Your Fire Years

You read the first book about your body under the covers, with a flashlight.This is the second one.The sleep went. The words started walking out of your mouth mid-sentence. The rage arrived with no return address. So you rehearsed your symptoms in the car, trimmed the list so you wouldn't waste anybody's time, and got The Shrug:"e;It's just age."e;"e;That's stress."e;"e;It's menopause. It's normal. It passes."e;It isn't just age. It isn't just stress. And you do not have to wait for it to pass.Your Fire Years is the perimenopause and menopause book your doctor never read. Colleen Ann Murphy, MD, is a board-certified integrative medicine physician and former Chief Medical Officer and Chair of Medicine. She has spent two decades on both sides of the clipboard. This is the straight-talking sister at the kitchen table at 3 a.m. Plain words. Real anatomy. Nothing softened because it might embarrass somebody. No instructions to be patient.This book is for you if:You have been told your labs are normal and you know you are notYou lost a word in a meeting and thought about it for four daysYou wake at 3 a.m. and lie there convinced you are losing itYour body stopped responding to everything that used to workYou came in about your sleep and were offered an antidepressantYou are thirty-eight and were told you're too young for any of thisYou are fifty-eight and were told you're too late You'll find out:Why it can start in your late thirties, and why your "e;normal"e; labs may have answered the wrong questionWhat actually helps the heat, the 3 a.m. wake-ups, the fog, and the rageWhere your desire went, and what it takes to turn it back onThe headline that stole twenty years of hormone therapy from a generation of women, and what the evidence says nowReal options if you can't take hormones or don't want to, including for survivorsWhy muscle is the currency of the next fifty yearsHow to run your fifteen-minute visit, with the exact words to say Then comes the Toolkit. Your Fire Score puts a number on what you've been living with. Her Card is for the woman who needs this next. You also get scripts, a page to hand your doctor, a page for the person who loves you, The Fire Years Manifesto, and a Fire Brunch kit for the friends who have been quietly going through it too.One more thing. The author has no financial relationship with any product, company, or pharmacy named in this book. Nobody here is selling you a supplement.Thirty-five to eighty-five is fifty years. Kings get bunting for less.We are unpaused. Say it at normal volume.Read it. Then hand it to her. Somebody has to go first.