Pluses and minuses
Jun. 4th, 2016 13:52![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
torquillSo, I'm nearing the end of week five.
Much of last week was spent in a haze of nausea, fighting hard to find anything that I could bear to eat and feeling horrible because I wasn't eating enough. A few days ago, the nausea lifted. I still can't bear to even contemplate eating certain things, but I'm actually hungry, and some foods are appealing. I'm thankful for that.
The crushing fatigue lifted almost two weeks ago, and other than being drained from low calorie intake, I've been doing pretty well.
Yesterday I was dysphoric, feeling too femme to get a proper grip on my identity. This morning I woke up feeling masculine enough to need a binder (even in warm weather); as the day progressed, the cramps have eased and so have the emotional overtones, leaving me with the sense of well-being I get from higher relative testosterone. I did well at the plant clinic, and I received some awestruck comments by one of the garden volunteers with amusement (it felt faintly absurd) rather than discomfort. My voice sounds deeper to me today as well, though I have no idea whether it is. My consciousness of my weight, present even this morning, has vanished. I don't expect all of this to be consistent past today, but I hope it's closer to the "new normal" than what I've had.
This week I started to get what I've now identified as a menopausal symptom: the slower, more low-key cousin of the hot flash, known as an "ember flush". I mostly get them in the middle of the night, when I wake up feeling like I have too many blankets on. I don't sweat, I just lie there and feel hot, for hours. I've gotten a bit of it during the day, too, like my thermostat has gone haywire. It's sabotaged my heat tolerance, and it's rather unpleasant when I start feeling like an 80-degree day is 95 degrees. But as I told a friend this morning, it's better than the symptoms I was having...
Unfortunately, cranking up my body temperature requires fuel, and I'm getting the same effect I get in winter, where I almost can't eat enough easy calories to feed the furnace. Yesterday I fell over about two hours after eating lunch, as ravenous and low-blood-sugared as if I hadn't eaten for six hours. I'm operating on both a long-term calorie deficit and a short-term one, and so long as my body is reluctant to burn body fat (I need to look into that) I have to get more to eat if I intend to stay upright. Given the dietary limits imposed by my food sensitivities and my current food aversions, that is not a trivial problem to solve.
It's one I've solved before, though, and the flushes may recede as I taper off the aromatase inhibitor. At my peak at the beginning of this week, I was up to 8 caps (about 800mg) of grapeseed extract a day -- a year ago I was taking four. This morning I took five. So long as the cramps and nausea keep receding, I'll keep decreasing the dosage (my libido is still above normal, but I can focus, so I'm just keeping an eye on that). If I can taper it down properly, I'll have a slow, steady decrease in average estrogen concentration, which should allow my body to adapt better. Once I level off at a low but constant amount of estrogen, the flushes may become less of an issue.
So, to sum up: very little fatigue, low brainfog, low nausea, cramps easing slightly, emotional state hitting optimal more often, mild hot flashes, still hard to eat, and half-starved. A mixed bag, but I'll do what I can with it.
Much of last week was spent in a haze of nausea, fighting hard to find anything that I could bear to eat and feeling horrible because I wasn't eating enough. A few days ago, the nausea lifted. I still can't bear to even contemplate eating certain things, but I'm actually hungry, and some foods are appealing. I'm thankful for that.
The crushing fatigue lifted almost two weeks ago, and other than being drained from low calorie intake, I've been doing pretty well.
Yesterday I was dysphoric, feeling too femme to get a proper grip on my identity. This morning I woke up feeling masculine enough to need a binder (even in warm weather); as the day progressed, the cramps have eased and so have the emotional overtones, leaving me with the sense of well-being I get from higher relative testosterone. I did well at the plant clinic, and I received some awestruck comments by one of the garden volunteers with amusement (it felt faintly absurd) rather than discomfort. My voice sounds deeper to me today as well, though I have no idea whether it is. My consciousness of my weight, present even this morning, has vanished. I don't expect all of this to be consistent past today, but I hope it's closer to the "new normal" than what I've had.
This week I started to get what I've now identified as a menopausal symptom: the slower, more low-key cousin of the hot flash, known as an "ember flush". I mostly get them in the middle of the night, when I wake up feeling like I have too many blankets on. I don't sweat, I just lie there and feel hot, for hours. I've gotten a bit of it during the day, too, like my thermostat has gone haywire. It's sabotaged my heat tolerance, and it's rather unpleasant when I start feeling like an 80-degree day is 95 degrees. But as I told a friend this morning, it's better than the symptoms I was having...
Unfortunately, cranking up my body temperature requires fuel, and I'm getting the same effect I get in winter, where I almost can't eat enough easy calories to feed the furnace. Yesterday I fell over about two hours after eating lunch, as ravenous and low-blood-sugared as if I hadn't eaten for six hours. I'm operating on both a long-term calorie deficit and a short-term one, and so long as my body is reluctant to burn body fat (I need to look into that) I have to get more to eat if I intend to stay upright. Given the dietary limits imposed by my food sensitivities and my current food aversions, that is not a trivial problem to solve.
It's one I've solved before, though, and the flushes may recede as I taper off the aromatase inhibitor. At my peak at the beginning of this week, I was up to 8 caps (about 800mg) of grapeseed extract a day -- a year ago I was taking four. This morning I took five. So long as the cramps and nausea keep receding, I'll keep decreasing the dosage (my libido is still above normal, but I can focus, so I'm just keeping an eye on that). If I can taper it down properly, I'll have a slow, steady decrease in average estrogen concentration, which should allow my body to adapt better. Once I level off at a low but constant amount of estrogen, the flushes may become less of an issue.
So, to sum up: very little fatigue, low brainfog, low nausea, cramps easing slightly, emotional state hitting optimal more often, mild hot flashes, still hard to eat, and half-starved. A mixed bag, but I'll do what I can with it.
