wierd physical stuff

[ljgeoff]

I got really cold last night. It's a weird kind of "really cold" that has only happened to me maybe eight or ten times that I can think of, and most of those times have been postpartum. And google tells me that is actually something called postpartum chill phenomenon:

Shivers and shakes. Immediately after delivery many women experience chills and whole-body shakes, probably due to a resetting of the body's temperature regulating system after a long bout of hard work.

Yeah, so just like that, except that I haven't had a baby in over eight years.

Digging a little more, I see that these same type of chills occure during menopause. "The body treats nursing like menopause with all the same symptoms due to lack of estrogen."

I got home from work around 10:30 pm, and went right to bed, but couldn't get warm and couldn't get to sleep. My muscles were cramped with cold. Finally, I got up and got into the shower. After being under the spray for a couple of minutes, I started shivering and couldn't stop. I was pretty surprised, because those are symptoms of hypothermia. Finally, I warmed up, dried off and stumbled into bed. But my muscles are sore today.

Comments

[kightp.livejournal.com]

Yup. Think of it as the flip side of hot flashes. The body's temperature regulators are intimately connected to the endocrine system, and when it starts doing backflips, it takes a while for the system to get things sorted out.

I actually had the chills long before I experienced my first hot flash.

[ljgeoff.livejournal.com]

It's such a weird kind of being cold -- as if it's coming from the inside. Being in bed under a heap of blankets for over an hour didn't help at all. I could feel the warmth on my skin, but my muscles were still cramped ridged with cold. Then, when I was in the shower and started to warm up, the shivers were so severe that they almost knocked me off my feet.

[kightp.livejournal.com]

Hot flashes are a weird kind of heat, too - you feel like you're running a high fever, but your skin is perfectly normal to the touch.

The body is a fucking mystery.