Spiraling….

At this point in time life should be great!  Husband has a brand new job with an amazing company with great pay and benefits!!  While I am slowly losing my mind at home and walking around sucking up all the negativity around me.  There are several days a month that I feel completely overwhelmed and I cannot handle the emotions.  The freaking ASPCA commercials are too much.  The St. Judes commercials are crushing my soul.  I just turned 50 and perimenopause is killing me.

About 5 months ago I began having very intense hot flashes.  They were so bad I would get nausea from the heat.  It feels like it is coming from deep in your center torso radiating out to the rest of your body.  Sometimes if the weather is not too hot I would have that intense hot flash while being cold on the outside and having goosebumps on my skin.  It’s disturbing and was happening multiple times a day and at night.  I was waking up multiple times burning up and have to kick off my sheets and comforter.  It was so exhausting and the brain fog is frustrating and overwhelming.  I was crying at commercials, crying reading things online, crying at news stories, crying at shows that are not sad at all.  Everything emotionally is magnified a million percent.  My mind has been completely overwhelmed and my anxiety over every little thing is so intense that I have had to use my breathe training to calm that overwhelming anxiety and not spiral out of control.

I’m sure my husband thinks I have lost my mind.  He doesn’t like it when I cry and I am crying all the time.  I finally went to my doctor, who is a woman thank God, and told her everything.  I take medicine for bipolar II but this seemed to be more than that medicine could handle.  She put me on HRT therapy with a patch and a pill.  I was somewhat hesitant about taking hormones due to terrible side effects I experienced from trying to take birth control but decided to give it a chance.

After about 1-2 weeks on the HRT meds I stopped having hot flashes, my head felt less foggy and I was able to sleep through the night.  It was amazing!  So I coasted through the next few months feeling pretty good and actually losing weight.  And then, I lost my insurance.  I lost my job and insurance and that was a very sad time for me, considering my passion for assisting domestic violence victims.  But losing the insurance is always the hardest part.  Medicine runs out and is usually too expensive to refill.  I am very lucky that my main meds for psoriatic arthritis are covered by the manufacturer.  Do some research, most drug companies have programs that will pay for the meds for you.  You just have to get the correct paperwork done and be an active participant in your medical care.

However, my hormone meds are not covered and cost quite a bit to refill without insurance.  So I stopped taking them a couple of weeks ago and at first it was okay.  Then about 1 week ago I had a hot flash that lasted for literally 4 hours and I thought I might die.  Of course it happened around 3 in the morning which woke me up from a dead sleep feeling that familiar heat coming over me.  Have you ever seen that video online with a black woman with a shaved head at an outside sporting event?  She was having a major hot flash and you could literally see the  steam coming off of her head and I felt for her.  I really understood that because that is me.

So I am going to get my hormones tomorrow and I cannot wait!  I have been stressing over things that are not in my control.  My husband is out of town starting his new job.  I am stressing about the hummingbird feeders outside our living room window.  Brett can easily reach out and grab the feeders but I am too short to do that.  The distance down from the window scares the shit out of me and I have to stand on a chair to reach the chain and lean out the window.  It is a completely irrational fear but every time I try to lean out of the window I freak out.  I should be able to do it but my anxiety and irrational fear of leaning out the window prevents me from hanging the damn feeders up.  It is ridiculous and I am not afraid of heights but I just can’t do it.  I have tried multiple times and failed.  It has caused me to have irrational fear of leaning out the window.

This is not normal for me.  Brett is out of town and I am obsessing about the hummingbird feeders.  This is ridiculous.  But here I am.  It is hard when you realize that you are behaving irrationally but you can’t fix it.  I finally got one of the feeders out there but there are two and I need to refill the second one.  Honestly, fuck my life.  I just can’t get past it.  My inability to hang the feeders is fucking ridiculous.

So it has been 24 hours since beginning this post.  To be clear, my house is 2 or 3 stories from the ground.  Once it got dark it was easier to hang the feeders than being able to see where I would die during the day.  I was finally able to get them hung but the amount of stress it caused is just ridiculous.  Brett is going to training for 2 weeks in September and guess who gets to change the feeders while he is gone?  I can’t miss a day because the hummingbirds depend on it.  The amount of time spent obsessing about these damn feeders is killing me.

I will miss Brett but I cannot wait to be alone for 2 whole weeks.  We have lived together for 30 years.  Surely you can understand my joy at the thought of what is possible.  I’m not planning to save the world or anything but I am planning on doing whatever I want, when I want just because and not have to abide by another’s schedule. The possibilities are endless and I am beyond excited. Turns out he is going to be out of town for a total of 6 weeks.  I will be staying here to take care of all the animals and once he is done training I am planning on flying in to DFW to see my parents.  It will be a much needed break.

So I am dreading changing out the damn hummingbird feeders but excited about being an independent woman for a while.  I guess I will just have to wait until it is dark and, hopefully I don’t fall out the window.