One Hot Mama

I'm not a spring chick; at 48, I've had a couple of "hot flashes" in the last couple of years as my aging body prepares to give up the ability to bear children and start thinning my bones.  I was told that chemo would intensify my drive towards menopause (and the five years of Tamoxifen taken after chemo will completely induce menopause as a way to stop feeding the estrogen receptors in my tumor) so I was prepared for a hot flash or two, perhaps more frequently than before.

I was not prepared to have three very long, very sweaty, and very hot hot flashes last night.

Let me just say that my body apparently prefers to have hot flashes in the middle of the night - usually in the middle of a good dream (one of those dreams you can't go "back to" when it's time to fall asleep again).  For the first time, too, my hot flashes have been bad enough to bring along its favorite companion, Night Sweats.  I see lots of morning laundering happening in the near future.

Hot flashes sound innocuous enough, but for someone who's never had one, they're hard to explain.  I'm one of those "always-cold" people; hands and feet freezing, running through all the hot water in the tank before Ken can get a 30-second rinse-off in the morning, always layered so I'm not cold.  I always joked that I would welcome hot flashes, if for no other reason than I would finally be warm.

A hot flash, however, is less about being warm and more about being hot (hence the name).  This isn't August in Michigan hot; this is "I fell asleep in the sauna for an hour" hot.  It comes on rather suddenly, but I learned last night that it will wake me up to make me aware that it's coming so I can enjoy it in its entirety.  I realize I'm getting warm, so I stick my foot out from under the covers to help cool me off.  Then the other foot.  The covers are off my shoulders.  I get up to walk around.  Then I realize that I can feel the cold air on my skin, but that's as far as it goes - it stops right there, while the inside of my body is on fire.  It's like a furnace surrounded by ice, the two forces fighting each other for control.  The ice won't melt and let the heat out; the heat won't cool and let the ice in.  Instead, I lay there caught between hot and cold, heat and cool, wake and sleep, praying for patience and release.

And just as suddenly - it's gone.  And now I'm cold because the house is only set for 60 and I've stripped off just about every piece of (now damp) sleepware, and need to crawl back into bed and warm up. 

Only to do it again two hours later.

Being a woman is the gift that keeps on giving.