Surfing the Cortisol Rush

Ministerial Meandering

Surfing the cortisol rush

Or the endocrine wave in its entirety.  A savage tsunami of uncontrollable emotions and feelings that leave you feeling as though a switchback ride followed by a roller-coaster, finishing with an elephant lifting you in his trunk and smashing you repeatedly on the ground - would be preferable.  

Are you safe from this experience?  Are any of us?  For quite some time (many months) I would wake up to the sensation that I needed to kill something/someone/anything.  I told Sheila - as gently as I could - that I thought I needed a punch-bag to get rid of my early morning aggression.

Fortunately, I have a daughter, Ruth, who is an Integrative Medicine Specialist, and has made endocrinology her special interest.  Having reviewed the medication some other person had prescribed for me, she suggested that I drop one of the compounds entirely, and now Sheila is significantly safer in the mornings than she was.

I went through the male menopause years ago, though I have been so messed around and medicated since, I’m not sure my body knows what’s going on half the time.  But I’m in good company.  There are a lot of what I might refer to as ‘mature practitioners’ at the gym I go to - one gutsy lady turning up with her walker, before she hits the machines.  I am also aware that some of the younger ones discuss their mood swings and other perimenopausal symptoms, so I am convinced that Ruth’s plan to hold life-style seminars for just such ladies will be a sell-out.

The men at the gym vary from insanely fit to sadly decrepit - but they are still there and they are still trying, and I admire that determination.  The insanely fit may be helping their muscle hypertrophy with added steroids - but it’s none of my business.  I’m probably just jealous that I didn’t look like them in my forties and fifties.

Cortisol, I am reliably informed, is a hormone.  We were taught very little about hormones or vitamins in medical school for the simple reason that very little was known about them.  There was a rather dubious joke that went around about ‘not being able to make a vitamin’ - and I’ll leave you to work out the other half of it.

I remember being asked in my final Physiology Exam Viva where cortisol was made.  I knew it came from the adrenal gland, but when asked which part of the adrenal exactly, I went into a momentary panic, and said ‘I can’t remember - but I can draw it for you!’  That had the examiners chuckling as they said they knew what the adrenal gland looked like, but I said I meant I could draw the cyclopentanoperhydrophenanthene ring structure of cortisol.  That raised an eyebrow, so I was challenged to do just that.  I did it - but I wouldn’t have been able to if one of my friends - just before my viva - had said, ‘Do you know what all these hormone-things are based on?’  I didn’t, of course - so he showed me - literally 15 minutes before my viva and that question.

They were all ‘hormone-things’ in my time at medical school, and since then science has found out so much more about them, and even discovered more hormone-producing organs that we had no idea about in the 60’s.  I am glad that people like Ruth are around to explain all the nonsense that goes on in my brain.  So should you be; and in case you think I should be forgetting my younger daughter - Hannah - she will be the one to pick us up as a paramedic when we go completely off the plot - and make sure we arrive at the asylum alive.  See you there.

Philip+