My nipples are shrinking ...By JENNIFR CRAWLEYMy nipples are shrinking. I was watching telly on Friday night and knew I had to leave the couch. The sense of heat and irritation rising from my body was one and the same. If anyone tried to talk to me as I headed for the bedroom I probably would have backhanded them. Sitting on the bed I stripped off and looked down. They’re not half the size they used to be and, unlike the line in Kenny Roger’s song, Don’t take Your Love To Town i.e. “I’m not half the man I used to be”, this wasn’t the result of a traumatic wartime accident. This was menopause. This was, as one of the midwives in the tearoom said yesterday, the time that gives ‘men a pause’. Conversation in the tearoom is pretty much like the core business of a maternity unit, it’s explicit. It gets down and it gets dirty. Ron, our sole male midwife, takes his smoko outside. He disappears to the little shop across the road to buy a sausage roll and the Age newspaper. You need to have had a set of ovaries to appreciate the women’s business that gets discussed in this tearoom. Hot flushes, night sweats, dry skin, even drier mucous membranes, ( this story is not for the faint hearted), loss of libido, irritability, dizziness, constipation, coarse facial hair, lower back pain, sleep disturbances, (when do you think I wrote this?), increased risk of heart disease and bone fractures. Kimmy, one of our more enterprising menopausal midwives, makes an HRT slice. Full of natural ‘anti-menopausal’ ingredients like soy flour, sunflower seeds and dates, it makes you feel good, for about half an hour. You almost convince yourself, as you munch on the warm, delicious, nutritious slice, that life isn’t too bad after all. This menopause thing is ‘a piece of cake’. But pretty soon the symptoms come subtly sliding back. It’s payback time for thinking you could defeat nature at her uncompromising best with just a slice of Kimmy’s cake. The real HRT, Hormone Replacement Therapy, has its drawbacks. Its use significantly increases the risk of breast cancer, heart attacks, strokes and clots. The shock of recognition I feel when I go to the supermarket and see women my age, with dark circles under their eyes, slumped shoulders, and a general air of depression about them. I wonder, are all these women menopausal? There are other women my age I meet who look the opposite. Their skin is youthful, taut. Their eyes sparkle, they’re full of energy. Are they high on life? I wonder. Or are they on a combination of HRT and an anti-depressant. Good luck to them. I’m too much of a scaredy cat to go down that road ...
Dylan Thomas once wrote, ... I intend to go screaming into the night, ladies, what about you?
RAPID RESPONSE EMAIL: What do you think? Monday, November 8, 2004 |