Menopodcast Season 1 Episode 9

The first episode with 2 mics! Yay for us!

Catch-up: Sarah’s eldest son has been delivered to college. It’s been a transition from knowing everything about his every move as a tiny child to knowing almost nothing about his life now. Julia has been adjusting to her daughter going to Kindergarten and not knowing everything about her day-to-day life.

Bible Study - Chapter 14 - Living with Heart, Passion & Joy - Sarah has had palpitations and she still has them, sometimes. The Chapter talks about how women and men are treated differently when seeing the doctor. Sarah talks about her experience seeing a doctor when she had her episode in the Spring. But she feels she would like to go in for a follow-up after having changed her diet somewhat, and to see whether any other treatment options are available.

Julia was struck by this statistic in the book: “1 in 2 women will eventually die of some kind of heart disease - either a heart attack or a stroke. In contrast, 1 woman in 25 will die of breast cancer, and yet women are more pointed to breast cancer as a huge cause of death.” Seriously big difference.

Chapter talks about “what is your heart telling you?” Do you come from a long line of stoic women? What is your heart telling you, emotionally? Express your feelings! You can intellectualize all you want, but your heart will physically tell you when things are bad. It’s very obvious to Sarah that this Spring when she had her heart incident, she was under stress on a work project, her son was deciding where to go to college, they were figuring out how to pay for it, and it was all happening at the same time. Makes sense! Julia wonders whether Sarah has changed how she approaches her feelings… Sarah talks again about adding exercise as a stress reliever.

Sarah was struck by the notion of living your life the way you really want to. There’s a line in the book about “Making a seamless connection between what we say we believe and how we actually live our day-to-day lives.” It’s something Julia has tried to live by. She has a job she doesn’t love, but that is helping her achieve her long-term goals - and yet it’s really challenging to get through the day-to-day sometimes. It’s always about evaluating and being very clear about the reasons you do something and the payoff you get. And the chapter talks about the value of having some JOY in your work or your life. And the threat of sudden cardiac arrest is real.

LIFE is SHORT, people! We talk again about the book telling us to eat right and exercise. And how we’re doing on all that. We want to have our levels checked and know our homocystene levels - do you know what yours is???

There’s a great quote from Gloria Steinem “The truth will set you free, but first it will piss you off.”

How Hot Was Your Flash? No flashes for the ladies this week.