Chemo brain vs Menopause

I walked into the bathroom for a reason. And that reason was a good reason. I was organizing my pills in the kitchen, did I come in here for a new bottle of something? Which bottle would that be?

I walk back to the kitchen and delve back into pill sorting, allocating, counting... Oh yes! I need more AlgaeCal Plus* - back I go.

As I start walking I say the name of the supplement in my head. AlgaeCal Plus. AlgaeCal Plus. AlgaeCal Plus.

This scenario happens more often than I would like. As does this one.

“Could you pass me the cylindrical object with liquid in it?”

A child might respond, “you mean the cup?”

Depending on their tone of voice and my sleep level I would either smile and say, “Ah yes, Momma’s brain!” or “You know what I meant, you don’t need to be mean about it.”

Sigh.

Anger and frustration directed not at the gentle nudge - but at myself. Unable to remember the word, the phrase, the name, the object, the subject - a gaping hole in my consciousness. Furious at myself for the evidence of my own mental fragility. Clearly breaking my own heart in the process according to Swami Kripalu.

Obviously this is a good thing to think about next time I do Fists of Anger.

Courtesy of chemotherapy, I went through menopause when I was 34. I wrote about the perimenopause experience in I Dreamt of Sausage (for those of you who want to see the inside of my brain 15 years ago). Then, in a balance of scales, both Bean and Dragon came to us via the same medical establishment that made my “ovaries into raisins” as one obtuse practitioner shared with me years ago.

Courtesy of Dragon, my body was flooded with hormones about 8 years ago. As such, according to the research I have done, I have about 2 years to get on the hormone replacement bandwagon before the door closes.

And learn whether what is going on with me is chemo brain or brain fog from menopause. There is no “treatment for chemo brain” but I can certainly try hormones to see if this is related to menopause.

At the moment I don’t know if it is both, either, or neither… Chemo brain “may feel like a fogginess of thought, lack of attention or focus, or an inability to remember things.” Menopause Brain (from the aptly named book The Menopause Brain by Lisa Mosconi) includes symptoms of “mental fogginess or sluggishness, trouble thinking clearly, more difficulty processing information or making decisions.”

They sound pretty familiar, yes?

Yes

Here is the fun part of being in the Aquarian Age. There is no md out there that would be able to tell me whether I blank out in the bathroom from chemo or hormones. (Honestly, if one of them wanted to tell me, I would be highly skeptical of such assurance and hubris in the face of such data.)

I have already been told they are worried about breast cancer - which honestly in my case in laughable. I have signed so many disclaimer forms over the years that spell out the direct connection between the therapy I am about to do and elevated cancer risk. Not only that, but every menopause expert out there agrees that medical “truth” is based on faulty data.

It is up to me to regulate, meditate**, and this instance experiment. What is the harm of trying hormones for a stint to see if these molecules help me remember people’s names in conversation (and other side effects of a Sahara Desert nature). Help my bones become less brittle, my skin less dry, heart happier, etc etc

Life is one big experiment no matter what you do.

* Huge HUGE shoutout to this company for taking me from osteoporosis to osteopenia. I am on my way back to full bone density! (now it is just the question of bone flexibility - estrogen looking to you for that one…)

**Plug here for jumping on the meditation bandwagon if you have been chewing on the idea. Even a bare scratching of the surface of what has published out there brought up this article: Meditation-induced effects on whole-brain structural and effective connectivity.

The article concludes with this passage. “Our results suggest long-term meditation practice is able to remodelling (sic) the way information is propagated across the brain, involving direct connections among areas, such as the anterior insula, the prefrontal regions and the precuneus/posterior cingulate cortex belonging to the DMN, the somatomotor cortex, the orbito-frontal and lateral prefrontal cortex, whose functions are associated with largely reported meditation-induced behavioral effects, as improved emotional regulation and reduced stress (Chiesa and Serretti 2009; Chung et al. 2012; Tang et al. 2016), enhanced attentional skills (Valentine and Sweet 1999; Brefczynski-Lewis et al. 2007; Semple 2010; MacLean et al. 2010), and reduced mind-wandering (Brewer et al. 2011).

BOOM!