Hot Tips

What the $#*& is Happening to Me?

YOUR OWN PERSONAL SUMMER

Many of you may have never experienced an authentic, full-blown hot flash before. If you have suspicions that they might be percolating up fairly soon, the following analogy might be helpful in understanding what possibly is to come. Your body has experienced “heat” many times before, but probably not within this brief frame of time. This is what can make the initial event so disconcerting and alarming. Keep in mind that around 15-20 percent of (American) women will never have a hot flash. If you happen to fall into that lucky category someday, please try not to gloat. The rest of us find this really, really, really annoying.

Worth remembering: If you only suspect that you may have had a hot flash, you haven’t.

A DAY AT THE BEACH

Recall one of those lazy, sweltering summer days at the beach when you were younger, thinner, and secretly enjoyed being half naked in front of strangers. Your first half hour was occupied with lotion lathering, checking out the guys, shimmying down in the hot sand to get comfortable, and finding where you left off in your romantic novel. Within the next half hour you begin to feel a little clammy, like a licked postage stamp… skin feeling strangely “foreign”. Your armpits tingle, your chest and neck start to send out a stretched burning sensation. By the second hour of beach time, your upper lip and forehead start to perspire and you begin to be aware how hot the sand beneath your body has become. You are finding it difficult to concentrate on your book, much less anything else. The tiny, stinging, beads of sweat popping out on your salty scalp begin to merge into slithering streams down your temples and back, dropping below your waist and trickling into unmentionable places. Your face and neck are now as red as an heirloom tomato and your heartbeat is decidedly faster. You begin to sense that you are a little bit dizzy and disoriented, and have a headache lurking in the shadows of your soppy forehead. A sage voice inside is screaming, “You’ve had enough!” Time elapsed….perhaps two hours. Time to go for a dip or find a very large umbrella.

Now imagine all of the above happening in less than thirty seconds! This is why we call it “your own personal summer”. In a way, hot flashes are a factor of time….time compressed. The sensations you slowly and sequentially feel on a hot summer day are not necessarily new to you, but the rapidity with which you now experience them as a true hot flash is overwhelmingly rapid….a sudden “Systemic Tsunami”. The operative word here is FLASH, and has been aptly chosen. You are not in your bathing suit, but are likely wearing your favorite wool turtle neck, wool jacket and slacks, panty hose, and boots. Unfortunately, the only appropriate attire for this event is your birthday suit. Unlike the beach, there is nowhere you can go to make it stop, no nice big umbrella, no ocean for cooling off. The event can last anywhere from two minutes to ten, can happen from a few times a day to as many as 30 times per day (the unofficial record given to an Italian woman), and is heavily related to stress and diet. Until you learn to take deep breaths, relax into them, and change your wardrobe, they will be uncomfortable and frustrating, but the very first full-blown hot flash is physically and psychologically traumatic. Very few around you understand what is happening, much less you, and the medical community has no definite answers that can explain the phenomenon. (see hypothalamus article below) In fact, your very first hot flashes can be so overwhelming that they can propel you, stunned, sizzling, unsuspecting, into a “panic attack” as well. This is entirely another issue, and a more serious one. Little wonder some initiates actually drive themselves to the emergency room, certain they are having a heart attack.

It is always a mystical, memorable moment when your body starts doing something totally unknown to you; when it overpowers you with a physical event that is so sudden and unstoppable that it takes your breath away and leaves you reeling in wonder. Childbirth contractions come to mind in this regard. From a little different perspective, having your first true hot flash is not entirely unlike having your first orgasm….you remember where you were, what you were doing, and who you were with. (Well, most of us remember) Both hot flash and orgasm manifest in that sudden “systemic tsunami”. An alarm bell goes off. The orgasm alarm says your soul is on fire, the hot flash alarm says your body is on fire. One tends to be surprisingly fun, the other….well, not so much. If both happened at the same time, you might spontaneously combust. But this is just a theory.

Having said all this, being a woman is still the best job on the planet. Taxis stop for us. We don’t have to pass gas to amuse ourselves. If we forget to shave, no one has to know. And every young person caught off guard by a candid camera completely forgets about their father and instinctively yells, “Hi Mom!” What could say more about our worth?

WHY?

The short answer: We can clone a pig’s ear onto a mouse, create life in a test tube, intuit dark matter, but science cannot yet decide why women have hot flashes.

CURRENT THEORIESM

1. Low Estrogen: The bulk of medical science today points to menopausal hot flashing as an indication of low “estrogen”. But estrogen is not a hormone. It is, instead, a class of hormones, not a specific substance. Your estrogenic “sister” hormones are estrodial, estrone, and estriol. Some studies indicate that is it chiefly estriol that tends to ease off as we age. This is significant because this particular estrogen appears to stave off the incidence of breast and ovarian cancers. But keep in mind that your adrenals and fat tissues also produce these necessary hormones, not just your ovaries. Some minor weight gain in middle age actually can serve a positive function and pick up the slack from the ovaries. Please note, however, that menopausal women who gain a lot of extra weight are not immune from the hot flash mechanism, so apparently more fat does not equal more needed estrogenic hormones as we age. Go figure. It would have been a great excuse to eat more ice cream.
2. Low Progesterone: If you are not aware of the pioneer work of the late Endocrinologist, Dr. John Lee, you won’t know that another theory regarding flashes alludes to the “unopposed estrogens” concept. Lee was convinced that mid-life declines in the hormone progesterone cause hot flashes, as well as the myriad of other negative symptoms such as sleeplessness, memory loss, weight gain, loss of libido and the like. Indeed, progesterone deficiency becomes increasingly common in women as they approach menopause, and can start as early as age thirty-five. Symptoms can include night sweats, hot flashes, de- pression, and premenstrual discomfort. Progesterone, produced by the ovaries and the adrenal glands, works in partnership with estrogen during your repro- ductive years and has a number of additional roles: it stimulates the activity of bone-building cells called osteoblasts; exerts an antidepressant and calming effect in the brain; helps to regulate blood sugar levels; and plays role in main- taining the myelin sheaths that protect nerve cells. It can also be used by the body to produce other hormones, including DHEA, the three estrogens, testosterone, and cortisol. The low progesterone theory posits that if you have insufficient levels of this master hormone, the estrogens are compromised, un- balanced, and unregulated. In a more modern sense, they become “Girls gone Wild”.
3. An Unhappy Hypothalamus: More recently, theories as to the cause of hot flashing have hinted that the temperature regulating hypothalamus may be the true culprit. That sounded pretty reasonable until the recent research at Wayne State University discovered a potential thorn in this thinking: “No one knows exactly what happens to your body during a hot flash, but it appears that changes in our brain chemistry have something to do with it. One theory is that these changes my affect the hypothalamus, a region of the brains that controls all kinds of things; blood pressure, fluid and electrolyte balance, and body temperature……More recent studies suggest another mechanism…..Dr. Robert R. Freedman and his colleagues at Wayne State University in Detroit have used functional magnetic resonance imaging to observe women’s brains during a hot flash. The area that showed the most activity was the insular cortex, which is responsible for understanding internal body events. Mysterious, no activity was seen in the hypothalamus.” Newsweek, Jan. 15, 2007 Oh, well.
4. You Are Imagining Hot Flashes: Now here’s a dandy medical theory that hung around until about 1975. Hot flashes were purported to be the imaginings of “hysterical females” who were probably “one or two cards short of a full deck”, or “peeling an empty banana”. It’s hard to believe that any of those tongue-depressing dinosaurs are still in practice. Women’s medical “issues” are historically slow to be taken off the back burner. But with millions of Boomers now in menopause, this burner is a hot one and the drug industry is certainly waking up to its potentialities for profit. Far more studies are now being funded, (probably by them), to interpret hot flash events and they really, really, really want you to take drugs to get better. Meanwhile you must be a pro-active, patient- patient, and advocate with your voice and pocket book to find relief and remedies that are helpful, but not harmful. Trust but verify.

Good Luck to all you Sizzlin’Sisters,
Linda Hill, The FLashion Lady,
FLashionables, Inc.

ADDENDUM
If you are considering a brief dance with HRT to help with your hot flashes, please read the following link http://www.friendsofanimals.org/programs/domestic-feral/horses/pmu.html “Premarin” is Pregnant mare’s urine. Your body, your choice, just thought you would like to know.

 

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"Information supplied by FLASHionables, Inc. is not intended, nor should it be construed, as a substitute for medical advice. Always consult your health care provider to make sure your complaints are menopause related and follow his or her advice before changing your dietary regimen."