What would you do?

There are two other teachers at school who are my age, 40+, so I decided to confide in them, both of them have studies in medicine making them all the more appropriate… I approached one by the copy machine and whispered to her:

“What would you do?” and she turned around to look at me directly in the eyes, ” what would I do about what?” she asked back… and I told her how I’d been feeling, foggy minded, a bit dizzy, like when you’re in the WC in an airplane, yes, that kind of dizzy! Terrible anxiety, feeling like staying in bed all day with the covers up to my eyes… Extremely sensitive, on the verge of crying till I shriveled up like a prune… not knowing how I got where ever I went or why I went there in the first place… the arrhythmia and heaviness in the chest… etc… “How about your period?”… “Hmmm, longer, heavier, closer together, and that’s if I remember to write it down on the calendar, if not then I just suppose I did get my period the previous month” … “Sweetheart, I’m going through the same thing” she said… “Really?!!” I asked incredulously “but you are so healthy and grounded and intelligent, a fabulous teacher, with everything in order…”… “Well, this is perimenopause and it doesn’t care about that… you need to go to your gynecologist to start looking for answers, at least that’s what I did!”… “OK, I’ll start there”…

Semester finals came up and I forgot about this appointment with self-care… I continued my half-functioning, half-aware life… not noticing how I was about to touch the deepest point in the pool as I tried to calculate my students’ grades… I had no idea what to do, I couldn’t concentrate, the numbers would dance on the screen and on my lists… at one of the worse moments of overwhelm my husband started asking me for quatities of payments done and due, I zoned out, could not speak until I just barely said, “I don’t remember, I don’t know”… “What?” he said in a very loud demanding tone, “Think!” he insisted… instead I started digging through my mess of a purse looking for ATM and grocery receipts to explain how much I had spent and where… I panicked… he decided to take away my credit and debit cards, I felt relieved, I had wanted to let go of that worry for a long time now, of course this meant he didn’t trust me anymore, though at that moment I didn’t trust myself either so no hard feelings, just relief…

He gave me everything back on Monday as he realized he had misplaced his credit card and had to cancel it… Karma, I thought as I put the credit and debit cards back in my wallet…

Christmas vacations started and I slept through like a bear in hibernation, that’s all I had the energy to do: SLEEP. I did put up the tree and it was one of the most peaceful moments to just sit and lose myself in its beautiful lights and decorations… The Christmas rush did not get to me, I was depleted. I gathered up strength and thoughts of gratitude to get me through Christmas dinner with the in-laws, that was it… we had our 17th anniversary and did nothing special, I just made a trip down memory lane back to my newly married years and how complicated they had been and now here I was, 17 years later, losing my youth along with my mind.

January 5, I get a call from school, “There’s a student here complaining about her grade, she says she didn’t flunk and her mom wants to talk with you, she needs for you to explain to her your class program and all the tasks done, when can you meet with her?”… I started to hyperventilate and asked to speak to the principal before doing anything else… and I cried, from frustration, from self-pity, from disappointment in myself and what I was becoming, from despair at the possibility of not going back to who I was before all this started…

I made my appointment with the gynecologist for the next day… She ordered I get a pap smear, my thyroid checked, a general blood test and another one that consisted of about 25 different markers… “We’ll know what’s happening once we get your results” she said bluntly.