Hormonal changes

Hi Orangewoman

Sorry to tell you this, but your body sounds quite normal to me. I have not had a period for about 2 1/2 years now. I regard perimenopause as a bit like labour. It starts gently, then becomes more intense. Periods become heavier and more painful. PMS became worse for me the closer I got to the end. Just when you don't think you can take it any more (transition) the periods just get easier and less often, and the discomfort tails off, and you discover that you don't have periods any more. Some of the symptoms stay but now I can see they are diminishing a little. I have also finished a stressful time as well. That stress worsened my menopause too, I am sure.

I now drink a lot of red clover tea (see Christine's article about red clover as a supplement for improving lichen sclerosus). I think it is in the Library. Red clover has weak oestrogenic effects, so doctors think it doesn't work, but it does occupy oetrogen receptors so they are unavailable to other metabolites of oestrogen in our bodies, so these inflammatory oestrogen metabolites are excreted instead because they have nothing to hold on to. Clever, eh?

Red clover has also helped my vaginal and tissues. Penetrative sex is much less abrasive. My outside skin has improved a lot too.

I have also recently started taking Remiferin, which is a standardised black cohosh tablet. That has helped with my hot flashes at night, so I have been sleeping better, so I am a much nicer person to live with.

I am pretty sure that your cervix will eventually go up and stay up. Your uterus will shrink, so it has less weight pulling your cervix back and down. I did have several months when my cervix was continually low. I felt permanently pre-menstrual. I think my body was trying very hard to be fertile, but alas the horse had bolted by then. My body eventually stopped sulking and the bloated premenstrual feeling went away for good. BTW, I had prolapse symptoms worse in the second half of the month while I was cycling regularly too.

I am very glad it is all over now. I feel much calmer and more steady, like I have been through a storm and the sailing is now smooth. My body is no longer revolt-ing against itself.

This too will pass for you.

Louise

Dear Orangewoman,

Watching these fluctuations, as you describe, during my menopause I was encouraged to be optimistic that once I was through menopause that somehow my prolapse would just go back up and stay in place permanently. Yes, how dumb can you be? To my disappointment this did not prove the case. Unlike Louse I had not yet discovered Christine's wisdom until I was well through menopause.

You, however, have a more considered opinion on this. Your idea to replicate the hormonal imbalance via food seems sound to me. This is simply intuitive on my part I have limited knowledge of how chemicals work in the human body. I feel sure there would be someone on this site who has looked into this question. If not there is some fascinating work ahead of you girl.

I would like to add that finding Christine's site and subsequently reading
her book, viewing her DVD and listening avidly to the advice of the members of this forum has given me the wherewithal to manage and improve my prolapse condition to the degree where I am back to living with prolapse. That means living first and prolapse just comes along for the ride. This in only a matter of a few months! (The fear of relapse in me wants me to cross my fingers at this point.)

My next aim is to further improve my condition to as near to reversal as possible and this may take some time but my progress so far after following WW advice would indicate that this time around it is no longer a matter of wishful thinking.

Take time for yourself and work it through. Best wishes.

Good comments Fab. Orangewoman, I hope I didn't give you the impression that menopause fixes all. It doesn't. What it does is to remove the bloating, heaviness and inflammation (more blood and bulk in the pelvic region) in the second half of your cycle, and whatever your perimenopausal body thinks is the second half of your cycle.;-)

With that luteal effect gone after your cycle decides that the there is no chance of ovulation or menstruation again, you have the bare bones of what you are dealing with (POP-wise), and a *tiny*, light uterus.

Another unexpected event for me during perimenopause was that the gradual shrinking of my uterus over several years made it small enough to easily flip from retroverted to anteverted. So for the last few years of perimenopause I had much more comfortable periods, with less night bleeding.

I really don't think the normalisation of position of my uterus would have happened had I not been implementing WW posture, and encouraging it forward 24/7. I guess this is making an assumption on my behalf to claim that WW posture was responsible, but common sense and my anatomical knowledge tells me that this would have been the likely outcome of changing the orientation of my pelvic bones and sacrum relative to the direction of gravity.

Once I knew my 'final' settled-out level of prolapse (which still might not be final!) I could fine tune my posture, which I am still doing. It is still a journey.

I think perimenopause is a time of great upheaval, challenge and change for most women, often with more than a dash of grief, regret, feelings of loss of potential, and being another step closer to the grave. We really don't know how we will be after menopause. For me it is much better than the previous few years. I would like to think that it is better for all women, but that is not the case, especially when there is a sudden onset of prolapse after menopause.

Post-menopause POP would be like evading an enemy that had approached gradually from the front, only to have them come around behind you and clobber you on the head when you thought you were safe again. It would feel like an unexpected and undeserved assault. Unexpected and undeserved assault leaves far reaching scars, and is very hard to recover from, at a time of a woman's life when she wants to slide gracefully into being a wise crone, and indulgent grandmother or great aunt, without the worry of unexpected pregnancy and monthly bleeds.

Better or worse is so relative, and there are so many sides to menopause. I guess it is just different, and finding POP post-menopause is probably no worse than finding it before even having babies.

I just wanted to illustrate that it is not necessarily all horrible, as my misleading ex-gyno tried to tell me it would be.

Louise

LOL!! Your sense of the ridiculous will get you through this.

What sort of clover were you collecting from your friends?

The female body is indeed an awesome piece of work. I have just been reading up on the menstrual cycle and what happens as we run out of eggs at the end.

There are four main hormones that participate in the normal menstrual cycle, oestrogens, progestigens, follicle stimulating hormone and luteinising hormone. There is a fifth, gonaditrophin releasing hormone, but I haven't figured out where it fits in.

Arbitarily, let's start at day 1, the first day of the menstrual cycle.

The hypothalamus gland, just under the brain starts sending FSH-releasing factor to the pituitary gland, for reasons that will be explained at the end of the cycle.

The pituitary responds by releasing follicle stimulating (FSH) hormone into the blood stream. This stimulates follicle development in the ovary.

The growing follicles manufacture oestrogen, which reaches a level which triggers the uterine lining to grow and also triggers the hypothalamus to decrease its production of FSH and increase its production of LH releasing factor. The LH releasing factor travels in the bloodstream to the pituitary gland which responds by producing a spike of lutenising hormone (LH), which makes the follicles burst and release the ovum, and changes the now-collapsed follicle into the corpus luteum, which starts producing progesterone.

(The ovum goes off via the fimbria and fallopian tubes, with its own agenda of finding sperm.)

The progesterone develops the endometrium lining of the uterus further in preparation for implantation of a fertilised ovum . It also increases the waxy secretions of the skin, relaxes smooth muscle and increases the temperature of the body. In the absence of fertilisation the corpus luteum and the other developing follicles 'die' and shrink away. This means that both progesterone and oestrogen levels fall, and the oestrogen and progesterone-reliant uterine lining crumbles and menstruation results. This fall removes the inhibition on FSH releasing factor by the hypothalamus, so it starts producing FSH releasing factor once again and the cycle begins again.

If perchance the ovum finds some sperm and they do their very special ovum and sperm dance, the resulting embryo will find a spot and bury itself in the uterine lining and grow its placenta to absorb nourishment from the lining of the uterus. This placenta will eventually produce its own progesterone and maintain its own existence. At that point the corpus luteum, whose progesterone production has gotten the foetus going, has done its job and can shrink away to nothing.

Now let's have a look at a woman's cycle when she is close to menopause.

No eggs or few strong eggs after menopause means that little oestrogen is produced by growing follicles at the beginning of her cycle. Weak follicles don't produce much oestrogen, so little uterine lining development happens, and the level of FSH production by the hypothalamus is not inhibited.

So the woman has continually high FSH levels around menopause.The story with LH (which causes hot flashes), is not so straightforward. It appears that LH is released in bursts, in order to try and induce ovulation. The brain kind of knows that it the ovary is no longer capable to feeding back information to the hypothalamus, so the hypothalamus makes the pituitary fire big shots of LH at the ovary to try and make it 'act sensible and burst a follicle'. The high FSH levels are to try and make the non-existent follicles develop. Eventually the hypothalamus gets the message that the ovary is not going to respond and make any more follicles, and these non-existent follicles cannot be made to burst, so it kind of gives up, and FSH and LH levels gradually fall in old age. I couldn't find any websites that gave a simple biochemical explanation of the changing levels of LH during and after menopause.

Maybe nobody really knows? One paper I read indicated that the high LH levels in postmenopausal women are caused by the body for some reason not breaking down LH like it did during her reproductive years, but they are still trying to find out why. There is another hormone called Gonadotrophin releasing hormone that is in there somewhere, but I would have to study it more carefully to understand clearly where it fits in.

So the end of the story is that during reproductive years oestrogen, progesterone, FSH and LH levels go up and down over a cycle.

After menopause oestrogen and progesterone production fall dramatically and their steady, low production is taken over by organs other than the ovaries. FSH and LH levels remain static and high.

During perimenoapuse the hypothalamus and its slave, the pituitary are trying to maintain reproductive ability but the ovaries have run out of vigorous eggs, and can no longer hormonally respond to the hypothalamus and pituitary. The ovaries have retired (but other oestrogen producing sites in the body eventually ramp up their small production so that some essential oestrogen production is maintained in the body.) The hypothalamus does not understand the ovaries' laziness and tries every trick in the book to kick start the ovaries again. Hence the presence of unpredictable and unpleasant signs that some women get while until the hypothalamus finally realises that its old partners, the ovaries are no longer active reproductive organs, and have been put out to pasture. The hypothalamus ceases its gymnastic hormone tricks.

Perimenopause is simply a confused transition phase between dynamic reproduction and the calmness of post-menopause.

I hope this explains it. I have been trying to get my head around this process for years. Thanks for the opportunity to get my head around it.

Louise

Well said, Louise!
I love reading your cool posts! :D

Liv