I feel like the gps doesn’t always give me time to get into the lane I need to be in.
I do have a history of saying left when I mean right, so my family member could have tuned me out, but then, why didn’t they say something when I said, “Hey, I know where we can park around here”?
I’d be more concerned that they got angry with you than that they fumbled the directions. If that’s new, that’s somewhat alarming. But it’s easy to fumble directions due to poor hearing, distraction, or just not being good with directions.
Probably more fair to say we got angry with each other. Maybe angry is too strong but definitely annoyed.
There’s a thread for that.
Same plus I am so easily distracted that having other people in the car really throws me.
If they would’ve made it with GPS that’s good enough IMO. Maybe just keep an eye out for any other worrying signs.
Yeah, mostly I wanted to know if that kind of confusion was in the realm of normal. Sounds like maybe.
I’d treat it as a piece of circumstantial evidence rather than definitive proof of anything.
I recall one time my mother did several things that alarmed me when I was visiting. She got really confused about a story we were telling to her gentleman friend… kept mixing up the details.
And at one point she made us all sandwiches and proudly proclaimed “and I didn’t put any mustard on yours because I know you don’t like mustard” (which is true… I don’t). Took one bite and the thing was absolutely slathered with mustard. She’d made three sandwiches: mine, hers and her boyfriend’s and they ALL had lots of mustard on them, so it’s not like she accidentally gave me the wrong one. She was surprisingly unfazed by this. And she’s not a practical joker where she would have done it on purpose. I wouldn’t have been so alarmed if she’d simply forgotten my preference, but she made such a big deal about not putting mustard on my mustard-slathered sandwich.
But I’ve had numerous conversations with her since and discussed this at length with local family members and she seems to have just had an off day. It seems pretty isolated.
Hopefully it is the same with your family member. Especially at age 57.
so I joined this perimenopause group on facebook thinking maybe my fatigue issues are related to that. i’m coming to the conclusion that it isn’t because these women have other issues. but now in reading about their issues i’m terrified of having their issues in the future. i’m already at the age of most of these women though and have not experienced most of this stuff.
i don’t have hot flashes. they sound awful. i also don’t have uncontrolled weight gain or gushes of blood. they also claim to have extreme moodiness. how do you even tell if you’re already kinda a moody person? nothing has changed in that regard for me either. is perimenopause awful for like everyone or is this a select group of women for which it is?
Hot flashes are unpleasant, but not awful. Also, hot flashes are easy to treat with hormones. (Well, the treatment is estrogen, but if you have a uterus, you shouldn’t take estrogen without also taking progesterone, because the uterine lining is overstimulated and can develop cancer.)
I had trouble with depression when i was perimenopausal, and i agree that it’s harder to recognize mood disorders. Mine got bad enough that i was going to talk to my doctor about it, though, when on a whim i asked him for hormones for the hot flashes. (I’d known i had hot flashes for a while. The whim was deciding maybe they bothered me enough to try treating them.) An hour after i took the first pill, i thought, “oh shit, I’ve had PMS from hell for most of the last year.”. I am still taking the estrogen to treat depression. The hot flashes were never really a big deal to me.
There were a couple of giant studies on post-menopausal hormone replacement that scared a lot of people away from taking them. But that’s because the results were misinterpreted in the popular press.
The studies were set up to test whether it was a good idea to give estrogen to menopausal women with heart disease. It was known that heart disease is less common in premenopausal women than in men, or post menopausal women. So doctors wondered whether you could treat heart disease in older women with estrogen. And the answer was a resounding “no”. It turns out if you give estrogen to a 70 year old women who hasn’t menstruated in a decade and has heart disease, it’s likely to exacerbate her heart disease, not help. Their “all cause mortality” increased, with more stokes, heart attacks, and Brady cancer.
But… When they picked apart the data, younger women in the study, those closer to menopause, for better with supplemental estrogen. They did have more breast cancer, but their all-cause mortality was lower than the women who didn’t take estrogen.
Since you have a family history of breast cancer, you’d want to discuss that with your doctor. And maybe it wouldn’t be worth the risk even if you had hot flashes. Or maybe, if they were really bad, it would be worth taking a little estrogen for a couple of years, and then tapering off. But you’d know if you were having hot flashes. And there are other treatments for mood disorders that don’t affect the breasts, like SSRIs. (That stands for “selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor”. Estrogen is a non-selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor.)
unless the symptoms were really bad, i wouldn’t risk breast cancer by taking hormones. My mother’s breast cancer was hormone related.
I believe hormone replacement is called HRT.
read recently that SSRI’s don’t work. just had a pop-up to my phone saying that.
That’s a mistatement of the recent result. SSRIs work, but a big meta study recently showed that most of the theories as to how they work don’t pan out. So how they work is unknown.
They don’t work for everyone, of course. And they have side effects. And they can be hard to stop using, even if they don’t work. But they work well for a lot of people. So the conclusion of the meta study was that more research is needed to determine who they will work for.
got a bunch of tests at the rheumatologists yesterday while not having symptoms. looking at the results online and all but one appear to be normal. the one upon further googling i think is likely normal too.
so nothing wrong with me even though i have months long bouts of crushing fatigue. i have a stress test/heart ultrasound next week with the cardiologist.
now i have severe reflux that started early in the morning and woke me up. no clue wtf brought this on!
There might be a better thread for this as I’m really looking for suggestions more than diagnosis.
About a week ago, probably bc I thought I needed more steps in my day, I walked down 8 flights of stairs. The next day, my knees started hurting. I assumed it was muscle pain since I haven’t done stairs in a while. Then the right knee got better but the left was still bad. Hubby said inflammation, take ibuprofen, so I did and it’s gradually better but I still have some “mild discomfort”. Saturday walking down the 2 steps on my porch was hard, as was getting in and out of my car, bc I was so stiff. But I am much improved. So I tried going down some stairs again today, just one flight to test it out, and that amount of bending that knee is still pretty painful. I can sit at my desk with knees bent but I can’t sit cross-legged on my chair like I often do. (I know, bad habit.)
Questions:
I would continue to walk up stairs but take the elevator down until your knees improve. As we age, I don’t think there is a benefit to walking down stairs. It can be bad for your joints.
I don’t know if your knee problem is similar to mine, but what triggers it is certainly similar. I’ve had troubles since I was about 20 with walking down stairs, down hills, and bicycling. For me, walking on flat ground, walking up hills/stairs, and sitting cross-legged are all fine.
I’ve tried physical therapy, both then and recently, and it was an abject failure. My problem is clearly a joint issue and not a muscular issue. Although exactly what is wrong is a mystery – the closest I’ve been given to a diagnosis is “your kneecap is a funny shape”. Avoiding walking down stairs and strategic use of NSAIDs has been highly successful.
Is the pain a burning pain or achy or dose it feel like sore muscles? A burning pain indicates tendonitis which is best treated with ibuprofen or naproxen sodium (Aleve) and ice. I prefer Aleve because it lasts 12 hours. You might need to take a high dosage to get relief, like two times recommended dose, because tendon pain is hard to treat. The pain will go away once the inflammation in the tendon is gone. An achy pain suggests arthritis or potentially a torn meniscus or ligament. OTC pain relievers will treat mild cases. The pain can be intermittent but won’t resolve on its own since. If it is just sore, then it is probably muscular in nature. Since you didn’t describe any weakness, it is safe to assume not a torn muscle and the pain will resolve on its own.
Generally, activity won’t make the pain worse but if it is tendonitis then it will delay reduction in inflammation. If it is muscle soreness, yes, work the muscles but not to the point you can’t move the next day.
My only suggestion is to ice the joint. Pain is generally caused by some sort of inflammation and ice helps reduce that. My spouse likes to use heat. Heat encourages blood flow which promotes healing but can also increase inflammation.
My first thought is the potential emergence of osteoarthritis (he’s a distant cousin of mine).
I have an issue with my knee that causes somewhat similar pain that can involve stairs, but that problem typically emerges for the first time as a young adult if you are susceptible:
It sure as hell will for me. Well, the wrong kind of activity will make the pain worse.
Your problem sounds similar to the one I have that I mentioned above: patellofemoral syndrome/pain, aka runners knee. Onset around 20 also matches. I was told part of my susceptibility is because my kneecap doesn’t quite ride in the groove there like it’s supposed to.
Not an exact match here, but close: lots of elevation change either up or down triggers mine, where walking on flat ground never does. I’ve learned that trekking poles virtually eliminate the issue for me, so I always bring them on longer hikes in the mountains. Biking doesn’t bother mine at all and is a preferred activity, as is skiing. Running is torture. I can be fine during a run, but will barely be able to get around the next day due to knee pain. NSAID’s do help if needed, and taking them prophylactically
can help too
Maybe I need to clarify. If you have no pain, activity can cause the onset of pain. However, that pain generally goes from 0 to x. Further activity won’t make it go from x to x+y. Generally. However, it turns out each person’s body is a little different and may not act like everyone else’s.
If you had something like a bone spur or chip, further activity can increase the pain level as the spur or chip rubs against different and more nerve endings. I guess I should have included a tearing pain in my question which could indicate either of those things. If you have a tearing pain, go see your PCP as it will likely require some more advanced treatment.