Week 24 Recap: Celiac and Menopause?

Week 24 started out much better than the previous week, though I still wasn’t sleeping very well and continued to experience pronounced night-time internal trembling. At one point, the nocturnal trembling/tremors got to me and I did more Googling even though I hadn’t been able to find much about it with previous internet searches. This time was different.

This time I found a website called PowerSurge which is “an informative and supportive menopause community for women going through the transition of perimenopause to postmenopause.” I was very excited about this because I also knew that this was the exact time of life I was going through.  My mind began to make instant connections.

The more I read on this website the more I began to believe that perimenopause might be the cause of just about everything I had gone through for at least the past year! I continued to read about the “34 Signs of Menoapuse” which I will list here even though I do not have all of these symptoms and most women never will have all of them at once:

1. Hot flashes, flushes, night sweats and/or cold flushes
2. Bouts of rapid heartbeat (including palpitations, skipped heartbeats and irregular heartbeats)
3. Irritability
4. Mood swings, sudden tears
5. Trouble sleeping
6. Irregular periods (including phantom periods when you experience the symptoms that come with the onset of a period, but no period arrives. This is apparently common in perimenopause.)
7. Loss of libido
8. Vaginal dryness
9. Crashing fatigue
10. Anxiety, feeling ill at ease
11. Feelings of dread, apprehension, and doom
12. Difficulty concentrating, disorientation, and mental confusion
13. Disturbing memory lapses
14. Incontinence
15. Itchy, crawly skin
16. Aching, sore joints, muscles and tendons
17. Increased tension in muscles
18. Breast tenderness
19. Headache change (increase or decrease
20. Gastrointestinal distress, indigestion, flatulence, gas pain, nausea
21. Sudden bouts of bloat
22. Depression
23. Exacerbation of any existing conditions
24. Increase in allergies
25. Weight gain (particularly around waist and thighs)
26. Hair loss or thinning
27. Dizziness, light-headedness, episodes of loss of balance
28. Changes in body odor
29. Electric shock sensation under the skin and in the head
30. Tingling in the extremities
31. Gum problems, increase bleeding
32. Burning tongue
33. Osteoporosis (after several years)
34. Brittle fingernails, which peel and break easily

Several more symptoms are listed in addition to these and this is what really grabbed my attention:

• Dry skin / skin changes
• Internal shaking / tremor-like feelings
• Acne and other skin eruptions
• Itching wildly and erratic rashes
• Shoulder pain / joints / arthritis development or flare-up
• “Heart pain” – a feeling of pain in the area of the heart
• Acid reflux / heartburn / difficulty digesting certain foods

Though I have experienced many of the original 34 signs, I think most of my recent symptoms are in that last group of symptoms! I immediately referred to an entire section on Internal shaking / tremor-like feelings and was astonished to find page after page after page of thousands of women who were experiencing the exact same thing! In fact, this particular forum was so huge it had been broken down into three or four sub-groups!! Like me, most women were told by their medical providers that is was probably nerves and often offered anti-anxiety drugs.

 HELLO?  What is going on with the medical community these days? During the first three months of the onset of my ‘illness’, I was offered anti-anxiety drugs by at least three different medical providers without even looking further into any physical reason for why I was suddenly (keyword) having these symptoms.

 The Internal shaking/tremor forum comments ran well into the thousands and I could read every day for hours and never be able to keep up with them all as more are being posted every day. But the general consensus seems to be that no one knows why these tremors/tremblings happen. Some have them in place of hot flashes, and some have them at specific times of the month, but most believe it is related somehow to our endocrine system and the fluctuations in estrogen and progesterone.

This caused me to think two things: First, I was okay. If thousands of other women were experiencing this around the globe and were going through the same ‘change of life’ as myself, then it was probably harmless. Second, I remembered back to when these tremors started – almost a year ago when I stopped using estrogen and progesterone creams because I couldn’t afford them. Probably within a couple months, the tremors started in my neck. I remember this distinctly even though it didn’t happen very often -- at first I thought my carotid pulse was racing! But when I put my hand on my chest or when I felt my carotid artery, it was calm. I didn’t think much of it as it happened off and on throughout the end of summer and early fall. By late fall, things came crashing down and my journey here began.

I also made the connection between the strange, oblong vertical bumps on my fingernails and the endocrine system (I found it here). Again—the endocrine system—which in general, regulates our hormones and glands.

I figured it was time to get back on the estrogen and progesterone creams and see if there was any improvement with anything. More about the endocrine system can be found at the National Institute of Health.

I also figured that many of my symptoms were alleviated by going gluten-free.  I wondered if there was a connection between gluten intolerance and hormones or more specifically, peri- and- menopause.

Though Week 24 was a long and difficult one, culminating in a dance recital for my girls and additional schoolwork toward my college degree, I felt my health was once again on the rebound. I was able to clock in over three hours of strength training (105 minutes of Pilates and 100 minutes on the Reformer), and logged 17.3 miles on the treadmill—all with complete normalcy… and that is a good thing.