The Hotness

When I first started having hot flashes, I did research on how to handle them. Whenever things go wrong, that is what I do to console myself. Let's see what we can find out about it. Let's try to see if we can knowledge ourselves out of the problem. Sometimes that works. I have a huge chasm of doubt about that working for any aspect of perimenopause. One of the first really nonhelpful things they suggest is 'don't get hot.' I remember reading this, thinking about summer, rolling my eyes, and clicking off the article. Don't get hot. Yeah, okay. Thanks. So helpful.

"Don't get hot" should really be revisited as "try to stay cold." If your body temp goes even slightly warm, it can toss you into a hot flash. For example, last night it was cold. I went to bed in two layers of clothing over my underwear, a hoodie, a hat, and covered myself with three blankets. As I was drifting off to sleep, I was deeply happy. I was a roasty-toasty snug little happy person. I was warmer than I had been all day and felt certain I would sleep through the night.

Around 5:30 AM, I woke up in a white hot pain. My body was aching all over and I was so insanely hot I wanted to crawl out of my skin. As quickly as I could, I stripped down to just my underwear and removed the heaviest of the blankets. Even then, I had to keep touching the cold wall to gain any kind of relief from how on fire my body was. After a while it stopped and I returned to an exhausted and ragged sleep.

As I've written before, hot flashes are one of those life experiences where you know what it is when it hits you. There is no mistake that you're experiencing it and your only thought is that it's so much worse than you imagined it to be. When you live in a state of blissful ignorance and a person talks about having a hot flash, you imagine what it's like to have a slight fever. NO! It is NOT like that. It is like your whole body is cooking on the inside. There is nausea. There is body ache. There is just kind of a bad mixture of every shitty thing you can imagine all at once.

So tonight when I go to bed, I'm not leaving on my hoodie. In fact, I'm going to just try and sleep in underthings and keep the blankets on me. Am I going to be colder than I would like to be? Yes. However, maybe I can 'not get hot' and keep myself from having another hot flash. I'd really like that because what I need more than anything else right now is a night of uninterrupted sleep.