Call me a crone and I'll bust you one.

I've been dealing with the hormonal mutiny every woman has to face at some point in her 40s. Trouble is, I wasn't ready. Is any woman ready? Anyway, it started with the previously mentioned never-ending visit from Aunt Flo. Apparently this was caused because I didn't ovulate last month. Hello, perimenopause. Boy, is it not nice to meet you. Anyway, apparently when you don't ovulate your hormones just go into complete confusion and they go running around your endocrine system with their little heads on fire and their little hands waving in panic. So, I couldn't stop bleeding, and to boot I was fighting an extremely low iron level (still am). As fast as I was shoveling iron in, I was losing it. So, I went to see my doc. She prescribed progesterone and lots of it. My panic-ridden hormones said "we SPIT on progesterone!" and they kept up the chaos and I kept bleeding. 30 days went by. Finally, my doc got out the big guns and put me on birth control pills. (The fact that I'm back on birth control 2 pregnancy-free years after going off it, is fodder for a whole different post.) I'm not just on birth control: I'm on 3 pills per day for the next three days, and then 2 pills per day for the following 3 days, and then down to the normal 1 per day probably until I'm 52. It's just depressing. But on a high note: this ought to halt the hormonal chaos and I can stop single-handedly supporting the feminine-products industry. Which will give me time to start contemplating the idea of menopause. Goddamn I'm not ready for that.

The saddest picture in my world

Before I was born my parents bought a chair to rock me in. It was a typical rocker for its time, with a turned spindles to support the back, and curved arm rests. It was painted black with antique gold trim and flourishes of apples and pears and flowers. Over the years, the paint was rubbed off the hand rests and the rockers had to be replaced, but my parents kept that chair. It was for me to rock my own children in one day. It turns out the never-ending visit of Aunt Flo is the result of one of my ovaries miss-firing. This is a relief, considering there could have been more sinister causes, like benign or malignant tumors. In the process of arriving at her diagnosis, my OBGYN performed an ultrasound. There on the screen was a dark gray image of my perfectly healthy, empty uterus. I'd never had an OBGYN ultrasound before. I'd always expected that when I did have one, it would be so I could observe the beating of a small heart inside me, and that I would get a series of little photos that would reveal the curve of a head, the little Hang Ten image of two tiny feet. The first picture in my baby's album. At the end of today's appointment, after my doctor explained her recommendations for treatment, she printed out a strip of images, zipped them briskly from the machine and waived them briefly in front of me. "For your chart," she explained, and left me to wad up the blue paper sheet I'd been covered with, get back into my black and lavender work clothes, and resume my hectic day. I was grateful for my health, but there wasn't time to think beyond that. Now, it's a half hour into tomorrow and I can't sleep. A month ago, when my younger sister mentioned the need to clean out the garage of my parents' house so tenants could park there, I asked her not to sell the rocking chair. "Please take it home," I said. "And rock your children in it."

Iron will

When I and my siblings were growing up, our mom was fixated for a while on our getting enough iron. Calcium was not a problem: She had milk for that. Fluoride was provided in our tap water. We ate oranges with gusto, so Vitamin C was not on her worry list. But iron? There was something to fret about. The last thing she needed was five little wan, anemic kids. My mom was canny. She knew that policing a multivitamin into her kids every day was not going to work. No, the iron problem would have to be solved by means of a carefully managed diet. She started sneaking spinach into soups and salads. She tucked an individual-serving-size box of raisins into every brown bag lunch we toted to school. She tried getting us to drink milk that had molasses stirred in (we hated it and flatly refused). She made liver and onions at least every other week. I can't think of a meal that is more designed to repel children than liver and onions. But my dad loved it. And on liver-and-onion night, as on every other night, it was either eat what was served or go hungry. We had wolverine appetites so going hungry was not an option. We'd drown the liver in ketchup and choke the mess down. All my mother's toiling on the iron front came to mind the other day when one of my lab results came back with a low ferritin level, again. Abysmally low. Hemoglobin is down, too, though not as alarmingly. I've been chasing after the ferritin for a while now, trying to coax it back within normal range. But It's remained at 9 instead of the minimum 22, and I imagine it thumbing its nose at me from the depths. Add to this injury the insult of either wacky hormones or a side-effect of the low iron (or both): never-ending visit from Auntie Flo. Now I have the attention of two doctors, both of whom want to run more tests to be sure nothing sinister is going on. Overnight I've turned from someone my insurance company makes money on to the dreaded "high utilizer." So, I'm scheduling appointments and going back to a carefully managed, iron-rich diet. I drink nettle tea, eat my spinach, take iron tablets, munch on raisins. I'm even considering cooking up some liver. Pass the ketchup.