954: LEADERSHIP STORIES: A New Me: My Personal Menopause & HRT Follow Up

Episode notes

A few months ago, I shared some of my personal experiences in perimenopause. Today I am back with a big update. Since the last episode on this topic, I had a severe shift in my mental health, including a raging comeback of my lifelong anxiety and panic. On top of this, I started having emotional responses to situations that I could tell were very much disproportionate to the situation, yet I couldn’t seem to talk myself out of severe and dark emotional states. Initially, I thought this was all due to general life stress and the relentless state of the world. After a few months of waking up in sheer panic night after night, I asked my doctor if we could recheck my hormones. WOW, did those lab results paint a picture! I received my lab results via email on a Friday afternoon. Since my follow-up with my doctor wasn’t until the next week, I did what any anxiety-ridden perimenopausal 49-year-old woman would do. I went straight to my pal, Chatty (ie: ChatGPT). Chatty broke everything down for me and told me that, based on my lab work, I was very likely in the final stages of perimenopause or early stages of menopause.