There’s a specific kind of dread that comes from realizing you just called a spreadsheet “the numbers thing” on a client call, and worse, said it with confidence. I’d been building a bit of side income for about a year, mostly in the hours after everyone else went to bed, and for months I told myself the fog was just exhaustion. I bought better coffee. Three kinds, actually. None of them were the problem.
By early afternoon most days, I had the energy and sharpness of a houseplant, and not a resilient one. I was forgetting client emails, losing words mid-sentence, and generally suspecting I was just getting worse at my own job.
What I hadn’t considered, mostly because nobody had said it directly, was that I was in perimenopause, and that fatigue and brain fog are two of the most common symptoms of it. Once that clicked, I looked into treatment and ended up with Winona, a telehealth service that connects you with a board-certified doctor and prescribes bioidentical hormone therapy, shipped to your door, based on your actual symptoms rather than a guess.
The process itself was a lot less dramatic than the problem: an intake, a doctor’s consult, and a treatment plan built around what I was actually dealing with. Winona says most patients notice a difference within 90 days, some sooner (I was one of the sooner ones) though I’d call it weeks, not days, and I’d rather undersell it than not.
My afternoons stopped belonging to the houseplant. I haven’t called a spreadsheet “the numbers thing” since, though I reserve the right to bring it back ironically.
This is where I ended up: Winona. If you’ve been building something on borrowed hours and lately those hours feel emptier than they should, or you know someone who’s been buying suspiciously specific coffee, this is worth passing along.