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"I had an exhausting weekend. I didn&amp;#039;t do anything too taxing during the day, but Friday and Saturday night were horrible. Both nights, I was tortured with night nights that woke me up 8 or 9 times, heart racing, body sweating. And then insomnia after that. I woke up more tired than when I went to bed. &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;m going on hormones,&amp;quot; I told Steve, at 3 am. &amp;quot;I can&amp;#039;t take it anymore. It&amp;#039;s a quality of life, thing,&amp;quot; I continued. &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;m irritable all the time. I can&amp;#039;t sleep. I&amp;#039;m tortured.&amp;quot; I even thought of starting immediately by slapping on the combi patch that my gynecologist had given me last year as a sample. I&amp;#039;ve kept them stored away. I know where they are. But I resisted. I&amp;#039;ve got 4 more weeks to go in a clinical trial where I&amp;#039;ve devoted my body to finding out whether exercise, yoga, or regular activities combined with either omega-3 fish oil or a placebo work to alleviate hot flashes. I don&amp;#039;t need 4 more weeks to tell them what&amp;#039;s not working, but if I took hormones now, I&amp;#039;d be out of the trial. I&amp;#039;ve come this far. And that&amp;#039;s the thing about perimenopause/menopause. I&amp;#039;ve come this far, though how much further do I have? Another 5, 6, 10 years? One article said that 8% of women have hot flashes into their 70s. Now that&amp;#039;s a special circle of hell. The reason I haven&amp;#039;t taken hormones is that I&amp;#039;m kind of a chicken. I have two first cousins, my age and younger, who have battled breast cancer. An aunt as well. Another aunt, whom I was named after, who died of the disease. A sister-in-law who died in August from a different, aggressive gynecological cancer, and a family friend who passed away last year from ovarian cancer.  Estrogen is the gold standard. It works. My mother was on hormones for years. Decades. And then I had another thought. But this blog is getting too long, so that thought will have to wait until Wednesday \u2026 To be continued \u2026 "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.womansday.com/health-fitness/a40781/are-we-there-yet-15817/>