Hi and welcome! What you describe for peri is very common. You are not going crazy! It’s good to check anything of concern with the doctor, but what you describe is very familiar. I had the same symptoms as you, starting from age 41. I was going to the gym 5-6 days a week and eating healthy, but I started to notice I was getting much more sore from exercise and also getting injured more easily. I really hurt a ligament at the gym doing exercises on a machine I’d done many times before without ever previously hurting myself. I then read that hormonal changes can change ligaments making them more vulnerable to injury.
What has ultimately helped me has been going on hormone medication. You may not need that but it’s an option if your symptoms are troublesome, as it can help with basically all peri symptoms. I would seek medical advice if you want to look into it. There’s an app developed by Dr Louise Newson from the UK that includes a forum for those in perimenopause/menopause called the Balance app. That may be a useful resource, as is her podcast. Certainly if you post on the app you’ll get people connecting with what you experience and with ideas of what helps. For me, I had the additional symptoms of extremely severe and strange hormonal depression and anxiety setting in from age 47. That’s when I eventually went down the hormone medication route because I was desperate. Hopefully that side of it will be minimal for you but there’s help out there if you need it. I actually now see a hormone specialist doctor through a menopause clinic and she’s excellent. Her knowledge is much deeper and more advanced than the GP, but there are some GPs who specialise in perimenopause and menopause too.
You may find you need to modify your exercise program compared to what you have been used to. You might want to mix in something like some gentle yoga and maybe have more breaks and go more gently with everything. I know that’s frustrating when you are used to working out at a certain level. I already had a lot of health issues so was going to the gym to manage and improve my health as much as possible and it was great until peri really started to change things.
Anyway, take good care. You can always get the left leg looked at just to rule out other things, but like you I’ve gone through the whole thing of worrying about things like MS based on the symptoms. I’m 50 now and things are better. The hormone meds help me a lot even though they gave me a bad spell of histamine intolerance side effects for a while, but I’m through that now and life is much better in terms of the whole peri experience. The meds helped with weird body pains including rheumatic/arthritic like pain, improved sleep and really helped the mental health side. I have neuropathic pain issues as well that predate perimenopause, but the longer I’ve been on a higher dose of the hormone meds, that’s improved too. Now that I’m at the end of peri I’ve also developed carpal tunnel syndrome which is apparently also often connected, but that too is improving now.
All the best,
Eagle Ray
