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Hot and Bothered podcast.

Welcome to another episode of Hot and Bothered with Melissa Ford.

Before I introduce my esteemed guest, I want to tell you guys a little story.

So I moved to New Jersey in 2023, and the first priority that I had was getting myself set up with a health care plan

and finding myself doctors, a general practitioner, gynecologist, the whole nine. So I found myself a GP.

He is a wonderful doctor. His name is Dr. Andrew Fagelman. And the first thing that we did was,

you know, we wanted to create a baseline. So we started by taking blood work. And he took some

family history, to which I don't really know much. Most of you know that both my parents

aren't alive anymore. None of my grandparents are here. My family history is

a little, you know, murky and mysterious. So basically all we have to go off of is what I can

report to him in terms of my current health, my past health, and also creating a baseline with my blood work.

So what we discovered was overall I was really healthy, but my cholesterol level was really high.

And this is something that I wasn't familiar with because I'd never been told that my cholesterol

was high, but in doing some research, I've come to find out that it seems to be a symptom of

perimenopause. A lot of women are starting to see their cholesterol levels rise. And I don't

really think that doctors know the real reason why. There's speculation, there's theory, but since

menopause is still kind of like an iceberg,

you only see this little bit, and a lot of the, you know, the information is under the surface

and yet to be discovered.

It's still up in the air as to what the reasons were.

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