I want to tell you something I don’t put in a brochure: I didn’t come to hormone optimization as a clinician looking for a new service to offer. I came to it as a 46-year-old woman who felt like a stranger in her own body and needed to fix that for herself first.
Nobody warns you properly about perimenopause. You get a vague mention that “things might change,” and then you’re just supposed to figure out, on your own, why you’re suddenly exhausted, why your mood swings like a screen door in a windstorm, and why you’ve developed a genuinely personal relationship with your bathroom.
That last one deserves its own paragraph, honestly. I started getting UTIs around 50, more of them than I’d had in the previous three decades combined, and nobody connected the dots for me. It took figuring it out myself to understand that changing estrogen levels change your tissue — and that a simple vaginal cream, something almost nobody tells you about, made a real difference. Not glamorous. Extremely effective.
What actually helped
I started with testosterone, and later added progesterone once I understood what my body actually needed rather than guessing. The changes weren’t dramatic overnight, but they were real, and they compounded. Sleep came back first. Then the fog lifted a little. Then, slowly, I started feeling like myself again instead of a slightly worse, more tired copy of myself.
Why I’m telling you this
Because when I sit across from a patient describing exactly what I went through, I’m not reciting something from a textbook. I lived it. And I think that matters, especially with something this personal, where so many women get told “that’s just aging” and sent on their way with nothing.
It isn’t just aging. It’s hormones — and hormones are something we can actually do something about.
You don’t have to wait until you’re desperate to ask about this. I certainly wish I hadn’t waited as long as I did.