For some reason, Maybelle’s not sure why, she ate an entire bag of doughnuts yesterday. They were the small ones, mind you, but still. A whole bag. The white powdered kind. Maybelle prefers the ones that taste like they have coconut on them, but those are hard to find when a gal is in the middle of a craving and has only the neighborhood convenience store at her disposal.

Although Maybelle did not eat them in one sitting—more like one sitting (on the floor), one ravaging (at the kitchen counter), and at least one reclining (on the couch)—eat them she did. She had put it off as long as she could, well past noon, but she was craving something soft and sweet, an unfortunate diet buster that’s been sabotaging her more and more frequently these days. Maybe she should ask her gynecologist if this is another disappointing development she can blame on menopause, even though her doctor keeps telling her she’s not in menopause yet.

“You’re not menopausal until a year goes by without a period,” he says as he scoots back from the examining table with a thrust and snaps off his plastic gloves as if he has just won some sort of vaginal duel.

“Even if you have symptoms for some ten years before.” Now he is jotting down notes in Maybelle’s file folder, which seems alarmingly full now that she takes a good, long look at it. Did he just say ten years?

By Maybelle’s calculations, which even Maybelle must admit often skew things in her favor, she’s been at this for two years, easy, by now. Or at least six months, for sure. But regardless of how long it’s been, she knows her body, for goodness’ sakes. She’s been hauling it around for forty-something years, and she senses when one organ or another is out of whack. Like the time in elementary school when she woke up and called out to her mother to say something was wrong with her stomach. Maybelle promptly threw up all over the blue-and-white floral bedspread she had picked out herself not two weeks earlier at JC Penney in the mall. Stomach flu. Or the time more recently when shedoubled over in pain in the Hallmark store while shopping for Halloween cards. “Something’s not right,” she told her husband. Ovarian cysts with an abundance of endometriosis.

Whatever was happening with Maybelle’s body now had to be the worst, if for no other reason than its unpredictable nature. From one hour to the next she did not know if she would be hot or cold, happy or sad, full of energy or down for the count.

“Some women don’t have problems for long,” says her doctor, ushering her from the examining room to the billing office. “Maybe you’ll be one of the lucky ones. But be sure to call me if you bleed for more than three weeks in any one month.” Did he just say three weeks?

Copyright 2008, Amy Lyles Wilson