Talk Can Comfort Confusion Menopause Is A Unique Experience For All Women

Cynthia from Healdsburg, Calif., walked into a Maui gift shop and remarked how the incense and candles made her think of her menopause and meditation group in California. The shop owner rushed over, pulled her aside and said “Tell me all you know.”

The store owner had left the Midwest to move to Hawaii because she suspected she was close to a breakdown or had a brain tumor and wanted to be close to family when she finally crashed. Now she’d discovered it was menopause and she wasn’t going to die but still felt like it.

She didn’t need to move to Hawaii. She could have stayed home and found herself a group of hormonally compatible friends to share their information and reassure her the condition is natural, universal and temporary.

Cynthia meditates. She takes walks. She gets up in the middle of the night and writes down her dreams. She also works and is married and has a 5-year-old.

She jokes about going from breast feeding to hot flashes, which she does not intend to regulate with hormone therapy.

In 2006 a national study of postmenopausal women will report on what combination of drugs, vitamins and minerals is the safest and most satisfactory to deal with menopause.

Those already in it can’t wait. Nancy Collins-Walker, Cynthia’s group meditation leader, says, “I don’t know about the rest of you, but I plan to be through menopause by then.”

To paraphrase Gloria Steinem, this is what menopause looks like. A gathering of upbeat, curious, open, progressive women. With gray hair and long red hair and grown kids and little kids. Who drink tea made from red clover and alfalfa or take ginseng and a little poetry before they go to bed. Who grant themselves one pleasurable activity a week and maybe a glass of champagne because it tends to bring on fewer hot flashes than other alcohol. Some who swear by tofu. Others, an occasional steak.

Walker is a hypnotherapist who runs support groups for menopausing women. Her personal health regimen is martial arts, no caffeine, an hour of meditation a day, lemon and water in the morning, and, for her only hormone supplement, natural progesterone cream made from yams. No estrogen pills.

Each member of the group follows her own individual path. Some prefer the prescribed hormone therapy route, estrogen and synthetic progestin. Some have gone on drugs and off again.

What works for one woman may not for the other, which is more than some doctors will tell you.

Some are gliding through. Some are bumping into themselves. Like the woman in Maui, it is not uncommon, they know, to have moments when you suspect you may be losing it.

Quiet breathing for just 10 minutes a day might help here, advises Collins-Walker. It stimulates the brain. Stills the demons.

Does it work? For those who keep coming back every week something does, if only the comfort and company of others. It beats waiting in the dark for the next Journal of Medicine to contradict a previous drug study.

Medical providers and science have limited answers. It’s other women who have actual experience. There’s a glut of information on menopause, much of it contradictory, some suspect. Groups like this one gather the real experts in the same room.

Here’s an idea. Ride your hot flash “like a wave,” says Collins-Walker. “Don’t fight it.” She thinks it’s possible to actually gain insight and illumination during those electrifying moments. A flash within a flash, so to speak.

And how about inviting your partner to share. “Have your husband hold your hand and feel the energy. Let him in on the mystery.”

Well, maybe the little flashes. No one wants to get cozy during the mega-drenchers. The standard literature explains the average hot flash “lasts ONLY three minutes.”

Three minutes is a long time to feel like you’re on fire and your heart is going to explode. Want to spend only three minutes stuck in an elevator? How about only three minutes in an attic with a bat?

These are the descendants of women who a century ago were warned about “climacteric insanity.” Climacteric is an old word for menopause, meaning the end of reproductive activity. Middle-aged women were also at risk for something called involutional melancholia, a menopausal disease that remained on the list of mental disorders until 1979.

Here’s another frightening fact. Estrogen, the controversial hormone science and medicine still can’t agree on, the one that might save you from heart disease but could kill you from breast cancer, is already the most frequently prescribed drug in America.

The women talk about this. “They say that estrogen could reduce the risk of heart disease. But that doesn’t mean that if you don’t take it you will have a heart attack.” Well, no.

Collins-Walker says by the year 2,000, close to half the women in America will either be in menopause or past it.

Keep talking.