Yes, there are good things about menopause

But until that's true for everyone, we do need to keep banging on about it, I'm afraid

Photo by Oleg Laptev on Unsplash

I did not wake up today with a burning desire to add to the many conversations about menopause. But I’m quite disheartened by the growing backlash against talking about it. When we’re finally getting somewhere, and women are feeling emboldened enough to stand up for themselves at the GP’s, to bite back against the patronising attitudes - or worse, flat-out ignorance - and get the treatment they need, there’s a growing chorus singing about how silly it all is to even mention it. ‘It’s not a disease!’ ‘It’s normal!’ ‘It was fine for me, so what are you moaning about?’

Alexandra Shulman is not the only dissenting voice, but she has written about it in her weekly Mail on Sunday column today. As I’ve written only recently, I have enormous respect for Alex, and I’ve enjoyed the very reasonable back and forth we’ve had on her Instagram page today.

Also, I do understand where she’s coming from. To an extent. I am with her when she says she doesn’t want younger women feeling as though there’s this dire phase of life awaiting them, when they’ll feel terrible, their life will be over and no one will hire them. (More on that later.) She doesn’t want a naturally occurring life stage to be treated as a disability. Neither do I! I’m not in the camp of those who want designated spaces in the office for women to go and wait out a hot flush, or have extra sick days as special dispensation for menopause. Even if they’d been available anywhere I’d worked, I’d never have attended a ‘menopause seminar’  at my work. I don’t want my menopause and my professional life to collide at all. I just want to be able to function normally, and I want that for every woman. We don’t have that yet, so until we do, then yes, naysayers, we really do need Menopause Awareness Month.

In her column, Alex says there’s no new statistics to say that menopause is on the increase. But there is ample evidence that women are routinely denied the treatment they need. That far too many doctors and other health professionals are ill-equipped to even recognise when a woman needs some help.

Menopause really shouldn’t be a big deal at all. Absolutely correct. Many women will sail through it with no issues. Again, yes. Other women will decide that HRT is not for them and that is a personal choice to be supported. For me, the point of an awareness campaign is this: Until everyone has the access to what they need to make their menopause ‘no big deal’, this is very much still an issue.

I know that everyone knows about menopause. But not everyone’s menopause is being helped nearly as much as it should. When even our doctors don’t have a good education about it, how are we expected to know everything about how to handle it? It’s one of an embarrassing list of women-specific health issues that are routinely  ignored by our healthcare systems.

Lorraine Candy wrote in the Independent this week about the slew of women who have died as a result of this systemic neglect. ‘Last month, a new Manchester University report found that the bias in treating heart disease as ‘a men’s disease’ is ‘killing thousands of women’. And HRT is a protective medicine when it comes to heart disease.’

‘New research into endometriosis found that sufferers were being left in excruciating pain by GPs. In July, the NHS’s own patient safety tsar found the health service guilty of ‘fobbing off, gaslighting, dismissing and patronising’ female patients who raised concerns about their treatment.’

I’ve seen it for myself. When I was the CEO of the charity Children With Cancer UK, I met many mothers  - more usually the parent in charge of ferrying back and forth to the doctor - who were routinely eye-rolled when they knew their child and they knew something was wrong. The charity recently released a documentary, Kids Like Us, (available on Sky) where two of the children featured needed multiple trips to the GP to have their cancer diagnosed. Their mothers were repeatedly told these young girls were making up their symptoms to vie for attention, the inference also being that the mums were over-reacting. 

I saw it for myself as a magazine editor. When I was at Glamour I met many young women who were fobbed off at the doctor’s because they were ‘too young’ to have anything serious like cancer. I guarantee you’ll be able to find a similar story any day of the week on Mail Online. 

And I saw it when I was at You magazine, where the readership is largely women of menopausal age. I heard from women much older than me who had no idea that their upsetting symptoms were down to menopause. I heard from women who were driven to the brink of suicide, so despairing they were of health issues that would not quit and doctors that would not help. I heard from their partners, men who told me that getting the right menopausal treatment, finally, had given them their wives back. 

We all know what menopause is, yes. Just about. But there are great swathes of doctors who still don’t know how varied and idiosyncratic the symptoms can be. It’s a fact that we are not aware enough of what it’s doing to women. 

I think my story is a very good example. And, fair warning, it’s one for fans of outrageous over-sharing. As embarrassing as these stories are, I tell them in the hope that no one else will experience the panic and despair I did as a direct result of my lack of awareness. 

I was 43 and started having erratic periods. I put it down to stress. I can’t remember what I thought I was stressed about, but I didn’t give it much thought. I’d have 14 instead of 28 days between periods, and then go two months with nothing. But then I had an incident that alarmed the hell out of me. I was at the airport bound for Milan. And I had that deeply unpleasant gush we’ve all experienced that indicates the unwelcome arrival of a period. Oh fantastic, I thought. It wasn’t due, and I had nothing on me to deal with it. I joined an agonisingly long Boots queue, tampons in hand, while that initial gush bedded in as a rapids-level rampage. Honestly, it was like someone had turned on a fire hydrant. I was terrified that soon everyone in the queue would know what was up with me. But the real stress came when I realised that one packet of tampons wasn’t going to cut it and between frantic trips to the loo - which I’d made look like a crime scene -  I was back in the Boots queue. I’ve never known anything like it. I thought something must be seriously, gravely wrong. I wondered if I should even board the plane. I did, and sat as still as possible in my seat, wearing a tampon and a wad of loo roll. 

Then the same thing happened to me in Paris just a few weeks later. (Why don’t these things ever happen when you’re near your own bloody bathroom??) That one was so bad that I had to leave a restaurant in an embarrassing hurry after destroying the loo, and phone my Glamour colleagues who had our car and say, ‘Do not ask me why but you have to come and get me NOW, I need the hotel.’ Of course that was enough for them to figure it out. I wrapped my blazer around my waist and almost cried on the way back to my hotel room to get changed. To add insult: the trousers I’d been wearing were a borrowed sample from a designer.

My mind went straight to ovarian cancer. The doctor did some blood tests and an internal examination and she too put it all down to ‘stress’. But I was uneasy. How could something so unusual for me be ‘nothing’?  

Add to that, sex was unbearable. No offence, Ross. Seriously, it was like being stabbed. With multiple sharp objects. I think it was the fourth time this happened that I broke down crying and confessed to Ross that I thought there must be something really wrong with me.  

It was he who spent time consulting Dr Google - I’d been too scared to  - and said, ‘I think it must be this….’ handing me the laptop. ‘Perimenopause.’. 

Peri-what-the-fuck-now? 

You might think it shameful that a women’s magazine veteran of decades had never heard this term. But that’s just the point. Even someone like me, bombarded as I was on the regular with all manner of women’s health issues, had never, ever heard of Perimenopause. Menopause, sure, one day, maybe as a treat for my 60th birthday. This pre-stage? News to me. 

So I went back to my doctor who rolled her eyes and basically said ‘well, duh!’ as if she had mentioned this to me before. She had not. She said that I was ‘incredibly young’ to be going through peri-menopause but maybe it was that, yeah OK. And she had no ideas for me on what to do about it. I guess I was happy enough to know I didn’t have ovarian cancer, or that next time that awful ‘flooding’ happened - a term she used this time, as if this apparently common peri symptom was something everyone had heard of - I would understand it. I went home and Googled what to do about the vaginal dryness. I used this for a time, which was not bad.

By the time I was 45, my periods had stopped completely and I saw a specialist and started seriously considering HRT. Until then, I’d had no real clue that my sleeplessness, insane tiredness at weird times, weird itchy skin at night and increased anxiety could be symptoms of menopause. No one told me. The extent of my knowledge was no periods and hot flushes and I didn’t have hot flushes. 

Doctors raised their eyebrows and exclaimed how very young I was to be menopausal. But I said, ‘Loads of friends my age are going through the same. You think I’m rare because we’re all told it’s an old woman thing, so we feel defective and embarrassed, so we don’t talk about it, when actually if we all talked about it, we would realise that none of we women in our 40s are weird.’

‘Yeah…. maybe,’ was the dubious response every time. So many of them know so little.

All of the above: This is why campaigners have probably gone in a little hard in the last few years on the menopause horror stories. Because menopause has been an issue that has been dismissed, ignored and laughed at, for decades. If it was considered at all. Currently, GPs receive no formal training in this life stage that will affect every single woman. 

It is not a one-size-fits-all condition and my blood does boil when women say it was no problem for them so it’s no problem for anyone. Ditto the women who say they suffered through it so why shouldn’t others. I talk about it not to scare, but to share the knowledge. I’m thrilled when I think that younger women will not be struck with the terror I was, because they will have the intel from women like me who will not stop banging on about it. 

I do agree, however, that we probably need to redress the balance a little. If you can be prepared and get the help you might need, menopause is fine. In fact, I have to say that once I started taking HRT, I found this stage of life to be actually amazing.

When I had periods, I would get a debilitating migraine with it. Every single month. I still get the occasional migraine but nothing like I used to. That in itself has made post-menstrual life incredible for me.  

I mean, come on, no periods? It’s liberating. I wear white trousers whenever I want. And with no pesky water retention and bloats, they fit me any day of the week I want to wear them. No pre-menstrual acne, or rage. I actually never had the rage that many report as a menopause symptom. Younger me had fights with strangers on public transport. These days, if you shove me or throw rubbish in my face on the tube, I’ll probably take a deep breath and let it slide. Life’s too short. 

Crucially, now that I know what it is going on with my body, and I have the appropriate care to handle it, I’ve never ever felt more healthful and energetic. It’s frickin magical.

I think in the past I probably was guilty of thinking that this stage of life is when you fade to grey. I remember my grandmother whispering darkly about ‘the change’ as if it was a fate worse than death, her whole demeanour around it that it was a deep shame to keep quiet about. It’s nothing of the sort. And I like to think that women like me, in our 50s, with reasonable profiles, are demonstrating that we are clearly getting on with stimulating, varied lives. I’ve written before about how much I am loving being in my 50s. Alex Shulman is right to say that this very normal stage of life is really not all doom and gloom. 

But it’s not yet great for everyone. When everyone  - especially doctors -  has the knowledge, when not woman has to steel herself for a fight to get HRT, when no one has to take multiple trips to the GP to get help: That’s when I will agree with those of you who say we really don’t need to talk about menopause.