Menopause

Well they come when I’m sleeping and then I wake up and I’m like kind of drenched so I’ve been sweating so I’m drenched and or I might wake up and I feel really cold and that’s because I’ve been sweating and then you wake up you feel really cold. Yeah.

And what do you do about it?

I usually discover it just before I get up so it’s usually time to get up anyway, so I don’t really do much about it. But I noticed in the last four months that it’s becoming more frequent like every now and they used to come like every now again but just in the last four or five months I’ve started to notice that it’s like a couple of nights a week that I wake up feeling like that.

And does it affect your sleep?

No, no, no. I think that it occurs just before I wake up because although I think I’ve probably had a couple in the night but they’re not, it’s not to the state where I have to get up and strip the beds and things like that.

Did you get them at night as well?

Yes I got them at night in bed.

How often at night did you get them?

During the night it could be two or three times in the night I had to get up and put the fan on.

And so were you sweating a lot as well?

Yeah.

Did you have to change your clothing or your bedding?

I’m a bit of a freak at night anyway. I’ve got a t shirt on and pyjamas and I jump into bed and if I got hot the pyjama top came off obviously I’ve got a t shirt on so if I felt hot that’s what I’d do. I’d get up and turn that on and take off the pyjama top which is only a nylon or cotton sort of thing. And put the fan on to cool down five or ten minutes and then go back to bed. But yeah, that would be a pattern in the night.

Did it have an impact on your sleep as a result of that?

Yes. Yeah. Because yeah I mean you’re working nine to five and you need a good night’s sleep and it certainly did make me feel erratic.

Just kept waking up being really hot and throwing the blankets off me or the duvet off me. And was just lying there with my arms and legs spread eagled, trying to get every bit of me to have a bit of cool air somewhere, open the windows and hope the cool air’s going to hit me everywhere.

So that must have been quite difficult?

Yeah. And sort of tossing into a cooler place because I’ve got a double bed and of course I’m boiling hot there so I’d move over to a cooler part. And then when that’s hot try and move to another cooler part. Yeah.

How many flushes were you having a night, how often was it happening?

Well it does seem to go on. It didn’t seem to start and stop, it just seemed to go on. Like I’d wake up and I’d be having a hot flush and I’d go to sleep and then I’d wake and I’d still be having a hot flush, that’s how it seemed at the time.

I think the biggest problem of all through the menopause was lack of sleep. A combination of night sweats, my own particular emotional turmoils but I was very badly lacking sleep. For quite a long time. One of my friends said, “Now you know what it’s like having a new baby in the house.” That’s what it really was. For about eight years I suppose I didn’t have an uninterrupted night’s sleep. And funnily enough it started again after I had those big operations, and I don’t know if it’s the anaesthetic but actually I don’t sleep at the moment as well as I would like. My definition of a good night’s sleep is nine hours unconscious.

No, I mean people say, “Oh having children ruins your sleep pattern.” I’m not sure if it’s true or not but I mean I can look with envy at my elder sons sleeping from whenever they go to bed to solidly through to whatever time they may choose to be woken up really. And I can remember sleeping right through to eight, nine, ten, eleven in the morning and I just wouldn’t know what that is now. And I would love to experience it again but don’t. I would tend to go to bed quite early because I’m very tired in the evenings probably because I’m awake then at three in the morning, and will lie there until four or five and then I would sleep a couple of hours quite happily, unfortunately have to get up for work about half six. But I can’t get out of that sleep pattern so whether it’s a case of getting older, whether it’s something to do with the menopause, I’m not sure of that but my sleep patterns certainly have been disrupted. And haven’t returned to what I would consider normal. And I would be a light sleeper as well, not helped of course by teenage boys coming in a little bit later than normal now and out on their own and driving.

We were talking about hot flushes. What effect did that have on your sleep?

Oh, horrendous. I mean it’s like being woken up five, six times a night from a deep sleep and of course then every time you woke up you wanted to spend a penny so you’re taking trips to the toilet as well. And then you’d go back to sleep, or try and get back to sleep once you’d cooled down. It’s just so, excuse the expression, but knackering, absolutely shattered, you’d wake up in the morning and feeling like you’d had a night on the tiles. You’d wake up with a fuzzy head, no energy, everything was an effort you’d, even now, I still get tired but it’s not through night sweats that’s just through the menopause in general, HRT can only do so much, it can’t deal with everything, but it’s just so very very tiring. The night sweats you just don’t want to be woken up at night. If I get six hours sleep it’s rare, but then I catch up at the weekends.

Well I’d go to bed fairly early and it’s probably in the back of my mind am I going to have one tonight, if I do am I going to wake up and all this. So I’d go off to sleep fine but I was fine I was waking up at certain times without even having the hot flushes. I got myself into a routine expecting to have one and of course once you’re in that circle it’s very difficult to break, but then when I do have one and it does wake me up I then lie there thinking am I going to have another one; is it going to come on soon; am I just going to drop off to sleep; then I’ll have another one; then I look at the time; then I’m thinking I’ve got to get up soon and it’s like a circle. You don’t seem to be able to get, well I don’t seem to be able to get back to sleep. And then just as I do drop off it’s time to get up. And of course that’s when I’m really tired. And doing the sort of work that I do I can’t really afford to be tired because it's figure work and then some of the companies that I go to are quite a distance to drive to so there’s that element as well. I haven’t as yet lost my temper with anyone I think or got cross or anything. I’ll probably get a bit cross when I get home but that’s with myself, cross because I haven’t been able to perhaps work as quick as I would like to but then I’m thinking as you get older you slow down anyway.

One of my other coping mechanisms was visualisation as well especially at night. I would visualise myself in a lovely beautiful blue sea somewhere on holiday. I’d be laying on the beach, with this, and this hot flush would come over me and I’d run in the water, lots of cold water and that’s what I visualise. And then just try and relax myself and to get through it and I actually found it worked for me. But I actually don’t do that as often now which I think is telling me now they have died down, they’re not as aggressive, unless I’ve had over the Christmas period where I have over indulged in things that perhaps I wouldn’t normally eat, I have drunk more. And then for a week after or so I don’t sleep very well. I’m not a good sleeper, since this I’m not a good sleeper and the hot flushes will wake me up. And I know enough’s enough and I give myself a break for a week or so and then I do start sleeping better and I’m not waking up with hot flushes as bad. So I do know there’s trigger points and hot spicy food, I love curries, hot spicy food is a trigger point as well for me.

And again the tiredness I’ve learnt that I have to go to bed by 10 o’clock at night. I used to stay up till eleven, eleven thirty, twelve o’clock. I used to be back up at six in the morning. Now I have to make sure I’m in bed by ten at night and I don’t get up until about quarter to seven in the morning. I have to make sure, even if I’m not getting eight hours sleep, because I don’t even now, I probably function on about six hours sleep, but I’m getting the rest. It’s listening to what my body needs and responding in the right way.

So your sleep has improved on what it was at its worst?

Yes, the fact that I get far fewer hot flushes now I’ll perhaps just get one or two a night and they’re less severe. Sometimes I can even sleep through them. I now get about five to six hours sleep a night which is fine for me I can function on that. It was when it went down to about two, three, four hours a night that I couldn’t function.

And I actually, the reality is the more red wine I drink the more hot flushes I get, the worse my sleep pattern is. I try now and have at least three if not four nights a week where I have no alcohol and it pains me to say it but I sleep better and the hot flushes are reduced.

Yeah, well I mean I’ve always been a good sleeper and I just went through patches where I would not sleep or maybe get a couple of hours a night and wake up. I would always eventually fall asleep in the morning and then wake up feeling absolutely dreadful, really sort of trembly because I’d had so little sleep. And if we went away it would be, holidays would be ruined in a way because I felt so tired but I found if I exercised then I felt better. So I had a friend who was very keen on walking so I used to go walking quite a lot. And I found that helped so if I did something first thing in the morning I actually felt better for the rest of the day.

But I have tried lots of things. I’ve tried Nytol Herbal and there are some other herbal things. I didn’t particularly want to take sleeping tablets but then I started taking these Menopause Plus* and I’ve found they’ve really helped.

What made you choose them?

Well, they’ve got isoflavones in so I thought maybe it was the lack of oestrogen that was causing it. So I thought I’d try them. I think I was getting desperate. I was going, I’d have tried anything. So and they’ve really helped.

How often do you take them?

Once a day.

And you’ve been on them for?

Since August. So now I get, I mean I don’t get an uninterrupted night’s sleep but I always go back to sleep if I wake up, so I wake up with a hot flush and go straight back to sleep.

(*Note' Available over-the-counter, Menopause Plus is a mixture of seven different herbal preparations.)

And you mentioned the insomnia as being a bit of a problem for you. How often did that happen? Was there any pattern to that?

It’s still happening now, and it’s only got a pattern in the sense that I very rarely get a good night, a whole night’s sleep. So sometimes I’ll drop off no trouble at all and I’ll wake up at one or four or five, just a bit too early, and other times I just can’t drop off and I finally will drop off and then I’ll sleep very heavily until morning. Yeah. I mean I have tried various things for that, some of which worked, but not consistently, all the time.

Was there any link between waking up and the hot flushes?

Yeah, at first, I mean I don’t really have any hot flushes now, but definitely at first, I think that’s what got me into a pattern of waking up was feeling this heat and that was the thing that woke me up.

Yeah. I’ve used lots of different things, I’ve used valerian, in tincture and capsules. And they worked really well for a short time, then they seemed to not work. And they also worked really well for getting off to sleep, but not so good for when I wake up in the middle of the night and can’t get back to sleep. And I tried melatonin which again seemed to work fairly well for a while, and in amongst that period I was doing some night shifts and I was just not sleeping in the day, and I got a bit desperate so I went to the GP and the GP gave me temazepam. So I get thirty from him about every five months and I use them sort of very sparingly really, I take a half when I really need to, if I feel like I have to sleep otherwise I won’t be able to work the next day.