PPSD: Phantom Pee Spot Disorder

You know that feeling when you've sat down on a toilet seat and there was a little drop of something on it but you don't realize it until you stand up again and there's that little cool spot on your butt that you hope is water? Hold that thought.

I'm at the age where people complain they were never warned about this or that health issue. Actually, I'm way past that age, because a lot of it happens during menopause. Or perimenopause. In fact perimenopause is one of the things that people say no one told them about.

So in case no one told you about it, perimenopause refers to the years right before authentic menopause in which your body is just experimenting with how it would be if all your youth-enhancing hormones disappeared. So one day they'll drain out and the next week they'll surge back and be all What do you think about me now and you won't know whether to laugh, cry, or stab someone just because. "Nobody told me my periods would get heavier and more frequent," people complain, nor do they mention that from time to time you will be passing something that looks like a small damp rodent, or that you will develop new moles everywhere, and then plant whiskers on them like flags, or that you will be asked to cut down on sleeping for a few years because you can sleep when you're dead which by the way is coming right up too.

That business about being all crabby because your hormones are in flux is something people do tell you about, but it's not true. You're crabby because you're just about at the age when it will become obvious you married the wrong person or wasted thirty years at the wrong job, or had more kids than you needed or will ever use, or you realized you didn't follow your dreams because you never had any to begin with even though everyone assumed you should.

They don't always tell you about pre-perimenopause, which would be the thirty years before perimenopause. If you're lucky someone will have warned your nine-year-old self about periods but even so that first one is still going to come as a big surprise, and like as not people will have glossed over some of the nastier details in favor of something more hopeful like "You're becoming a woman." So even with the basics, you can't always count on a ton of good information.

And as long as we're about it, they don't tell you about how unpredictable your periods are going to be, especially the whiz-bang very last one that happens two years after the one before and one year after you've gotten rid of all the paraphernalia, as soon as your last hormone can detect you're wearing white pants.

They don't tell you anything about fibroid tumors and when they do, it's because you already have them, and then they tell you they're usually benign, although not always. They don't mention that they like to sit on your bladder like a big fibroid joke.

They don't mention the connection between laughter and laundry.

There's stuff men don't get warned about either. Like peni-pendular recession, or the effect of scrotal gravity on the hairline. Nobody ever talks about that, but those bow-legged old men with gigantic foreheads didn't come out of nowhere.

And so as a public service I offer all of these observations to those who might otherwise complain that no one ever told them about them, and add the following:

Sometimes your body gets just a big kick out of itself and makes shit up. Like suddenly developing a dime-sized portion of your left buttock that feels just a little colder than the surrounding acreage and every time you pull your pants up you think: did I just sit on a wet spot on the toilet? Five times a day you think that, for a couple weeks, and then you realize your own buttock is doing  that to you for no reason medical science will ever discover. There won't be a name for it, or a ribbon-color for it, or a foundation devoted to its cure.

So don't let that come as a surprise.

'Tain't Fair

I loved my former gynecologist, who was cute, smart, and laughed in all the right places. She once even agreed--eagerly, I might add--to take pictures during my exam in case I needed some for my blog, and you can't put a price tag on that, although they might have been worth something thirty years ago.

So just as soon as you get a doctor you really, really like, what happens? She treats you for twenty-five years and then up and quits on you. Was it something I said? Something I might have emitted under pressure? Either way, I needed a new doctor.

And it's not like choosing a plumber or a mechanic, most of whom don't charge for the breast exam. It's a special relationship. You don't generally shake hands with someone you're meeting for the first time and then wing out your knees and say "check this out." In the 70's, sure, but not these days.

They usually talk to you while they're spelunking away, but I'm not always paying attention to their actual words; I'm listening for an echo, and as long as I don't hear one, I figure everything's okay. Or close enough. I do have a sorority of fibroids that have been living rent-free in my abdomen for a number of years, and that was a concern. My new doctor hadn't met them personally, so I thought she might subject them to a scolding or something, and I'd have to rush to their defense. "Oh those," I'd say. "No, they're okay. We have an understanding. They don't sit on my bladder, and I don't have them cut out."

Fibroids are something that nobody tells you about until the day they're poking around and say, casually, stripping off a latex glove, "looks like you have some fibroid tumors in there," and by "in there" they mean "down there," and by fibroid tumors they mean--what, exactly? Do I have one foot in the stirrup and the other in the grave?

My gynecologist could have called them fibroids, as most people do, allowing me to imagine I had a belly full of breakfast cereal of some kind, but she--the one, come to think of it, that I liked so well--clearly said "tumors," and didn't act too concerned about them at all, which made sense inasmuch as they were in me and not in her. And, once she expounded on the topic a little, and revealed how common they were, and how cancerous they weren't, I did begin to relax. Still, anything growing inside my person that I have not made personally out of beer falls under the category of "unauthorized," and I don't approve of it.

The theory goes that you don't do anything about fibroids unless they're getting unruly or keeping the neighbors up, because by the time menopause comes barreling through and runs off with your estrogen, their infrastructure is likely to collapse and cause them to shrink, in much the way tax cuts cause bridges to fall down.

Anyway, my fibroids and I have come to a truce over the years, and I didn't want to upset them by introducing them to a brand new doctor, but there was nothing for it: she was going in, and that was that. I needn't have worried. She met the sorority; I believe she may even have shook hands, and all was well. I was informed, without echo, that I now have "pale tissues," which is a normal consequence of the eviction of estrogen, along with chin whiskers and an inability to give a shiny shit what other people think of you. I argued that the paleness could be put down to my Norwegian heritage, but she said no. Apparently, the bloom of youth is not solely on one's cheeks.

Things were going so well that I went ahead and told the new doctor all about concerns I have about gynecologically irrelevant areas of my body, chiefly my head, and mentioned my fainting incident. "I guess it was a loss of blood pressure due to a combination of giving blood, having a beer, and standing under hot shower water," I explained. My new doctor frowned and shook her head.

"I don't think the beer had anything to do with it," she said.

I love my new doctor.