u/lascriptori

There's all the physical symptoms, the hot flashes and irregular cycles and vaginal dryness; there's the emotional symptoms like anxiety and irritability and rage and flatness. Some of us get some of those symptoms and some of us get others.

I heard on a podcast recently that the most common peri symptom is a woman saying, "I just don't feel like myself anymore."

But after spending the last year in the thick of peri and spending a lot of time here, I honestly think that the most universal experience is an overwhelming desire to run away alone to a quiet cottage in a forest or bog or desert somewhere.

I think it's just an overwhelming need to get away from the stress, from the people who we love but who need a million things from us every day, from other people's mess and noise, from the sandwich generation chaos, from having to take care of other things and people, from all the work stress, from the world wanting so much more from us than we feel capable of giving at this stage.

It's a fantasy and I don't actually want to be away from my family and friends and community (and I still genuinely really like my husband, he's great). But I just keep on deeply feeling the need for solitude and calm someplace quiet. I want to read and write and do creative things and exercise and go on long walks in nature and just feel like I have a handle on all the things that need to be done. And I am historically a high achieving extrovert who has her shit together and has always been happy to be in the thick of things.

I'm kind of joking about the bog cottage but honestly it feels like something that so many of us are conceptually craving and I'm wondering if it's evolutionary or what is happening to make it such a universal thing.

My husband finally got PSLF approved last week and his balances dropped to 0! (Borrowed $40k in 2010, paid about $40k over the years, a little over $20k balance remaining).

Two questions:

1. He overpaid by several months over the 120 months. My understanding is that those months can get refunded. Do we need to do anything to make that happen?

2. He paid a little bit extra over the minimum payment every month over the years trying to get at the principle (and never quite believing he would actually get PSLF. Will he get any of that excess payment back, at least for the months after he had credit for PSLF?

I’ve been staying at my parent’s house off and on for the last three weeks while my mom recovers from a broken hip. My dad has dementia (prob stage 5) that is still undiagnosed because he was a physician and narcissist and has refused to see a primary doctor or neurologist and my mom hasn’t forced it.

This period of living with them has shown me how bad off both parents are. My dad was very intelligent and has some pretty good conversational, social and masking skills, but his short term memory maxes out at 2 minutes. Emotions and grievances take longer.

My mom came home from the hospital today and we set them up on a sofa bed downstairs because she can’t go upstairs yet. My dad has been really discombobulated the whole time she’s been gone, and generally hasn’t remembered she was in the hospital, so I was looking forward to him being a little more centered with his person back home with him. But the bed setup downstairs is really messing with him. He was wandering around trying to cover all the windows and being really restless.

I fell asleep around 10:30 and at 11 he came into the guest room I’m sleeping in. He’s been coming in a couple times a night, never remembering that I’m there but always happy to see me. Same thing, he was surprised/happy, gives me a sweet kiss. And then he sheepishly shows me the gun he had behind his back. I stayed visibly calm, but got him to put it up.

It’s an hour later, I have the door locked, I’ve been sitting upright in bed with cortisol sky high. The odds of him mistaking a family member, home health aide or worker for an intruder feel high. I sent a frantic text to my cousin asking him to come first thing in the morning and take all the guns. I fly back home tomorrow afternoon to my house in another state and I’m not coming back to their house again if there are guns in it.

I had basically a mini panic attack and I’m not okay right now.

The last three weeks have been some of the most exhausting of my life (including literally, because my dad has been waking me up in the middle of the night every night), but this is the first time I’ve been scared. I’ve been doing a ton of gentle managing with him and tiptoeing around the anosognosia but I don’t even give a fuck anymore, I’m not playing around with this.

ETA: It’s 4:30 in the morning, I slept for maybe three hours and popped awake again like hellooo cortisol. My sister, who was here last week taking care of him with her 18 year old son, said that last week he was freaked out that some guy was wandering around the house — it was his grandson. The risk of tragedy is all this is freaking huge and I’m getting the guns out of this house at first light or I’m disowning both my parents.

Update 2: my sportsman cousins are coming to take the guns out of the house at 10. I have them all collected and hidden. We all wound up having a conversation because my dad heard me talking to my mom and he actually gave permission. I tried to approach it lovingly but firmly, like, “my whole life I’ve known you to love and take care of your family and we have to do this to be safe.” He agreed and I think he’s maybe forgotten the conversation but still has a sense of grievance. He holds onto memories of injustice/grievance longer than anything else so it’s possible he remembers. I’m trying to be super cheerful and distracting him with questions.

Update 3: thanks for all the support. Guns are safely moved. I am pretty sure I’m coming out of this with PTSD. I don’t feel okay at all. But at least this one problem is solved.

47f and in the last 6-8 months peri stress and mood issues came for me hard. I’ve always been pretty cheerful and even keeled and just didn’t feel like myself at all. It got pretty bad. I have a genuinely stellar husband and great kids and I was fantasizing about turning into a hedge witch and finding a nice quiet cottage in a bog somewhere.

I found a great peri provider, started on just progesterone for a month and that didn’t help (and may have made things a bit worse). I had a luteal phase that just absolutely kicked my ass. Reached out to my provider, got a same day appointment to adjust the HRT, added an estrogen patch, and started to feel better right away.

It’s been about three weeks and the only way I can describe it is I feel like myself again. Which sounds so simple to say, but it’s huge. And sweet baby Jesus, I’ve been putting it to the test — my aging parents (including my dad who is a narcissist with dementia, a winning combo, let me tell you) suddenly had multiple major health and house crises that I’ve had to help them deal with, and I’ve been able to just kind of get on with it and do what needs to be done. I am fairly certain that if I hadn’t had that relief from estrogen I would have absolutely broken.

I went swimming with my husband and kids yesterday and was just enjoying life and being around them. I was swimming underwater looking at the sun reflecting on the bottom of the pool and felt like such a cliche of the second half of a commercial for depression medication, after they get happy again. It made me laugh but also really appreciate the moment.

Anyway. Yay. I know it doesn’t work for everyone and I may still need to readjust in the future but I’m so grateful to have this relief.

My dad has always been a narcissist. When he first started showing signs of dementia, for several years he became a lot sweeter and easier to be around. But as the dementia is progressing, the narcissism is really showing up again in full force.

Temper tantrums when people are having conversations that aren’t focused on him, a lot of anger and paranoia, trying to get constant attention and adoration. My mom has been his primary caregiver and I think the dementia + narcissism is such an exhausting combo for her, but she’s also been dealing with him for 60 years. She broke her hip and whether or not they’re going to accept adequate supports in the next week is an ongoing question.

If your parent was a narcissist and developed dementia, what are you experiencing?

47f with a busy job and my own family that I love very much. My parents are 82 and 88, dad has advanced but undiagnosed dementia. Mom is his caretaker and broke her hip a week ago. They live in the huge house I grew up in, which has more and more deferred maintenance and insurance costs. My sister and I live 500 miles away, a third sister lives locally but travels about half the time for work.

For the last week, my sisters and I have been scrambling to be in town to caretake for my dad while my mom is in the hospital with a broken hip.

My mom is so sweet but my dad is a narcissist, I’ve always had a very challenged and distant relationship with him, and while for a few years dementia make him sweeter and less angry to the point where I didn’t actively dislike him, at his current stage it’s just full dementia plus his full classic narcissism — behaviors that were always were there but used to have more of a veneer of social graces that have been removed. He throws a temper tantrum if my mom is talking on the phone to someone. He is really sweet to me when I am pouring whole and adoring and undivided attention on him and listening to the same stories about him on a loop, but gets agitated and has outbursts and paranoia if we’re not focused on him. He has major anosognosia and will never admit that anything is wrong. He still can bathe himself, use the toilet, dress himself, turn on the TV, pour a bowl of cereal, have a conversation about things from the last century. He mostly recognizes his family through he’s started not being sure which daughter each of us are.

Caretaking for him for 6 days was only mentally possible because I’m very even keeled, know that I’m a grownup with a wonderful spouse and kids I love, and know that it’s time limited. I can take a little more time off work but not endless. It’s virtually impossible to work while caring for him because he demands so much attention.

When my mom gets out of the hospital, she’s going to need a lot of extra care. We’ve talked to her about needing home health aides. The hospital social workers are taking to her about it. Other friends and family members are talking to her about it. However, she seems to think that my dad plus a weekly housekeeper will be enough. We’ve done a lot of things to make sure my dad isn’t driving, and had endless conversations with my mom to make sure she knows my dad can’t drive, but I am almost positive that if she can’t drive and we’re not there to prevent it, my dad will drive unless we remove all vehicles from the house.

While we were there, the house had a major plumbing emergency that I was coordinating, and it’s still not fixed (though there are enough working bathrooms that the house is still livable). But there’s a lot more major repairs that are deferred, and I’ve been coordinating minor repairs for the last couple years because my mom has been struggling with the executive function to do it (between the exhaustion of caring for my dad and her own declining executive function and memory loss).

They REFUSE to leave their house, for years have refused to entertain the conversation first of downsizing and then of any sort of assisted living, and I think they’re going to refuse in home health aides.

And at some point, I feel like I have to let them choose their choice and fail on their own? I am going back next week to care for my dad for a few more days until my mom is discharged, but after that, I have to be tending to my own family.

I’m most worried about the driving because that could kill other people, but if I can figure out a way to prevent that from happening, is it so wrong to let them fail if they’re refusing help?

ETA for clarity: she had surgery last weekend and is in a rehab facility now; she’ll probably be there for another week or two doing OT and PT before getting discharged home.

My hat is off to you who are long term caretakers for your parents, because after three days I can confirm that I am absolutely not cut out for it.

My mom (82) is the primary caretaker of my dad (88), but she fell Friday and broke her hip. She was pretty strong and active going in to the break and they sound optimistic that she’ll make a decent recovery, but she’ll be in rehab for two weeks and will be recovering for months. I have one sister in town with them, I live 500 miles away and have kids and a busy job, and my other sister also lives out of town.

I put my life on hold to come and take care of my dad for two weeks and oh my lord is it hard. My dad was genuinely a narcissistic dick my whole life, but as his memory went a few years ago, he turned into a much sweeter person.

In the best moments, he’s sweet and needy like a toddler and just wants to tell me the same stories over and over for hours at a time, and I just have the frustration of being unable to do anything else, including my own work. But we’re also getting so horrible sundowning, he’s consistently agitated and looking for my mom, and he goes back and forth between being sweet and loving and super spiteful and verbally abusive. I’m able to stay patient when he’s being sweet and keep a shell when he’s agitated but it just sucks.

He was a doctor (in the 1980s, when doctors expected to be treated like gods) and he gets really agitated and angry if we try to push him to medical care not of his choosing. He wound up in the ER yesterday with inability to urinate and was in extreme pain until he got a catheter. He kept that in for about 12 hours until he removed it. I had made an urgent follow up appointment for him for tomorrow morning, told him about it, etc, and tonight he started sundowning and was hurling abuse because he’s the doctor and how dare we go behind his back. He’s actually been able to hang on to sundowning anger for quite a while.

My hope is that tomorrow morning I’ll show him the hospital discharge paperwork (and I’ll forge a note from the hospital doctor on it about the follow-up appointment) and he’ll have forgotten about this, because I can’t physically manhandle him into the car.

I don’t think he’ll tolerate home care but I am absolutely making calls tomorrow to try to get some paid backup because I am not cut out for this.

My 88 year old dad has some sort of unspecified dementia that has been significant for about 5 years now. My mom is his caretaker and they still live in the house I grew up in.

My mom fell a few days ago, broke her hip, and is currently in the hospital with

I’m 47 and late peri hit me like a truck about 7 months ago, though my cycle started getting irregular about 4 years ago. Last month I realized that what was going on was probably peri, found an absolutely amazing menopause provider and started HRT and am still figuring out what all my body needs to feel good.

When I get interested in something, I get hyper interested, and in the last few weeks I’ve been reading and learning everything I can about perimenopause and I am so mad right now. I work in women’s health policy (contraceptive access). I’m not a clinician but I have a certification in public health. I’m very well informed about a lot of areas of women’s health and I knew practically nothing whatsoever about perimenopause. It’s actively shocking to me how little I knew.

Like, estrogen mediates practically every system in our body. Our cardiovascular health, our mental health, our metabolism, everything. When i suddenly gained 15 lbs and had high cholesterol and slightly elevated blood pressure for the first time in my life, no provider was like, oh yes, this is a very common thing to happen in perimenopause. I wasn’t having hot flashes or vaginal dryness so nobody said that my stress and irritability might be hormonal. And I’m fairly certain that if I asked my big box GP about it, i would have gotten the same misinformation that people report here every day.

And I am so, so mad at the junk data from the women’s health initiative that set us back two decades and probably resulted in god knows how many years of life lost for women who didn’t get appropriate care.

I’m shoving books and podcasts at all the women I know. But oh my lord. We all have got to educate ourselves on this as fast as we can and get super knowledgeable so we can advocate for ourselves. And we need to teach our daughters about this so they don’t suffer unnecessarily. And if your provider is not menopause certified and if they don’t work with you to figure out a solution and take your issues seriously, give yourself a huge gift and find a provider who does.

We all deserve so much fucking better than the current status quo.

47F, in the thick of peri though I still have some regular ovulatory cycles mixed in with very irregular cycles. No physical symptoms, just mood symptoms.

I largely gave up alcohol like 3 or 4 years ago after realizing it wrecks my mood and sleep (I have maybe 2 drinks a month nowadays).

I gave up THC this month because I realized that, despite being super enjoyable, THC also seems to cause anxiety and depression in the days after. This was a super big bummer because music, sex, art, self reflection, etc is all really amazing for me when I'm a little bit stoned.

I've been limiting myself to one small morning cup of coffee for years now, because excess caffeine is one of the several factors that gives me brutal insomnia (even before peri set in). But my sleep has been getting worse and worse, and I've been noticing this terrible anxiety spike after that one small cup.

I've always said that they would pry that last cup of coffee out of my cold dead hands, but I am really starting to think that I may have to lose that one too. I know I'll get headaches for a few days and it'll just be really sad and I love coffee and this sucks.

The vices I have left are pretty much marital sex (thank god I still like my husband) and chocolate. Everything else is dropping like flies.

I started progerstone about a month ago and tbh I haven't noticed it doing anything at all, so at my followup in a couple of weeks we're going to talk about estrogen and testosterone. I have a really awesome provider, a women's health nurse practitioner who specializes in peri treatment, so hopefully I can get back to a good place.

ETA: Thanks for advice and commiseration, it's nice knowing I'm not the only one on this crazy ride. I switched to black tea this morning and also ordered some matcha so I'm going to experiment with that. I've did a bunch of blood testing recently and my ferritin is a measly 6 so I've been supplementing that aggressively the last couple weeks, and hoping that will help, and also about to start magnesium glycinate.

Any tips for providing sugars in a test tube without it being a huge mess? I've tried to do sunburst on a little piece of paper but the front half of the tube is just sticky now.

47f here, in the thick of perimenopause. I've never been a super heavy drinker (maybe drank a bit too much in college and a bit too much during the pandemic) and I didn't really like smoking pot when I was younger. But about 3 or 4 years ago, I started realizing that even 1 or 2 alcoholic drinks gave me clear-cut anxiety and glumness and also wrecked my sleep, so I almost totally eliminated it. I have maybe 2 drinks a month nowadays.

I really, really thought that THC was a nice alternative that didn't have the same side effects. And it offered some genuinely beautiful moments of self-reflection, stillness, and appreciation of sensory things like art and music and sex. As I cut out alcohol, I slowly ramped up THC (typically gummies or drinks). For a couple months at the start of this year, I was having like 10-25 mg maybe 2-3 times per week (where it used to be like 2 mg once or twice a week). Not a daily thing or an all day thing, but frequent.

Around Thanksgiving, I started noticing significantly worse mental health. I chalked it up to work stress, perimenopause, the flaming state of the world, etc. But I started noticing it getting worse after having THC. Thankfully it's always been very easy for me to stop using substances, so I started experimenting with not having THC for a couple weeks and then having some and paying attention to how I feel.

It's really clear. THC gives me anxiety and lowkey depression for a few days after using it. I'm really bummed because I really enjoy getting lightly stoned and going to a museum or listening to music or hanging out with my husband or just watching the sunset, and I've had some genuinely good moments of self reflection. But it's just really clear that it's bad for my mental health and I shouldn't use it. My vices are dropping like flies the older I get.

We're financially in pretty solid shape (solidly middle class with savings, not crazy big spenders, and not living month to month) but need to be doing a better and more intentional job of retirement savings, so I decided to go through my finances in the same way that I would go through a junk drawer or overstuffed closet. Basically take everything out, look at it to see if it sparked joy and fit in the container, get rid of anything that needed getting rid of.

It was a really good exercise. I downloaded a year of all of my bank and credit card statements (we have multiple bank accounts and multiple credit cards that we use for points but pay off every month). I went through all the transactions, coded them into categories, and looked at what they added up to. I also figured out how to download a spreadsheet of all of my amazon purchases because that was a significant expense and I wanted to know what was, like, household basics vs unnecessary impulse buys.

I found multiple subscriptions and recurring charges that were easy to jettison, found a few categories where we were spending more than the joy we got out of it, and just have a much better sense of where our money is actually going. I know that most credit cards will try to categorize spending into buckets, but going through actual charges and knowing what they were actually for felt way more accurate. I boosted my retirement contribution significantly based on the savings I found, and felt really good about it.

I had a little bit of that "ick" feeling that you get when you look at clutter that you created, like kind of guilt about overconsumption. But it also felt really good to make positive changes going forward. And I think the decluttering muscles that I built up with physical objects were really helpful with this financial decluttering.

Basically what the title says. Late 40s. I have a fairly high stress job (nonprofit lobbyist for a progressive cause in a red state, I promise I'm one of the good guys) and I'm deeply, deeply burnt out and have been for some time. I make a salary just barely over 6 figures, as does my husband. There are a lot of things I love about my job and org, but I've accepted that I don't want to do it anymore. I should add that I'm neurotypical, I don't have any physical or mental health struggles, I have an awesome supportive marriage and family. I'm just burnt out.

I've started looking at other jobs, but the jobs with similar pay that I'm qualified for seem like they would have stress levels that are the same at best, or possibly much higher. I keep on looking at jobs that seem like they would be utterly lovely for quality of life, but would pay about half of what I'm making.

I haven't crunched numbers to fully see how extremely low our budget could go, but we live in a fairly high cost of living town, our autistic 12 year old goes to a small private school where he is happy and loved (after being deeply unhappy in public school), and fully up and moving to another town is not a current option because we're taking care of aging parents. That said, I think we could make the budget work, at least for a while. But it feels crazy and irresponsible to even consider it.

We have a friend who died suddenly in her 40s of a very aggressive cancer (from first symptom to death was about 4 months), and the year prior, she had quit her stressful job, moved to the region that she loved and was working a part time job while making art. I kept thinking that I was so glad she had taken that step, which probably felt crazy, and had that time doing what she loved. And then it occurred to me that any of us could get a crazy diagnosis or get hit by a bus at any point.

So, if you quit a high paid, high stress job to move to a lower-paid, low stress job, how was it?