Menopause and new anxiety, hormones? Does HRT help?
Hey all, hoping to see of others can share if they've had similar experiences as I have lately, and how HRT may have impacted the situation. So, sorry time:
I'm currently 50, and via bloodwork (I've been using mirena for over a decade with no cycle the whole time so blood test was the only way) my obgyn confirmed i'm in menopause. I started having hot flashes almost a year ago, and other than occasionally having trouble sleeping, I haven't really had any other symptoms. We're going to be discussing what I want to do pretty soon, but there's a secondary situation I have going on.
I have no kids, so over 25+ adult years, my 7 dogs were my kids. Never in those 25 years did I ever not have a dog until the last of them had to be put down last summer due to cancer. It was the first time I was empty nest. Of the 7 dogs, 6 of them had serious medical issues, various cancers, heart conditions, IBD, etc. Dog #6 in particular (who we had to put down about 3 years ago) was the worse, she had multiple medical issues, required near constant care/watching, and really tore me up for the last several months of her life. She was only 7 when we ended up having to put her down.
About 3 months ago, we decided to adopt another dog, which was great for about 6 weeks. Then hell broke loose. The dog got sick a couple times which is not uncommon for newly-adopted shelter dogs, but which (per my therapist) triggered my own PTSD anxiety attacks (likely from my experiences with dog #6) and I got very sick GI-wise for about a week. The anxiety was so bad that my doc put me on a couple of meds, including Zoloft, which did NOT work well for me. Ended up with 4 days of me being pretty much non-functional. I couldn't think straight, I couldn't get out of bed, I couldn't work. Husband had to take care of me, the dog, the house, and work. He ultimately made the extremely hard decision after several days of this to take the dog back, so that I could recover.
I don't have a history of super high anxiety, in fact, during the care of my prior dogs, I was always able to do what they needed (one dog even needed to be fed three times a day through a tube for 6 months, and I could do that with no anxiety). I did find out after this whole ordeal that anxiety does run in my family, but I'd never personally experienced it like this.
I'm fine now, anxiety-wise, but I feel like my body's and mind's reaction to this dog's illness (which, honestly, the vet thinks she just had a sensitive stomach from stress of being in a shelter for months) was a HUGE overreaction. Finding out that my hormones are indeed very out of whack makes me wonder how much of role the hormone imbalance played into it. Sure, I probably would have been upset and worried, but years ago, this would not have sent me into the spiral that it did this time.
I know there's no way to know for sure, so I'm wondering if anyone else ever experienced something like this? I've seen lots of posts where the women had pre-existing anxiety that got way worse during menupause, but anyone have it come on suddenly like I did?
I also see people saying HRT can help with anxiety, so I'm hopeful. Hubby and I have been fighting the urge to not run back to the shelter and get her back in hopes that HRT will 'fix' this, but we want to be responsible for our sake and for hers.