Photo by Mac Mullins on Pexels
Last night, I met up with old friends for dinner and conversation. We hadn’t met for a while, but as soon as we sat down, the conversation and fried apps were flowing freely. It was as if no time had passed, and we had just seen each other the day before.
As we caught up, we started to talk about physical ailments, we were all in our late forties after all. One by one, we realized how the time had indeed passed, as we talked about night sweats, hot flashes, rising anxiety, and frozen shoulder.
The last one brought me up. We’d all dealt with this supremely painful condition. For me, the condition started with severe pain in my left shoulder. Scratch that. Excruciating pain in my left shoulder. I don’t know what I was doing, maybe lifting a box or putting laundry into the dryer. But the pain was blinding and sharp. After that, I continued to feel pain in that shoulder, but it started to decrease along with my range of movement.
At some point, I couldn’t lift my arm at all. Trying to shave or wash that armpit was nearly impossible. Simple tasks like putting on a bra or a shirt became exercises in frustration. I was given stretches to strengthen the muscles around my shoulder. I basically had to live with this condition for a little more than a year. In the article I linked, frozen shoulder symptoms can last up to three years!
Why had no one warned me about this? All three of us had experienced it. And, as I talked to my other girlfriends around this same age, they’d all had some experience with this as well. With something so common, you’d think our physicians would have warned us about this.
When you go through puberty, there are classes, your parents, and pop culture to warn you about what changes you are going to go through as your body gets pelted with hormones and physical transformations. But a woman going through perimenopause and menopause walks down that path of spiking hormones that gradually decrease in the dark and most likely alone.
Other than hot flash jokes, menopausal women are generally invisible in popular culture. There has been so much talk about banning TikTok, but honestly, thank the Goddess for that platform, because my particular timeline is now filled with middle-aged women sharing their perimenopausal symptoms. I learned that I wasn’t alone in this major life change that impacts all women.
It was good to gather with my friends. This is what’s so important about community, and it’s why isolation and loneliness can be so devastating as we age. In community, you learn that you’re not alone in your symptoms, and you can share tips and laughter and camaraderie, all over some cocktails and steak tips.
Making an effort to spend more time with my friends has made me relish these middle-aged years and not fear them so much.
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