No, It's Not Hot in Here: A Husbands Guide to Understanding Menopause - Hardcover

Roth, Dick

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0965506738 ISBN 13: 9780965506731

Publisher: North Star Pubns, 1999

Synopsis

Presents the facts about menopause, exploring both the physical and psychological aspects, to help men understand what their wives are experiencing

About this title

From the Inside Flap

"In preparing to write this book, I've asked a lot of women what they want from their husbands. Far and away, the number one answer is something like this: "Understanding. I just wish he could understand what I am going through."

From "NO' IT'S NOT HOT IN HERE": A Husband's Guide to Understanding Menopause At long last, men have a book to help them understand what their menopausal wives are going through! Here in straightforward and east-to-follow language, you will learn what women most want and need during this mysterious (and potentially trying) life passage. Completely and concisely -- and with a minimum of scientific and academic jargon -- this book presents the facts about menopause. In examining this major transition, author Dick Roth explores both the physical and the psychological aspects, offering anecdotes and explanations along with the latest evidence. As he makes his case, Roth now and then bares his own soul -- but always with lively and down-to-earth humor.

Roth also delves into the controversies that swirl around menopause -- from whether or not a woman should take supplemental hormones to the reasons for the "medicalization" of menopause. Clearly, he aims to help husbands, family members, and significant others become aware of the information (and misinformation) that a woman in midlife is likely to receive. Perhaps most importantly, Roth points out how men can avoid being judgmental or condescending in their efforts to help their mates.

The bookends with a "word to the wives." But "NO, IT'S NOT HOT IN HERE" is, in fact, a complete enough treatment of menopause to serve as an excellent resource for any woman who wants to read an unbiased book -- one that presents the facts and choices without trying to sway her in one way or another.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

From Chapter Two - The Marvels of a Woman's Body

The female body has to be one of the most impressive creations in nature. The more I've learned about women and menopause, the more I stand in awe of what it takes for us to reproduce ourselves. The workings of the female body inspire me. It's the very dance of creation, a waltz of wonderment. Biologically, women are impossibly complex. Their chemistry is as subtle as a delicately flavored gourmet soup, only a hundred times more intricate. Amazing Womankind

Briefly, here's what happens inside a woman that enables our species to live on. This is also what stops happening at menopause.

Once a month, with uncanny regularity, an inborn message triggers a change in the balance of chemical messengers in a woman's veins, and her blood washes her cells with an ages-old reproductive call. In response, new micromixes of hormones go into action, some commanding other hormone-producing organs, some turning cellular functions on and off like a light, and some acting as direct agents, causing her reproductive tissues to swell.

No one knows precisely what initiates this innate life-sustaining process. We can be taught to point to a woman's glands, organs, and portions of the brain, like the pituitary, the ovaries, and the hypothalamus, and to say where this or that hormone is produced or received.

We can learn long lists of confusing scientific names and initials, like estrodial, estrone, and progesterone, or LH, FSH, and GnRH. We can measure her hormones, time them, replace them, and observe their actions. We can try to understand the process, or even try to control it.

But the more we come to know about a woman's inborn reproductive system, the more we must stand in awe.

In the amazing monthly cycle that enables a woman to reproduce humankind, all of her three trillion cells are flushed with her hormonal messengers, but only a relative handful, a billion or so in her ovaries, are stimulated into action. After these ovarian cells receive the signals that only they are equipped to receive, they grow toward their unique purpose: to ready this month's single egg for a possible mating with one of a man's three hundred million frantically competing sperm cells, swimming for their lives in a do-or-die race.

Of course, the mating is only a possibility. Regardless, a woman's body goes through the ritual every twenty-eight days or so, in an unfailing attempt to be prepared. Ovaries, Ova, and Ovulation

Nature, in her wisdom, has provided every woman with more than enough eggs to ensure the continuation of our species -- way more than she'll ever use. But all she'll ever have.

As a female grew in her own mother's womb, her cells differentiated differently from those of a male, creating ovaries, a uterus, and a vagina instead of a scrotum, testes, and a penis. By the time of her birth, her ovaries contained as many as half a million single-celled eggs, repositories of her genetic contribution to evolution.

From the onset of her menstruation, or menarche (from the Greek words meaning "month" and "beginning"), at about age twelve or thirteen, to her last period or menopause (also from the Greek, meaning "month" and "cessation") at around fifty, a woman's ovaries prepare her eggs in their follicles. They start with about four or five hundred thousand eggs, and prepare as many as one thousand per month, or ten thousand to twelve thousand per year. The ovaries might prepare fewer and fewer eggs with the passing of time, but the body keeps on preparing ova to start new life until the supply is gone.

Monthly, as a woman's system is stimulated by her hormones, between a dozen and a thousand of these eggs begin to grow inside her ovaries, swelling in their protective coverings, known as follicles. Almost always, only one matures enough to disgorge an egg; the rest wither and die. These follicles turn out to be of great importance, because along with the egg they release estrogen and progesterone, the female hormones that are of such concern during menopause.

During the human female's four decades of fertility, each of her two ovaries, while at rest, is about the size and shape of an almond in its shell, but quite smooth-surfaced, as if the almond were shelled and peeled. When stimulated, the growing ovarian follicles swell up like a cluster of soap bubbles. What was once small, smooth, and regular grows large, lumpy, and asymmetrical as several follicles compete for the chance to be the only one to release an egg, or ovum.

Nobody really knows why one follicle prevails, but when a woman's body has, in its wisdom, chosen from among the candidates, that one continues to expand, balloon-like, until there is an enormous bulging on the ovary's surface. At its fullest point, the ripe follicle bursts and casts the mature ovum toward the fallopian tube and the swimming sperm, in the phenomenon known as ovulation.

Along with the egg, the follicle releases a wash of hormones that trigger the body to create a place in the uterus to nurture the fertilized egg. After a few days, if no sperm is successful in its quest and the egg is not fertilized, the uterus somehow knows, and other hormones are released that in turn trigger both the unfertilized egg and the uterine lining to be sloughed as menstrual flow.

And then the cycle starts all over again. Hormones

However, if a single sperm cell had succeeded in penetrating the egg, the fertilized ovum would then have sent a different set of hormonal signals through the blood, and the woman's body would have engaged in an entirely different process. In this case, if all goes as planned, the fertilized egg attaches to the lining of the uterus, finds nourishment, divides, differentiates, grows, and -- perhaps, if everything goes well -- becomes another new human being.

Either way it goes, period or pregnancy, the process is determined by changes in the delicate internal balance of hormones. A small change in one hormone level and follicle growth is stimulated; a few micrograms of another -- far less than half a grain of salt -- and the uterus begins making ready to receive the ovum.

Edition details

• Publisher: North Star Pubns
• Publication date: 1999
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0965506738
• ISBN 13: 9780965506731
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 174