Blog Posts by Ellen Dolgen

The weather was not hot. In fact, it was a beautiful spring day, and I was wearing a lightweight pantsuit. All of a sudden, I felt a flush of heat come over my entire body. Perspiration began dripping from my head trailing between my breasts creeping all the way down to the inner seams of my pants. It looked like I had just come from a Bikram yoga class, but instead I was in a business meeting!

I was no longer going to be able to ignore that nagging suspicion that something was going on with my body. Now, I and everyone around me had a clear sign of what was happening to me. I was in perimenopause.

I have blogged about hot flashes before, frankly, who hasn't? Hot flashes are one of the most frequent, dramatic, and alarming symptoms of perimenopause and menopause. I find it an amazing sign of women's resilience that we've found a way to laugh at this often-debilitating condition. I've heard all of the hot flash jokes. Hot flashes have been compared to power surges, brief

September is Menopause Awareness Month! We're so glad there's a month to bring attention to the needs of perimenopausal and menopausal women. Here at ellendolgen.com, we do this all year long and will continue to make sure you have the information you need to take care of yourself, even while you are called upon to take care of others. September also happens to be my birthday month, so look for a special "Happy Birthday to Me" post on September 17th. Today, we kick off the month with a reminder for you to be your own caregiver, and to take care of your own needs as well as those you love.

One of the lessons I had to learn in my journey towards hormone happiness was to place myself on my own to-do list. This would be easy to do if we lived in a vacuum with no one else depending upon us. However, priorities battle for top position in most women's lives. In my Menopause Mondays Blog: Menopause is the New Puberty™, I spoke of menopausal Moms sharing a home with pubescent teens

Last week I had the tremendous pleasure of interviewing Jessica Cline, Publisher of Riviera Magazine San Diego. I anticipated that our conversation would be a fun opportunity to explore the current trends in fashion and lifestyle with someone who is on top of the scene. Jessica has her finger on the pulse of style and fashion trends nationally and internationally. Boy, was I in for a surprise! Our talk was an enormously insightful and evolved perspective on life, fashion, and the art of living well. It turns out that fashion, even wearing your grandmother's brooch, can be a tool for helping you be and express more, YOU.

Q. Jessica, what recommendations and clues can you offer someone looking to create a fun and exciting lifestyle?

A. Fashioning our lives so to speak has to start first with the basics: finding a job, career, volunteer organization, or hobby that's fun for you and surrounds you with good people. (A life with good, fun people is the key to daily

Photo for August 20, 2012 Menopause Mondays- A Menopause Crash Course with USF Dr. Barry Verkauf

In our July 23rd post, Dr. Julia Frank said something profound in relation to the options available to treat menopause-related depression, "Some women will respond better to one [treatment] than another, but that has to be determined on an individual basis--it isn't predictable from large studies." This idea is something we need to hear again and again especially when the media blasts a headline claiming the medical advice we've believed in is now the very thing that puts us at risk of something possibly worse than the condition we're treating. Eventually, these conflicting reports begin merging with other dramatic claims into one, colossal doomsday prophesy, and we feel our health options counting down, like a Mayan Calendar, and December 21, 2012 is right around the corner! But wait. Maybe it's not that dramatic. Maybe there is a path through the confusion. We live in a time when access to information is at an all time high, but making sense of it is the real challenge.

Menopause Mondays: Menopause is the New Puberty™If you're in your 40s or 50s and you have kids in the house, you're probably familiar with what I like to call "dueling hormones." I've also seen this referred to as a "hormone house" or, my favorite, "mother nature's practical joke."

This is that ever-so-special time when Mom is going through perimenopause and menopause, and her kids are going through puberty, all under the same roof. Who just had a meltdown and locked themselves in their bedroom? Was it daughter, son, or Mom? With all these hormonal fluctuations happening at once, things can get more than a little hectic!

Fortunately, amidst the chaos (which will often peak during the holidays or other high-stress times like the start of a new school year), there is a real opportunity to take these challenges and turn them into a time of growth and connection. Often, the anger or outbreaks that come with hormonal fluctuations are really just an overflow or projection of the same anger and frustration that we might harbor