Menopausian Journey, Part 3
by Leslie Shalduha
The Come & Go
My body has played host to all manner of uncomfortable perimenopausal symptoms over the last sixteen years. As I recount the most wretched and persistent ones in grim detail, I thought to take an interlude into some of my more ephemeral experiences.
For a week or so, I began to see things. Living alone then, I was accustomed to the flow of my space – an occasional dog or cat scurrying about the only movement besides myself. Shadows suddenly began to move quickly past me, at the edge of my vision, over and over during the day. I sensed and saw a figure, just at the corner of my vision, standing silent and still beside me, causing me to startle, often, throughout the day. Perhaps now, I thought, in my time of crone I was finally making the spiritual connections I have always craved. Otherwise, the mental illness that runs through my father’s side of the family had at long last found purchase in me, laying bare a fear that has always been just there. Alas, the truth was revealed to me in a post by a fellow Menopausian on a social media platform. In that eerie way our phones have of reading our minds, this woman posted a few days into my experience that the exactsame thing was happening to her. I laughed at both myself and the tricks our minds play on us as I welcomed in the specters, chalking another ridiculous symptom up to perimenopause.
I experienced extreme vertigo in the early years, a symptom not as amusing as my supernatural experience. I was still having periods, though unpredictable and erratic. The vertigo was much worse during those times, guiding me to intuit a strong hormonal connection, long before the benefit of hindsight made it crystal clear. I sometimes woke in the middle of the night from sleep, the room spinning crazily like I had just polished off a bottle of gin. The onset of vertigo was arbitrary, arriving at the most inopportune times, while driving or during the chaos of managing a lunch period of the fledgling organic and farm-fresh school food program I was working to create. Discussions with my doctor led to no concern or assistance, leaving me with yet another disconcerting aspect of perimenopause to flounder through.
The joys of phantosmia, better known as olfactory hallucinations, cannot be understated. Though a few claim to have pleasant smells clinging incessantly to the inside of their noses, that was sadly not the case for me. The tenacious scent binding itself unremittingly to my innermost nose tissue was cigarette smoke – not the sweet smell of tobacco pipe smoke drifting romantically on the wind. Rather the funky reek of one who chain-smokes cigarettes, oblivious to how the scent cloys to their every bit of being. Other times the sharp, tangy smell of mold attached itself, compelling a search of my house in excruciating detail, pulling out the refrigerator and stove to investigate, and in one case, actual flooring, to find the culprit, scrubbing walls and floors like a madwoman. All to no avail, though my home was certainly never cleaner. Most recently, the putrid scent of feces filled my senses. I wandered around the house, sniff, sniff, sniffing away, asking my housemates if they could also detect the awful stench. I cleaned the litter boxes, gave the toilets a quick scrub, looked under furniture and in corners for a mysterious pile of dog poop. I lit strong incense and scented candles, applied desert sage infused olive oil to the skin just under my nose, in vain, as the fetid smell lingered for over a week, having become one with my nasal vestibules. Hallucinations, indeed.