterus and I don't give you anything to combat that estrogen, that's not safe. But that's kind of not estrogen's fault, right? So you can't say estrogen is safe or not safe. It just has to be added in the right way.
Lauren:Does that make sense? Yeah, yes, absolutely Okay. Here's another question I have for you.
Val:You're on a roll, lauren. You're like, okay, I'm in it, I'm here. Yeah, I got me.
Lauren:I have some. I know you guys talk about this stuff all the time, but I've got some, yeah Okay, some, yeah okay. So you know we talked about the extreme, the extremely painful joints that we have on occasion, yes, um, sometimes it's all the time and other times I feel pretty good, um, but you know you hear things about let the frozen shoulder, that that can be a thing that happens to women. Um, I swear I get frozen elbow, um, not a frozen shoulder.
Val:I got frozen knee for the first time. We were camping over yeah over 4th of July weekend and I was like, oh my, I couldn't even walk up and down the steps into the camper. It was the worst thing. I'm like this feels this must be what frozen shoulder feels like, but it's like my knee. I had to take ibuprofen mine was my elbow oh terrible.
Lauren:And the thing is, it's not like I'm doing something different. You know what?
Nisha:I mean Exactly.
Lauren:It's just out of the blue. Very strange, Right yeah.
Nisha:So this is. There is a part of this that is natural to happen as we march through life, right, we're going to lose some of the, some of the things, some of the hyaluronic acid, some of the collagen, right. So we're going to lose some of that joint lubrication and we're going to get more things like arthritis and that type of thing. But estrogen is a potent anti-inflammatory meaning. As estrogen goes down, we get more inflammation.
Nisha:And when you get more inflammation in a joint like an elbow or a knee or a shoulder that's kind of this enclosed space that's really painful, because now you've got all this extra inflammatory mediators taking up space in this enclosed space with nerve endings in there. It's really painful. So it can be part of it. The problem is is, in the past people would just say, no, it's just part of growing older, it's just part of getting older, and then they would poo-poo the idea that, oh hey, estrogen also plays a role here. So yeah, we should probably get the x-ray and find out. Val, do you have a thing in your knee Like, is there an issue, right? Do you have like a narrow joint space that we should maybe also do something else for?
Val:But estrogen can be a potent changer of that situation. Aren't there, like how many different estrogen receptors in the body?
Nisha:Oh, hundreds and hundreds, over 400.
Val:Yeah that they affect so many different.
Nisha:Everything Hair, skin, nails, brains, colons, dry eyes.
Val:Dry eyes caused by lowering of estrogen. Itchy ears.
Lauren:Yeah, itchy ears, you name it, that's the thing you will find.
Nisha:If you find a woman digging in her ear, she's probably in her 40s. For me, isn't that?
Val:crazy, it's just ridiculous. The symptoms for me it was like the dry eye. I had gotten, you know, dry eye and I was for, you know, every time, especially in winter time, if I put my makeup on and I'd get in the car to go to work and they might just have tears rolling down my face from the dry eye. And then when I finally started doing this podcast and I realized that that was a symptom of my low estrogen, I'm like, oh my gosh, you've got to be kidding me.
Nisha:It is not just hot flashes and night sweats and that's kind of historically what people have said oh, you don't have hot flashes and night sweats, you don't need this Right, and it's changing, hopefully.
Lauren:Yeah, so if your hormones change throughout the month because you're still maybe having a period, does that mean, like your levels of a hormone replacement therapy should change daily, weekly?
Nisha:Like, how does that work? I mean, yes, kind of sometimes check Uh-huh. Yes, that's the hard part about perimenopause is. It's not that you cannot have hormone replacement therapy during perimenopause, it's that we're chasing a moving target, yeah, and it can get kind of tricky. And you know what Our whole lives as women, what has the world told us about our bodies? Don't listen to them.
Val:Yes, very much so.
Nisha:There, there, sweet, silly little girl, that period doesn't hurt. Silly little things, right? Those don't hurt. Why are you on that bathroom floor Right, like we have been told not to listen to our bodies for our whole lives? And then now here comes this crazy lady saying, hey, tell me all the things. I want to know, everything your body is telling you. Document it if you can Log it, put it in an app, put it on paper. I don't care how weird it is, tell me about it.
Nisha:Yeah, I probably have said this on the show before too. All my staff calls me a data whore and I'm like like, yes, I will be that whore for you. I love that so, because I love all everything when my patients can tell me what's going on. Women are reticent to say anything because you're not supposed to, I don't know. You're not supposed to vagina complain, I guess, right throughout life, you're not.
Lauren:I mean, you're not supposed to talk about it.
Val:Definitely don't talk about your vagina or complain about it.
Nisha:Don't talk about about it, don't touch it, don't think about it and, god forbid, it doesn't do what you expect it to do. Do vagina complain? Right? So they don't want to complain, they don't want to be a nag, they don't want to be a complainer. You know, we're supposed to be tough, we're supposed to soldier through.
Nisha:So I just tell my patients, every single out, tell me all the things. Because every time you message me in the portal and you say, hey, okay, listen, I'm okay if you're okay, but here's what's happening, or lead with I'm not well, send help, mayday, mayday, right, and then I'll know. Okay, I need to get done this a little sooner here. But either way, I plot that in a little graph in my head and then it starts to make sense to me and I go okay, this is what's happening for her. This is how we can kind of chase that moving target a little bit better. But honestly, post-menopause a little bit easier. Ovaries, they peace out, they're gone, you stay at a certain level, we give you a certain level of hormone and you just stay there. It's kind of great. But perimenopause, the difficult part, is doing what we haven't done our whole lives and that's listening to our bodies.
Lauren:And how do you know? That moment you recommend doing like a journal? Yes, absolutely. Before you see a doctor about all of this, yeah, if you can.
Nisha:But you know what, if you, if it, finally, if you know, the first time you're hearing this podcast and you're like this is me, you don't have to wait and start journaling and then call your like, call your practitioner, get in there and just say this is what I'm noticing and then start journaling and seeing, because, again, it's a moving target until you're done, till those ovaries are done, done, it's going to be a moving target, so you can start journaling now. You don't have to wait to see somebody, but it is sometimes helpful.
Lauren:Are you going to find that I feel like there's times a year that I could journal and there's times a year that I cannot? Yeah, this is the time of year I cannot.
Nisha:And I'm not going to not treat my patients just because they don't have a journal.
Val:It's just extra information. Is there a moment in time where you can be maybe somewhat satisfied that you're like over the hump?
Nisha:Yeah post-menopause, but if you've got an. Iud in if you've had an ablation if you've had a hysterectomy but kept your ovaries, which is a good portion of our population, especially now, right? So not necessarily. I mean like if you're not bleeding to tell you when is 12 months from my last bleed, then I don't need to know when you are post-menopausal.
Val:I guess the only reason why I asked this question is when you were talking about. You know, once you're post-menopausal then it's easier to you know, dial in your hormones and you're good to go and we don't really have to worry about the men check in once a year or what. Have you Let me know if you've got something in between. So that's where I'm kind of dialing that in at a little deeper, where you know, if we do have this very large portion of women in our country who are in that area where they're not going to know where that last period is, how, what can they start feeling? What are the symptoms that they're going to be like?
Nisha:Oh joy, stability, Sleep, sleep, right there. I'm just going to notice hey, you haven't messaged me in a year, right, you haven't messaged me in six months. You must be doing well, and then they'll look back and they'll go.
Val:Oh, you're right, I guess I've been feeling pretty stable so would it be that you're, you're realizing that you're sleeping better, and you're, maybe you, you're, your episodes of rage are not as big.
Nisha:I'm saying this like if they're treated Right, right, yeah, if you're not treated and you go through that, you feel less joy. Right, if you're not treated through perimenopause, then you're not treated at postmenopause. Yeah, I wouldn't say joy is what you would feel, not usually.
Lauren:You know what's funny and Val and I have talked about this with you know different people that we know and probably friends of my mom's. There are friend groups where friends have gone bye-bye because we think they were going through menopausal symptoms and they just seriously were not kind human beings, yeah. And I just feel like if women knew they were going through this, they might check themselves a little bit, be like, okay, maybe I, maybe I'm raging or I'm ready to splash tires right, because there's so much more anxiety and not knowing what's happening, right?
Nisha:so if we can understand at least that these fluctuations are gargantuan and they're up and down and left and right and on the diagonal and back and forward, right that that's what our hormones are doing, instead of just nice little dips for PMS or PMDD each month, right, then at least we don't have the question of the unknown like what the hell's happening to me? Will it ever end right.
Val:Well, and some people don't even realize it is happening to them like they're, so you know, high on the anxiety level, or high on the ragey level, or high. You know that they don't even realize that they've changed that's what I think yeah, yeah, that's what I think.
Val:And so getting back to, like you know, the topic of this podcast, lauren, I think you know, having friends that go through at the same time granted, we laugh and tell our stories and they, they're hilarious some of them um but also having just this, your own intimate support group. The more you talk about it, the more you realize that that might be what it is like. Hey, have you thought about hrt?
Nisha:yeah, yeah you just you gotta have someone walk by you and just slap that estrogen sticker on you and be like hold her down, I'll get the patch.
Lauren:I got you babe.
Nisha:I mean, I mean, if you're having those people really close to you that you trust to say, whoa, you're in full on bitch mode and I just feel like this is not you.
Lauren:Let's figure out what's going on, right, that can be really helpful and really powerful, because sometimes, yeah, we are just we're told to soldier through some stuff yeah and that's why I hope more and more people and I know we're all trying to talk about it more, but that's our little friend group, but I think your following here on the podcast is really um, they're just gonna help each other out, for sure.
Val:Yeah, oh, Lauren, thanks so much for asking all the good questions and like chiming in and, you know, being there for my high anxiety moments.
Lauren:Thanks for getting real with us Right back at you.
Val:Oh, I guess that wraps it up for this edition of the Pause. If today's episode really resonated with you, do not keep it to yourself. Please share with a friend who might be going through the same thing. And hey, if you haven't already come out, hang out with us in the Pause Diaries Facebook group. It's a private space where we keep the conversation going. We swap stories. The women there are amazing. They love to support each other and they are constantly, you know, just giving advice, giving their recommendations for what they do to get through their perimenopause journey. So until next time, I'm Val Leggo. Take a deep breath, give yourself some grace and remember you are not alone and menopause is not the end of anything. It's the beginning of the rest of your life and we are going to talk about it.
