I had a bunch of freshly-made cultured butter, cultured buttermilk (from the aforementioned butter), as well as a big-ass bag of bran taking up valuable real estate in my butter-stuffed freezer, so it wasn’t like my arm needed much twisting or anything.
I’ve made these muffins three times now, and two of those three times I doubled the batch, because: holy heck these muffins. They might appear underwhelming and look wholesome in an unappealing I-think-I’ll-pass way, and they might be flat as failure, but they are wildly delicious. In fact, my husband has said, unprompted and more than once, “These muffins may be the best muffins I’ve ever eaten.”
So even though the flat tops bug me (sunken muffin tops are usually a sign that something is off with the recipe), I’ve decided to run with it: these ugly muffins couldn’t be more perfect. So take that, muffin police (aka The Voice Of Perfection Inside My Head).
I eat my ugly muffins with cultured butter because I’m fancy like that. The rest of the family eats them naked (the muffins, not the people), often three or four in a single sitting.
The mini loaves, which I resort to when I run out of muffin tins and are less tedious to deal with than fiddly muffins, look pretty gnarly since they tend to fall apart when removing them from the pans. But this is, I think, in keeping with these particular muffins’ theme: the uglier the better!
*I lied! I have FOUR bran muffin recipes on this blog, not two! The other two are apple raisin bran muffins and refrigerator bran muffins. This one makes five. FIVE. It appears I may be partial to bran.
When I eventually ran out of molasses, I used half corn syrup and half blackstrap molasses, and for my most recent double batch of muffins, I used three duck eggs instead of four chicken eggs.
1 cup butter 2 cups brown sugar ¼ cup molasses 2 eggs 2¾ cups flour 2 cups wheat bran ½ teaspoon salt 2 teaspoons baking powder 2 teaspoons baking soda 2 cups cultured buttermilk
Cream the butter, sugar, and molasses. Add the eggs and beat well. Combine the dry ingredients and add them to the butter-sugar mixture alternately with the buttermilk.
Scoop the batter into muffin tins or buttered mini loaf pans. Bake at 350-375 degrees for 15 minutes or so. The tops should feel firm(ish) when pressed, the edges will be pulling away from the sides of the pan, and a toothpick inserted in the muffin should come out clean.
Cool and eat. Best eaten within the first 24 hours, but these also freeze beautifully, so do yourself a favor and bake up a humongous batch.
A few weeks back I had a routine checkup with my medical provider, a certified nurse practitioner who specializes in women’s health and sees me and both my girls and my mother (how’s that for wholistic intergenerational healthcare!). When I told her that I hadn’t had my period for 2-3 months, she asked if I had considered hormone replacement therapy.
Me: Not really. Tell me more. Her: When you begin to go through perimenopause, sex hormone levels drop and all sorts of problems crop up so take HRT to not have problems. Me: But why does HRT have a bad rap? Didn’t they determine that it causes cancer? Her: That study was flawed in a number of ways and the data was misinterpreted. There may be a slight increase in risk of breast cancer, but it’s like 1 in 1000, so not even really worth mentioning, and the health benefits — improved cardiovascular health, bone health, mental function, etc, etc — far outweigh that teeny risk. Add in the improvements to quality of life — Me: I’ll do it.
And then I went home and thought of a million questions:
I haven’t felt that terrible with perimenopause to start with, so would I just complicate things for myself with HRT?
Would HRT revert me to a moody ragey PMSy woman? Would I feel bloated? Gain weight? Get nauseated? Start my period? Get cancer?
Could I just quit if I didn’t like it?
Did I really want a patch on my belly for the next decade (or two or three)?
How long was I supposed to stay on HRT anyway?
How much would this cost?
But there was the flipside to consider, too. In recent months my hands have begun to ache. Some days the pain is so bad that it hurts to pinch my thumb and index finger together to zip my wallet closed. Early onset arthritis, I told myself. But my provider said that achy joints are a sign of dropping estrogen. If I went on HRT, would the pain disappear?
And then the long-term benefits were pretty impressive. Without estrogen, the body — because estrogen is found in all the body’s systems — becomes inflexible and brittle, from skin to bones to brain to heart. The way my provider described it, HRT felt like a comprehensive and necessary vitamin, and not taking it sounded bleak.
So she sent me to get a blood test to determine that I am indeed transitioning from the reproductive phase to menopause (I am), and I picked up my medicine at the pharmacy: 1 month of twice-weekly estrogen patches for $50 and a 3-month supply of progesterone pills (one a night) for $40.
Still, I hesitated. I didn’t know anyone my age who was taking HRT. Who could I talk to about this?
That’s when I had the brilliant idea to email women my age who worked in medical professions. I sent three emails. One didn’t know anything. Another said she didn’t know much, but she was hesitant about it. But the third was on HRT — ding, ding, ding! She couldn’t answer all my questions but her experience was positive, and just talking to another human about it, and getting affirmation for my concerns, was enough.
That same morning, I mustered my resolve and slapped on a patch.
And then I dove into the research, because apparently I’m the sort of person who acts first and considers second. (Which isn’t entirely true but I have noticed that I absorb new information better when it is paired with experience.)
Books The Upgrade: How the Female Brain Gets Stronger and Better in Midlife and Beyond by Louann Brizendine. I actually read this book last year, and because Brizendine spends a lot of time discussing hormones, I was already aware that the science around hormone treatment (as I’d understood it) was changing. I think it’s largely because I’d already read this book that I was so quick to start HRT when it was suggested to me.
Here are a few tidbits I’ve picked up from my readings/listenings. (Remember, I’m not a doctor so don’t quote me on this stuff without doing your own research first!)
*The symptoms of menopause go far beyond the loss of a monthly cyle and hot flashes. Others symptoms include: UTIs, brain fog, frozen shoulders, hair loss, anxiety, vertigo, weight gain, heart palpitations, etc. (I think there’s a list of about 25-30 symptoms.)
*The Big 2003 Study — the one that halted 70-80% of HRT sales overnight — was flawed and misconstrued. For example, consider the interpretation of absolute and relative risk: in the study, a woman’s chance of developing breast cancer while on a placebo was 4 in 1000, and a woman’s chance of developing breast cancer while on HRT was 5 in 1000. As relative risk, that’s a 25% increase, but as absolute risk, that’s 0.08%. The media released the first number and just like that women’s health care suffered a massive setback.
*Humans are one of three species to go through menopause; the other two are whales (short-finned pilot and killer). It’s only in the last hundred years or so that women have begun to consistently living 30-40 years beyond their reproductive years.
*Women were not included in human randomized control trials until 1993.
*There is not an insurance code for menopausal office visits: just for the boobs and the babies.
*Even if a woman has a history of breast cancer, that does not preclude her from taking HRT. (Women with breast cancer are most likely to die from cardiovascular disease; breast cancer has a 90% survival cure rate.)
*The window for getting on HRT is the first 10 (some say 5) years after menopause. Women who start HRT within that window have been shown to have a lower risk of heart problems, osteoporosis, stroke, and dementia.
*Traditional treatments for high blood pressure and heart disease work for men but not for women. What does work for women in preventing these diseases is estrogen.
*Progesterone, which needs to be taken in conjunction with estrogen for women who still have a uterus (because if they only take estrogen there is an increased risk of endometrial cancer), helps with sleep and has anti-anxiety effects.
*Quite a few women (I think I read there’s a spike) go on antidepressants in their 40s and 50s, medicating for depression when, in fact, what they are suffering from is a decrease in estrogen.
*Many common midlife female medical problems — frozen shoulder, UTIs, high blood pressure, joint pain — are usually treated as isolated getting-old issues. Women are sent to specialist after specialist without ever being told (becuase in many cases their doctors don’t even know) that their issues are all common symptoms of a rapid decline in estrogen brought about by menopause.
*Women often notice a slight loss of belly weight with HRT. There are a number of reasons (Haver talks a lot about visceral fat in her book), but one common sense reason is that women on HRT don’t have hot flashes so they sleep better which means they feel better which means they have more energy to exercise and aren’t as tempted to self-soothe with food.
*Weight-training is crucial for women in their second stage of life. Be strong, not skinny. Our bodies desperately need the bone and muscle mass.
The patch is like a bandaid: peel off one half and adhere it to your skin, and then peel off the second half. Once on, it doesn’t budge.
So what’s been my HRT experience? I’m in my first month so I’m still adapting to the therapy, but here’s what I’ve noticed:
For the first three days, I felt fantastic: energetic, sleeping well, happy.
Day 4: I threw up twice. I freaked out, but in hindsight it was just a random unrelated bug.
Day 9: I got my period. It lasted about 12 days, with three days of cramps at the start that were bad enough to require medication.
I’ve had a couple bouts of shouty rage similar to how I used to always kick off my PMS every month, probably caused (I’m learning) by the surge of estrogen. (It used to be that when I noticed I had a sore throat from yelling at everyone, I’d look at the calendar and be exactly 14 days out from my next period.)
Sleep is still up and down. I fall asleep pretty quickly and sleep hard, at least for a few hours, but the dreams are so wildly vivid that I feel like they actually disrupt my sleep. For the last couple mornings I’ve been waking between 4 and 5.
I think I have less of an appetite, or at least “the munchies” aren’t as intense.
Another side effect of starting the therapy: two of my friends have started HRT in the last couple weeks, and another is scheduling an appointment with her provider. We all mirror each other with our “are you serious? you mean there is treatment for what I’ve been feeling?” incredulity, and the hope to go with.
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I’m gathering HRT stories, so if you’ve taken HRT, or made an educated decision not to, I’d love to hear about it via the comments or a private email to jennifer@jennifermurch.com. xo
