Frequently Asked Questions

Why ‘Hot Flash Sisters?’
Because hot flashes are the most common symptoms of perimenopause. Because I want this to be a positive community of women supporting each other—a Sisterhood. And because perimenopause is nothing to be embarrassed about! Thanks to advances in medicine, more children are surviving serious illnesses and one of the side effects of treatment is often perimenopause for women in their 20s. Hot Flash Sisters is for every woman regardless of age and regardless of the ‘cause’ of perimenopause.

Do you advocate a particular treatment?
We're not physicians! Our mission is to make it easier for women to gather information about perimenopause so they can make informed decisions after talking with their doctors. Every woman must make her own decision.

Who is ‘we?’
‘We’ is a team of two: Cindy and Mark. Our families met years ago when our daughters were in Sunday School together. I asked Mark, a business consultant who specializes in small businesses and startups, to go over my first plans for the app and see if he thought it was a good idea. Two weeks later we became business partners.

What is the most challenging part of designing the app?
The chart. We think Sisters will find it useful and we think we have it designed in a way that is easy to track and read…but we won’t know for sure until Sisters try it out and tell us what we got right and what we got wrong. And that bugs me because I want it to be perfect for women right away and we can’t make it perfect until we hear from the women using it.

What kind of dog is that?
That is a Tammy. She lives with Cindy’s friend Whitney, a photographer who was kind enough to take this picture on a windy, freezing winter day. Tammy's brother Duke stayed home by the fire with the rest of their family much to his regret, as Tammy now gets all of the attention on their walks around the neighborhood due to her modeling career. As to Tammy’s gene pool, well…that’s open to speculation.

Are you and the blog writers really friends?
Yes! Willona, Katrina and I met in Reykjavik, Iceland at the very first Iceland Writers Retreat. (Here’s a shout out to all the other IWR friends we met!) Cynthia and I met in Beijing more than a decade ago when we both traveled with our families to adopt daughters. I always sign off my emails to her with “The Other Cindy,” aka TOC which I guess makes her TIC.

““Thank you so much for this app. I knew I was perimenopausal, but had no idea all the other random things happening to my body were linked and symptoms of menopause. It was like a light bulb moment as I read through the list of symptoms on your app. Everyone hears about hot flushes, crazy periods and dryness, but until today I knew nothing of migraines, joint pain, bladder pain or breast pain. I now know I’m not going bonkers !! Thanks to this app, I’m reading the right literature to get help and relieve my symptoms . Big thank you.””