woMEN- oh!-Pause...

Why is it not womenopause instead of menopause?

At 28, the menopause and its phraseology is not something that would normally bother me, yet here I am surfing the internet looking for ways and means to quell the constant flash of hot flushes.

I am in the middle of the menopause (well at the start really, but you get my drift).
Tamoxifen has hijacked me, kidnapped me into a scenario that is very bizarre. Already today I have searched a number of websites dedicated solely to this process that happens every woman, but a process that tends to happen at the time when twenty eight as an age is nearly doubled.

Hot Flushes.
Sleepless nights.
Moody moods.
Potential extra tummy rolls.
Osteoporosis.....

Another lists of side effects and things to concern myself with. If I kept all the list of side effects, hazzards and potential bloopers on a piece of paper and tacked them all together, one piece after another, I'd have enough paper to make a substantial roll (loo roll perhaps!).

Anyway hot flushes. They are not my friend. They come at the most inopportune times of course. Sitting in a cafe with my two friends, beaming an unsightly beetroot red, as if I had just ran a very hilly half marathon, the waitress casting unsure glances my direction. Or sitting in the waiting room at the doctors surgery, or worse, on the radiotherapy bed of torture,  as the nurses are politely chit chatting over my prone body. I spark a hot flush, big enough to ignite me and potentially the whole wing of the hospital. Silently I sweat, immovable as the machine buzzes around me and I pray that the lake of sweat gathering at the hollow of my collarbone will have magically disappeared by the time the nurse comes back. Of course it hasn't and she needs to pat me down before drawing on me with her permanent Sharpe marker. When I get up off the bed of torture the paper is stuck to my back in damp patches.

It's a good thing I don't have much modesty or self-conscious genes left after the last eight months of treatment. I shrug my shoulders and say, matter of factly 'Tamoxifen - Hot Flush.' The nurses nod their heads and cluck their sympathies.
I don't have time for sympathies, so I just get redressed and head out into the cool air of the morning. Smash bang into another pesky hot flush.

They happen if Ive drunk too much caffeine, if I eat anything too spicy, going from hot to cold, going from cold to hot, going from slightly warm to any other kind of temperature, going from slightly cold to any other kind of temperature, under any form of stress and of course when I attempt to sleep.

Sleep...OHHHHhhh elusive sleep.....habitually now, most nights around 2am I scorch a sweaty patch into the bed. One of the nurses the other day kindly pointed out, 'whatever will it be like in the summer time?'

Whatever indeed!