Friday, April 04, 2008

Do We Really Need a Menopause Predictor Kit?!

As I was waiting for Tom to show up for Friday Date Night (a new weekly tradition... tonight we saw Leatherheads), I strolled around Bartells drug store, not looking for anything in particular.

Then this caught my eye:

Now, this is either hilariously funny or not funny whatsoever. Are you frikkin' kidding me? The pharmaceutical industry feels the need to produce (for profit, of course) a product that women can purchase to tell them whether or not they're in the midst of menopause?! Dude, I haven't had a period since Aleks and Kat were three years old and even I knew beyond a doubt when I was approaching the throes of menopause!

Really, let me save you about twenty bucks here. Sorry to be the bearer of bad news (and I won't even charge you for some sort of "kit"!), but there's really no two ways about it. If you have more than a few of these symptoms and you're in your mid-40s to early-50s, chances are you're there, my friend:

Memory lapses
Mood swings
Headaches

Weight gain
Dry skin
Loss of... well, that "blossoming" feeling


Anxiety and irritability


Insomnia

Oh yeah, and hot flashes.
But fear not -- because life is good, and you WILL find your way. We all do, you know.

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6 comments:

Maria said...

LOL! Anything to make a buck!

Haralee said...

Carol,
That was very funny and to the point! I do know several women that are running down that river of denial. I am in the menopuse business, making sleepwear for women with night sweats down the road in Portland, haralee.com, so I am asked as an expert. I love your pictures as an answer to the question, "could I be going through menopause/"

Rositta said...

Thanks Carol, I needed a laugh. Thank God I'm all through that and it wasn't fun. Drug companies, well don't even get me started...ciao

mica said...

Stuff like this from drug makers, I consider helpful, but really--is this a proliferation of incompetence, or a real concern for some people--am I or ain't I in menopause? I laughed quite a bit on this, a wonderful break from scouring for solutions to hot flashes...

all your pics were wonderful:)

Anonymous said...

I understand the humor that you can see in the menopause predictor kit but to be honest there are other situations (like mine) where an ectopic pregnancy and the resulting removal of the fallopian tube 4 years ago has left me suffering from the symptoms of perimenopause for the past two years, including crazy hormone mood swings, hot flashes, and missed periods. I won't even be 30 until November. A kit like that sure could help women in similar situations as mine who arent necessarily expected to go into menopause for another 10-20 years but for some reason they are. Sorry to kill the humor if i did.

PHD said...

Yeah, very hilarious! However, I'm 43, my mother was THROUGH menopause at 42, I've been more fertile in the last few years then E-V-E-R, and as of this moment I'm more than a week and a half late, yet no pregnancy tests are coming up positive (4 so far). And I've had most of those "symptoms" forever (been workin' on that). I just went looking for one of these (since knowing its results could conceivably save me a trip to the gyno), but I can't find one!!! I would find it MOST HELPFUL at the moment. And, for the record, everyone is different. My mother didn't have a single symptom - they just stopped one day (maybe that's when my symptoms will finally GO AWAY). A test like this probably would have been helpful to her as well. Just for the record.

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