Duavee and sleep

...or how I gave up formication and got enough sleep
I'm now entering month five of Duavee use, and updating my previous review with a bit more good news.  If you're reading this post, you must be dissatisfied with the state of your sleep.  More than one scholarly review of the downside of menopause--the upside, I suppose, being the state of maturity and wisdom to which we've arrived--states that associated poor sleep  is not just about heat.  As my night's rest improves post-Duavee, I realize that it is more, in fact, than the end of the sweats. 


Yes, hot woke me wondering what on earth I was thinking when I turned off the light and settled to sleep beneath a mountain of quilts. But what kept me awake once I'd doffed the duvets was a maddening case of formication.  Look carefully, that's an 'm' not an 'n', as in formication from the latin word formica meaning ant.  A known side effect of menopause, formication is the itchy, maddening sensation that ants or some other insects are crawling on your skin.  If you're a woman of a certain age and you know it's an illusion, it's formication.  If you are convinced there's really insects on or in your skin, it's called delusional parasitosis which is a nightmare syndrome and no laughing matter.


I still wake up in the middle of the night, but, if I do, I'm not sensing an army of ants on the march up my limbs. As a result, after a trip to the bathroom, I'm right back to sleep. One can never be sure if improvements with meds are coincidental or causative, but perhaps due to Duavee, my sleep is creep-free.