Hi!
If you are bleeding heavily and feeling tired, it is very likely you are low in iron. This in itself can cause all kinds of weird symptoms which are similar to peri-menopause symptoms often, so it's important to find out if you are low in iron and to supplement if you are. You can ask your doctor or do a finger **** blood test via Medichecks for ferritin levels - it will say it is normal if it's over even 10, but really 60+ is best to aim for. If your doctor tests, be sure they don't just test haemoglobin - because that just tells you the iron levels in the blood. Ferritin is more indicative of the stored iron level, so ask if they can do that as well.
I highly highly (in your case extra highly) recommend you get a copy of Lara Briden's book 'Hormone Repair Manual' (for women over 40). Because she is really into using only body identical progesterone to begin with (ie not estrogen as well), especially early in peri. I can't give you links here but if you google 'Lara Briden blog cyclic progesterone' you should get up the blog posts and then read around the blog, and click other links there etc.
Basically, the first thing that happens in peri-menopause is that we lose progesterone - almost entirely. Estrogen fluctuates, sometimes very high, sometimes low. If you were 'in a terrible state' in the 2 weeks leading up to a period (which is your luteal phase, when progesterone should be high), it is likely you were experiencing that common low progesterone peri state. That is especially the case since you now feel good when taking your progesterone. She talks about using body identical progesterone during peri-menopause to support that luteal phase in the last 2 weeks. (This isn't commonly done in the UK, to use the utrogestan without also estrogen, by the way - I really think it should be - I am discovering that utrogestan is (so far) keeping my endo under control at 200mg continuously. I would far rather take body identical utrogestan to achieve this than synthetic progestins like desogestrel, which I was previously on - and which I now blame for the low estrogen state and my current situation! Utrogestan should be known to be a valid alternative for endo, not just synthetic progestins.)
If you are not sure whether you need the estrogen patch and whether your symptoms now are due to too much estrogen, you could ask your doctor to check your estrogen levels (which they might not agree to do, as you are peri and they should be treating on symptoms alone) - or you could do again a Medichecks finger **** home blood test. I just did this, terrified my levels were going to be incredibly low because they were low already on the 50 patch and I'd only reduced to 37.5 due to estrogen side effects - and my levels were 453, which is a very decent level. That made me realise that I've been having too much estrogen (I was on a 75 patch at one point!!) and no wonder I had all these high estrogen side effects. I am now very happy to be only on a 25 patch. I believe it was because I've been on desogestrel for 9 years prior to HRT and it just took my ovaries a while to wake up and get making decent amounts of estrogen again after having been suppressed for so long. So a blood test can be really useful as being just PART of the picture of figuring out what's going on.