Help in decision-making

Ladies I need your help.

I feel the best that I have felt since I was in my 20s (I'm 45 now). All to my hysterectomy and .5 mg of Estrace.

However, I am having LOTS of hotflashes and coldflashes, my sleep is moderately interrupted, and I cry rather easily.

So. should I risk the great feeling and increase my Estrace to 1 mg or should I just be eternally grateful for how good I do feel and ignore the rest????

Or should I consider taking Progesterone in addition to the Estrogen? Are ladies actually getting Drs. to consider this? Are a lot of women finding this effective?

I'm so afraid of trying something new that will put me into a tizzie and wreck how good I feel right now. Yet, I'm selfish and want to feel 100%.

Please give me your input and I'll get it next week when I'm back in town. Thanks for everything ladies. I love and appreciate you all.

It's hard to answer your question, because no one can really tell you ahead of time if increasing your hrt or adding progesterone is going to help............sometimes you have to try something for a while and see if it works........we're all so different, and different things work for each of us. Also you are still early in recovery, and it really takes a while for things to settle down and your body to get used to the different hormones. I had trouble with insomnia for a while but it went away after a while. I never had much trouble with hot flashes, but I take black kohosh and I think it helps with that.
I can tell you this much.........for the first 6 months after my hyst I could my doc would only let me take 0.3 mg Premarin (the smallest dosage available) because I had so much endo. It helped some, but not enough, and I started on Progesterone cream, which seemed to help me feel better.
At 6 months post-op my doc increased the Premarin to .625 mg. Like you, I felt the best that I had in a long long time but I thought maybe I could feel better. I wanted to try a bio-identical hrt so my doc let me try the Climara patch......didn't work for me, I felt lousy. Same with Cenestin and Estratest. So I went back to the Premarin, and tried increasing the dose to 1.25 mg. It was too much for me..........I did not feel well at all.
I went back to .625 and continue to use Progesterone cream........I think it adds just enough of whatever it is that I needed that I don't get from my Premarin. I feel better with it.
The only way you'll know if increasing your Estrace, or adding Progesterone, will help you feel 100%, is to try it. But I would only add one thing at a time, and give yourself a few weeks, to see if there is any change, before I added or deleted anything else. If you try to many things at once, you won't know what's working.
Good luck to you!!

Ann
TAH/BSO 1/5/01