Breathe
By Aidée Zamorano,
I was the last of my school generation to menstruate. I was a freshman in high school, days away from my quinceañera. In a school where most of us were girls, periods were public knowledge. My mom's friends worried excessively about my case, but I enjoyed it to the fullest: I could still swim and climb on the trampolines or go to McDonald's games with my brothers because I had a "girl's body. It was normal for me; my mom had also started at fourteen.
The Carmelite Missionaries of St. Teresa - yes, I studied in a school of nuns - made sure that we saw menstruation as something disgusting, shameful and almost a divine punishment. We never had a sex education class. If in third grade a group of parents prevented us from reading Aura, what were we going to have classes on hormonal changes! Talking about the blood that some classmates left on the benches was forbidden.
When the time came I cried hugging my mom. For me it meant leaving the pool and facing the director's comments about smelling like fish. That day my dad took me to the opera, it was uncomfortable to sit for four hours in a huge towel with wings and my brown flowered jeans. I felt everyone noticed the bulge in my crotch and the "smell" I imagined filled Bellas Artes.
Fortunately, my menarche was brief. Until my quinceañera, my mom would religiously take me to check the towel under my salmon-colored dress, as if menstruation might reappear at the least opportune moment.
Today I tenderly embrace that fifteen-year-old version of myself. I remember the fear with which I lived my first periods. In high school, with men in the room, we were told that they should never know about our towels.
It has been 292 menses since then, discounting my pregnancies and breastfeeding. I have had four consecutive years of monthly bleeding, a count I took recently, when I understood that a fainting spell, dry skin that left spots on my arms and legs, tingling in my left arm, dizziness, excessive hair loss, waking up drenched in sweat and other symptoms were the beginning of perimenopause. It was a three-month journey: between consultations, misdiagnoses and expenses, until an endocrinologist -on the recommendation of a friend- helped me find the answer. And when she, my friends and the ChatGPT agreed on the diagnosis I felt great relief, for a moment I feared a relapse of anxiety and depression.
It's exhausting that these days hormonal stages - menarche, pregnancy, breastfeeding, menopause - are still treated as individual problems, when they should be collective issues. I bet I was not the first to arrive with these symptoms to see medical specialists. In a European country where 51% of the population is female and whose GDP and per capita income is higher than in Mexico, I did not think that such a natural diagnosis would be so complicated.
Here it is not easy to find a health system that understands our needs. Coral Herrera was right when she told me: "I hope you will soon get over the idea that we are better off here.
Women continue to face a medicine that trivializes our symptoms and perpetuates misinformation. Maybe you too have had itchy skin for months that no one knows how to explain, or you are afraid to wash your hair because you feel like you have half the amount you did three months ago.
In Mexico, where more than 50% of women work in the informal sector, it is urgent that public policies guarantee access to decent services. The IMSS reports more than 70,000 estrogen replacement treatments per year, but these figures leave out those who do not have social security. Visiting endocrinologists, dermatologists, gynecologists to "discover" the beginning of a process expected for all women should not be a class privilege.
This stage may last me fifteen more years, or maybe it won't. I've read that it can start as early as 35. I have read that it can start as early as 35. When the day of my last menstruation arrives, I am going to throw myself a party and we will toast with menstrual cups. Because if the heteronormative system has taught us to be traumatized and scared with the arrival of menopause, I am going to throw a party with mariachi, for the system my body will be seen as less available for men's consumption, I guess they think that makes us sad and maybe that is why some medical specialists find it easier to tell us that it is stress, rather than finding out the answer in a hormonal profile.
The opinions expressed are the responsibility of the authors and are absolutely independent of the position and editorial line of the company. Opinion 51.
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