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It is the day before my 50^th birthday, and I’d be doing okay if everyone didn’t keep calling me to ask if I’m doing okay.

Really, I can’t complain. I have my health, my hair, and all my original teeth. Which, to be honest, is more than I can say for many of the men whose pictures used to show up in my online dating inbox.

But I do have a few things I would like to bring up with God. Or my mother. Wait, she’ll think that’s redundant. First of all, why didn’t anyone ever tell me that raging hormones strike twice in a woman’s life? Once in adolescence and again, during peri-menopause.  The ironic twist? My 14-year-old son and I are both dealing with irrational hormones at the same time, in the same single-parent household.  If you don’t hear from me for a few days, please come make sure neither one of us has locked himself/herself in the bathroom for too long.

To my son: I apologize in advance for what's coming this year.  I will mark my calendar so that I am hyper-aware of when a hormonal seizure is predicted to erupt, and promise to take myself out of the house and into a safe area. 

At least you can walk away. I have to be in the same room with me.
I did try to head off the whole change-of-life thing before it got this close. Last year, a friend of mine who is nearly a decade older than I highly recommended that I see her bioidentical hormone replacement therapy doctor. She said that she had tons more energy, her memory and mood had improved, she had lost the five aggravating pounds that seemed to follow her around just above her belt line, and she and her husband both exclaimed – loudly and before I could stop them -- that their sex life was even better than when they first met. Being in a fairly new relationship myself, I didn’t need this last testimonial, but I would like my brain back full-time. And those extra little pounds? My jeans keep falling down not because I've lost weight, but because my new love handles are literally pushing them down. 

So I went to see the miracle doctor. I filled out an exhaustive 15-page form and the nurse extracted from my body what seemed to be about half of my blood supply.  One week and $500 later, I went back to the doctor’s office to discuss my results. The first thing she asked me was if I had eaten a lot of sugar the day before my blood tests. Not more than usual, I said. I could see this was not going well.

She began reading my results -- which she said were not that bad for my age -- and then she proceeded to line up nine bottles of special-lab-created pills and a jar of cream and a paper straw thing I was supposed to sip with water once a day. All in all, I was instructed to take some 16 pills a day, three to six at a time, at regularly scheduled intervals.  I was to have food with some, take others on an empty stomach, cut some in half and dissolve others. I don’t even eat regularly enough to be able to take all those pills, and if I did, I think I would gain more weight than my pesky five-pound love handles.

But I had already spent nearly $1,000 (yes, the actual hormone replacements are extra), so I felt I had to try. I bought an extra-large-size compartment box and organized all the pills according to morning, noon and night.

The first day I completed my regimen, I felt nauseous the entire day. The next day was worse. So I began eliminating one pill at a time to determine which one was causing me to feel sick. This took 11 days and I still could not identify the bio-identical culprit. And because I have not eaten breakfast since the second grade, I was suddenly overstocked in my morning pills – the top row of my box was getting jammed.  

Naturally,I called the doctor.

I wanted her to tell me which pills I absolutely had to take to maximize my bio-identicalness.   And guess what? I could not get her on the phone. I was only allowed to speak to her nurse-slash-assistant, who was not nice enough, experienced enough, or anywhere near old enough to talk to me about my aging hormones or merit the amount of money I had spent. She did tell me that I could make another appointment, for another $250 dollars.

Seriously.

They need to train people how to talk to a woman who has only recently discovered she is not always fully in control of her emotions.  Picture the comic-book version of me reaching through the phone…

So there I was with a shoebox-sized pill box filled with expensive bioidentical pills and no one to even talk to me, encourage me, help me understand why throwing up is worth having more energy, less blubber and smoother skin.  

I kept those pills in that box on the top shelf of my closet for a year. I could not bring myself to throw them away, being so costly and all. But I couldn’t bring myself to swallow them and keep getting sick either. I was in a hormonal Catch-22.

Until today.

With “the big day” looming and my son swearing he will never talk to me again, I got out that box of pills.

And I threw them all away.

 More articles by Ginger Emas, click here.

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