Estro-'grin' and Bare It!

All hail estrogen. "Hail, estrogen! Yoo hoo, over here!" Picture me waving frantically, both arms high and wide in the air, a painful rictus of a grin on my face. I want it to pull over to the side of the road so I can pop all four of its overblown tires. I want to puncture its gas tank and witness the gushing bleeding-out. I want to keep it off my highways and byways. Even the frontage roads. I want signs posted everywhere, reading: ACCESS DENIED. TURN AROUND, FOLLOW THE FALLOPIAN ROUTE, AND RETURN TO THE OVARIES!

An extra generous dump of this female sex hormone in the body causes a nightmare of chemical connections and disconnections, functions and malfunctions, itches and glitches, all of which masquerade under a ubiquitous and misunderstood abbreviation: PMS. Or, as we affectionately refer to it in our household -- 'pre-,' 'present-,' and 'post-' menstrual syndrome. (I've also heard PMT -- pre-menstrual tension. Yup, tension sounds about right!) It's the natural gift that keep on giving long past the intended season! Doctors state PMS occurs roughly 3 to 7 days, or 7 to 14 days in studies, before the onset of menses and leaves the scene right before or at the start of the cycle. Technically, that may be correct, but based on years of information I've gathered in the field since the age of 10, I'm asserting it dominates right on through to the other side. The mind, body, and family check-in for triage and recovery after the initial assault.

If the typical cycle rotates around 28 days, then mine is slightly atypical. My little friend (think Al Pacino here) blasts onto the scene every 21 days. In my twenties and early thirties, I was most fortunate to have it hit ever 17 or 18 days. However, I changed one or two practices related to this topic. These modifications slowly altered the schedule in my favor. Whoo hoo! My husband is fond of noting, "Okay, so let me get this straight. If I hear you right, a woman has roughly one week of PMS, one week of period, and one week of the body prepping FOR the period. On your schedule, that leaves you with . . . approximately one or two good days out of each month!? Am I getting this?" Obviously, this is a gross exaggeration . . . I'm not that bad . . . really? . . . am I? . . . maybe only sometimes . . . in February?

Let me state emphatically for the blog that I applaud the 60% of women out there who avoid this issue by virtue of superior reproductive system conditions. I'm happy for you. All of you. Each and every last one of you. Better to have not than to have in this case. You don't want your ugly innards laid bare to the world around you with such confusion and alarming frequency.

But within that blessed number of free-from-furious-flow'ers are those special few, the ones who, because they never bit off their spouse's head and had to sew it back on; never cried unexpectedly when watching Kelly Rippa of 'LIVE With Regis and Kelly' dance in her little blue spandex number with the Laker Girls; or never shifted suddenly from sunny skies to heavy mental fog within the space of minutes, are quite smug in their annoyance with their fellow women who act as if their period symptoms are anything other than what every woman throughout history has had to face. (Should I mention the women who were told 'it was all in their heads' who went away to visit relatives forever or recuperate in an asylum due to their delicate nature back in the day? Should I mention the husbands who made the going-away arrangements and found younger, less-affected spousal replacements.) "Sop it up and suck it up, you wimpy specimen of the female species!" their eyes seem to say as they investigate you with all the curiosity of a dog inspecting a stink bug on the sidewalk. Goody, goody, goody for you, too! Oh, and I have a pair of size 9 shoes if you ever want to walk in them for a few bloody days.

I'm not whining. Really. Other women suffer far more than do I. And, then there are the men. We have three women in our household. Each one of us transmogrifies into an alien creature roughly once a month. A lovely little trinket I managed to pass down the line. Our men orbit around us, caught in our gravity, wary of the pull, eager for release. My son is educated far beyond his 14 years on the physical and emotional needs of the menstruating gal. One day in the not too distant future, he will be able to prophesy, as his father before him, as to the exact date and time of impending household doom and, with a survivor's instinct, respond accordingly.

Though I write tongue-in-cheek, all of this jesting can not detract from the fact that PMS has the ability to severely impact the days and lives of select women. I'm contemplating a tantalizing array of options to limit the impact of this syndrome on my schedule and the accompanying periods which pick and choose when to reduce me to crawling along the carpeted living room floor, my face pressed into the fibers, crying and questioning the intelligence of a womb putting me into labor on a monthly basis when there will be no damned baby at the end of the agony!

1) cauterize by laser the inside of my uterus, knowing it won't last forever and other methods will be necessary at this point
2) take medications to suppress my emotional responses, irritability, mental fog bank, and mild-depression, realizing they may also make me lethargic, apathetic, and feel distant from God, oh, and cause weight gain
3) add varying hormones to my system which could work and also cause significant weight gain
4) remove one or more major members of my reproductive systems and hope for the best or possibly for early menopause
5) continue as I am and rely on the selective short-term memory malfunction of peri-menopause

The skie's the limit. Certainly this isn't the time of the month to specify an option. Right now, I'll continue to limit my verbal sparring with family members (and apologize when I don't), refrain from making major financial purchases or decisions, lock the refrigerator and pantry doors (so no one else can consume my salties and sweets), stay away from loud sounds, heavy scents, strong vibrations, and bright colors, keep reading materials and laptop and movies on tap for sleepless nights, ingest 800 milligrams of ibuprofen every 5 hours while I can (stomach has been protesting the past six months), and remind myself that my one good day -- maybe two if it's timed right -- is just around the corner!