Menopause and medical malpractice
How Menopause helps and hinders women’s health.
This post links back to this post because it was partially brought on by another writer’s community discussion, and this one because patriarchy is a freaking death cult.
The original post invited us to discuss perimenopause and menopause and how they have affected us. Here are my thoughts, edited and condensed.
Menopause and the Patriarchal Bargain and Colonialism
First, holy crap! I did not know that neural remodeling came with menopause! That is some crazy shit, and I am here for it. I looked up the scientist who is investigating this and found her work interesting, but all CLEAN DIET OR YOU WILL DIE, and she’s very white and heteronormative, so, like, that’s problematic. Because cultural foods are not automatically unhealthy, thin isn’t automatically healthy, and fat isn’t automatically unhealthy. Intentional weight loss fails 98% of the time.“Processed” foods can be healthy and affordable. Anyone who’s only eating McDonalds is doing it because they have no other choice because they work too many jobs and have too little money to buy fresh food and cook everything from scratch, white lady. Ugh. But regardless, the brain changes during menopause in ways that can increase our well-being, and that tracks with the women I know who have come into their own post-menopause rather than doubling down on trying to stay relevant to agist sexist capitalist bullshit.
My experience with perimenopause is conflated with having a kid late. I had my kid at 38 and then breastfed for 1.5 years. That shit basically makes your body load new operating systems you’ve never met. By the time I was done, it had dovetailed with perimenopause. As an undiagnosed ADHD person (until recently) with diagnosed anxiety and PPD, it was a lot. I’m currently 52 and still ovulating. Help.
Still, I have to say that between childbirth, parenting, and perimenopause, I have had to develop the ability to LET THAT SHIT GO on a level I never was able to before. Perfectionism is not helpful in this stage of life. Recognizing that my body might be doing something different every day and just going with it has been good for me. I’ve managed my symptoms (hot flashes, mood swings) somewhat with Chinese medicine and acupuncture, but no HRT other than my IUD. I still get hot flashes, but they’re usually brought on by activity or stress. I sneak the thermostat down another degree every summer (because Texas).
I have a lot of beef with the medical industry and society around menopause. The medical industry still largely treats women like defective men with more hormones and treats menopause like a deficiency rather than a necessary physiological transition. I’m all for treating your symptoms when they drive you crazy, but not framing them as sickness or “imbalance.” I’ve ranted about this in many a comment section. It’s not a fucking imbalance. It happens for a reason, and guess what? People who can gestate have stronger immune systems and live longer than those who fertilize, so maybe someone should start studying the positive effects of menopause instead of pathologizing it like everything else involving vaginas. Also, as my body moves out of the “object of the male gaze” phase, I also find my give a fuck button is permanently broken. Good.
But medical bias actually for real tho:
“Observing that women tended to have lower rates of heart disease until their oestrogen levels dropped after menopause, researchers conducted the first trial to look at whether supplementation with the hormone was an effective preventive treatment. The study enrolled 8,341 men and no women … And a National Institutes of Health-supported pilot study from Rockefeller University that looked at how obesity affected breast and uterine cancer didn’t enroll a single woman.”
https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2019/nov/13/the-female-problem-male-bias-in-medical-trials
My friends, these were the flagship studies on heart disease, uterine, and breast cancer. AND ALL THE SUBJECTS WERE MEN LDKSFJG;LSDFGHJLDFKJG
Deep breath.
I’m an academic, and all research is built on previous research, and there’s a lot of absolute bullshit out there, particularly about sex and race. Also problematizing fatness is big, big money in research, not just medicine and diet culture. You can find all the funding in the world if you want to study what it’s bad to be fat, but there’s not much at all on protective aspects of fatness (like the obesity paradox) because money. More on that below.
Final thoughts on the social experience of menopause. Weight gain. We are conditioned to live in perpetual fear of our bodies doing a thing that it’s doing all on their own, probably for some very good survival reasons. Yet the medical industry goes to extremes to convince us it’s always a sign of sickness or impending doom, which makes me LIVID.
Weight loss has not been tied directly to improving ANY CONDITION.
It can, however, cause malnutrition, bone and muscle loss, and fuck up your blood sugar. Once again for the people in the back, it has a 98% failure rate. And much like the madness that is putting our daughters on diets when their bodies are in puberty and need all the nutrition they can get (and fucking up their metabolism and relationship to hunger and their bodies for life), trying to control our weight at all costs during perimenopause/menopause is bananas. It’s just more fucked up internalized patriarchy, but this time we’re fucking ourselves over instead of our daughters. Perimenopause has been a 10-year invitation for me to tune into my body, befriend it, listen to it, and feed it.
Everything Changes
This has gotten harder but more rewarding lately for me personally because bodies are weird. Here’s some crazy shit. I used to be an hourglass, fat or skinny (mostly fat), but with very distinct proportions. After the kid and perimenopause hit, my waist thickened some, and I had more belly (proportionate to before, regardless of my weight because BABY). But then, THIS YEAR, at age 52, my body started morphing into a completely different shape. I dropped a pants size but went up a top size (none of this was intentional; I don’t have the time, and dieting is stupid see above). I lost inches in my hips and stayed the same in my waist. But I’m much thicker and beefier in my upper body, and my face is rounder.
So, of course, I googled it, and in between all the weight loss ads and LOSE THAT MENOPAUSE WEIGHT NOW or DON’T YOU DARE GAIN WEIGHT DURING MENOPAUSE articles, I learned that menopausal bodies tend to hold more upper body weight and less lower. This is hysterically funny because the medical industry is constantly screaming that APPLE SHAPED BODIES ARE HIGHER RISK FOR HEART FAILURE OMGGGGGG. And I’m like, ??? Like, do you think I should get lipo because my body is doing this thing totally on its own? Because that’s the only way to change my proportions. So yeah, no.
It’s still disconcerting to see a differently-shaped person in the mirror. As a femme person with more than a bit of vanity, this might be the first time in a while I’ve really struggled to accept my body’s changes. I’m like, yay! All my jeans fit again! But why is my face so round? What happened to my waist? It’s a worthy challenge, both because it makes me unpack more patriarchal garbage and also because I really have no choice. But it also coincided with a big move, so at least that made it easier to get rid of clothes I knew wouldn’t work with my new body type. Yay?
Prediction:
In another 20 years, when more women get to research and publish, I bet how our bodies change during menopause will be recognized as positive adaptations. Maybe stop pathologizing women’s bodies about this shit too.
Fuckery Abounds
I am in no way the only person I know going through middle-aged shit with the added burden of a health system that doesn’t study or treat women’s bodies adequately in a state that criminalizes them. My current rage is directed at how men’s bodies are prioritized over women’s, sometimes at great cost. Story time.
My husband had cancer in his 20s. From the moment of detection, he was rushed through surgery and radiation and fully recovered. His surgery was days after his diagnosis. The second the doctor realized something was wrong, treatment started. I also saw this with internet nerd Hank Green, who had non-Hodgekin lymphoma. He vlogged about the whole process (I highly recommend his content, especially to demystify cancer and cancer treatment), and once again, they got him into the pipeline right away.
A few weeks ago, one of my best friends asked me about what it was like when I had a needle biopsy on one of my boobs several years ago. She had three scheduled at one time because she’d had some weird symptoms, gotten a mammogram where the radiologist had hinted that it looked like cancer, and then was scheduled for the biopsies. I took her to her appointment to offer support. There were several issues right away. The intake nurse called and insisted she not take any anxiety medication until after she had filled out her paperwork at the office and that she arrive early to do so. But they also sent her a link to complete all her paperwork online. When we got to the office 30 minutes early as requested, they were like, “No, you already filled out your paperwork online,” so she had less time to let her meds take effect. Maddening.
Next, they wouldn’t let me accompany her for her procedure or even just hang out with her before it. However, my husband was allowed to be in the room for every invasive, painful thing I went through during pregnancy and birth. Apparently, menopausal women with potential breast cancer do not merit moral or social support. Not cool, ARA, not cool.
The procedure went smoothly, and my friend was told she would have results in 24-48 hours. She waited over a week. She called her doctor and the testing clinic multiple times. Finally, she dug up her results on their website and found out she had breast cancer. On Friday evening. By herself.
She spent the weekend wondering WTF was going on and making plans for things like losing work and money while getting treatment, whatever the fuck that was going to be. There was a note in her chart for a nurse to call her with the results, but that didn’t happen. The sheer rage emanating from her and her friends in South Austin at this point could probably power our defective grid.
On Monday morning, she called her doctor, and the receptionist tried to schedule her for an appointment in three weeks. She was like, uh no, I have cancer. WTF. They scheduled her for an appointment that day and then stuck her in a room and ignored her for two hours. Eventually, she spoke with a doctor who referred her to a surgeon. A surgeon she is still waiting to call her back.
Update: She had a consult with an oncologist and surgeon and is scheduled for an MRI and then a mastectomy. Her cancer is stage 0, not stage 2 because apparently, her GP’s PA didn’t know what she was looking at. The same thing happened to my husband when he had an x-ray for hip pain, and his GP, who knew he had a bone disease called MHE that causes benign bone growths, told him he had cancer, only to be refuted by the oncologist. A MONTH LATER.
I fucking cannot. Women are treated like they are disposable. If they are Black, brown, disabled, poor, queer, fat, old, childless, single, or any combination of those, even more so. Both my friend and my husband were diagnosed with Stage 2 cancer, but they were treated very differently. By now, my husband would be post-surgery and in radiation treatment. My friend is sitting by the phone wondering when she gets to schedule her life-saving mastectomy.
I’m not sure whether to cry or scream. Is cry-screaming a thing? The medical industry sucks when it comes to women’s health, but this is fucking insane. We are the richest country in the world, and people die of preventable diseases because they can’t afford treatment or the industry marginalizes them out of treatment. Women are dying because hospitals in states where abortion is illegal won’t treat them if they have a miscarriage or are pregnant with a fetus that will die when born. Our basic humanity has never been affirmed by the Constitution. The rights we fought for are being yanked away at an alarming rate by ignorant men who don’t understand basic science (or survival of the species) at all.
We cannot separate our personal experiences with our bodies, society, the medical industry, and our rights from the politics of our era. The personal is political. Always. I’m glad my husband survived cancer so we could meet and make a family. But his life does not have more intrinsic value than my friend’s. Or mine. Or my queer kid’s. Or the Black woman who loses her life in childbirth. This madness must stop. I know this upcoming election sucks, but we have to vote for the party most likely to restore our rights and then hold their feet to the fire until they understand that they work for us and they must unfuck the system and create a functional government. If we don’t, everyone loses.
Rage Blogging is Therapy 