Vanessa Roberts

Jun 21 · Posted

Okay so I need to just... say this out loud somewhere. I'm 39. I had a bilateral oophorectomy eight weeks ago and I genuinely was not prepared for what happened to my body like the DAY after surgery. Not gradually. Not a slow fade. Day. One. The hot flashes woke me up every 45 minutes that first night in the hospital and I kept thinking it was a fever, kept buzzing the nurse. She was kind about it but I could tell she was like, honey, this is just menopause now. And I did not have a framework for that. I had read about menopause as this thing that creeps up on you over years. I had zero years. I had one afternoon. I've been keeping notes on my phone since week two because I couldn't hold it all in my head for my follow-up and I knew I'd cry and forget everything the second I sat down in front of my surgeon. So now I have this running log. Sleep quality (rough scale 1-10, mostly 3s and 4s). Mood stuff. Which hour the worst flash hit. What I'd eaten that day because someone in a cancer support group I joined mentioned that certain foods seemed to spike theirs and I wanted to see if that tracked for me too. The food thing is real by the way. When my appetite came back around week three I was only managing like small soft things anyway, scrambled eggs, soup, yogurt, nothing spicy or heavy. And those weeks were honestly calmer symptom-wise? Could be coincidence. Could be the gentler eating. I'm not claiming anything, just... it's in my notes. I have my first proper post-op follow-up in two weeks and I'm building a question list. Top of it right now: what does "normal" even mean for surgical menopause at 39, because everything I find online is written for women 20 years older than me and I feel like I'm reading instructions for someone else's body. Anyone else been through this and found language that actually worked with their care team? I feel like I'm showing up to appointments slightly out of step with the script they're used to running.

Jun 12 · Posted

Okay so I finished my last treatment in September and by October I was having hot flashes so bad I was sleeping on a towel. I'm 39. I didn't even know what was happening for the first two weeks, I genuinely thought something had gone wrong with the surgery. Nobody sat me down and said hey, this is going to feel like a switch got flipped. There was no gradual. No perimenopause runway. Just. Done. I've started keeping notes on my phone because my follow-up is next month and I don't want to walk in there and blank on everything the way I always do. So far I have: when the flashes hit, how long they last, whether I slept or didn't, and what my mood was doing. Also what I ate because weirdly food has mattered more than I expected. Some days my appetite is completely gone and I've been making myself eat soft things, eggs mostly, soup, anything that doesn't feel like a project. I just want to find other people who had it happen fast like this. The regular menopause content doesn't quite fit. I'm not in a slow transition, I got dropped off a cliff, and I need different language for that.