Women's Health · Real Stories

I Screamed at My Dog for Following Me. That Was the Moment I Knew Something Was Wrong With Me.

By Donna Prescott
Updated this week  ·  6 min read

He walked behind me through the kitchen — like he's done every day of his life — and I whipped around and screamed at him. Then I stood there shaking, watching him slink away from me, and thought: who does that? Who screams at their dog for loving them?

I'm 46. And I need to tell you what was actually happening, because I spent two years thinking I was just becoming a horrible person.

I've always been the calm one. The even-keeled one. The friend people call when they're falling apart. I meditate. I'm good at regulating myself. That was my whole identity.

And then, around 44, a rage showed up that I did not recognize as mine.

It came out of nowhere. Not a slow build — a switch. One second I was fine, the next I was full of this black, otherworldly fury, and everyone and everything was setting it off.

I snapped at my kids over a glass left on the counter. Over a question asked at the wrong second. And the whole time, some part of me was standing outside my own body going "what is wrong with you, stop, STOP" — and I couldn't.

One night I got so angry I wanted to put my fist through the wall. Another night I packed a bag like I was going to leave. I didn't even know where I thought I was going.

I started giving myself timeouts. Like a toddler.

I would physically remove myself from my own family — go sit in the bathroom, or in my car in the driveway — just so I wouldn't say something to my kids I could never take back.

A grown woman hiding from her own children. To protect them from her.

And the rage wasn't even the worst part. The worst part was after. Watching my son's face change when I yelled. Seeing my husband — a genuinely kind, patient man — start walking on eggshells, never knowing which version of me was coming down the stairs.

I was poisoning the people I loved most. I could see it happening. And I hated who I was becoming.

I thought I was losing my mind. I really did. I wondered if I was depressed. I wondered if I'd developed some personality disorder out of nowhere. On the worst nights, I wondered if I was just secretly a bad person and it was finally coming out.

So I went to my doctor. That's where the real betrayal started.

I sat in that office and described all of it. The rage. The snapping. The crying that came right after. The feeling that I'd become a stranger in my own life.

She never once said the word perimenopause.

When I brought it up myself — because I'd started reading other women's stories online at 2am — she told me I was "too young for that." I'm in my forties. She rolled her eyes and changed the subject.

I left and sat in my car in the parking lot and cried, because I'd walked in begging for an explanation and walked out with a prescription and the feeling that nobody was actually going to help me.

And here's what still makes me angry: no one warned us.

Our mothers went through this in silence — locked in bathrooms, white-knuckling it, losing themselves — because no one told them what was happening either. The medical system has known about this for a hundred years. And somehow half the population still walks straight into it completely blindsided, thinking they're going crazy.

Meanwhile erectile dysfunction gets prime-time commercials and a billion-dollar industry.

We were left to figure it out from strangers on the internet — all of us going "wait, you too? I thought it was just me."

Then my neighbor changed everything.

Her name's Carol. She's 71, a retired OB-GYN — she treated women for over thirty years before she retired. She found me crying on my back porch one afternoon and sat down next to me.

I told her everything. The rage. The dog. The timeouts. The doctor who said I was too young. How scared I was that I was permanently this person now.

She took my hand.

"Then what is it?" I asked.

"When you hit perimenopause, your estrogen doesn't gently fade. It crashes and spikes, completely erratically, for years. And estrogen isn't just a 'reproductive' hormone — it directly controls serotonin and dopamine. The exact brain chemicals that keep you calm, level, and in control of your impulses."

"So when it crashes…"

"Your brain suddenly runs low on the chemicals that keep you patient — and at the same time, cortisol, your stress-and-rage hormone, stops being held in check. So you get a brain that's starved of calm and flooded with fury. That's not a character flaw. That's chemistry. You are not doing this. It is being done to you."

I started crying again — but a different kind. The relief kind.

"Then why didn't anything work?"

"The antidepressant did nothing. The meditation barely helped," I told her.

"Because they're aimed at the wrong target. You don't have a thinking problem. You have a hormone problem driving a brain-chemistry problem. You're trying to breathe your way out of a chemical fire."

"So what actually works?"

She told me a lot of women get their lives back on hormone therapy — you'll see them say it everywhere, "I started HRT and the rage was just gone." Because it puts the estrogen back.

"But there's a whole army of women the system strands. Told they're too young. Scared of the cancer risk in their family. Stuck on a six-month waitlist for a specialist. Or just flatly dismissed, like you were. And those women are told to suffer in silence. Again."

Then she went inside and came back with a bottle.

"This is what I started recommending to my own patients in that exact gap. Saffron."

I almost laughed. "The cooking spice?"

"That's what every patient says. Then they read the research."

Women across Persia, Greece, and the Mediterranean used saffron for centuries — for exactly this. The moods, the rage, the despair that comes with the change. And modern science finally tested it, in real clinical trials, head to head against antidepressants like Prozac — and it matched them. Without the numbness. Without the weight gain. Without the side effects that make women quit.

It works on the same serotonin and dopamine your estrogen is taking down, and it lowers the cortisol that's fueling the rage.

"It's not a magic cure," Carol said. "It's not a replacement for a good doctor. It's the thing your doctor never told you about while she was reaching for the prescription pad. If your rage is hormonal — and from everything you've described, it is — give it three to six weeks."

I started the next morning. One capsule with my coffee.

I won't pretend it was instant.

It wasn't fireworks. It was quieter than that. The fire just… stopped catching.

By week six, my husband said something to me in the kitchen that wrecked me. He said, "You seem like yourself again." I had to leave the room. I cried in the hallway — the good kind this time.

That was four months ago. I haven't had a rage episode since. My kids have their mom back. My dog follows me around more than ever now, and I just laugh.

I have me back.

I'm writing this because I see so many of you saying exactly what I used to:

You are not crazy. You are not a bad person. You are in a hormonal storm that nobody warned you about — one your doctor was too rushed or too dismissive to name.

Carol told me one more thing that stuck with me: "The rage isn't who you are. It's a symptom. Treat the cause and the woman comes back. She was never gone."

So if you've been screaming at people you love and hating yourself for it — if a doctor brushed you off because you were "too young" — if you've been white-knuckling this in silence the way our mothers were forced to — please don't wait two years like I did.

We make saffron the way Carol's patients wished they could get it: real Persian saffron, properly extracted, dosed at the exact levels used in the clinical research — not the under-dosed dust on pharmacy shelves that's degraded before you even open it. One capsule a day, with your morning coffee. Most women feel the turn between week three and week six.