I’ve burned for lovers, and had my fingers
burned as a result. I've burned with longing, with desire, and with fever. But now I just
burn. I wake in the morning and my
arms are on fire. On a bad day it
creeps into my chest. On a really
bad day, it wakes me up long before the night has even ended and I lie there
feeling like I’ve been scalded, tossing and turning. On
the worst of days I’ve groaned with agony. It’s hard not to think about those times when I open my eyes it’s there at
6am, waiting for me.
Anxiety, I’m told by Dr Google and a score
of other people who can’t spell and who’ve seen countless specialists and had heart
scans and investigative procedures and found nothing. This doesn’t put my mind at ease. I can still imagine a hundred and one diseases that I might
have, and frankly – even the catch all of ‘anxiety’ isn’t any comfort. I don’t even know I’m anxious, and then
I am – about the bloody burning.
Seems madder than ever to be anxious because you’re anxious about the
symptoms of your anxiety.
Damn it. I meditate. I sit and breath like I’m a human ventilator, and my breath is all that’s keeping someone alive (well in a way it is – me) and I visualize, and I chill, or with burning arms, I try to chill. But no, it’s still there, invisible sunburn, searing me like a steak with no fat.
Though I’ve plenty of that.
Maybe it's the menopause, I've been told once or twice as though that would be a perfectly reasonable explanation. I asked my doctor. She didn't know, despite being one of the people who offered the diagnosis. She shrugged. The big M is the catch-all for hysterical symptoms - we haven't come far since men attributed anything resembling neurosis to the uterus. As if that somehow makes it okay. Yes, sure, you wake ten times a night in a burning sweat and it's all fine - what are you worried about? It doesn't matter if you haven't slept for a year, it's just the menopause. No it's not, it's the fricking womenopause. If it happened to men there would be a Government Health Campaign and a screening process - and possibly a treatment that didn't put you at risk of cancer.
I've never had the menopause before so I can't judge. Neither can my GP who is twelve and barely through puberty. It doesn't seem to over-concern her this time when madness is expected and correspondingly perfectly normal, but it's something that every single women will face unless death gets her first. We won't all be mothers and we won't all be wives. Some of us might still die without ever having sex, but even if you don't use it, you still lose it. The menopause is coming to get you. What isn't coming is sympathy. It's natural, you know, so you have to suck it up or look like a cliche of a woman who's past it, who's shut up shop, who can no longer be considered fertile, and therefore desirable.
'Menopausal women' is a derisory term for the flabby, the permed, the thick of waist and ankles.
I'm definitely all of the above, except for permed, but I'm not sure I'm burning because of hormones waxing and waning. But if I am, Mother Nature didn't think very far ahead with her plan for reproduction. By rights we should all be dead by now and not having to suffer any of the ill-planned symptoms of age-related barrenness. I suppose one could find out. But there seems remarkably little import on helping women to understand or manage the menopause, and what does exist is buried in a ghetto of others like us whispering.
All I know is that I'm not having a hot flash. I've had those - they're totally different animals. I'm taming something else here, without much success. Though it's still eating away at me...
