Menopause, Arrhythmia, Hot Flashes, Cardiologists, Einstein and I

I wrote this ages ago and didn't publish it.  Or did I?  Maybe I published something like it.  I can't remember, and there's probably a reason for that.  I have one word for you – MENOPAUSE!

Men, you don't know how lucky you are.   Thank your very lucky stars and cherish the fact that your hormonal system doesn't fly into absolute disarray whenever it feels like it.

Mind you, on the other hand, you've got problems of your own, having two brains and all, trying to decide which one to listen to.   At least it only happens to us at certain periods in our life.  Or that's what we tell ourselves.

And of course when menopause hits.   Funny word, that.  Men - oh! - PAUSE.

Here's the thing.   I thought mine was over.   Apparently it's not.   Hot flashes like you wouldn't believe.   Didn't I already do this a hundred million times?   Handy in winter, though, I must say.   Who needs a heater on when every two minutes you're tearing all your clothes off.   The feeling is the same as going to sleep in a down sleeping bag, all zipped up and waking up because the outside temperature just soared and you're dying of heat-suffocation.  Can't get out of that bag quickly enough!

A hot flash doesn't happen out of the blue, by the way, it's always when something stressful happens.

Like trying to play a piece faster than I can on the piano, which I just did.   It's a lot of fun, setting the metronome too fast and trying to keep up.   Wakes up parts of your musical brain that don't know they exist.

But man oh man, does it bring on the hot flashes.   Whooee.   It's like a slapstick comedy.   On again off again, on again off again.   Right.   Very funny.   I'm rolling in the aisles.  Particularly since it isn't winter, no.  It's flipping mid-summer deep in the heart of Africa.  Well, on the edge of Africa, actually, but there's no harm in a little bit of dramatization.   Exaggeration is very good for the spirit, I've heard.  It's more fun to read, also.

And here's an interesting tidbit.   The heart has its own generator that isn't controlled by the brain.   That's why people's hearts keep beating for a while when their heads are cut off.  Clever heart.   No, I haven't got off the subject of menopause yet.   Keep reading.

This generator resides in the upper right quadrant and creates electricity which runs the heart, makes it pump.   It runs on chemicals in the blood.   Ions and iron and god knows what.   It obviously can handle quite a bit of variation but it's got a basic level at which is must function, otherwise things go beep in the night.  Which is an obscure reference to a panic button, by the way.

When arrhythmia happens, these curious sparks start occurring all over the place in the heart, like mini generators.   The heart, poor thing, starts going beserk, pumping wildly.   When you hit menopause, arrhythmia is a very common result, I've discovered.   Which means?   A certain combination of hormones might conceivably be one of the generator's requirements to function normally.

Ya think, Probie?   It's food for thought, anyway.  How did I make my discovery?  Did any of the zillions of doctors I saw tell me?  Nope.  When it first started happening and I thought I was a heart attack canditate I went to a GP who laughed at me and made not at all obscure references to hysterical women.  Then I thought I'd try a cardiologist.   He didn't work so well for me, either.  So off I trotted to another one.

It wasn't that I didn't trust them.  Well, actually, who am I kidding.  I didn't trust them at all.  Because they wouldn't listen to me.   Literally, they weren't interested in what I was saying about what I was experiencing.   Does this happen everywhere - that if you're not actually having a heart attack they couldn't be bothered.

Go away, nuisance woman, and come back when you're really sick.  Oh.  But I thought it would be quite a good idea to - you know - pay attention to my body before the crisis so the crisis doesn't happen.  How foolish of me.   So then I went to our world famous heart hospital where Chris Barnaad performed the first successful heart transplant.

It's a student hospital, and they're even worse than the cardiologists who get paid.  It's a long and gruesome story.  Over a period of six months I saw a different student doc every month.  Every one prescribed wrong, diagnosed wrong.   Even I could tell that.  Each time I didn't believe - or trust - them and fortunately I could chat to the Prof, who always agreed with me.  Hmm.

Well, my point is that not one of them - 3 real cardiologists (including Prof) and 6 learning-to-be-learned docs - asked me if I was going through menopause.  It didn't occur to them.  Curious, no?

In the end I figured it out for myself.  Stress and menopause.  I should have studied medicine.   I'd have been a regular medical Einstein.  Since I didn't and I'm probably kidding myself again, I'll stick to playing the piano - and climbing into the fridege every time a hot flash hits.