The Perimenopause Husband
Perimenopause Joint Pain: The Night My Wife Could Not Walk
My wife could not walk.
It went from her hip, round the front of her thigh, into the groin, and down the front of her leg to the ankle. She had one working leg. She could not get across a room without me holding her up.
She had had a bit of discomfort in that hip before. Nothing like this.
Perimenopause was in the back of my mind. I just did not know it could be this.
Can perimenopause cause joint pain?
I am not a doctor. I will tell you what the emergency doctor on duty said, in the room, and stop there.
The doctor said women from about forty to their late fifties go through hormonal changes. Those changes can affect the body, right up to what she was going through with her hip. And it may happen again, even though she did nothing out of the ordinary to bring it on.
The x rays came back clear. Nothing to be concerned about. Pain relief, a few days of rest, move about when she could. She came home on a brand new set of crutches. Her accessories for the week.
That was the first time anyone had joined that up for us, and it came from the doctor, not from me.
What was I doing in that waiting room?
Running the list. That is the honest answer.
What did she lift. Did she fall. Did she slip on something. What did I miss.
I was not being cruel. I was doing what a bloke does with a problem, which is look for the cause so he can do something about it. If I could find the thing, I could fix the thing.
There was nothing to find. She did not lift anything. She did not fall. She had done nothing out of the ordinary.
Here is the part that gets me. A sore hip was already on the list I had written myself of what has turned up in our house over the last few years. I had been reading about perimenopause for a while by then, and I had heard about hips. So it was sitting there in the back of my mind the whole time. I just did not know something this bad could be part of it, so I kept running the list anyway.
Is it only the hip?
No, and this is where blokes go wrong, me included.
It moves around. In our house it has been the hip. Before that it was a shoulder, severe, seized up like it was frozen. They do not arrive together with a label on them saying same cause. They arrive one at a time, months apart, each one looking like its own separate bad luck.
That is exactly why you miss it. One pain is bad luck. A pain, then a different pain, then another, with nothing she did to cause any of them, is a pattern.
The rest of what turns up works the same way. So do the headaches, which are their own frightening thing and belong in their own article.
Is this perimenopause or something else?
Both questions are worth asking, and you do not get to pick one and stop.
I have written about the other mistake, blaming every single thing on the word once you learn it. This is that mistake in reverse. It was on my own list and in the back of my mind, and I still did not trust it enough to say it out loud.
New pain, pain that stops her walking, pain that will not settle, any of it goes to a doctor or a specialist in this field. The doctor on duty took it seriously, imaged it, ruled things out, and then told us what she thought was underneath it. That is the order. You do not get to skip to the end on your own, and neither do I.
What should I do when a pain turns up with no story behind it?
This is one of the tools. There are plenty more. It is the one that would have made that night easier for her.
Believe it before you can explain it.
When she tells you something hurts and there is no story behind it, treat it as real in the same breath she says it. Do not run the list out loud. Do not ask what she lifted. Do not go looking for the moment it started, because there may not be one, and every question you ask her is one more time she has to say I do not know.
Then do the next plain thing. Get her seen. Drive her. Carry the bag, get the crutches in the car, take the stairs off her for a week. That is the whole tool.
The hunting can happen in your own head, quietly, where it costs her nothing.
What I saw in that room
She was in agony. She still thanked the ones who treated her, with a smile.
You will see that in your house too, if you look for it. She will hold it together in front of strangers and let go in front of you, and it is easy to read that backwards as you getting the worst of her.
You are getting the true version. That is not the same thing.
Her body is going through something on the way to menopause that she did not ask for and cannot control. Some of it turns up as a mood. Some of it turns up as a leg that will not work. It is all the same weather.
Start With the Weather
The Weather Report is the two-page guide to reading these days: telling a storm warning from an overcast day from a fog day, and knowing the one thing to do in each. Free, on your phone in thirty seconds.