I can sort of relate. I'm 48 and 11 weeks post op from total abdominal hysterectomy taking everything except my right ovary. I've been dealing with extreme anxiety due to stress in my marriage and over finances. I spent most of last year looking for a job without any success and then found out in August that I needed the surgery and had it done December 11. I was feeling anxious and stressed before my surgery because there was the possibility of cancer and we were trying to raise the necessary funds on a Go Fund Me because I was uninsured. I thought I would feel better after the surgery and for a few weeks in early recovery I did.
Now that I'm back to looking for work, I wake up before my alarm goes off and I feel anxious and jittery. This doesn't seem to happen on weekends. My husband refuses to work and lives off other people's money. I thought we were going to lose our house at the beginning of the year. I became a certified nursing assistant last year and just as I started looking for work, I found out I needed the hysterectomy and it put everything on hold. Now, I don't have anything left in the tank physically or mentally to work at a hospital or assisted living. I'm trying to get back in with a remote call center job and have already gotten two rejections. I have one application in with the company I used to work for and they were a horrible place to work, but I'd rather be stressed working at home than working 12 hour hospital shifts. My exercise has been affected too. Rewind back to summer 2023 and I was absolutely crushing STS2.0. And now I'm doing a workout called PVOLVE, which is more low impact functional fitness that doesn't leave me feeling wiped out. Summer 2023 my energy levels were through the roof but I didn't have anxiety this bad. I've been trying to find work in hopes of leaving my marriage but things are so darned expensive, I'm not sure if I can make enough to make ends meet. Also when and if I do leave, there will be no settlement and I'm afraid that I'll get stuck with half of the federal income tax debt even though its clear in 2018 my husband made a sizeable amount of money and I was making part time income that bought gas and groceries. The mortgage is a owner finance and I'm not on the mortgage but we're upside down on the house. There are no savings (except my secret bank accounts), no assets, no retirement accounts, investments, nothing. And to add to it, a few weeks ago I took my car in for an oil change expecting to pay $60 and maybe a little more for some oil leaks and walked out needed $4,700 in repairs. I haven't used credit for anything in over 2 years after interest rates were being raised and was so proud that my debt was slowly being chipped away at and my credit score was going up and one car problem wiped out all my progress.
My husband is expecting to get some money for helping a friend refinance his house and I'm waiting to see if the anxiety gets better because he says I can see a therapist once we get the money and I'm also thinking of getting my thyroid checked too as well as cortisol levels. My blood pressure and pulse rate have been elevated too.
You mentioned your're on HRT. Do you use progesterone in addition to estrogen therapy? I've been using natural progesterone cream since 2021 because I kept thinking it would help the cyst on my left ovary go away (it didn't because the cyst was a mucinous cystadenofibroma and surgery was the only answer) but in the Dr. Lee book, what you Doctor may not tell you about menopause, it talks about the benefits of natural progesterone supplementation. I hope you can get some answers and get your groove back. I hope so too for me because I used to be able to get up at 5 AM, workout, walk my dog and be ready for my day and now I'm doing good to make it through a early morning workout and not even be working yet.
