Sweating It
Confessions of an HRT-ineligible "super-flasher."
First do the math. Whoa, you’ve just had your 100,000th hot flash (give or take). It’s July 31st, 2023, you’re 57, and your body has been doing this bizarre thing roughly twenty times a day since November 21, 2009, when you were 44. That’s 5000 days, times twenty.
Your Hundred Thousandth Hot Flash. How will you celebrate?
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A few weeks before, on the occasion of your roughly 99,360th hot flash—a doozy at a professional drinks thing you’d been looking forward to after three isolating years on Planet Pandemic—cringe when you see ~that look~ on people’s faces. You’re recounting a funny story to a crowd of five or six, and as the heat rises from the soles of your feet to the top of your head, their expressions shift. One minute ago they were laughing at your party banter. Now they’re staring at you with familiar concern. In the mirror of their collective horror, you see yourself melting—publicly—again.
Be jokey about it. “Menopause—amirite?” The women in the group laugh, if forcedly, on cue. The men avert their eyes and look for a natural way to excuse themselves from the conversation.
Tear off your jacket dramatically for another laugh. Join them. Laughing along makes it so that they are laughing with you, not at you.
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Consider that maybe you brought this on yourself, with your brilliant sense of humor, no less. Your karmic error: not taking your mom’s hot flashes seriously all those years ago. Making fun of her. Jesus.
Flash back to the fall of 1992. In the middle of a phone conversation with her, you start to hear a low, motorized hum.
“What’s that sound, Mom?”
“Oh, I’m just sticking my head in the freezer.”
You’re 27, she’s 52.
After that, each time you hear the motorized hum of the freezer through your phone receiver, you tease her a little. I mean, come on. It’s a hilarious image—your mom suddenly burning up, running to the kitchen, flinging open the freezer door, leaning her head into a compartment crowded with Lean Cuisine, pints of Häagen-Dazs, frozen leftover pizza slices—without missing a beat in the conversation. It’s such a bizarre, unrelatable concept, you almost can’t believe it’s real. But then you pay her a weekend visit and witness her melting in person, and somehow it’s even funnier.
Cringe when you see ~that look~ on people’s faces. You’re recounting a funny story. As the heat rises from the soles of your feet to the top of your head, their expressions shift. One minute ago they were laughing at your party banter. Now they’re staring at you with familiar concern. In the mirror of their collective horror, you see yourself melting—publicly—again.
You watch as your mom transforms instantly, one minute herself, the next a red-faced, dripping banshee desperate for a blast of cool air. Still, even right in front of you, it doesn’t quite compute.
It becomes a running family joke. “Mom’s sticking her head in the freezer again.”
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Seventeen years later, the joke’s on you. A few months shy of 44, after a lifetime of muder-scene level menstrual nightmares you undergo a hysterectomy. At your follow-up appointment after the surgery, the doctor informs you you’ll probably start menopause a year or two earlier than you might have otherwise. Of course, it’s all theoretical. Who knows when “you might have otherwise”? All you have to judge by is your mother’s experience.
“My mom was 52 when she started.”
“Okay, so you’re probably looking at around 50, 51.”
Cool, you think. But then two months later, on November 21st, 2009—autumn in New York’s mid-Hudson Valley—at just 44, you feel anything but cool.
You’re taking a walk on the local rail trail, braving an unseasonable cold front, when you feel an intense heat quickly rise up through your body, intensifying as it travels up your torso to your neck, face, and scalp. In an instant you go from shivering and braving the cold to dripping with sweat.
Your clothes and your hat are drenched. You rip them off, almost involuntarily. Your need for relief is desperate, unlike any feeling you’ve ever experienced. Then it hits you: this was that. What your mom felt every time she ran to the kitchen and stuck her head in the freezer. Wouldn’t it be nice if a freezer magically materialized right here, on the rail trail? You would totally stick your head inside of it.
Think, Now I get it! Now I know what my mother was going through! Think, Oh, but I’m still only 44. Wasn’t I supposed to have six or seven more years?
In a matter of moments, the flash is over and now you’re freezing, colder than before because now you're all wet. Your clothes, hat, and jacket are fully soaked through.
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Don’t mention your first hot flash to anyone—not your husband, not your mother, not your friends. Tell yourself, Maybe it was a fluke. Curse the goddesses when it happens again a few days later. And again and again and again. Then come the night sweats, more exaggerated than their daytime counterparts.
I mean, come on. It’s a hilarious image—your mom suddenly burning up, running to the kitchen, flinging open the freezer door, leaning her head into a compartment crowded with Lean Cuisine, pints of Häagen-Dazs, frozen leftover pizza slices—without missing a beat in the conversation. It’s such a bizarre, unrelatable concept, you almost can’t believe it’s real.
Your husband is shocked when you start furiously throwing off the blankets in the middle of the night. One evening in bed, before you turn out the lights, he observes the transformation in real time. Right before his eyes you redden quickly. A dewy glow sets in, and a minute later you’re a sloppy, sweaty mess, as if you’ve just played a long tennis match. (You don’t even know how to play tennis.)
“Oh, my god,” he exclaims, “I can feel the heat radiating off of you!” He says this without judgment. It’s just something he’s marveling at, like a science experiment. You marvel, too.
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The flashing ramps up. It becomes a regular feature of your existence, literally twenty times a day. Go about your life, embracing the hot flashes as just a part of it, something not too terrible that you’re saddled with. Tell yourself, “Everybody’s got something.” You could have something worse.
The participants in a writing workshop you lead have learned to giggle along with you every time you suddenly break a sweat and grab something, anything, with which to fan yourself—a manilla folder, a notebook, a legal pad. One day, in front of the class, your co-instructor presents you with one of those fancy hand-fans that tango dancers flaunt. Everyone has a good laugh.
Sometimes, though, it’s not so funny. Like when a Major Big Deal Author invites you to be in conversation with her at her book launch in Brooklyn. It’s a big honor, a feather in your cap, to be chosen for this. You’re nervous, and surely that compounds the problem. You and The Major Big Deal Author are seated in armchairs before a packed house. The event is being sponsored and filmed by a literary magazine.
Then you feel it, the intense heat making its way up your body. You’ve barely gotten one question out of your face before it’s glowing bright red. Here come “the floppy sweats.” You’re Albert Brooks in Broadcast News, dripping before the camera when he finally gets his big chance, ruining it. You’re Audrey Rose, from that scary movie by the same name that you saw when you were 11, about a girl your age who’s been reincarnated from another girl who burned to death in a house fire. Think: Hot hot hot hot hot, like Audrey drones each time she goes into a fugue state, channeling her predecessor.
Here come “the floppy sweats.” You’re Albert Brooks in Broadcast News, dripping before the camera when he finally gets his big chance, ruining it. You’re Audrey Rose, from that scary movie by the same name that you saw when you were 11 about a girl who’s been reincarnated from another girl who burned to death in a house fire.
The sweat stings your eyes and blurs your vision. You can’t even make out the questions you’ve written down on index cards.
Nearly die of embarrassment, even though you know it’s not your fault. There’s literally nothing you can do about it—maybe some herbs, some dietary changes, some acupuncture, but they don’t do much. A family history of reproductive cancers makes you ineligible for hormone replacement therapy (HRT), which turns out to be safer and more viable for many more women than it was originally understood to be. No estrogen for you!
Continue flashing twenty or more times a day. Marvel at it. Every. Single. Time. There’s something so astonishing about a hot flash that even thirteen years after your first, each one still shocks and amazes you. What a strange thing, to have your body suddenly and dramatically change temperature, independent of the weather.
Perhaps how curious and interesting they are makes the hot flashes tolerable. It’s a good thing you’re so fascinated by them because you, lady, will probably be flashing for the rest of your life. Your mother, now in her 80s, still does, although not nearly as often.
Someone sends you a New York Times article on “super flashers,” women who keep experiencing those internal heat surges well past menopause. Share the article with your mom.
“‘Super flashers’ sounds like a good thing,” she points out, “something you’re super at. Like a superhero.”
“Oh, my god, you’re right,” you say. “Let’s own it—get capes made.”
Laugh together. It’s nice to both be in on the joke this time.
A version of this essay was originally published in the inaugural issue of Litt Magazine, the “Heat” issue.
The effect on your sleep must be devastating. Like you, I entered menopause in my mid-40s. I’ve been taking hormones ever since. At 74, I’m bracing myself to go off them on my doctor’s advice. Previous attempts failed because lack of sleep did me in. Maybe the next will succeed. But I would rather bear the risks of taking hormones at my age than be a screaming, sleep-deprived wraith.
My mom is just starting to go through menopause now & this is helpful for me to read so I can sympathize with her ❤️
Interestingly, menopausal hot flashes seem similar to the kind of flushing attacks I get from my mast cell disease. I’ve been getting flushing attacks since middle school and I’m 29 now! I don’t sweat, and they are somewhat more predictable in response to certain MCAS triggers like heat and exercise and high histamine foods, but the extreme embarrassing redness and feelings of burning up from the inside seem similar. It feels like a sudden forest fire in my body. Only Benadryl and Prednisone can put it out. Though deep breathing helps, while I’m waiting for them to kick in. Also sucking on ice cubes and putting ice packs on pressure points. I often try to wear high-necked shirts and dresses, to hide the flash of redness on my chest that I can see others stare at in surprise. And layers, layers, always. I point a small fan at me at all times too! OPOLAR is a brand that has some good fans; I recharge mine each night.
Just wanted to mention my experience, not to take any attention away from the specific suffering of menopause, which needs more discussion in public spaces! But in case any other readers come here thinking, well, I’m definitely not menopausal but I feel like I have flashes of heat too. Mast Cell Activation Syndrome is often undiagnosed. I try to do my part in talking about it in case someone undiagnosed is reading.