Donna Fielder

EDITOR’S NOTE: Donna Fielder is on vacation this week. The following is a reader favorite.

“You mean you’re still taking those female hormones after all the research shows they’re bad for you?” a woman asked me this morning.

“Well, I’m too old to die young and everybody’s going to die of something,” I said. “And I hate to inflict me-without-estrogen on anybody in the meantime.”

It’s true I’m cranky if I forget to take that little pill. So cranky, in fact, that a few of my co-workers have their very own stockpiles of my prescription hidden in desk drawers in case I come to work without.

It’s less about generosity and more about self-preservation, they tell me.

You’d think the water pistol in my desk drawer holds cyanide, the way they act, or that I ever fired it at anyone who wasn’t terminally annoying.

Some men fear their young wives at certain times of the month. Others find themselves up against the wall during baby blues.

Women like me are hard to live with 24-7-365, and does anybody want to make something of it?

I remember the day I had the hysterectomy — the surgery that led to this hormone depletion. I was waiting on a gurney in front of the operating room doors for my turn under the knife. I had on one of those cute little wispy blue caps and the front half of a hospital gown and needles sticking out of odd places.

“You’re not going to like me much in the morning,” my surgeon told me.

“What makes you think I like you now?” I snapped, and that’s when he wrote out the prescription for Premarin.

Sometimes I wonder whether my willingness to tell things like they are without the sugarcoating of, say, tact, is actually more a combination of years and the rigors of my job rather than hormone deprivation.

When you get to be a woman of a certain age, the little niceties that grease that slickety slide through life don’t seem so important.

You discover you’ve climbed the ladder as high as it goes and you’re cowering at the top of a slide so tall you’re afraid to peek over the side.

And there’s no playground monitor to keep the bully just topping the steps from giving you a hard shove.

Eeeeeeeeeeeeeee!

At my age, a woman’s outlook on life loses that romantic haze. She has a sharp tongue and she knows how to use it. There’s a niggling doubt that the Earth is really round. A suspicion that the man in the moon is pointing a green finger and laughing just at you. A faint distrust in the veracity of Greg Fields. A cold realization that Tex Schramm is never coming back to rescue us from that idiot from Arkansas and that Tom Laundry won’t rise from the grave and whip Da Boys into shape.

You wake up from the American Dream in a panic, hoping it was just all that pizza you had for dinner. But you’re afraid to close your eyes again.

When you’re out walking and someone whistles, you know for sure there’s a lost dog somewhere in the neighborhood.

The preacher stops looking in your direction when he warns about the dangers of fast living.

All the things you saw happen to other people in your youth and swore would never happen to you are happening to you.

You come to the realization that you have turned out to be exactly the kind of person your parents always wanted you to be and that you vowed you’d die rather than become.

All this midlife angst is making me cranky. I’d take another estrogen pill but my co-workers have forced four down me already, and I don’t know what the effects of an overdose would be.

Maybe I’d smile at an editor.

DONNA FIELDER can be reached at 940-566-6885. Her e-mail address is dfielder@dentonrc.com .