Back To The Grind

Over the past few weeks, I had the most amazing opportunity to take some real time off. Time away from all of my day to day responsibilities and a real chance to sleep and just exist. It was nothing short of transformative, I had a near complete remission of symptoms I’ve been struggling with for the past 6 months, I felt more energy than I have in years, and I caught a glimpse of what life looks like without burnout from chronic stress. I’m back home now and things have returned to normal, I’m working, I have the kiddo and all of her midnight low blood sugars, the dogs, all the cleaning I didn’t do over the past few months, all of the money stress and the same bullshit cyclical patterns of feeling less than, wanting a change, eating too much garbage and retreating back to TV to get a couple hours away from it all. My stomach hurts again and I am tired. So tired. I know intellectually that I need to address my sleep (hahahahaha), move more, break up my tasks, plan naps/rest and eat real food, but god damn is it hard when life is just life. It’s not all bad, I got to catch up with a dear friend from highschool, which was such a great recharge and I had lunch with another friend that I’d missed so much-these are some of the women that just get me. I don’t feel judged, I don’t feel less than, but more importantly, they validate all of the struggles and just help me feel less isolated during this most challenging season of life. During this lunch, my girl told me about a life changing podcast that goes into all the nitty gritty of estrogen losses in perimenopause. It got me thinking and putting a lot of pieces together that seemed to have no connection like brain fog, becoming more and more clumsy, the night sweats, mood swings and joint pain. Maybe it’s not just stress, maybe there is some real cause of all of this unwellness that I don’t seem to be alone in. It turns out that women really haven’t been studied. Most studies of the human body have been done on men. We don’t just have different body parts, our whole hormonal composition and regulation is different. We literally feel pain in different ways at different times of the month, depending on what’s happening with our hormones. Why is it that we don’t have more answers, more doctors addressing midlife health challenges for women? I was laughed out of several doctor’s offices with my complaints of severe fatigue, this fatigue that cost me my job, that stole all of my hustle. Not my OBGYN, not my hematologist, not the surgeons, not the GI doc, and not my PCP, not one of them suggested that in my mid 40’s, I might be suffering with perimenopause. Not one blood test beyond the basics that look at basic health markers. 6 months of workups to come to the conclusion that I need to manage my stress to feel alive again. I accepted that I would just need 10-12 hours of sleep a day, would need to figure out how to manage the stress as a single mother of a kid with health and behavior issues without the energy  to work full time. I plan to go and ask my OBGYN to talk to me about this and see what we can do about getting some HRT, but in the meantime, I am pissed that it was overlooked. I’m pissed that I’ve lost so much time because women are overlooked in medical research. This post is my homage to women’s health and the need to shift our perspective on what acceptable care is for all of us.

this post is not meant to exclude the trans community and the terms male/men, female/women and pronouns used are meant to assume the physical gender assigned at birth and the physical differences only

Why have women been excluded?

For much of medical history, the male body has been considered the default or norm in research. There was a deeply rooted, patently false belief that male and female bodies were fundamentally similar, with the exception of reproductive function. Because of this, findings from studies conducted on men have been generalized to women without accounting for our gender specific differences in physiology, metabolism and hormonal cycles. Not to mention the societal expectations women have to take on “trad wife” duties while usually working full time and “taking care” of not just their children, but their spouses too. I could go on for days about this, but let’s get back to the topic at hand, lol.

Reproductive Concerns, Institutional and Societal Biases, Misdiagnoses and Delayed Care

Women have been excluded from clinical trials for some legitimate reasons, risks to fertility, pregnancy and fetal development are real concerns. Understandably, this presents some challenges with including women of childbearing age, but I need to ask, can’t they rule out pregnancy via a pregnancy test or even a blood test? How about all the women of child bearing age that actively prevent pregnancy and do not want children? These “protective” measures, although may be well intentioned don’t consider that men are also able to produce offspring. They also diminish the ability of women to make sound choices in their care and what they participate in. It reeks of mansplaining and reducing women to only their physiological abilities as baby machines. This stance has resulted in a serious lack of how treatments and medications affect women. They also disregard all the medications that are Generally Regarded As Safe, which we simply assume will be safe to take while pregnant. Women’s health has been undervalued and the scientific community owes us the respect of better health and medical understanding of the changes we go through and the way that standard treatment modalities affect us.

Misdiagnosis and delayed treatment is echoed throughout, with countless women telling stories of poor treatment at the hands of medical professionals, even with overwhelming evidence of illness. How many women do you know can say that their concerns were heard the first time? All this lack of research on women’s health has led to all too common misdiagnoses and delayed treatment for so many different conditions. The historical neglect of research on women’s health has caused a serious lack in understanding the treatment options for female specific diseases and conditions. Endometriosis, PCOS and many autoimmune disorders primarily affect women, but research has been underfunded and understudied. Countless women suffer for years from debilitating symptoms with limited and ineffective treatment options. There is no good reason why in this day and age, any woman should have to go on for years with crippling physical symptoms, only to be told to lose weight, exercise more and maybe start an antidepressant. Prozac is great, but it is not the answer for all vague symptoms.

There just needs to be more funding for women’s health research, we deserve to have patient centered care that includes all of the physiological differences between men and women. There needs to be more information about how our age, pregnancy and lactation status, body fat composition, hormone levels and even our liver enzyme activity affect our health and the treatments we are given. Given that drug dosages have been based on male physiology, there is a whole lot of room to over or underdose women with even the most common drugs. These discrepancies clearly demonstrate the need for gender specific research in medication development and testing, but also in women’s health as a whole. We have unique needs and we are owed the same medical care and knowledge that men have had for so long.

I hope that in the years to come that women’s health is emphasized while the medical community continues to learn and develop new treatment modalities, I need it, my friends need it and most importantly, my daughters need it.