You guys, have we discussed this before? NIGHT SWEATS. What are they, and why?
The internet tells me I either have cancer, AIDS, am on crazy medications, or am going through menopause. I guess a couple of those are possible but they don’t feel that right to me!
REAL TALK: the rest of this entry will be about night sweats and begging you for help with them. Please skip if this sounds boring to you, or if you don’t know anything about night sweats, or if you’re just gonna say “sleep with less clothes on!” or something because FUCK YOU, I am NOT AN IDIOT
I started having night sweats in the year 2005 when I was, I don’t know, 27 or something. All of sudden! They were horrible, and regular, and sometimes involved even going so far as getting up in the middle of the night, changing all my bedding, and taking a shower. Then I got on a different birth control pill and they stopped. Then I got off the pill altogether and they still were stopped. But like periodically I would still have one, seemingly at random. Or a stretch of having them every night for awhile. And it’s that thing where it’s the middle of the night and it’s SO HORRIBLE, yet once you deal with it and go back to sleep, in the morning the memory is so faded and dreamlike, you almost don’t really remember it….so years go by before one day you’re finally like “wait a second, what are these crazy night sweats I periodically have?”
I am asking because I’m in the middle of a 2-week run of Every Single Night. I don’t have enough sheets and duvet covers to keep up with this shit!
Is it about alcohol? But I don’t drink every night.
Is it about my period? But I have not been on my period for 2 full weeks straight.
What it is like:
- our bedroom is FREEZING COLD all night long. Freezing. We sleep in all kinds of warm jammies and down comforters and sometimes ski hats. I go to bed pretty cold, then slowly warm up enough to fall asleep. In the middle of the night I wake up completely drenched, soaking wet, and freezing to death. So I associate the sweats with being COLD, not hot, although maybe they are from me secretly getting super hot in my sleep and then sweating and then the sweat cools me off?
But honestly these are not the natural sweats of a hot lady. At no point in my life do I ever sweat even 1/12 as much as I do during these night sweats, not even when I ran 3 miles in Texas in August. Honestly not even when I’ve done Bikram yoga. This is a deeper scene. PLUS, usually when I get too hot in my sleep I just wake up, because I’m uncomfortable, and then I take off some clothes or whatever. Like a normal person. PLUS, our bedroom has been freezing cold for a couple of months now, and nothing has changed about my sleepwear habits, so why all of a sudden the night sweats, if all it’s about is “oh you’re getting hot in the night.” So I feel like this sweating issue doesn’t actually have anything to do with my actual temperature. Hence fears of cancer, AIDS, etc., I guess.
???
CROWD SOURCING. You people have solved a lot of the problems in my life, can you solve this one without telling me I have Hodgman’s lymphoma or something????? Also I feel like it’s not menopause, since I started having them when I was 27, and come on, that’s too early for menopause, right??? Even 34 is probably rare….RIGHT??? Oh god
You poor thing!
It’s not from being hot. I’m the same way: if I’m too hot then I’ll wake up (usually because I can’t get my socks off while asleep). But with the night sweats, I woke up drenched & cold. Mine were caused by wonky ovaries. Knock on wood: It’s been about 2 years since my last one.
how did you get your wonky ovaries checked? I mean, I’ve had a bunch of annual exams/pap smears/etc. since the sweats started and nothing’s come up weird….is there some fancy other test I need to request??
I had chromosome tests in my teens.
I don’t have my medical history, but the diagnosis was/is Primary Amenorrhea. I can’t have children (cool by me) as a result.
You obviously are suffering from something totally different. I’m sorry I’m not able to help you, but I empathize with what you’re going.
I have terrible night sweats. I usually have to get up and dry myself off with a towel, and then sleep in a different, not completely soaked spot on the bed. And I don’t have ovaries!
Sometimes I think it’s a discrepancy between my head temperature and my body temperature. I also sleep in a pretty cold room, but my head is usually not covered, so while my body is under many nice warm blankets, my head is still sticking out into the cold room. So maybe my head is like, Ooooo it’s cold, and my body is like, well okay i’ll heat up some more. And then I get so hot that I sweat all over. I don’t know, it’s just a theory. I definitely think my night sweats happen more in winter, but I haven’t actually charted them or anything.
I’m pretty sure I’m not dying.
Oh god. Me too! At 27! But for me, it only happens in the winter. And I agree — it has nothing to do with the amount of blankets, or whatever. It’s so gross and it happens almost EVERY SINGLE NIGHT for me. Usually what happens is, I go to sleep snuggling Matt and then at some point in the night I wake up to him saying, “Yeccchhhgg. Sweetie, you’re all sweaty.” And he gets as far away from me as possible. But it happens when he’s not there, too!
And now I am convinced that I will never have children because I have amenorrhea, too. I mean, if I can’t have kids, I’d like to know that. But my TSH and T3 and T4 levels always come out pretty normal, so maybe it’s nothing. How does one find out if one is infertile?
It’s deffo something hormonal. I never had them until after I had my baby, and then I had them like once a week, and now he’s a year old and I still get them from time to time. It’s all about ovaries. or something.
AND, BTW, I had amenorrhea too… mine was due to a pituitary tumour that was putting prolactin into my body, so it thought I was breastfeeding (for about 6 years!) and didn’t give me a period.
Jesus. MEN, READ THIS THREAD AND FEEL SORRY FOR US.
i think there was an episode of “pre-taped call-in show” about this EXACT subject!