Physician assistant Vida Vickers wrote down what her own menopause actually looks like on the clock. Hot flashes about every half hour. Night sweats every thirty to forty-five minutes. Naps that last about ten minutes.
She wrote the jokes too, because the jokes are how most women are handed this. The denial first: oh, maybe I’m just warm. Then the correction: nice try though. Then the three in the morning greeting she gives her own body, hi, psycho, and the instruction she gives herself after, go get your life back.
The reason she wrote it is what sits under the jokes. Vickers names bone loss, high cholesterol, osteoporosis, heart disease and stroke as risks that arrive with this stretch of life, which is to say that the thing being laughed off in the break room is a cardiovascular and skeletal event with a punchline on top of it. She mentions that a bipartisan group in Congress held a first hearing on menopause, and her column gives no date for it.
Vickers is a columnist, a physician assistant and the owner of a party decor business in San Bernardino County, not a researcher, and she puts no figures behind any of this. What she puts behind it is a clock and a list, which is more than most women are offered before it starts.
