I'm melting...

There are so many things I want to write about in this space, but apart from the fact that I'm juggling several clients and deadlines, misery started for me as of the weekend. The Rainbow Voices concert went very well, the audience had fun, and I felt the sense of accomplishment and excitement that buoyed me after the last concert. But because the humidity had risen considerably during the day, I sang with rivulets of sweat pouring into my mouth. My hot flashes have returned to their summer frequency of every 45 minutes -- you can set your watch by them -- and the air feels like syrup to me. Most of May was actually lovely -- cool and sunny, in fact spring-like, which is odd for Toronto. We usually don't get spring. I've had a very happy May -- a happy winter, in fact. But now spring is over, in my book. And the Toronto summer is increasingly unbearable to me.

On top of everything else, I wrecked my back by standing through the whole concert and helping clean up afterward, so I'm feeling like a cross beached whale.

I'm counting the minutes before I leave for my summer in Calgary, where I expect the air to be dry. I remember the morning my friend Michel drove me to the airport in Edmonton after my 10-day vacation in Alberta last summer, when I felt almost frantic that I was leaving that wonderful air to return to what feels like a swamp to me. Thank God I don't live in New Orleans. I'm genetically a Teutonic type, but it's not so much the heat that bothers me. People laugh derisively about phrases like "But it's a dry cold!", but the truth is my life is dictated to a great extent by the amount of moisture in the air. I was even miserable when I lived in London, England. As soon as the humidity exceeds 45 percent on my little barometer, I turn into a dishrag.

How a dishrag resembles a beached whale, I'm not sure, but never mind. It's not just the hot flashes, but I become tired and lethargic in the summer, I get dizzy spells when I exert myself (low blood pressure, the doctor says) and I sweat like a longshoreman. (Well, I imagine longshoremen sweat as much as they supposedly swear. Can I blame the weather for my poor use of metaphor? I can try...) This condition runs in my family. We all hate hot weather. And my mother still gets hot flashes in the summertime at the age of 69! When people tell me, "Oh, they'll pass," I just laugh ruefully. (I asked the surgeon at the breast clinic a year and a half ago if the hot flashes, which were brought on in full force by chemotherapy, would pass eventually and he said, "Oh, yes." Standing in the corner of the examining room was a clinic volunteer, who locked eyes with me and slowly shook her head from side to side. "How old are you?" I asked. "Seventy-three," was her reply.)

Of course, I don't have air-conditioning in my house -- boiler heating precludes that, as I have no duct-work, and not enough exterior wall to support the no-duct kind of A/C. Last night I slept in my basement, which isn't a very cool basement, but it beats the second storey.

(The funny thing is, my hair loves humidity. I'm the type of irritating woman whose whole life seems to be one long quest for the right hairstyle, whose mood is substantially affected by the condition of my coiff. So when the rest of my body is happy -- when it's nice and dry outside -- my hair is flat and brittle and flyaway. But when I'm feeling like I want to die, my hair is full of body and curl. How many women do you know who travel with a barometer? I'm always meaning to call CBC Radio's morning show and beg them to include a humidity reading with the temperature on the weather forecast. It determines whether I should air-dry or blow-dry my hair, what kind of styling product to use -- and whether I'll have the energy to do any of it.)

Poor me. I could be living in an earthquake or hurricane or war zone. There are far worse things than heat and sweat and smog and the mouldy smell that hangs over our neighbourhood at this time of year. But hot flashes are only funny until you've experienced this level of temperature disturbance. I used to laugh when I saw the Shoppers Drug Mart ad where a woman runs into her backyard wearing shorts and a T-shirt in the dead of winter, and uncovers the air-conditioning unit. Now when I see that ad I want to cry. One thing they don't warn you about (well, nobody warns you about menopause at all, actually) is that when I'm not having a hot flash, I'm often so cold I can barely work. Hot flashes every 45 minutes means I'm freezing more than I'm hot. The effect of this seesaw on my sleep patterns is devastating, which is why I'm so tired all the time. I used to sleep eight hours a night easily. Now I wake up every half hour or so, when a hot flash comes, and when a cold "trough" comes.

There. Selfish rant over. Life is really pretty good otherwise!