My dear readers would know that I had a frozen right shoulder a few years ago.  You would also know that I'm having some loss of flexibility and pain in my left shoulder for a while now.  The knees, they hurt.  I feel bloated and uncomfortable about 50% of the time anymore.   I'm tired more often than not, but I find myself often waking up in the middle of the night and again by 5 or 6am.  My sinuses are constantly swollen and basically close up at night so I am now snoring, which I never did, and also getting woken from this issue.  I'm emotional and anxiety ridden - if I didn't know better I would think it was PMS.  I'm forgetting things and disorganized lately, which is 100% not me.

Sure, I'm overweight and that is probably a lot of it.  I'm not the type of person who would dive into hormone replacement etc, but when I asked "at what point that is advantageous" at my recent doctor's appointment it was indicated as "not needed unless I was having problems" (after I noted that I haven't been having as many hot flashes as I was there for a while).

Ok.  I felt a little dismissed, but I took that answer.

In one of my favorite communities (The Why Files if you must know) the topic of testosterone replacement was going on in a chat - and basically how doctors were offering it to several of the men in the group because their levels were slightly lowered.

Now I'm a little pissed.  Seriously?  You don't feel like getting down and dirty as often as you used to and maybe don't feel like yourself and the medical establishment jumps to solve that for you.  I, frankly, feel like shit more often than not and I'm left to trying various approaches on my own to deal with various symptoms.

I am not a "wah, I am so oppressed" type of person.  But I will point you back to the long touted "signs of a heart attack" that rarely match the typical symptoms a woman feels under similar duress and say that our medicine isn't doing right by women.  Fact is, I bet my insurance wouldn't cover those types of treatments unless we hopped through all kinds of tests and met a ton of criteria.... but if I were a dude and wanted female hormones... this world is so f'd.