hormones, at my age?

Life has been feeling weird lately. My surgery and initial recovery are behind me. I still have aches and pains and occasional swelling, but I’m not having to be so careful about everything and I generally feel like my days can proceed normally.

At the same time, though, I’ve been feeling completely exhausted. I have no mental or emotional energy to do anything, and physically I just can barely drag myself around sometimes. I can’t concentrate, and I’m forgetting things. Although teaching is going fine, the administrative part of my job has been suffering. It feels like everything is an insurmountable mountain—if I even remember that it’s something I’m supposed to do. I’m not sleeping well, either. It’s hard to fall asleep, and even then I wake up frequently. I feel jittery all the time, and I’m just feeling wiped out.

The other day I was talking with my supervisor. It was very hard to admit how much I was struggling, every single day—especially when I’m in the middle of two big projects and have my annual review scheduled in two weeks. But this is one of those situations where having the difficult conversation was the right thing to do. For one thing, I acknowledged to her that it must be difficult for her to have to be having this conversation with me. Somehow, that was good, because after that our conversation felt more genuine and collegial. The other good outcome is that I realized that something was not right with me and I told her I would be contacting my doctor.

My doctor is leaving the practice next week, but I was able to get in to see her yesterday morning. As we went through a list of all the troubles I’ve been having, we got looking before my surgery and into the past couple of years. Everything I’ve been struggling with is a symptom of ovaries shutting down. It’s possible that this happened in response to the ablation two years ago and that the symptoms have been exacerbated by the hysterectomy. Some symptoms have been masked for several months by other medication I’m on. I had four tubes of blood drawn yesterday, and they’ll be tested for a variety of hormones. Meanwhile, I’m now on day 2 of estrogen pills.

I feel really odd about this. When I was first facing my hysterectomy, I somehow felt like it was all okay because I wasn’t losing my ovaries, just my uterus. I don’t know why this mattered, but it apparently did to me. And now I’m feeling like I’m old and dried up at the age of 44. At the same time, though, I can’t begin to express my relief that this was physiological rather than psychological. I was thinking I was crazy, and learning that my brain fog and fatigue could be part of a larger condition was very healing emotionally.

I’ll go back to see another doctor in the practice in two weeks, and we’ll discuss my blood tests and figure out how long this whole estrogen routine will last. I hadn’t even gotten around to thinking about my views on HRT, and here I am.