Ep. 86: What you should know now about Menopause

Caitlin:

Welcome to the Woven Well Podcast. I'm your host, Caitlin Estes. I'm a certified fertility care practitioner with a master of divinity degree. Each episode will cover a topic that helps educate and empower you and your fertility while honoring the deep connection your fertility has with your faith. Let's get started.

Caitlin:

Welcome back to the Woven Well Podcast. If you saw today's episode title and you had a little bit of pause, ah, I don't know if this really applies to me. I don't know if I need to listen to it right now. I want to encourage you to go ahead and listen. Just think back to those high school days when you knew nothing about your period, and then now as an adult, as you're learning so much about your reproductive health and your fertility, and you're thinking, ah, why did no one teach me these things? Then I think I needed to know them then, and not just now at this moment in life. That is so true, and it applies to this very moment and this very topic. Okay? So even if you are years away, decades away from menopause, it's good to start learning about it now because the more knowledgeable we are now, the more empowered we can be whenever that time comes.

Caitlin:

So if you're like most women, you know very little about menopause. You know it's going to happen one day, way off in the future. When you're older, you know that it means you won't be able to have any biological children after that point, and it has something to do with hot flashes. But it's helpful to understand a little bit more than just that, even right now, regardless of how old you are or how far you are from menopause. So let's start by reviewing some of these basics today. What is menopause and what causes it to happen? Last year, we published an episode called the Reproductive Continuum. This is episode 45 if you'd like to go take a listen to it after this. But it explained the basic truth that every woman follows the same general fertility timeline and milestones throughout her life. There is a beginning and there is an end to a woman's reproductive season of life.

Caitlin:

The dates are going to be different. The experiences will most definitely be different, but the general continuum, the reproductive continuum is the same. So the reproductive system becomes active in puberty. This is when that continuum begins. Hormone hormones slowly begin to rise and fall, and they get stronger with every rise and fall along the way until eventually the body reaches that sufficient level to ovulate and then menstruate for the first time. The fancy term for this is menarche, but we all remember it as our first period. It usually stands out in our minds for most of us, we're never really aware of any changes that were happening until one day boom, we're having our period. But your body was busy preparing long before that first period, and those reproductive processes had to practice creating hormones like estrogen and progesterone. The cervix had to produce a touch of cervical mucus that you may or may not have noticed long before that first period happened.

Caitlin:

So you had your first period and then it just feels like decades of consistent or maybe not as consistent menstrual cycles before you. You know, it feels like once the period begins, it's never really going to end. It will last forever, but eventually the reproductive system will begin slowing down once again this time in order to stop cycling altogether. And when this happens, and a woman has had her last period and a year's gone by just to confirm that it was her last, she officially enters into menopause. That is the end of the reproductive continuum. But that slowing down process of the reproductive system, that happens a long time before you reach that point. So just like it took a long time for you to get to the point where you had your first period, it takes a long time before you suddenly stop having periods for the rest of your life.

Caitlin:

And that average length of time, the season of slowing down for women is about seven years. So it's not quick. In fact, it could be as long as 14 years. That's I think, the longest documented window of time. But this time is called perimenopause or the menopausal transition. I like perimenopause at the moment. I just feel like it sounds a little bit less ominous. Now the body is used to producing lots of healthy reproductive hormones that not only provide the possibility of pregnancy, but also support the body's overall health and organ systems. So estrogen, as we've learned it supports blood flow in the body, decreases inflammation, protects against bone loss, and even supports healthy brain function. Progesterone, it improves our mood, helps us to sleep at night, reduces anxiety, supports thyroid function. I mean, you want strong, healthy reproductive hormones during those reproductive years, but when your reproductive system begins naturally slowing down, less and less of those hormones are going to be produced and you're likely to notice some side effects from that.

Caitlin:

The big one that maybe we've all seen joked about on TV shows hot flashes. Okay, I'm not sure why it's a joke. It doesn't sound fun or funny at all. But that instant, hot, sweaty moment that we see portrayed on tv, that happens due to drastically changing estrogen levels. You may notice that specifically, but you may notice something a lot smaller. Maybe you don't sleep as well as you used to. You wake up too easily or too early, and then you can't go back to sleep. Maybe you're more easily angered or more likely to cry all throughout the month. Hormone changes may even show up in how your body feels to you. Maybe your skin loses some of its elasticity or your waist gains a few extra pounds. The thing is this, you're going to start noticing the decrease in hormone levels because your body is used to having those hormones.

Caitlin:

So when it doesn't, you're going to notice. And although this is a big change, remember that it's a natural process. You are not designed to be fertile throughout your lifetime. Fertility is a relatively short window of time for women. It begins at puberty, it ends at menopause. So the years are going to vary when you start your first period and when you go through menopause. But the milestones are the same. The reproductive years in between our particular season of our lives, they are not the norm. They are not the best, they're not the standard. They're not forever. They are a season and we're all aging. Now let me tell you the culture that we live in, it doesn't like that. We hide it with all we can. You know, we'll go to any lengths. We pay money for surgeries and hair dyes and all sorts of other things to keep up this illusion that we're not aging.

Caitlin:

But remember that aging is not an evil. There's no shame in getting older. We live in a natural world, okay, one day we won't age, but not on this side of eternity. So how can we live to embrace it? And I, I'm getting off topic, that could be a whole different episode. But I do think that one way that we can embrace it is to simply acknowledge it with curiosity, right? Be interested in what our body is doing. So for those who are charting with the Creighton system, you can start to notice some of these changes on your chart maybe before or at the same time that you notice them in your life. So you may notice changes to your period, like a much lighter or heavier menstrual flow. Maybe the time between your period starts to change wildly three weeks, one cycle, three months.

Caitlin:

The next there could even be spotting in between the cycles that you have. Maybe you notice your mucus buildup starts happening at the end of your period more often than not, or even the time between that peak day and your next period starts to get surprisingly short. Okay? These are all documentable signs of possible perimenopause. But a natural question is, okay, when is this going to happen to me? Is this happening to me right now? Well, I can't tell you that information, especially over a podcast. But I will give you some general information. But first a fun fact. The Guinness Book of World Records says that the oldest woman to give birth was 66 years old. So we can assume that she hadn't gone through menopause if she was still birthing babies, okay? But most women begin going through perimenopause in their mid to late forties.

Caitlin:

And the average time of menopause, remember that's one year after the last period is age 51. Now, once you go through menopause, I want everybody to know this, okay? If you have bleeding after menopause, then this is a big red flag and needs to be checked out by your OBGYN as soon as possible. So this is one of those things where I don't want you to say, how come no one ever told me? I want you to hear it right now after menopause. If you have vaginal bleeding, it should be checked out as soon as possible, because it can be pointing to some cancer concerns. But what about early menopause? Are you going through early menopause? I think this is actually a question I get a lot from ladies who've been trying to conceive for many years and maybe have gone the artificial reproductive technology route previously and didn't find the support or the success that they were hoping for.

Caitlin:

And they'll often ask me if I think that they're going through early menopause. Well, first of all, remember that menopause can only happen after it's been a year without a cycle. So if you're still cycling, you're not in menopause, but maybe you feel concerned about signs of perimenopause, this is when I would emphasize what an incredible difference it makes to work with a medical professional who cares about preserving and restoring your fertility and one who treats you with respect and dignity. So some doctors will hear that you have irregular cycles and they'll see a low AMH lab value, which there's a whole other episode recently on AMH and they're going to be quick to tell you that you're in early perimenopause. But I encourage you to work with a doctor who looks at your whole picture. What's your, what's your health look like?

Caitlin:

What other lab values are we seeing? Are you underweight? Is your thyroid optimal? Because there are lots of things that can cause irregular cycles. And there are borderline studies on how much a m H really matters in predicting future natural fertility. So taking a close look at your overall health and wellness is always going to be the best place to start for reproductive health or health of any other system in the body. because remember, we're not merely disjointed organ systems all stuffed into one human shell, okay? We are an entire person. The body itself is interconnected. The brain affects the ovaries, the heart affects the liver. We can't look at just one system without a context of the whole body. And we're not even just a body, okay? We are a beautifully complex person, paid up of body, mind, and spirit. So taking care of our entire personhood can be a really great place to start.

Caitlin:

And whenever perimenopause does begin for you, it can make it that much easier. Now, of course, if you listen frequently, then you know, I'm going to recommend this. I'm going to recommend to begin learning your unique cycles. So yes, the reproductive milestones are the same. We're all going to live through menopause if we live long enough. But the process is going to be slightly different for all of us. And so the more knowledgeable you are about your cycles, the length, strength, and color of the menstrual flow or the length, the quality, the pattern of the mucus buildup, they're going to give you early insight into hormonal changes as they happen. I'm talking real time information and what can compare to that, and I'll say this too, a lot of times women think that they couldn't use a system like Creighton when they get to that point in life. You absolutely can.

Caitlin:

I would say that by perimenopausal women are my most dedicated Creighton charters. They are usually more than done with growing their families. And so they are very set on avoiding pregnancy and they do it. They are very successful at it. And so you absolutely can use Creighton confidently through every reproductive phase of life, including perimenopause. I hope that this episode has been helpful regardless of what age you are to give you a little bit information about menopause and perimenopause so that you can feel more prepared and empowered whenever that time comes for you. And hey, I hope you got our woven newsletter that went out this week. If you are not on our mailing list, I really encourage you to register through the link in the show notes so that you can get next month's newsletter. We always include information about reproductive health, wellness swaps, upcoming events, interesting interviews, all sorts of stuff. So I recommend that you do that, and so we can have a little bit more communication. You can even reply directly to me and we can have a conversation. But as always, thanks so much for listening as we continue to explore together what it means to be woven well.