The Unspoken Signs: Early Perimenopause Symptoms I Blamed on Hashimoto’s

Week of Small Victories and Garden Battles

It's been another good week! I'm grateful to report sustained energy, no pain, and not hitting a wall by mid-afternoon. The stability from the 4 pumps of HRT is truly making daily life manageable again.

My appetite is slowly returning, and while I'm eating smaller portions, I am making a conscious effort to eat to fuel my body rather than just giving in to the lack of desire for food. My biggest struggle remains simply finding the desire to eat.

Garden Successes (And Pest Setbacks)

With spring almost to an end, the gardens are well underway. I’ve had to task my husband with fixing a water pipe that I apparently managed to slice at some point while weeding—a clear sign of my enthusiastic, if sometimes messy, gardening style!

We have plenty of positive signs of fruit, too: my strawberries have given me a few berries, another berry bush looks promising, and my blueberries are amazingly full of flowers.

The biggest challenge now is the brown bronze beetles. They have finally come out to play late this year, and they are actively eating my apple and plum trees. Hubby has been spraying, but there hasn't been much luck. It's frustrating to see the damage—it's back to the drawing board for us with what we are still doing wrong in the garden.

A Gentle Reminder

I did manage to bake some bread, make a dessert, and tidy up the last few gardens, planting the final seedlings. However, the energy push brought a gentle reminder: hip pain returned at the end of the week, suggesting I might have pushed a little too hard.

Also, a new, weird thing has happened since perimenopause started: I now get a rash on my hands from the dirt when gardening. It’s yet another strange sensitivity I have to manage! 

The Unspoken Signs: Symptoms I Blamed on Hashimoto’s

This sustained stability has given me the mental clarity to look back at the years before the crippling joint pain and identify the subtle, early warnings of perimenopause that were completely brushed off by doctors—or that I wrongly put down to my Hashimoto’s or other unexplained issues.

Here are the early signs that, in hindsight, were screaming "Hormones":

• Early Period Regularity: At 38, my period started coming more regularly, which I mentioned in my first blog. This was a red flag, given my history, but it was dismissed.

• Dry, Itchy Ear: I had a dry, itchy left ear that was so bad it lasted for two years.

• Heart Palpitations: I suffered from frequent heart palpitations, which I initially attributed to my ferritin or T4 being out of sync. Once those levels were optimal, I knew the palpitations were coming from a different, unseen hormonal source.

• Nighttime Leg Twitching: This started around age 38, where my legs would twitch at night around my period. This symptom has completely stopped now that I’m on 4 pumps of Estrogen Gel.

• Chronic Rash: For the past seven to eight months, I had a horrific rash up my back. The astonishing news is that this rash has fully cleared up now that I’m on 4 pumps of Estrogen Gel.

• Subtle Sweating: I sometimes had night sweats, but not often. When my thyroid was more optimal, I would get hot flushes, but nothing that would make me overheat too much.

• The Crippling Pain: Last but not least was the crippling joint, bone, muscle, and hip pain that made life unbearable and forced me to seek help.

It’s astonishing to realize how many seemingly random, separate issues were all linked to the same root cause—a hormonal imbalance—and how much relief the HRT is providing beyond just the joint pain.

My journey has taught me that the symptom checklist for perimenopause is far wider than what we are typically told.

What have been some of your first, earliest, or weirdest signs of perimenopause that were dismissed by doctors, or that you initially blamed on another chronic condition? Share your story below!