What Else Causes Hot flashes?

I remember experiencing my first hot flash around age 31. It accompanied a lumbar spinal injury that left me bed-ridden for 33 days.

My fiancé at the time used to patiently help me to the washroom. On one such trip, as he supported my weight so I could stand, an immense hot flash hit and then I passed out. He set me on the floor. I wrote about it in An Accidental Awakening… everything in an author’s life (and that of their friends and family) is fair game, don’t you know 😉

I asked many different specialists about the hot flashes as I progressed through doctors and the spinal clinic and eventually the orthopedic surgeon. No one really had an answer for me.

When the heart palpitations kicked in a few years later, I was given a full cardiac workup. I had to stop the treadmill test before it was over because my hands and feet were getting numb and I felt as if I might faint. Keep in mind, I was a personal trainer at the time: I considered myself fit.

The cardiologist in the lab told me it was most likely peri-menopause that caused the frequent PVCs. Go home.

Hot flashes continued.

A new thump started knocking around my heart a few years later and I nearly fainted one day while watering the plants. I headed to the ER.

The ER doc told me I was experiencing frequent PACs along with my usual PVCs and then gave me a long speech about the lizard part of our brains feeling too much and I needed to stop being so sensitive. Most people had PVCs or PACs and barely noticed them. Go home.

I could mention that these middle-aged male doctors all gave me the proverbial pat on the head, but the female doctors I saw, my personal GPs, were just as dismissive of my symptoms. Especially if I mentioned the hot flashes.

“It’s just menopause,” they’d say. “Try hormones.”

“But I can’t make it up a flight of stairs without feeling weak and like I’ll faint,” I’d reply.

Go home.

The one doctor who actually got it right, Dr. Donaldson, I thank you!

I saw Dr. Stuart Donaldson after my cervical spinal injury. He specialized in using biofeedback to help patients with chronic pain, fibromyalgia, ADD/ADHD, anxiety, and concussions. He talked to me about my old TBI and the spinal injuries. I asked him about the hot flashes and he was very clear, “Those are not hot flashes, that’s hot flushing. We need to get that under control.”

I was seeing great success with treatment from Dr. Donaldson’s clinic. And then covid hit and everything stopped… and I let it all go. I managed with what I had. Sadly, Dr. Donaldson died in 2020.

Post-covid, post-divorce, post-move to another town and immense chest pain sends me to Urgent Care. No heart attack. Thankful for that because the staff looked worried (no cardiologists on the team). Low potassium and frequent heart palps, along with… hot flushing.

Another full cardiology work-up back in the city. “Your heart is good,” she said. “Whatever is happening, it’s not coming from your heart.”

So, I went on HRT, mainly to prove to my GP that the hot flashes I’d now experienced pretty much every day for 7 years weren’t menopause-driven.

3 years of HRT. 3 more years of daily hot flashes and heart palpitations.

I deepened my practices: Qigong, meditation, walking barefoot in nature, cycling (not to work out but to enjoy movement, sunshine, fresh air and hopefully a bit of sweat). One of the strangest things I discovered after my cervical spinal injury was my sudden inability to sweat (unless I was hot-flushing). A competitive athlete from age 12 and personal trainer by 26, I used to love that feeling of working out, sweating, and delightful exhaustion that comes before the satisfying recovery.

But that all stopped. I didn’t sweat. I didn’t enjoy physical activity, and it didn’t leave me feeling euphoric or relaxed. I still did it. Instead of invigoration, movement left me with a sense of fatigue, neck and head pain.

And the hot flashes.

I kept mentally returning to the day of my cervical spinal injury. The neck and the nerves had to be the root. I switched my focus to the vagus nerve. I deepened my practices of the parasympathetic nervous system. I felt small relief here and there, enough to keep me moving in that direction.

I Googled around one day, looking up cervical instability and the vagus nerve. What else could I learn? What more could I do?

And then I found it. An article –no, a series of articles— by a doctor in Florida, talking about the patients who came through his door and their complaints. It all sounded familiar.

His article: Postural Orthostatic Tachycardia Syndrome (POTS), the Vagus Nerve and Cervical Spine instability ~Hauser Neck Centre

I wasn’t familiar with POTS. Down the research rabbit hole I went, emerging with my timer set on my laptop and my finger on my pulse point. I did the test at my desk.

It wouldn’t be the first time I brought a diagnosis to my doctor’s attention. In fact, most of what I’ve uncovered about my health has come from years of misdiagnoses and me finally finding answers online (or from friends) and asking my doc to look into it.

I had a new doctor in my new town and he was compassionate, patient and interested. He doubted POTS was at play but was equally frustrated with the inability to find me relief from years of symptoms.

He took the time and conducted the POTS initial testing. No talking allowed, so I stood in silence for 10 minutes while my hands and feet first grew hot and the flashes ensued, and then my upper arms felt cold. I couldn’t wait to sit down.

He recorded the results (I could see them out of the corner of my eye during the test —in line with the results I discovered at my desk), and then smiled at me and said, “Thank you for bringing this to my attention. I would not have thought of it.”

He told me it might take a year to get into the Autonomic Disorders Clinic since there was only one in the nearby city, and that we could also look at me traveling to a Mayo Clinic. I said I would wait for the local clinic.

Decades spent living with POTS? Perhaps. Dysautonomia of some sort. Likely. Doctors telling me I’m too sensitive, most people aren’t bothered by my same symptoms, it’s only menopause… infuriating.

The hot flashes never made sense to me. My body had been signalling me for years and years, sending up flares. And I tried to help her but I couldn’t quite find the answers, or the people who had them.

You know me… now that I have them, or at least some of them, I’ll share them far and wide so that no other woman has to endure the head-patting and ‘there-there, it’s only menopause.’

I am not a doctor nor do I play one on TV. I am quite certain many things can create hot flushing in the body. It’s a signal. Your body is sending out a signal. Maybe it’s menopause-related.

And maybe it’s not.

Because you know what else causes hot flashes?

POTS.

Much love,

Stephanie