All my life, I went to bed, and laid down, almost never having insomnia, and went to sleep within 10 minutes of laying my head down. I sleep well, never waking up to pee. I could get by with 4 hours of sleep if that was all the time there was to sleep. I usually go to bed about midnight, unless, like last week, I am binge watching Ally McBeal or something, old Survivors, junk tv. I wake up rested, and happy. Every morning I greet the new day with a smile. I like my life, and the work that I do. I have always considered myself a lucky boy. My wife, back a million years ago, when I was married, would rather have a kick in the ass instead of morning sex, but I am always ready for the potential. Mornings are just the best. Until now.
Truth is, even groggy like I am often now, I wake up happy. But since the hormone therapy I have been doing, which is messing with my hormones a lot, sleeping the night through just ain’t happening. Not for months now.
I googled night sweats, to find out what is actually happening to me. It is that damned hypothalamus. It controls your body temperature, among other things. When your hormones are whacky, it fools the hypothalamus. So the hypothalamus senses incorrectly that I am hot, and it causes sweat to cool me down, The hypothalamus is what guards your body’s core temperature. It tries to prevent you from becoming too hot, because that affects how your organs function. Then, sweating and cooling, the hypothalamus worries that I will get too cold, and it moves blood from my extremities, to my internal organs, to protect them from cooling too much. So my hands and feet get cold, from less blood going to them. Then it calms down, and I go back to sleep. Until it freaks out again, and makes me wake up sweating. Over and over every night. Ad nauseum.
Let me again send a <3 out to women having menopause. It is nothing that you can control, this hot flashing and night sweating. You can’t control your hypothalamus. It is autonomous. Like God knew that humans were too dumb to come in out of the cold. Personally, I think She made an error. (I am going to hell for saying that God made an error.) Her error was that mostly only women suffer menopause. Had she been a non-sexist God, She would have given menopause equally, not just to women, and men with hormone therapy for prostate cancer. Men need to experience this, so that they, in their barely cognizant lives, can have empathy for the suffering that their favorite woman of the moment is going through. It would change how men see women.
I just looked up at the sky and said, “Dude, ( God and I are on a first name basis) do you see what I am writing here? You could have done better on this thing.”
I give feedback to God, in hopes that next time She will do better. See? I am an optimist.
None the less, lately I look at my bed as a place where I am tortured, and I sometimes shy from it, like a galloping horse does to a white rag blowing across the trail.
I never felt the need to use a fan before. I never needed one. My hypothalamus worked great. I sweated when hot, and shivered when cold. Like it is supposed to be. Fans just messed with me. Now I use a fan every night. It seems to make the wakeups less frequent. But sometimes I wake up shivering, and get up and walk out, and look at the thermostat. 78, just like always, the perfect temperature. And I give my hypothalamus the finger. And then I have to pee, because I am awake. Then I go back to sleep-n-wake.
On nights when I wake up a lot, I am cranky and slow thinking at work the next day. Then I have a strong hot flash, and my heart starts beating faster, and sweat pours down my forehead, I start panting, and my energy plummets. Mostly it only lasts 5 to 20 minutes, and then I am back to my usual semi-hyper moving on with the day and job self.
It is so cognitively dissonant. Two days ago I woke up in the morning, in the middle of a hot flash, but even then, I was smiling, and happy. There is something deeper wrong with me. Too many Pollyanna genes.
So I am trying to love my bed more. It isn’t its fault.