The Perimenopause Husband
Weird Perimenopause Symptoms: The Ones That Threw Me
Her hands went tingly.
Not pins and needles from sitting on them. Tingling that came with the headaches, down her arms, into her fingers, for no reason either of us could see. I'd have bet the house it had nothing to do with perimenopause.
I'd have lost the house.
What are the weird perimenopause symptoms?
Google has a list. Weird dreams. Weird smells. Smelling smoke that isn't there. A strange taste in her mouth. A weird feeling in her head she can't describe. Itchy ears.
I'll be straight with you. None of those came through our door, as far as I know. I can't tell you a story about them. But they're searched for every day by someone, and if one of them is in your house, you're not imagining it and neither is she.
What I can tell you about is ours.
Which weird ones turned up in our house?
The tingling, with the headaches. Hands and arms. That one went as far as a neurologist, and with it came blurred vision and numbness I'd never have put on the same list as a hot flush, or hot flash, as other parts of the world say it.
Her shoulder. Locked up like it was frozen, for no reason, nothing she'd done to it. Everyone in our house has played sport. We know what an injury feels like. This wasn't one.
The room spinning. She'd say she needed to lie down, middle of the day, and the kids wouldn't know why.
Her chin. Hair arriving where it never had, while it came out in clumps in the shower.
Itchy skin with nothing on it. Her hip, out of nowhere, one leg barely working.
Nineteen things in the end, and the full list is here. The point of this post is the odd ones, because they're the ones a husband never connects. The mood, the heat, the sleep, a bloke might eventually join those dots. Nobody joins tingling fingers to perimenopause unless someone tells him.
What did I get wrong?
I had a different explanation for every single one.
Slept on it funny. Sitting badly. Getting older. The midges. Stress. Each explanation was reasonable on its own, and each one meant I didn't have to think about what they added up to.
She was living inside all of them at once. I was handing her a separate excuse for each.
Are the weird ones dangerous?
I'm not a doctor and I won't pretend. Some of ours ended up in front of specialists, and I'm glad they did, because the whole point of a specialist is to rule out the thing that isn't perimenopause.
So here's the rule in our house now. Anything new, anything getting worse, anything with the heart or the head, anything that frightens either of you, that's a doctor or a specialist in this field. You go with her. You don't decide at the kitchen table which weird one is the harmless one. Neither of you is qualified, and that's fine.
Perimenopause isn't one thing. It's a kaleidoscope, and it turns up in places nobody warned you about. That's not a reason to panic. It's a reason to stop explaining things away.
What should a husband do when she says something weird is happening?
Here's one of the tools. There are plenty.
Believe the weird one the first time she says it.
Not the third time. Not after you've Googled it and found a forum that agrees with her. The first time, at the bench, when she says my hands have gone funny or I keep smelling smoke and there's no smoke.
Believe it out loud. That sounds real, and that sounds like it belongs on the list. Then write it down somewhere, dated, so when she's in front of the doctor she's not trying to remember when it started while you both stare at the floor.
That's it. You're not diagnosing anything. You're the one person in her life who takes the weird one seriously the first time, and that is rarer than it should be.
What we did with each of ours after that, and the question of what waits and what doesn't, is in the book. The chapter is called The Headaches That Scared Us Both.
Do the weird ones go away?
Some did. Some come and go. Some we're still on.
What went away was my habit of handing her a reason. Once I stopped doing that, she stopped having to argue for her own body in her own kitchen, and that's a weight you don't notice you've put on someone until you take it off.
Start With the Weather
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