Hotties

Menopause, medicine shortages, and making our own rules

Back in December, I went to refill my prescription for HRT, only to be told they were out. Not just out for the day, or the week, but until January. So, I had to switch to a different kind—something I really didn’t want to do. It took me five years of suffering through relentless, drenching, miserable hot flashes (which I prefer to call hotties, because let’s be honest, “hot flashes” sounds like something a Victorian woman would say before fainting onto a chaise lounge). Five years of suffering before finally deciding that HRT was worth the risk. And now, I’m back in the unknown. It’s April now and they still don’t have my original prescription.

It’s funny how much shame is baked into the language of menopause. Going through the change. Oh, she’s menopausal. The way we talk about it makes it sound like we’re fading out, becoming irrelevant. It’s no wonder so many of us grow up believing that after a certain age, we’re dismissed from the world.

I follow this Instagram account, Welcome to Heidi, where the creator, a fucking fabulous woman was talking about exactly that—how she thought she wasn’t valuable anymore because that was the message she heard over and over. It got me thinking about all the ways society has ignored or diminished women’s experiences. For so long, we’ve been expected to just deal with things that completely upend our bodies, our emotions, and our sense of self. And we did. Because what choice did we have?

But something is shifting. We’re talking about it now. We’re rejecting the shame.

In my band, Madison Violet, we have been performing a song for the last couple of years—originally called PMS Party, written by Maya Francis, a Swedish songwriter. At first, the song resonated with me, but as I moved into this next phase, it felt like it didn’t quite fit anymore. So, I rewrote the second and third verses to reflect my own experience with menopause. It felt like reclaiming something.

Even still, deciding to go on HRT was a struggle. I worried—about risks, about everything we’ve been told to fear. The big C loomed in my mind. Was I making a mistake? Was I inviting some unknown consequence? These fears weren’t based in fact so much as in conditioning, in the vague but persistent warnings we absorb over a lifetime. In the end, I decided that the ability to live my life—without seven thousand hotties a day—was worth the risk of something else.

And now, after all that, my prescription is unavailable.

It feels symbolic in a way. We finally start talking about menopause and demanding solutions, and suddenly, they run out of what we need. But we don’t just disappear because the world hasn’t made space for us. We make our own space. We rewrite our own songs. We call it what it is.

And we keep going.