Well, ladies
6:15am Tuesday. Alarm off. Coffee started. Outfit picked the night before. Normal.
6:22. Hot flash.
Not a warm feeling. Not a gentle flush. A wall of heat that started in my chest and moved up through my neck and face like someone turned on a broiler inside my ribcage.
I was standing in my bathroom in a towel and I was drenched in under a minute.
I had a 7am video call. A real one. People I need to take me seriously sitting in a row of little squares while I present something I spent two weeks building.
I am not writing about the unfairness of it. I am writing about what I did. 🏃♀️
I ran cold water over both wrists for thirty seconds. The inside of your wrists, where the veins run close to the surface. I held them under the tap and counted.
By twenty seconds the heat in my face was pulling back. By thirty it was not gone but it was behind me instead of on top of me. I patted my face dry. I got dressed. I was on camera by 6:58.
Nobody in that meeting knew. That was the whole point.
The blood runs close to the surface at the wrists, the temples, and the back of the neck. Cold water on any of those points gives real relief fast. The flash is not a fever. Your body thinks it is overheating because estrogen is rewriting the thermostat. The cooling does not fix that. It does not stop the flash. It shortens it. 😤
This has been happening twice a week for about three months. Sometimes morning. Sometimes 2pm in the middle of something I cannot pause. Once at a dinner, which I got through. Barely.
There are women my age in every meeting I sit in. None of us talk about this. I do not know if they have it. They do not know I do. We just sit there, composed, and nobody says a word.
That is the part nobody prepares you for. Not the heat. The quiet around it.
Dani wrote about standing in front of a mirror and not fixing anything. Just looking. I thought about the woman I was at 6:22 on Tuesday, soaked and furious in a towel. That is also me. Not the composed version. Not the version on camera at 6:58. The one whose body does something she did not approve and cannot schedule. 💪
I do not like her yet. I am learning to stop pretending she is not there.
Perimenopause does not care about your 7am. It does not care that you prepared. It arrives in the middle of the thing you cannot afford to pause, and you either have a tool or you do not.
Cold water. Thirty seconds. Inside of both wrists. The moment it starts, not after. Do not wait for it to pass on its own because it will pass on its own timeline and that timeline does not respect yours.
Keep a cold water bottle at your desk if you cannot get to a tap. Hold it against one wrist, then the other. Same effect.
Nobody needs to know unless you want them to. That is not the point. The point is you have thirty seconds and a tap and that is enough. ✅
