Destination Unknown! in QUOTIDIEN

According to my recent blood work, I have arrived.

With her unsettling, cheery-person, morning voice, she practically exclaimed,

"You are post-menopausal."

"What?" I gulped and sputtered my coffee. "Post?"

The terms 'menopausal' and 'post-menopausal' are technically interchangeable, I'm told. And yet, the addition of POST implies, to my delicate psyche, that I am beyond, further than....end of the road. The GPS of my life has just announced, through this gleefully wicked nurse, 'You have arrived at your destination.' A definite call-your-mom moment.

So I call.

'Maman, I just got the results from my blood work. I'm post-menopaaaausal! Soon, my ovaries will shrivel up like sun-baked raisins and fall out.'

I hear her suck in her breath. One intake, I assume, to inhale any scrap of airborne compassion, and cries, 'I am getting so old.'

There you go! Me and my raisin ovaries? We're on our own.