The thing nobody told me about perimenopause
A year ago I thought I had agoraphobia.
It started one night in summer — what felt like heat stroke. My heart raced, I vomited, the anxiety hit like something had short-circuited in my chest. Two days before my period. I did not put those two things together. I stayed in that night, felt fine the next day, and assumed the heat had got me.
Then I stopped going outside. Going outside made my heart race. Heat stroke takes time to recover from — I'd read that — and it had been a brutal summer, so I waited.
Then the rainy winter came and it didn't get better. Short walks to the store would set my heart racing and I would need to lie down on the sidewalk with my feet up on a bus bench, waiting for it to pass. I stopped driving. I was afraid I'd faint at the wheel. I stopped leaving the house entirely.
I went from 20,000 steps a day to 200.
I googled "agoraphobia." I matched the textbook definition. I started looking for a cognitive behavioral therapist.
For nine months I lived like this.
Then two more months of crying most days, and I called two ambulances.
The second time, I woke in a sweat, heart rate 165, sternum pain I'd been having on and off for days. I thought I was dying. In the way where you actually believe it, not as an expression.
I saw five doctors. I mentioned perimenopause to every one of them.
What I received: Valium, Xanax, beta blockers, a two-week heart holter monitor, a chest X-ray, a lung CT scan, a pulmonary specialist, an MRI including my head, a psychiatric evaluation, a sleep apnea referral, antibiotics, a pap smear, and routine labs. My CRP was elevated because my autoimmune condition had flared. My ribs were bruised from months of hyperventilating. I had a female gynecologist among the five.
Not one of them engaged when I mentioned perimenopause.
Meanwhile: my ADHD and autism — masked for decades, functional enough for a demanding career — collapsed. I developed a tic. Saying "I'm sorry" out loud, sometimes in my sleep. I did not recognize myself. I took a month off work.
I had already been tracking my hormones with a Mira wand. I had data sitting there. Nobody looked at it.
Eventually I went on Threads.
I started reading other women's accounts. The heart racing. The lying on sidewalks waiting for it to pass. The agoraphobia that wasn't agoraphobia. The ADHD suddenly unmanageable. The anhedonia so flattening you spend days taking your temperature and testing for COVID because there must be a fever. The crying at nothing. The 3am wakeups. The rages. The feeling — and this is the one that hit hardest — that somebody put something in your drink. That this is not your body anymore. That someone swapped the operating system overnight and didn't leave instructions.
These women had the same symptoms. The same dismissal. The same file of tests that ruled everything out except what was actually happening.
I finally booked a telehealth appointment with a doctor who treats perimenopause as a real clinical event.
For me, bioidentical estrogen and progesterone changed almost everything in days.
I had been handed every drug except the two that were actually relevant.
I am 44. I spent 20 years in tech — most of it in rooms full of men, most of it while managing endometriosis I kept quiet about because that is what you did. You did not bring your body into the room. You were already asking them to take you seriously; adding a chronic pain condition felt like too much. I learned systems. I learned how health data moves through software. I learned what happens to your data when a company takes venture capitalist money and your cycle becomes an asset on a spreadsheet.
I built Perity because I needed it a year ago.
A place to log the weird, scary, ordinary, ragey symptoms without translating them for an algorithm designed by someone who has never had a luteal phase. To see patterns before I could name them. To find out that the heart racing two days before my period was not heat stroke or agoraphobia — it was my progesterone falling off a cliff. To track which arm I used the gel on yesterday. To know whether the magnesium glycinate actually helped me sleep or if that was the progesterone. To have a report for my doctor that shows three months of data instead of whatever I could remember in a ten-minute appointment.
A place that does not need my real name. That cannot be subpoenaed for something it was never given. That was not built with anyone's exit strategy in mind.
I'm EiEi. That's all you need to know. And honestly — that's the point.
Join the waitlist if you want early access. Tell me what you'd track. I'm listening.
— EiEi, @perityapp