Menopausal Mother

 Welcome to the latest edition of Fly On The Wall group blog postings, hosted by Karen of Baking In A Tornado.  Today, three bloggers are bravely inviting you into their homes to see what goes on behind closed doors. 

The nosy fly has been witnessing my health journey as I try to get back to a reasonable weight for my age. Of course, I can never do anything by myself in this house, so the Hubs decided to hop on the diet train with me. I'm happy to report that I'm successfully losing pounds and inches, but let it be known that it is TOTALLY UNFAIR how easily men lose weight without much effort! I'm over here eating astronaut food while Hubs lost 10 pounds just by cutting out a few beers each week. I'm also drinking half my body weight in water daily (no, I am NOT going to tell you how much) and basically turning myself into a floating human raft, so you can imagine how many trips I take to the bathroom in a 24-hour span. Anyway....here are some snippets of conversation the fly overheard:
 

I guess I need to keep clipping my toenails because there's still some weight that I need to shed. If you have any extra-large clippers, send them over. But please hide them from my husband---he doesn't need the extra weight loss advantage. 

***WANT MORE MENO MAMA? If you're interested in past life regression, check out my latest for The Doe HERE. Do you find terrifyingly large bugs cool? Then take a look at my latest article for Always Pets HERE. Or have fun reading about the cutest cats on the planet HERE. And if you want to know who the cutest dogs are, you can also read it HERE

Buzz around these links for a peek into some other homes:

 

Baking In A Tornado                  https://www.BakingInATornado.com

Menopausal Mother                   http://www.menopausalmom.com/

Wandering Web Designer      https://wanderingwebdesigner.com/blog

Never Ever Give Up Hope.        https://batteredhope.blogspot.com

Today on the blog the good people from Minute 31 are here to discuss the five most common questions women ask about menopause. They have the answers--and a solution--to help ease the uncomfortable symptoms of menopause. 

5 COMMON QUESTIONS EVERY WOMAN ASKS ABOUT MENOPAUSE.

The basic information that everyone has about menopause is that it marks the end of menstruation. 

While men act like this topic doesn't exist, women tend to streamline it to this: I have seen women in their early 40s and early 50s complaining of how stressful and uncomfortable menopause is. I have heard a woman complain, "The issue I have with menopause is that it is so uncomfortable. It's like puberty at an older stage with more inconveniences. I always thought of menopause as a stage where we would never use tampons again and then count our blessings for our grandchildren. It seemed that simple."

It is simple when you have enough information to tackle the subject. So apart from the fact that menopause is the end of menstruation, menopause has other important factors that you need to know. Maybe you have a friend who is aging gracefully and is enjoying menopause; remember that these things hit us differently; body chemistry and a host of other factors can make it a whole new ball game for others. 

Today, we will be answering FAQs (frequently asked questions) on menopause, such as menopausal age, and symptoms of menopause. By the end of this article, you will be much more informed.

Question 1:

WHAT IS MENOPAUSE ALL ABOUT?

Let's begin by saying that menopause is not a disease nor an illness. Going through menopause doesn't mean anything is defunct in your system. It just means that you have stopped menstruation and your body is getting older. This is a completely natural and biological process. 

Menopause is pretty much self-diagnosed, and the most accessible way to check is through the menstruation method. If it has been 12 months since your last period, you are menopausal. 

Question 2:

WHAT ARE THE SYMPTOMS OF MENOPAUSE?

You can also use the symptom method to check. Some very common symptoms are:

A. Dryness in the vaginal area- some hormones that ensure natural lubrication and even blood flow no longer work, leading to dryness in the vagina. The effect of this is that it is uncomfortable, and it makes penetrative sex painful.

B. Hot flashes- Some women experience hot flashes. A hot flash is a feeling of warmth, usually sudden, that affects the upper body---particularly the face, neck, and chest. It leads to sweating, and if you lose a lot of body heat, you will feel chilly afterward. For some people, their skin might redden, and it will appear like they are blushing.

C. Night sweats- This is a nighttime hot flash. They can cause so much discomfort that sleeping becomes impossible. This happens due to the fall in hormone levels and invariably, 

affects the body temperature.

D. Headaches- There are bound to be a lot of severe headaches and migraines. Why? During 

menopause, hormones that regulate a woman's body tend to drop, which can lead to painful discomfort.

E. Decreased Libido- Or sexual urge---(lack of) id due to the fall in testosterone and estrogen. Testosterone combined with estrogen is responsible for repairing women's reproductive tissues and controlling some behaviors; when these two take a nosedive, the desire for sex is reduced or completely disappears.

F. Joint Pain- This is not only a sign that you need to hit the gym but a sign of menopause. The hormone responsible for lubricating joints---estrogen---reduces, leading to joint aches. In some cases, it can lead to fatigue or menopausal arthritis.

Other symptoms include sore breasts, irritation, change in tastes, and mood swings. It's not your fault if you're feeling crankier than usual! 

Question 3:

WHAT AGE DOES MENOPAUSE BEGIN, AND WHEN DOES IT END?

The average age range for menopause is 45-55 years. The average age in the United States is 51. All symptoms mentioned above can occur, but we have early starters occurring as early as the 40s and even 30s. This is called early menopause, and some factors can prompt it, such as childbirth, diseases like HIV, or thyroid disease. If you've had chemotherapy and other types of surgeries, this could trigger it as well. You are also likely to be an early starter if you come from a long line of early starters. However, there have been late starters who began around their 60s.

Question 4:

WHAT ARE THE STAGES OF MENOPAUSE?

There are three stages of menopause. The perimenopause stage, the menopause stage, and the postmenopause stage.

The perimenopause stage is the time before menopause (you stop menstruating). There are a few symptoms such as irregular periods, trouble sleeping, and hot flashes. During this stage, there is no particular time range for perimenopause, just as there is no definite age for starting menstruation.

You are in your menopause stage if it has been 12 months since your last period. Here, the symptoms increase and become more pronounced. It can affect not just your reproductive system but your physical appearance. You are prone to dry skin, bloating, increased breast size, fatigue, joint pain, and night sweats. 

In the postmenopause stage, the symptoms wear off after a while then stop completely. This takes about 2 to 3 years, and then slowly you'll begin to feel like you did before. You will be more balanced and will no longer have the painful symptoms of menopause. However, it's important to remember that the fall in hormones will remain the same. Health issues may occur such as heart disease and osteoporosis if not appropriately managed.

Question 5:

HOW CAN I MANAGE MY MENOPAUSE SYMPTOMS?

There are several ways to manage your menopause symptoms so that they don't overwhelm you. Try the following:

- Exercise regularly.

- Reduce your intake of caffeine.

- Stay sexually active.

- Don't smoke.

- Get a lot of calcium in food or supplements.

- Control your blood pressure and cholesterol to prevent heart disease.

- Practice relaxing exercises like yoga and level exercises.

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I hope this article has been helpful and answered your questions. If you have more questions, please drop them in the comment sections below.

 Ladies, have you ever laughed/sneezed/coughed and had a little "accident"? There's certainly no shame in it--- we've all been there! It's actually very common for women who have given birth, are 50+ in age, and for those going through either perimenopause or menopause. But there's no need to allow urine leakage to disrupt your life when there are so many options for this problem.  Here are some tips and advice from the good people at Zorbies:

4 Effective Tips for Managing Incontinence Through Menopause and Beyond

This information is general advice only and does not replace professional medical advice for your unique needs and situation. Always consult your doctor or a medical professional for personal advice.

Is urine leakage getting in the way of your life?

You’re not alone. Around 50% of women aged 50 years to 64 years experience urinary incontinence. In comparison, only 5% of men, in the same age bracket, experience this problem.

Incontinence is often an embarrassing experience for many women. Pelvic floor disorders, child-birth, aging, urinary tract infections, and menopause are some causes of incontinence in women. 

During menopause, women experience rapid hormonal changes in their bodies. They also develop weaker pelvic floor muscles, something that may also occur due to aging. 

At this time, estrogen production reduces, leading to thinning of the urethra (the tube responsible for passing urine out of your body from the bladder) lining. 

“Pelvic relaxation” due to aging further weakens the pelvic muscles surrounding your urethra and bladder. Your vaginal tissues also become less elastic, explaining why women have an increased risk for incontinence at menopause. Aging and child-birth heighten the risk for incontinence during menopause. 

Whether you’re concerned about your menopause years ahead or they’ve already kicked in, you don’t have to let it steal your peace and happiness. Instead, you can manage incontinence through menopause and beyond with various tips that have been proven to work. 

Here’re a few tips to help you manage incontinence:

4 Tips to Help You Manage Incontinence During Menopause and Beyond 

1. Lifestyle changes for managing incontinence 

Various changes to your lifestyle can help manage incontinence. The changes span anything from a healthy diet to your normal everyday habits to strengthening your pelvic floor muscles. Some lifestyle changes to consider include:

• Create a schedule known as timed voiding to empty your bladder – don’t wait for the urge to empty your bladder; visit the bathroom often to keep your bladder empty.
• Empty your bladder prior to a physical activity or exercise to prevent leakage. 
• Avoid lifting heavy objects; if you must carry something heavy, get help from a second party. 
• Avoid drinking fluids before going to bed or indulging in a physical activity. 
• Wear women’s incontinence underwear or pads to manage urine leakage through menopause and beyond. The incontinence panties and pads ensure that urine doesn’t get through your clothes, and nobody will ever know that you’re wearing one.
• Train your bladder to increase the timings between your bathroom visits.
• Exercise and eat a healthy diet to reduce weight – excess body weight is a risk factor for incontinence. 
• Get an OTC (over-the-counter) vaginal insert to manage incontinence – the devices are placed in your vagina to compress your urethra. They ease stress incontinence. 
• Do Kegel exercises to strengthen your pelvic floor muscles. Lift, hold and relax your pelvic floor muscles to strengthen them. Do the lifting and holding for a few seconds and increase the timing gradually over time. Do many sets (a set contains 10 exercises) of Kegels daily. 

The benefit of these exercises is that you can do them anywhere while sitting, standing or lying down. And, the best part is that nobody will ever know.

If these lifestyle changes don’t seem to help, you may need incontinence treatment. Depending on your incontinence diagnosis, consider the following treatment options.

2. Surgeries and procedures for treating incontinence

Ranging from basic injections to sophisticated surgeries, treatment options can help manage incontinence if the lifestyle changes above have failed. The right procedure for you depends on the type of incontinence in question, its symptoms, and how it affects your life.

• Botulin toxin injections – Botox isn’t just useful for cosmetic treatments, but also handy in relaxing body muscles. This temporary injection is administered on your bladder to relax muscles around it and manage urge incontinence. 
• Bulking agents – a substance is injected into your urethra lining to increase its thickness. This treatment works for stress incontinence. 
• Sling procedures – a strip of your own body tissue or a synthetic material is used to support your urethra and its surrounding muscles. The procedures improve urine retention. 
• Neuromodulation devices – pacemakers are implanted in your bladder to stimulate surrounding nerves and enhance urine control. A nerve near your ankle can also be stimulated to enhance bladder control. 

3. Medication for managing incontinence

Some medications can stabilize your muscle contractions to prevent an overacting bladder and reduce leakage. Other drugs relax your muscles to enable you completely empty your bladder and control leakage. 

Most medications for incontinence management can restore the proper function of your bladder. The best medication is the one that suits your particular needs. 

Seek the advice from your medical provider to get an accurate diagnosis and prescription for your needs.

4. Hormone replacement therapies (HRTs)

HRTs involve estrogen replacement in your body; this hormone reduces during menopause. This therapy can boost or restore your bladder’s normal function. Once again, this is an extremely specialized process so you need to seek the professional guidance and advice from your doctor.

Conclusion

Urinary incontinence in women is common during menopause. Although the condition can cause embarrassing moments when urine leakage occurs unexpectedly, you can manage it or even get it treated. 

Whether you opt for Kegels, incontinence panties, or surgery, you can control urine leaks through menopause and beyond. With the tips discussed in this article, you take control of your incontinence to ensure it doesn’t get in the way of your life.

I live on the coast, and now that we are deep into the warm temps of summer, I'm thrilled to hit the beach.  However, I know how important it is to be vigilant about avoiding damaging sun rays that can cause overheating and sunburned skin. That's why I was so excited to discover some cool products from AKASO, a company that sells all sorts of outdoor gear that offers protection for my beach days. I tried their beach tent and their microfiber beach towel, and loved them both! Some of their other outdoor gear includes swimming tubes, refrigerated bags, and even swimming pools!

The microfiber beach towel is made of super-soft, durable fabric (88% polyester fiber and 12% nylon) that dries quickly after use. It is a highly absorbent towel that also has a sun-protection function that reduces damage from the sun's rays to the skin. How awesome is that? Sand-free, oversized 71x35, and lightweight, this towel is perfect for children and adults. Although I used it at the beach, it's also perfect for poolside fun, camping, picnics, the gym, or a yoga class. It conveniently folds up and fits in its own carrying bag. I really love this towel!

The beach tent is another awesome product I tried and enjoyed. Made of a UV blocking fabric and UPF50+ sun protection, the tent offers plenty of cooling shade, and at a spacious 118"x118"x83" size, it can fit 6-8 people. This canopy pop-up has two aluminum stability poles, anchors, and is easy to assemble with a three-step setup. I love that it's super convenient too since it comes in a travel-ready, carry-all bag. Wind and rain resistant, the portable shelter is ideal not just for the beach but also for camping trips, fishing, backyard fun, or picnicking. If you love being outdoors as much as I do but want to avoid the heat and the sun's damaging ultraviolet rays, this pop-up canopy is perfect for you!

Check out the ASAKO website for other amazing products or visit their Amazon link to purchase the outdoor gear that I love! 

Microfiber Beach Towel: Buy it HERE

Portable Shelter: Buy it HERE 

I'm so excited to share an excerpt from a book by an author who prefers to remain anonymous----which is what immediately piqued my interest in reading "Everything You Ever Taught Me," written by Person Irresponsible. I am in awe of what this author did---she packed up her life and hit the road to travel through the wilderness.

Synopsis:

In 2020 the world went to hell in a handbag. This isn’t exactly headline news - although it was then. I went from perfectly locatable in the Cotswolds to utterly baffled in the American wilderness when I embarked on a quest to walk from Mexico to Canada for reasons that escape me. It was most probably nothing more dramatic than a mid-life crisis.

Perhaps I should have come ‘home’ but I lived in the deluded optimism the pandemic would all be over by the summer. Besides, I’d given up my home: shoving my belongings into storage, persuaded someone to look after my cat and someone else to look after my car. I did think about returning but each time I popped into civilisation to top up my supplies, I discovered a new reason to run for the hills. So 'home' became a tent: a mere flimsy bit of fabric to protect me from every conceivable terror that exists in the wilderness - bears, rattlesnakes, deserts, avalanches and other human beings. Most dangerous of all was the racket inside my head.

Everything you ever taught me is my journey, relying on nothing other than the twelve steps of recovery, teaching me to take it one day at a time, one step at a time, and one bloody ginormous mountain at a time as I staggered my way along the Pacific Crest Trail. As mid-life crises go, I remain utterly clueless why mine took me from my sofa to the Canadian border via the fridge, powered only by two chubby legs and a fat arse.

An excerpt from Chapter 12: “There is such a thing as a dumb question!” 

I wondered if foot bones had individual names, because I couldn’t think of a single one. The agony of pressing down was causing a mild but detectable limp, which in turn bruised my hip joint, and strained my knees. Each morning descended into a ritual of asking myself what was actually working. How much did various parts of me hurt? What didn’t hurt? And why the hell was I doing this in the first place? That latter question is the most commonly asked question. “Idiocy,” had become my stock-in-trade answer. I had no idea, and I couldn’t face explaining multiple times a day how a friend had watched Wild, and then died. Not because she’d watched Wild, but because of cancer. And no, it wasn’t some carpe diem response to grief. And no, I wasn’t doing it for charity, but still after nearly two thousand, two hundred miles, it startled me that I still didn’t have a neat, plausible realisation. 

“Are you thru-hiking?” is the typical way one breaks the ice with fellow travellers. On this particular day, it was asked by a thirty-something male as we crossed paths mid-morning, mid-trail. “Yes!” To which he asked, “Are you Australian?” Sometimes to entertain myself I would hold entire conversations with a discernible, but very dodgy, Australian twang. I did actually have an Aussie accent once upon a time, but then elocution lessons pummelled it out of me. On this occasion, I admitted to my Britishness. “Ah, in that case, do you want crisps?” Food of the Gods! Walkers are better known as Lays globally. Same logo, different name. Unfortunately, different flavours too, and I struggled to get excited by Limon, Habanero or Dill Pickle but the universally acceptable Original Flavour Doritos delighted me greatly. I’d met the legend that is GoldTech. Each year he trawls back and forth sections of the PCT, giving out a treat to any Northbounding thru-hiker he crosses paths with. He knows full well that hiker hunger is second-worse in terms of the physical discomfort now faced by thru-hikers. If proof was ever needed that long-distance hikers are not marauding animals, each hiker has always accepted GoldTech’s single and generous token without mugging him for the remainder of the giant sack of treats he carries about him.

 

There were plenty of other questions I answered quite repetitively. “Do you carry a gun?” was one of those random and particularly daft ones to ask a thru-hiker. I imagine if we did, by Washington, day hikers would be negotiating their freedom in exchange for a half-dozen Snickers. ….

….Being asked questions was just about the only distraction most days. The views were largely irrelevant given it was thick woodland in every direction. Aside from questions from the occasional day hiker, days remained quite laborious. A plethora of garter snakes rapid-firing off the trail would give me a timely jolt of adrenaline here and there. Another day, I was mesmerized by two small, bright pink, pudgy snakes all curled up beside a rotting log. They both eyed me warily, I assumed at their most vulnerable as they had just shed their skins. Later, when I asked Google why they were so pink, I discovered it was probably because they were northern rubber boas, which explains why they didn’t shoot off, or kill me.

Author bio - Person Irresponsible*

Female. Aged 46. Average height. Large rear. Huge thighs. British in nationality. In the midst of a mid-life crisis. It probably began when I was about four. Hoping I'll overcome it one day. Can't afford a Ferrari, and I can't be bothered with an affair. I bought a quad-bike instead but then I sold that when I buggered off to America for six months to live in the wilderness.

Got into the recovery gig aged 41, almost by accident. So I'm now *that* boring divorcee, teetotaller, vegetarian and cat-owner that absolutely no one wants to invite to their dinner parties. Loves chocolate and cats. Loathes camping.  

*The author has retained her anonymity in keeping with the eleventh tradition of Alcoholic Anonymous: “we need always maintain personal anonymity at the level of press, radio, and films.” 

Website 

https://www.mlconaquad.com

Links

https://www.amazon.com/Person-Irresponsible/e/B096G6C87R?ref_=dbs_p_pbk_r00_abau_000000