I clutched my pregnant belly and looked around the room. Nearby, nursing students moved briskly through a crowd of emergency patients, checking vitals, calling out to each other. I knew I wasn’t their most urgent triage priority, certainly not compared to the bleeding patients on gurneys around me moaning, “Help me … can someone please help me?”
“We’ve called OB/GYN, and they’ll be here as soon as they can,” a young nursing student promised me.
I closed my eyes and sighed. Help was on the way.
At some point – I couldn’t tell you exactly when – my hand stopped seeking out my baby bump for reassurance, and located something else instead. It was small and square and adhered discreetly to my skin beneath my maternity shirt: an oestrogen patch, oozing a steady dose of this miraculous hormone into my bloodstream.
Because I wasn’t pregnant – I was pretty much the exact opposite. I was in the relentless grip of menopause, and I was playing a pregnant woman as part of a disaster simulation at a nursing school. The bloody patients calling out for help? They were mannequins, and their pleas were being remotely broadcast through microphones from a nearby control room. My baby bump? A prosthetic that had been velcroed in place.
“Thanks everyone,” one of the managers in charge of the set called out, causing a few of us to break character with nervous laughter.
I did need help – that part of this scenario was entirely true. Most urgently, I needed financial help. So this simulation was one of many part-time jobs I’d taken on after severe menopausal symptoms had, at least in part, driven me to quit my full-time job as a medical writer months before.
The $160 estrogen patch had been on a national shortage. I had called around to several pharmacies before I was lucky enough to score one, out of pocket. The last time I felt this desperate for something this scarce was in fifth grade, when I competed with every other kid in my class for a Cabbage Patch Kid. Now, apparently, we had grown up and aged into hormone patch kids.
To understand how I ended up here – menopausal, underemployed and incubating a pretend baby – you’d have to go back a few years, to a time when we were still wiping down our groceries and wondering if it was safe to touch the mail.
The truth was, the pandemic had spoiled me.
I am not going to say I enjoyed the pandemic, although I know I wasn’t the only one who guiltily noticed certain silver linings (serial plan cancellers and Zoom stockholders, I’m looking at you!).
However, for me and the other women going through what my mother once quaintly called “the change of life”, the pandemic had, if you’ll forgive the expression, masked our pain.
In my case, the menopausal symptoms snuck up so stealthily I didn’t realise what they were at first. Because I had never carried a baby or birthed a child, I felt no particular grief around my uterus being closed for business. And as a person whose knowledge of menopause had been mostly limited to cringy jokes about hot flashes, I was wildly unprepared for the range of symptoms it could cause. Itchy skin? Joint pain? Heart palpitations? Worsening of ADHD? Really?
Meanwhile, the pandemic had basically put the whole world on pause, providing a work-life ratio that for me, for once, tipped towards life. Not only were we allowed to bring our laptops out into the fresh air while identifying white-breasted nuthatches, we were practically required to.
It shouldn’t have taken a devastating viral outbreak for it to happen, but for women like me, many of whom were also navigating the difficult realities of nest-leaving children and ageing parents, the pandemic offered a slow-paced, surprisingly gentle sanctuary in which to endure the hormonal crash-and-burn.
Source: Read the original article on www.huffingtonpost.co.uk
