Member-only story
An Open Letter to My Hot Flashes
Please go away and never come back
Dear Hot Flashes,
I was about to give a talk to 1,500 people at a conference. And then, there you were. You showed up and you didn’t mess around. You heated me up. And you didn’t stop. You kept at it, all right. You kept at it 17 to 20 times a day.
Hot flashes, you don’t care what I’m doing when you hit. When I’m teaching, I have to throw off my sweater, only to put it back on three minutes later, and a cashmere scarf too because I’m suddenly freezing. Who knows what my students think. Maybe they think that I’m a design professor whose fashion flourish is a penchant for semi-disrobing herself, then dramatically wrapping herself up again.
Or that I really, really like my water bottle because I keep nuzzling it.
If I opt to flatten myself against whiteboards in the design studio classroom, it will disturb people. But I bet it will feel really nice.
A basic Google search tells me what can help. Avoid spicy food, alcohol, caffeine. Avoid stress. Find a way to laugh! I’ve tried drinking and not drinking, coffee and not coffee, spicy food and not spicy food, meat and no meat. I’ve tried exercise and no exercise, normal breathing and phased breathing. I took Zyrtec and it warded off my allergies, but not you, hot flashes. I took some pills that cost $35 and tasted like scorched butterscotch, making for burps like molecular gastronomy gone terribly awry.
I got my therapist to give me 10 Ativan pills so I could sleep because you wake me up five to eight times a night. She told me the meds might give me dementia.
That would be nice. Then maybe I’d forget.
I’m a professor. Research projects make me feel better. So I started doing Google Scholar searches on “vasomotor symptoms” and reading literature reviews in Menopause, the journal, and here’s what I learned about lifestyle changes. Nothing really works.
My doctor says to destress. Well, hot flashes, you’re definitely not helping me do that. Besides, what woman between the age of 40 and 60 is stressless? We’re all busy — managing careers, families, tensions, and things we can’t reconcile.
It’s not like you’ll kill…
