I Knew It Was Hormones.

What I knew before the labs came back

I had just moved back from San Francisco.

We were in the middle of the post-COVID world, the part where you could finally see a doctor in person again but had to wait six weeks for the appointment. I had just gotten in to see an OB-GYN.

For weeks I had been waking up in the middle of the night completely drenched. Not warm. Not uncomfortable. Drenched. The kind of night sweats where you wake up convinced you have run a marathon in your sleep.

I told him everything. The night sweats, the exhaustion, the feeling that my body was no longer behaving like my body. He listened. Then he said, let us try birth control and see if it helps.

That was the whole appointment. No deeper conversation. No real investigation. No curiosity.

I remember sitting there on the table, paper crinkling under my legs, thinking, I am in my thirties. Why are we treating this like an experiment? But I took the prescription anyway.

The exact words blur now, but what I heard was clear. We do not actually know. And what I felt was, maybe I am wrong.

Because I knew it was hormones. I knew my cortisol was high. I knew something was happening inside my body that was not normal for me. And yet somehow I left that appointment questioning myself instead of questioning the appointment.

That moment is the one I want to take back.

For years after that, I lived inside a different version of every appointment. I was always preparing. Bringing evidence. Tracking symptoms. Doing research. Reading studies. Walking into rooms with notebooks because if the provider was not going to ask the right questions, I was going to bring the right answers.

I thought that was advocacy. It was. But it was also exhausting in a way I did not name for a long time. Every appointment started feeling like I had to build a case for my own experience. Patient and lawyer at the same time.

Ironically, getting pregnant five years later changed everything. I switched practices. I started over. And eventually I found a practitioner who was willing to ask a different question.

Instead of trying to convince me that what I was experiencing was not happening, she became curious about why it was happening. She listened longer, asked better questions, looked at my history instead of a single symptom. Most importantly, she treated me like a participant in my own care instead of a problem to solve quickly.

For the first time in years, I felt believed.

The labs eventually came back. Hormone shifts. Cortisol dysregulation. Patterns we had been tracking together. If I am honest, the numbers mattered less than I expected them to. By the time the labs confirmed it, I had already spent years being told to wait, to monitor, to power through, to try something else. The labs did not tell me anything my body had not already been saying. They simply proved my body had been telling the truth the whole time.

That is the part nobody warns you about. The validation is good. The years it took to get the validation are the loss.

The pivot was not him. The pivot was me.

The moment I trusted myself, I hired my core.

I stopped looking for one provider who would believe me and started building the team that would partner with me. The nurse practitioner who actually listens. The functional medicine doctor who orders the panels other people skip. The acupuncturist. The therapist who knew the difference between perimenopausal anxiety and the rest of my life. The friend who texted me articles in real time. The trainer who built strength back into a body that had been in survival mode for a decade.

Not one doctor. A team.

I found them the same way most women eventually find good care. Through other women. Not through a directory. Not through a hospital system. Not through insurance. Through a recommendation that started with, she actually listens.

That is the protocol most women are running, whether they call it that or not. Network medicine. Whisper networks. Friend texts that read like prescriptions.

Within the first ninety days of building the core, everything changed. We ran better testing. We discussed options. We built a plan instead of a prescription. The symptoms did not disappear overnight, but something else did. The feeling that I was crazy. The feeling that I was making it up. The feeling that I had to convince someone my body belonged to me.

That feeling went first. The body work came after.

If you are leaving every appointment feeling smaller than when you walked in, that is your answer. A good practitioner may not have every solution, but they should never make you doubt your own experience.

Your body is talking. If the person across from you is not listening, find someone who will. Then find the next one. You do not need one doctor. You need a core.

You are not difficult. You are not high-maintenance. You are not doing too much research. You are the only person who has lived inside that body for forty years. You are the expert on the data.

Build the team.

MOMumentally,

Erika

PS · The PHASE™ Vol I · Perimenopause is the workbook for the woman who is still in the wrong appointment. The Symptom Decoder. The Clinician Conversation Script. The labs to ask for. The language to walk in with. $27 · thisisphase.co

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Erika Hanafin Austria

Erika Hanafin Austria Founder, MOMumental Moments® · Publisher, MOMumental Reinvention Co-Founder, NeonID · Former CEO, HeyMama · 2x Top 50 Women Leaders, Virginia

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