Lost For Words

5 minute read

You know when a word is on the tip of your tongue? You can see it in front of you, but you can’t get your lips to form around it. You’re reaching out, grabbing at it, other words floating by getting in the way as you try to bring the one you need into focus. It’s like being at an optician’s appointment, but with words, when you haven’t found the right lens.

This happens to me a lot. I’m forever describing words to my husband, staring at him expectantly as he just looks at me with confusion and often amusement. It’s not the ideal situation to be in as a journalist. I literally rely on words to pay my bills. So where are they gone?

I was describing this to a friend on a walk recently and she stopped in her tracks. Oh, thank god she almost screamed. I thought I had dementia but we both can’t have it at the same time, that would be too weird. It turns out she keeps losing words too. She had decided that it was because she had a rare form of early-onset something and had been Googling home care nurses.

I had also briefly entertained the possibility of dementia, but because I write a lot about perimenopause and sleep deprivation (write about what you know pals), I had settled on blaming my hormones and children. I’m in a weird place in that my babies have coincided with the decline in my hormonal balance.

I was listening to a podcast about menopause recently where they pointed out that in times gone by women married and had babies in their teens and early 20s and were completely unbothered by menopause because they’d have died by the time it hit. Cheery listening, I think you’d agree, but a fascinating reminder of why we know so little about the change in life. Women have only really been experiencing it en masse for about 120 years. Well, that and the patriarchy obviously. If men experienced menopause there would be multiple Nobel prizes awarded for research on it. Physics? Pah! Did you see what Einstein discovered about periods? That kind of thing.

See also post-partum hair loss, childcare, weak pelvic floors and rape.

Anyway, perimenopause has many symptoms. Women can experience all, some or none of them, which is helpful when you’re trying to figure out if you’re in it. What everyone needs to know, though, is what happens when oestrogen levels drop, which they do during this time. It’s an incredibly powerful hormone and one that has an effect on so much.

Its decrease can result in flushing, mood changes and sometimes cognitive changes – bingo! These can include verbal fluency and mild memory loss. The good news is that this is often temporary and can go away on its own. It can be helped by HRT if you are experiencing more symptoms and need further assistance, and there are other things that clinicians often recommend. These include memory games, brain trainers and good quality rest.

Which brings me back to my children.

I haven’t slept in almost four years, which is fine generally, and to be expected when you have small kids, but when it goes hand in hand with being 44 and probably at the start of your perimenopause journey it can make for confusing times. And I mean that literally.

There are strong indications that memory and sleep are closely linked. Fragmented sleep has also been found to negatively affect memory. Neither of these things are good for me because even when I get a relatively good night’s sleep, it’s broken because I wake even when the kids don’t hear phantom cries.

According to Medical News Today, sleep that’s poor quality can cause memories to stay stuck in the hippocampus and not reach the prefrontal cortex, which results in forgetfulness and difficulty remembering names. Which is to say that if I meet you and say everything but your name, it’s because I’ve only slept in 90-minute bursts since 2018. I will remember your name as soon as I get into the car to drive home and the embarrassment of that will keep me awake at night long after my children have learned how to sleep. Which I understand will happen any year now.

But I live in the Venn Diagram of memory loss. Perimenopause can cause it, sleep deprivation can cause it, and guess what? Perimenopause can cause sleep deprivation. It’s the perfect storm.

So what am I doing? I’m talking to friends to normalise the situation. As soon as we talked about struggling to find the right words we laughed about our self-diagnoses. I’m taking some targeted vitamins, which are known to help with cognitive function. I’ve had a few nights away by myself here and there to try to repay my sleep debt (yes, it’s been blissful), and I’m playing Wordle, Hello World and Quordle obsessively in the name of training my brain. I think it’s working.

Knowledge is power and I’m watching out for perimenopause like a hawk. I don’t want anything to sneak up on me. I’ll take the help when I need it. I’m monitoring the situation and I’m giving myself a break because, look, being a woman is hard enough without beating myself up when I can’t remember the word for when you chew through food so that it becomes like porridge. It’s poltophagy by the way. Isn’t that a great word?

Lost For Words

5 minute read

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