Y’all remember when I said I felt like a full blown cayenne pepper? 🌶️ Turns out there was a reason for that. I finally had my @MidiHealth visit, and I learned something that low-key blew my mind: menopause isn’t a whole era of your life; it’s literally one day, the day marking 12 months since your last period. Everything leading up to that is perimenopause, and depending on your body, that can start anywhere from your mid-30s to your mid-40s. That’s when estrogen and progesterone stop following the rules and start doing whatever they want, which... explains a lot. My clinician took the time to actually walk me through this (why did nobody tell me this in my 20s?), ordered labs to see where my hormones actually are, and we built a plan together. Part of that plan is an estrogen cream. We also talked about hormone replacement therapy, and to be honest I was skeptical. I’d always associated HRT with synthetic hormones that weren’t identical to what our bodies actually produce. ...