Hi, I am Kris!

• Hello world!

Greetings, guys and I mean guys and gals!! Guys if you think this is just your partners problem you are wrong!!!

In the Beginning

I was probably around 42 or 43 when I woke up one night

I woke up one morning, drenched in sweat, thinking I had just peed myself! Nope I’d just had what I later found out to be called a night sweat!  I got so hot that night and sweated so much and my bed sheets were wet and sticking to me!  

I got up, cooled off and thought, what fresh hell is this? Am I getting sick? Do I have a cold? No, I feel fine. Once I completely cooled off, I went back to sleep.

I remember this went on for two or three nights, and then it would be randomly, I felt fine, keep in mind it was November or December and it’s Ohio so it is a little chilly and the furnace is running but as far as I was concerned you could turn it off!  I was curious what was going on with my body, but at the same time you’re always so busy you don’t really stop to find out! 

I remember a few weeks later I was out shopping with my girlfriends, and they were talking about having a menopause party as they just had their last period, and so I told them about my night sweats and how I woke up soaked and saying is this part of menopause? But they never really answered me, they pretty much brushed it off and moved on as if to say, we don’t talk about it as women just move on and deal with it. I remember thinking why don’t women want to talk about these things.  It’s not like people don’t know. We get a period; we have babies and then we go through menopause what is so difficult as women to talk about menopause?  I was very frustrated in general not only with my girlfriends but society, why do women have to live in a closet and suffer?  Why can’t we talk about these things?  Why must we hear about men having a hard time getting an erection on TV, but women can’t talk about their own bodies? 

Fast forward, a year later my husband and I sell our house and move in with his mother because we purchased land and was going to build our retirement home, his mother’s house was a two story home and the bedrooms were on the second floor and it was September and still hot outside, and I was HOT to say the least and so was my husband!  We ended up purchasing a little A/C unit for the window to cool down our room at night, so we didn’t have cool the whole house, and that was a savior.  Keep in mind the window AC was cranked down to probably 67 or 66 degrees and my poor husband was over there in his cocoon (wrapped in several blankets), not saying a word, just dealing with it, but that was our only option, if I was going to get sleep, because this isn’t a normal HOT while sleeping this is a new level of hot!   

Keep in mind it’s Ohio and eventually the furnace would need to be turned on, and I know that heat rises, so I started to figure out what I can do to sleep and survive the night! We have a Sleep Number bed so they offered a dual temp cooling mattress pad that would cool you down up to 15 degrees more than the room temp or it could even heat you up 15 degrees (I was never using the heat feature!) So, I went to the store and ordered one!  It wasn’t cheap but let me tell you it was one of the best purchases I ever made! Still is awesome to this day!  I have had it on my side of the bed for the last 6 years and I run it every night and of course it is set to a cool 15 degrees lower than the space temp! 

Fast forward a few months and notice that I start gaining weight, but I’m not eating anything different than what I was before and I am still exercising I am doing yoga daily for 30 minutes and then walking on the treadmill after dinner for 30 minutes, but I am still gaining weight. And I can’t control it!  What do the doctors say MENOPAUSE!  Do they offer you any solutions NOPE they just start to blame everything on menopause. 

A few more months later we ended up buying a condo as our build wasn’t going as planned so we moved into the new condo, and it is right before COVID hits! 

So, we start working from home and I’m working 60, 70 hours a week and online all hours of the day and night, and not paying attention to really anything except for work, and that is when it happened, I lost the desire to have sex. I don’t care what you say ladies I like sex and if you don’t like sex, you’re not doing it right or your partner is not doing it right. I’m here to tell you sex is a very good relieve of stress and it is a great connection with your partner!

That is also when the periods got bad!  And I mean bad!  I woke up in the middle of the night, probably about five years ago, with a flush of what felt like I peed myself. But in all reality, it was blood. I didn’t make it to the bathroom before I was just dripping blood along the way on the carpet. And then when I finally got on the toilet, it felt like I was having a miscarriage, but that wasn’t possible because my tubes were tied, and I knew I couldn’t have kids anymore. Luckily, my husband, who is a very understanding man, gets up and cleans all the blood trail on the carpet because it was insane. Help me with a shower, and then I just lay on the couch the rest of the day. I was so mentally and physically exhausted from it, not knowing why, as I went from a period that was two or three days light bleeding to, oh, my God, I just created a murder scene in my bedroom and in my bathroom thank God I was lucky enough to not get it all over my bed, but the rush woke me up out of the dead of my sleep, just like the night sweats do! 

So here I go again off to the doctors and sure enough I have polyps, please keep in mind that in my 20s I was told that I have PCOS (Polycystic ovary syndrome) and I tied my tubes as I was told that would help with my periods and symptoms but fast forward another 7 years and once again I have polyps and now I am being told to have an ablation on my uterus saying this will help, and that after you shouldn’t have another period, instead you will just eventually go through menopause well guess what not 4 weeks after the ablation I have a period!!  So, I returned to the doctor, and we agree I need a hysterectomy, but I ended up waiting 6 months for it to even get scheduled due to back log of surgeries.   

During this time, I also noticed that I would get angry here and there, but nothing too moody, but noticed that sometimes when my husband talked, he just started to irritate me, he isn’t saying anything out of the norm, it just became irritating, and I notice myself getting upset with him for absolutely nothing! I learn to control it sometimes I would just get up and walk out of the room and count to 10, but there were a few occasions that I would just go quiet and wasn’t friendly and he would ask me did I do something?  Are you ok?  And I would just say nope and that was the truth and then eventually I would think to myself WHY am I mad?  He didn’t do anything, and the feeling would go away!

So let me recap here for you and understand I am NOT a medical professional or doctor, but I do know my body!  So far, I have night sweats, hot flashes, weight gain, loss of sexual desire and start to be irritated by the stupid things in life and all of that started 7 to 8 years ago when I was around 43 years of age and now, I am 51!    

So, ladies I find it unacceptable that we aren’t talking about this more! Everybody knows we have a period; everybody knows we have sex; everybody knows that we must go through puberty and that women can have babies!  And at the end of the day, guess what? Eventually, our lady parts stop working, so why can’t we talk about it!

All of the above symptoms on and off while I continue to wait 6 Months for them to finally schedule my hysterectomy and I have it done in March of 2022 and it was successful, I was in a little pain but nothing too bad, but I was exhausted after the surgery and it took 6 weeks for me to recover instead of 4 weeks, but I was lucky and had a good job so I could take the time and rest, which was a good decision for me as my job was stressful to say the least and I was already working way too many hours and had a huge team reporting to me, so the rest was a good thing (something woman don’t do enough of or know how to do it or ask for it)

During all of this my husband and I move again as we sold the condo and move into our rental property to save money to build our retirement home, and I remember I was working with a lady at the storage facility, because we had to store items because we didn’t have a garage or enough space in our twin single for everything, but I remember talking with her because she apologized for forgetting something or not doing something couldn’t really remember but I remember that she said ever since I had a hysterectomy I just feel like my brain doesn’t work anymore and my hormones are off balance, but my doctor said yea that is going to be the case for a while!  I told her I was going to have one too and she told me to just have patience with myself! 

So remember I told you I had my hysterectomy in March of 2022 and I was going to just take 4 weeks off but instead I took the 6 weeks off to rest before returning, but when I did finally return I began to see what the lady was talking about at the storage facility, I too started to have brain fog and I mean I would forget words and thoughts and forget items I was supposed to do, and this wasn’t a good combination when it came to my job!

Now here is where my life gets a little more interesting because keep in mind I am on a team of all women, so one would think there would be a little more understanding and help as I kept talking with them all about menopause and how I had all these symptoms but that isn’t how it went down!  There was no compassion with the women in my group instead they used it more to their advantage!  Which is why I say I don’t understand women!  YOU KNOW what we go through why are we not more supportive of each other or even talk more with each other about it!   We are so busy trying to be in a man’s world that we forget that it’s our world too!!!

My husband was more supportive and helpful then any of the women in my life!  I remember one day he goes: I’ve been reading about menopause. And he said it’s like your body is just killing itself. This is what he says to me. He’s not a female. He’s a male, but this is what he says, and because he has seen the changes in me, he wanted to be more involved he wanted to understand more of what I was going through because like everything in our marriage he wanted to tackle it as a team!  So, Men if you think you don’t play a part, YOU are wrong you play a huge part and that means you should be reading and understanding more of what your partner is going through.

I want to continue to emphasize, and I am not a doctor, nor do I take any stance politically as I am discussing my own issues that I have went through when it comes to perimenopause and menopause!

Fast forwards another few weeks and the next symptom I started to have was lack of sleep!  I would fall asleep fast and be very tired and I would sleep for about an hour or two and then I would wake up and couldn’t fall back asleep!  I would sit there for one, two or even three hours and NOTHING!  This went on for about 3 weeks I was barely getting 2 or 3 hours a sleep each night and still working 8 to 10 hours a day!  I thought I was losing my mind, how could I be so tired but still couldn’t sleep, so I tried a little melatonin per my doctor and that helped a few nights and finally got me back into a little schedule. I started to do a little reading about menopause and hormones and realized I am not losing my mind; this is another side effort for menopause!  It’s your lack of hormones!  

Ladies, since we aren’t talking to each and we don’t understand all of this, this is where you get more angrier and angrier because you don’t understand what’s going on. You’re a woman that’s multitasking, that’s used to handling everything from the kids to the grocery, to the house cleaning, to working full time, and being there with your husband or your partner, for that matter. And now you can’t even manage to get yourself out of bed because you’re so exhausted and the brain fog, and you can’t sleep. So, ladies, when I tell you this is real, it is not in your head, and it is the worst feeling ever!

One year after my hysterectomy I go in for my annually pap with my OBGYN and we are talking about my symptoms that I was having, gaining weight, brain fog, lack of sleep, irritation, dryness, and lack of sex drive and night sweats and she offers me estrogen cream to put up my vagina every night for two weeks and  then twice a week to get my body the estrogen it needs but she doesn’t talk about progesterone or testosterone just estrogen.  So, I try this for a few months, and I notice the my face is breaking out and I have a couple of rashes, so I just stop taking it and think this isn’t doing anything to help so why bother!

Well, this is the part that is the most frustrating we don’t understand because no one wants to talk about it and WHY our bodies need these hormones and why it is important!  Keep in mind at no point has the OBGYN tested my blood work for anything, nope they just offered me the estrogen cream and according to that conversation it was to help with my dryness, there wasn’t really a discussion on how estrogen is needed and what this cream could do instead it was here is a cream for dryness! 

So, at this point I am a year and half past my hysterectomy and stopped taking the estrogen as I really didn’t see a difference and it was messing with my skin.  Keep in mind the symptoms haven’t gone away they are still there and just getting worse, there isn’t really a lot of discussion’s that I can see with doctors or friends going on either about menopause, it was more like yep it sucks, but we just power through!!! WHY should we just power through!!!!  Keep in mind this whole-time work just sucks as I am exhausted all the time and my team is huge, I had 19 people reporting to me directly and that meant a lot of listening and putting out fires, never any real time to prevent the fire before it became a fire!  I was doing my best to stay afloat with all my direct reports because to me getting their needs meet was my priority! 

This went on for about another 9 months until I returned to the doctor for my annually!  So, I am talking with her about all my symptoms and how the cream didn’t really help and she offered me PAXIL!  I said I not depressed.  Why Paxil and she said in a study it helps women with hot flashes, me being the person I am was not happy with this offer at all!  Still, she doesn’t offer to test my blood doesn’t say anything about progesterone or testosterone!  She did offer the estrogen patch said it might be better than the cream!  I didn’t agree to Paxil but she did forward me some articles on menopause and Paxil and I read them 10% or maybe 20% of women on Paxil said their hot flashes were better?  No other symptoms were better!  My biggest complaint was brain fog, lack of sleep, and not feeling myself, not hot flashes! Offering women an antidepressant makes me feel like a man thought hey let’s help these women and just give them an antidepressant and then they will just get over this whole menopause thing!!!

This is why I say it is so important we talk!  Please keep in mind that I will stress again I am NOT a doctor, these are just my feelings and my experiences while I am going through menopause, and I am sharing so that it will hopefully help other women!  I left the doctor’s office thinking there has got to be something better than this!

Keep in mind three months has past and the symptoms haven’t gotten any better and I was supposed to be doing research but I was exhausted!  It is 4^th of July week and my husband have the week off, so we went to the pool. Before we left the pool I started to become irritated with him, there wasn’t really any reason,  he just started to upset me in some way, shape, or form, and it wasn’t anything worthwhile to be upset about, but I couldn’t tell my rage that, because at the time I was upset and I am mean, he was attempting in the car to get me to stop, and I wouldn’t stop. I’m so angry. I’m so mad and I was yelling at him, and he is insisting that I stop and not talk about it anymore, but I keep going. He was just trying his best to get me to shut up and I wasn’t going to do it. I was just thinking I was right, and I was feeling this way the whole way home. But the interesting part of it is, we walked in the door and I thought, why was I yelling at him? Why was I upset? I have no idea, by that time he was beyond pissed, which I didn’t blame him. Here is the funny thing, I should of walked over and said I am sorry I don’t know what just happened to me, but I didn’t do that either I just keep replaying it over and over in my head really trying to understand WHY I was so angry!  At that point, I said it’s not just about hot flushes, lack of sleep or the brain fog. It’s all of it because we are losing control over our body and it is like my husband said killing itself! 

So that weekend, we had plans to visit a friend and see the fireworks for the Fourth of July, and we’re at this function for our friends to see the fireworks, and we run into this couple, and this guy starts talking to my husband about his knees because he has knee issues, and this guy is talking about this place that he’s went to for stem cell research. His wife says, yeah, I go there for HRT. And I’m like, HRT?  And so, she starts talking about how she was miserable, such as sex didn’t feel good because of dryness and also she didn’t want to have sex. She said don’t get me started on the brain fog as it was bad!  

So, she tells me she started doing the HRT (Hormone replacement therapy) pellets. I ask her all about the pellets and we end up talking throughout the evening, and I’m thinking, oh, this is amazing. And she starts talking about how she started the pellets. and how awesome it is now because brain fog isn’t bad anymore and she has a desire for sex again. She also doesn’t feel so tired.  I’m thinking, okay, so she gives me the name, and I call and interesting enough, my husband calls and he goes, for his knees too. I let them do a blood panel on me keep in mind, they’re the first place that recommended to do a blood panel to find out where my levels are with regards to my testosterone, my progesterone, and my estrogen.

Also, they’re the first place that talked about my progesterone and testosterone because as women you need all three and we have all three!!!  The other doctor just wanted to focus on my estrogen. That’s it. Because they believe women just need estrogen. That’s not a true statement. So, I let them do a blood panel, and it comes back. My testosterone’s in the toilet, my estrogen in the toilet. Imagine that, so is my progesterone. They recommend a treatment plan. So, in July of 2024, I start a treatment plan with the pellets keep in mind that I had my hysterectomy in March of 2022 so two years after that surgery! 

The testosterone and estrogen is pellets that get inserted into my skin in my butt, after about a month or so I started to feel a little bit better. I started to feel more like myself.

I also started the progesterone which was a pill not a pellet, too, and I started to notice that my sleep was getting better, not perfect but was better than it was. It was amazing to me what those little hormones can do to your system how quickly your body starts to turn around. I did the pellets for year. They were expensive. They weren’t cheap, I paid $645 every time I went to get my pellets every three months not to mention the lab work, which insurance did cover.  It was worth it because I felt like I had started to become myself again and every time I went in, we talked about my symptoms, and they always adjusted my pellets to help with the symptoms. 

There was an interesting phase during one of my three months treatment where sex became harder like, it wasn’t that great, as I was having a hard time to have an orgasm, which isn’t the best. When you must work extra, extra hard to get there for an orgasm because I’m sorry I’ll go back to these ladies. If you don’t like sex, either you’re not doing it right or he’s not doing it right so figure it out because sex is damn good with the right partner and even better if you get to have an orgasm! So, when I went in for my follow up treatment, I had conversations with them about how, it was harder for me to orgasm, so they adjusted my estrogen a little bit in my pellets that treatment and about a month later I started having the best orgasms, the easiest orgasms ever!  I didn’t have to use lube anymore because my body would do natural lube.

Maybe you are blushing right now, that is fine, but understand this, humans have sex, and sometimes sex can lead to babies, because as females we have periods. These are all facts so why is it so hard for people to talk about menopause and why as women do we shy away from it?  Also please understand if me talking about my journey leads to helping just one woman, then I am more than happy to share!    

In early 2025 My husband forwarded me the article, about Ohio Health opening a Menopause and Midlife Clinic in New Albany, OH only 25 minutes from my house.  Yes, ladies, I will say it again. The man in my life is the one that found the article and sent it to me as he has been very proactive on finding articles around menopause to help me deal with all my symptoms.   He isn’t shy about talking about menopause either with people as he wants our marriage to stay as healthy and as good as it is and he understands that my body is going through something, so he is being very supportive.  Men, I will say it again if you don’t not think that you’re involved in this, you are wrong you are involved 99% of the time! The actions that you take, how you help and your understanding of what your wife or partner is going through if the best support you can provide, and if you are going to be a good partner you have to know all the facts to help them get through menopause!

I called immediately to make an appointment, and it was six months’ wait to get into the clinic!  Regardless I made the appointment and kept doing my pellets so that I could keep my hormone level where they needed to be, in the meantime my husband listens to this doctor on the radio Dr. Lisa Mosconi and she has a book “The Menopause Brain” So I listen to her podcase and then I download her book to listen too!  What a great book!  Ladies if you are struggling with your brain fog and think you are going crazy, please buy this book read it or listen to it as it is a real eye opener!  It has such important information to help you along in this journey!

More to come….