Editor's Note: This story is part of a three-part series on menopause, incarceration, and the climate crisis as a collaboration with the authors of The Black Girl's Guide to Surviving Menopause.
They never tell you that menopause behind bars is a special kind of hell. That the inferno building inside your chest will meet triple-digit Texas heat and create something that feels like slow torture, designed by people who have forgotten you are human.
I'll never forget my first hot flash. It hit me during count time. I was standing in formation, sweat suddenly pouring down my face like I'd been doused with scalding water from the inside-out. My uniform clung to my skin, heart hammering against my ribs as if trying to escape this oven of a body. The guards sneered, "What's wrong with you?" as if my biology was a personal affront to their authority.
A typical day starts at 3 a.m. with my body jolting awake from another hot flash that'd been building like a storm inside of me. On the way to the bathroom, I grab a bowl of water I keep sitting on the floor. As I empty my bladder, I pour the bowl of water over my head, desperate for any relief from the fire consuming me from within. Soon after, we're herded to the chow hall for a 15-minute-long breakfast at 3:30 a.m.
Upon returning to my dorm, the sweat is back and already pouring down my face in the stifling cell where we sleep packed together like cargo. Over 100 bodies in an unventilated space without air conditioning. I watch others around me, an older person pressing wet toilet paper against their neck because the medical staff said hot flashes weren't "real emergencies." Another person sitting up, rocking and complaining of heat exhaustion, and begging for cold water as guards debate whether she is "faking it."
Most of us learn to suffer in silence because visibility makes us targets. When the guards get angry with us, they turn the heating system on. It's their secret weapon—invisible, deniable, and devastating. The temperature climbs until the air shimmers and breathing becomes work. The brain fog rolls in thick as cotton, making simple thoughts feel like swimming through mud. I forget words mid-sentence, lose track of conversation, feel my mind dissolving in the heat.
But nighttime is when the real battle begins. Night sweats poke through my thin plastic mattress until I'm lying in my own private swamp. Bright lights that never turn off burn through my closed eyelids. So I tie a thick, itchy sock around my eyes like a blindfold and pray for the coolness of darkness that never comes.
Sleep deprivation compounds everything: the pain sharper, the confusion deeper, the heat more unbearable when your body has no chance to recover. I drift off around midnight only to wake again drenched in sweat, and the cycle begins anew.
My constant companion is dehydration, a gnawing dryness everywhere. It feels like I've been gargling and douching with sand. We depend entirely on staff for drinking water: no fountains, no bottles, nothing but the lukewarm trickle from our cell sink. When the staff wants to punish us, they turn the water valve off completely. I've watched people drink from toilets to avoid collapse from thirst. A disciplinary infraction awaits anyone caught leaving the chow hall with ice. This relentless thirst becomes another form of punishment layered onto an already unbearable existence.
The cruelest irony is that I'm a nurse. Was a nurse. Now, I'm treated as just another number, another body breaking down in ways everyone refuses to acknowledge. In here, I am simultaneously a healer and patient in a system that erases both identities, reducing me to a problem to be managed rather than a person cared for.
They want us to disappear into compliance, but our bodies betray us with their needs, their changes, and their refusal to be invisible. Initially, I didn't realize I was sentenced to be cooked alive as my menopausal symptoms worsened. My body has become both the crime and the punishment in a place designed to break spirits along with flesh.
