Hi, I'm 51 and haven't had a period for 3 and a half years (and even that barely lasted a day and was the first one I'd had in 10 months), I did have some minor hot flushes at the time but they seemed to have tailed off, and just when I thought I'd got off fairly lightly, I've been hit with really strong symptoms - horrible hot flushes, which with the change to autumn have left me not knowing how to deal with them, as I'm freezing one minute and boiling the next. I'm a person who naturally feels the cold, so for example I always sleep with socks on, even in the summer, and now I take them off because I'm boiling then wake in the night with freezing feet
! it's really debilitating, as I'm sure everyone on here knows only too well.
I've also got awful digestion problems which I think are a result of anxiety and hormones - I have had an endoscopy and there is nothing sinister, just gastritis and acid reflux, but that also wakes me in the night, with burning, griping pain. I did have terrible insomnia a few years ago and to be fair that has eased off, I regularly used to get up at 4 or 5 am and be like a zombie all day, but I feel somehow older and less able to cope now when I do lose sleep and wonder how I functioned a few years ago when it was at its worst!
The worst thing is probably the crippling anxiety, verging on panic attacks occasionally when they coincide with other real-world stresses (of which I like everyone have plenty!) It's either over-worrying about specific things or just a general feeling of impending doom, which is hard to live with.
