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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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>, 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n