Ageless: The Naked Truth About Bioidentical Hormones (34 page)

I had never been one of those women who “wanted to get it over with.” I was always a willing participant. I loved it.

I was embarrassed to tell my husband; I was embarrassed to tell my doctor. I didn’t understand hormones adequately at the time to
understand that what I was experiencing was not emotional but physical. My body was not working correctly. I was experiencing severe hormonal loss. The vagina must have adequate amounts of estrogen. Low estrogen levels decrease vaginal lubrication and thin the vaginal lining, which results in vaginal dryness, itching, burning, and painful intercourse. Low levels of estrogen also reduce vaginal blood flow and impede nerve transmission, which impairs sexual function. If I’d understood the syndrome better at the time, I also would have noticed that I couldn’t sleep more than two hours at a time, that I was sweating all night, my body itched from head to toe, I had headaches, I was depressed, I would cry, my stomach was always bloated, I was gaining alarming amounts of weight even though I was eating less, my usual cheerful mood was becoming downright bitchy, I couldn’t think, I was so forgetful that I couldn’t remember who I was calling on the telephone, and then my sex drive dried up. What was wrong? I felt like I needed a psychiatrist. The life I had had left me, and I didn’t like the new one that had taken over my body. No one had prepared me, and my doctors didn’t know what to do. Antidepressants were suggested, so were diet pills, sleeping pills, fat farms, synthetic hormones, and nonfat foods. Nooo! I thought.

There has got to be an answer. As you know, I found it in bioidentical hormone replacement. It was not easy. I went from doctor to doctor, and I was horrified at the way menopause was being treated. There was a complete and total lack of understanding of this passage.

In the defense of the doctors, we were not meant to live this long, so menopause was something hardly thought of in medical school. Then the pharmaceutical companies seized the opportunity and handed out synthetic hormones like candy to the doctors. Finally, the doctors had something to give their female patients to calm them down: synthetic hormones that took away the nastier symptoms, like hot flashes, but did not restore sexuality (or their hormones, since synthetic hormones are
not
hormones). But what the heck, we’re just women.

For the men they had Viagra, which gave them back humongous hard-ons, so the men thought, Whoopee! This is better than ever. What men have never known is that even though the blue pill gives them erections, the testosterone loss they are experiencing is part of
their ongoing body failure. Little by little, these men are falling apart internally, and eventually the symptoms will show up as either cancer, heart attacks, or Alzheimer’s (or all three).

It became clear to me that we women were “on our own.” There was no little blue pill developed for us. And that is probably the good news. If we had a “sex pill,” we might not be so driven to find balance with our hormones. This search for a solution will ultimately save our lives. We don’t have to fall apart and get sick if we find balanced BHRT. Of course, the answer for me was not synthetic and not a drug … the answer was bioidentical hormones, and they have clearly changed the quality of my life.

To regain your sexual feelings, it’s simple. You need to replace your sex hormones with real bioidentical sex hormones (estrogen, progesterone, testosterone if you need it, maybe DHEA, maybe pregnenolone), mimicking the time in your life when you were your strongest. That is usually about thirty-five years old or even younger. Isn’t it wonderful? You get to be as sexy as your thirty-five-year-old self. You don’t want to replace your hormones to normal status for a woman your age, do you? A woman your age is in hormonal decline; that’s your problem. So if your doctor tells you that you are “normal,” tell him or her you don’t want to be normal for your age. You want to be restored to your healthiest prime. If your doctor just stares at you, thank him or her and leave. This is not the right doctor. You want the “good old days” to come back. Remember when sex was on the kitchen counter or in the bathtub, or when you were on vacation how you would try to sneak it under the blankets on the beach? Remember those fabulous, vibrant times? That’s when we were alive, ready, excited! Bioidentical hormone replacement gives it back to you. I’m giving you extravagant examples, and just because you are not doing it on the beach anymore is not the issue. You just want to feel in the mood and have a good time with it.

For me, today, my life has returned to how it used to be. There are times of the month when I am “more in the mood” than other times, although with a little encouragement I am a willing participant almost anytime. It makes me feel that I am part of the universe again. When I had lost my “feeling,” I felt as if I were on the outside looking
in; I felt it was a cruel trick. I finally had the time, I had raised my children, I had put aside my own needs to take care of my family, and now I no longer had the inclination … in other words, the well was dry.

Young women whisper to me constantly that they have no sex drive; women my age just roll their eyes, like “Forget about it”; older women have given up. Did you know we can remain sexual until the very end?

How many of your friends are now sleeping in separate bedrooms? How many of your friends who once had fire in their eyes are no longer touching and joking with their partner anymore? Sex is our human gift. It is our most intimate act. It is how we communicate with our partner. Sex makes us feel alive and young. When my sex drive diminished, it was the only time I started to feel old. I have nothing against getting old; believe me, each year gets better and better for me. The wisdom that is starting to permeate at sixty gets me to thinking how incredible my thoughts will be at eighty and ninety and a hundred. Think of what I will know and will have seen. My goal is to get to each of these stages healthy and with vitality. That’s the mission and goal of antiaging medicine.

If BHRT is not working and you can’t seem to jump-start your libido, find a good sexual urologist to make sure there isn’t a physical problem that is impeding your sex life. A sexual urologist is someone you and your partner can talk with in frank terms, someone who deals with sexual issues all day long. In my book
The Sexy Years
, I interviewed Dr. Jennifer Berman, a sexual urologist (her address is listed in the Resources section of this book). If there is no issue physically, then find a good antiaging endocrinologist. He or she will take blood or saliva tests to determine your deficiencies and prescribe a bioidentical hormone regimen especially for you, and it won’t take long before “that old feeling” comes back. You must be clear with your doctor that this is one of your issues. He or she is not a mind reader.

If your lack of sexual feeling is psychological, you might want to read Dr. Laura Berman’s book
The Passion Prescription
. It is loaded with helpful information. A good therapist or sex therapist can help you through issues that might have kept you inhibited or turned off
your inner light. Often, overbearing fathers or mothers or religious schools made sex unmentionable or, worse, a “bad thing,” so it might be necessary to get your head screwed on in a different way about it. The services are available, so take advantage of these professionals.

Often, after a woman gives birth, the nerves get cut during the common episiotomy (the cutting of the vagina to make room for the baby to come out), and the new mother is sometimes left with no feelings because the nerve was severed and blood flow to the genital area has been damaged. Couple that with the fact that often after giving birth, a woman suffers from such low progesterone that she experiences the common postpartum depression, and you have a recipe for disaster. Along with the “blues” and depression comes a loss of sexual feeling or appetite. Most doctors don’t know or realize that temporary restoration of natural bioidentical progesterone will not only take away the depression, but will also restore the woman’s sexual feelings. Think about the positive effects of that. Having a new baby in the house is wonderful, but we all know it is a very stressful time. Add the mother’s depression and weepiness, and the poor new father feels completely left out and alone. If there has been nerve or blood flow damage, a sexual urologist can help.

As much as I know and like Brooke Shields, I disagree with her doctor’s treatment. This is a criticism not of her, but of her doctor. Perhaps an antidepressant was her only option, but it made me wonder whether by giving Brooke an antidepressant, her doctor, like so many others, was demonstrating that most likely he or she didn’t understand the hormonal system.

Once the umbilical cord is cut, all the progesterone
whooshes
out of the mother into the baby. The mother is left in a complete state of hormonal imbalance, which we all know wreaks havoc on her emotions. Depression is often the result. A qualified doctor who understands the hormonal system and how it works would take a blood test to get a hormone panel, replace the missing progesterone to appropriate levels, and possibly replace some estrogen short-term until the woman’s body can rev up again and start producing a full complement of hormones.

Unfortunately, most doctors go the pharmaceutical way. Why would you take a drug when you could take an exact replica of what
your body makes and replace what is missing? Besides, if a woman is nursing, she most probably has to stop nursing if she is taking a drug. You wouldn’t want your baby to be getting antidepressants from breast milk. And as you have read earlier in this book about rhythmic cycling, nursing is the greatest thing you can do for the mother’s immune system and the baby’s. The longer you nurse, the more eggs you save, and the healthier both mother and baby will be.

Also, there is always the danger that once on an antidepressant, it’s hard to get off. Antidepressants make you feel good unnaturally. The object in BHRT is to get to a place of such balance that no antidepressant could ever compete.

As you become more informed about bioidentical hormone replacement, you will understand that lack of a sex drive is not an imposed sentence on menopausal women and men. Men can get their testosterone brought back into peak range through replacement. Sometimes men are also low in DHEA, which is another hormone present in both men and women that works in concert with testosterone.

Women can also restore their hormonal systems to balance when they are with the right doctor. Sex does not have to become a distant memory as we age. It can be a vital and satisfying part of life and bring much pleasure and closeness to a relationship.

I truly believe that marriages break up during menopause from lack of understanding. Women who are not hormonally balanced can hardly stand to live with themselves, and it is very difficult on the other members of the family. If the man of the house is getting dumped on day and night because of hormonal imbalance and then on top of it is not having any satisfactory sexual contact, after a while even the nicest guy will say to himself, What do I need this for?

Getting your hormones balanced with real bioidentical hormones can bring you back to the woman or man you used to be.

T
HE
I
MPORTANCE OF
S
LEEP

Sleep … glorious sleep. You never appreciate the fact that sleeping is a daily function until you can’t sleep. Without hormones, it is really
impossible to sleep. Without sleep, prolactin keeps escalating. Prolactin is a pituitary hormone that induces lactation and prevents ovulation. Prolactin is the domain of nursing mothers. A mother with a new baby needs to be awakened many times during the night to feed her baby … thus the high prolactin. Nature has provided this phenomenon for the new mother.

A young healthy reproductive woman has a full complement of hormones, and if she goes to bed early, sleep is a given; but as we age and begin to lose our hormones and develop bad sleeping habits, the body gets confused and prolactin keeps escalating.

T. S. Wiley writes in
Sex, Lies, and Menopause
, “At the end of perimenopause, cortisol soars and estrogen and progesterone hit bottom … just as they do during labor and delivery. At this point in the template, your immune system revs up so high that it may attack your cartilage and mucous membranes, and that scenario creates joint pain (arthritis), allergies, and an autoimmune disease called Hashimoto’s thyroiditis can also happen. Once your immune system has attacked and halted thyroid function, with the insulin resistance from sleeplessness, you just keep getting fatter” [and more and more tired].

Wonderful things happen in the night if you go to sleep early enough. Early is between 9:00 and 10:00 p.m. I know, I know, nobody goes to sleep that early; it is one of the reasons we are in such poor health in our country. As a nation we are sick because we don’t sleep. In fact, sleep loss is the new American deficit. We are fat and diabetic from lack of sleep. We are dying from cancer and heart disease from lack of sleep. Our healing hormones have no chance to do their work without sleep.

When you lose sleep, you really can’t catch up. Your hormones don’t spring back like that. Sleeping less than you need affects at least ten different hormones, not just melatonin. That’s just the tip of the iceberg. Sleeplessness causes shifts in all these hormones and changes appetite, fertility, and mental and cardiac health.

The National Institutes of Health concludes that six hours of prolactin production in the dark is the minimum necessary to maintain immune function like T-cell and beneficial killer-cell production. But you can’t get six hours of prolactin secretion on six hours of sleep a
night. It takes at least three and a half hours of melatonin secretion before you even see prolactin. So if you don’t go to bed two or three hours before midnight, there won’t be enough time for this hormonal action to happen. Remember, if you sleep enough each night, you will lose weight as a result of your cortisol going down. Now you’re listening, aren’t you?