Quick as a Hot Flash: Hormonal Haiku

by Diane Saarinen

I was bewildered by my own body. It had happened over and over again in just the past three days. This prickly heat, this sensation of intense warmth, started at my chest and moved up through my throat and into my face and radiated out my head. It even happened when I slept, waking me up so I couldn’t go back to sleep.

Sunday was the worst. I had been roused into consciousness at 4:30 a.m. and spent the sunrise hours staring at my computer. The rest of the morning I was tired and in a bad mood. It dawned on me that I was having hot flashes. What was I doing with hot flashes when — yes, I did have another birthday coming soon – I am closer to 40 than to 50? Just what, I thought, were my ovaries up to?

Googling to try to find an answer, I ended up staring at books with covers like this titled Could It Be Perimenopause? Well, could it? I wondered what caused hot flashes since I had resigned myself to hot flashing for the next ten years or so. I couldn’t find the answer here. Or here. So, in other words, I was finding out that, although as many as 85 percent of women experience hot flashes, the mechanism that causes them has never been discovered!

If men had hot flashes, you know that there would be billions put into research to find the answer.

“More than the Iraq war,” adds Misty, our intrepid Her Circle Ezine Editor-in-Chief.

At least I am keeping a sense of humor – for now. Awake again after another episode, I composed a haiku poem in honor of my hormonal changes.

Insolent hot flash!
Nocturnal, uninvited
I am hot and cold.

Diane Saarinen has written for numerous publications including Women’s eNews Daily and Quiet Mountain: New Feminist Essays as well as What We Think: Gender Roles, Women’s Issues and Feminism in the 21^st Century, a forthcoming anthology.