The Story Behind NovaPause

How three years of suffering in silence became the reason NovaPause exists

Between the two of them, they shaped me into the woman I am. Their love and their words are in everything I do — the way I carry myself, the way I refuse to quit, the way I show up even when it costs me something.

When everything started happening to me (the symptoms, the confusion, the fear) I went to that table. I sat down and I told them everything. And they did what they always did: they listened as only they could. Then they told me of their own struggles at my age. Various things. Health issues. Things that were hard. They called it normal woman suffering, and in their voices was the particular tenderness of women who have endured and come out the other side.

They gave me a sense of my family medical history. They gave me their presence. They gave me everything they had.

What they could not give me was the one thing they had never been given themselves — the language for what was actually happening.

Years later, after I had my own answers, I sat at that table again and asked them directly: what was menopause like for you? My grandmother told me she'd had a hysterectomy and taken estrogen. No real issues, she said. My Aunt Denise said she never had any real symptoms either. And I believed them, because why wouldn't I?

But now I think about what I know. Neither woman could ever lose weight, no matter what they did. My aunt monitored her calories strictly for decades, a committed vegan, disciplined in ways most people never manage. Both had high blood pressure. Other things, starting in their late forties and early fifties, that they carried quietly and called something other than what they were.

They weren't hiding anything from me. They were telling me what they had been taught, which was nothing. The silence that was handed to them got handed to me. Not out of carelessness. Out of a world that never gave women the words.

September 2019 — Seattle

We stepped off the ferry and onto the sidewalk in downtown Seattle, and the ground moved.

Not an earthquake. Not a stumble. The sidewalk itself seemed to ripple beneath my feet - like small, rolling waves. I lifted my feet higher than I needed to. I stumbled. I leaned left. My husband Elias and my sister-in-law Shandra thought I just hadn't found my land legs yet after the ferry ride from Orca Island. We laughed it off.

That night, we had a dinner at one of the most breathtaking restaurants I've ever been to, high above the city, above the Space Needle. A view that should have been unforgettable for all the right reasons. Instead I sat there nauseated, feeling like the building itself was swaying. Like I was still on the water.

We got back to the Airbnb. I lay down on the bed. And that's when it became something I couldn't laugh off anymore.

I flew home with that feeling. It never left.

October – December 2019

My blood pressure was 190/95. My doctor told me it was within normal range and sent me to physical therapy for vertigo.

I started leaning against walls when I walked down hallways, running my hand along the surface to keep my balance. I missed my mouth when I ate. I missed the table when I set things down. Every step required concentration. Every hallway at work felt like something I had to talk myself through.

Keep going. Almost there. Keep going.

I worked in demanding scientific research, starting at 5am, no lunch breaks, no room for anything less than perfection. And there I was, pouring every ounce of energy I had into simply walking straight, simply staying upright, simply surviving each day. I would get home and collapse. It took so much just to move, my body felt impossibly heavy, every step a negotiation. The fatigue was unlike anything I had ever experienced because it wasn't the fatigue of doing too much. It was the fatigue of holding yourself together.

I started researching myself. I brought printed papers to appointments. I begged to see someone different. Finally, an ENT doctor (the first person who actually listened) read my research and sent me an email weeks later with an official diagnosis.

Mal de Débarquement Syndrome. A neurological condition where the sensation of motion never stops. It affects mainly women. Women in a specific age range: 40 to 50. The research noted they were likely undergoing some kind of neurological shift with a cause yet to be determined.

No one connected it to menopause. Not then.

December 2019. Dinner at a restaurant with Elias. I felt a sudden warmth, excused myself, and by the time I reached the bathroom I understood what was happening. I ran to the car. He paid the bill, found me there. I called Kaiser emergency. They told me not to worry unless certain things happened. Thirty minutes. Then it stopped.

That was the first time. It would not be the last.

Elias, through all of it, was steady. He cooked every meal. He learned about sound bowls and meditation and sat with me in that stillness. He made me laugh, which is its own kind of medicine. When we went out and things felt precarious, we had a system. If I needed him, I would find him and say two words: Code Red. He would meet me at the car, no questions, no fuss. We laughed about it because sometimes that is the only way through.

2020 – 2021 — The Pandemic Years

COVID arrived, and my surgery was declared elective.

I was deemed essential at work and kept going in while the rest of the world stayed home. My workload quadrupled. The medication prescribed to manage the cyst, Lupron, introduced its own symptoms on top of everything else — hot flashes, night sweats. My body was doing things I still didn't have complete answers for, and the world had stopped in ways that made getting those answers even harder.

In March 2021, I had my uterus and fallopian tubes removed. It was not a small thing, surgically, hormonally, or emotionally. My boss had me working from home a few days later.

I kept going. It's what the women at my grandmother's table taught me to do.

Summer 2025 — The Moment I Finally Understood

I was watching Oprah's menopause special. A neurologist came on screen and began describing the neurological effects of hormonal transition — the ways the brain and nervous system respond to the loss of estrogen. The disorientation. The imbalance. The motion sensitivity.

I sat there and said, out loud, to no one:

Five years later. I finally connected the dots.

And I thought about my grandmother. I thought about Aunt Denise. I thought about sitting at that kitchen table, telling them everything, and them telling me back, in the only language they had, that this was normal woman suffering.

They were right. It was normal. It was also menopause. And if someone had given them that word, they might have given it to me. And if someone had given it to me in September 2019, standing on a moving sidewalk in Seattle, I might have spent three years healing instead of three years surviving.

They didn't need to have all the answers. They just needed to be able to say:
"Michele, you're coming to that age. If something feels wrong, it might be perimenopause."

That sentence. That one sentence could have changed everything.

I have lost them both now. I miss their presence in my life deeply. I miss our talks, their laughs, their hugs, their love.

What I Wish Someone Had Said

Menopause is not just hot flashes and mood swings. I know that now — intimately, from the inside. For the woman reading this who is still trying to figure out what is happening to her body, here is what no one told me:

• Neurological symptoms

• Balance and motion sensitivity

• Extreme fatigue

• Brain fog

• High blood pressure

• Heart palpitations

• Irregular or heavy bleeding

• Inability to lose weight

• Sleep disruption

• Anxiety that appears from nowhere

• Joint pain

• Skin and hair changes

These are menopause. All of them can be menopause. And you deserve to know that before you spend years thinking you are losing your mind — before you run your hand along the wall just to make it down the hallway, before you sit at a table with the women who love you most and still leave without the one thing you needed.

I still carry some of this. The heart palpitations arrived last summer. The blood pressure never fully settled. This isn't a story with a clean ending, because menopause rarely is. It's a story I'm still living, which means I'm still learning, still finding what helps, still looking for what's true.

And now I'm telling you.