Symptom checking had once helped me stay well. But perimenopause challenged everything I thought I knew about managing my body.
I went to my shower and sat on the floor, letting the warm water run over my body. In the past, when mixed bipolar episodes made my skin crawl with agitation, a shower or bath offered safety, as if the sensation of water on my skin grounded me. Like many people with bipolar disorder learn to do, I did a quick inventory of my symptoms.
Skin crawling? Yes. Agitated? Yes. Can’t sleep? Yes.
But something felt different. My mind felt fully present — not like when I experienced mixed episodes and felt strangely disconnected. During those cycles, the collision of mania and depression made my thoughts frenetic and full of rage. I did not feel angry, just confused by a body that didn’t feel right.
As water ran down my shoulders, I wondered if I was having a panic attack. Because I also have generalized anxiety disorder, I ran through those symptoms, too. I was definitely having anxiety, but there was no sense of impending doom. Instead, I was just frustrated by a body that felt hijacked.
Over the past year, I had experienced this feeling occasionally, usually in the week before my period. I had been diagnosed years earlier with premenstrual dysphoric disorder, but it had gotten worse. A few months before, I had asked my general physician about whether my various pains and increased anxiety might be related to perimenopause.
“It could be,” he had said, and then laughed. “Call me if it gets unbearable … or if you feel like killing your husband.”
I laughed too — the polite reflex — but the joke landed wrong. I was bringing him a body I couldn’t recognize, and he’d handed me back a punch line.
As I sat on the shower floor, I longed to be that woman, the one my general physician and I assumed would be the creature of perimenopause: someone angry, having hot flashes, perhaps even wanting to throw things. But instead, I felt frail, scared, and confused.
Read more at https://www.bphope.com/blog/bipolar-disorder-and-perimenopause-how-symptoms-overlap/.
Article originally published at https://www.bphope.com/.
