Opinion: My nightmare menopause symptoms were ignored by doctors for six years

Reminder, this is a Premium article and requires a subscription to read.
Doctors’ advice for a woman with perimenopausal symptoms ranged from ‘have more sex’ to ‘use different soap’. Photo / 123rf
THREE KEY FACTS
Katia Narain Phillips is the author of Self-Care for the Real World, and the founder of London’s Nectar Cafe
OPINION

The first time I noticed I didn’t feel myself was a few months into opening my health food cafe. It had been my dream and years in
the planning but I’d be standing there dripping with sweat but I put it down to drinking too many ginger shots. I also had this awful unexplained anxiety.

I was finding it hard to juggle everything and felt completely exhausted. “I’m so tired,” seemed to be my new mantra. I could feel myself losing confidence and my own voice. I didn’t know what was happening to me.
I was 39 with two small children, so I definitely wasn’t thinking about menopause after all, it had only been four years since I stopped breastfeeding my second child. At 6 and 9 my children were young and jumping all over me all the time.
It was excruciating – as painful as being engorged when you’ve just had a baby. I remember having to constantly remind them: “Please don’t touch me. Please don’t hug me.”
I went to my GP to tell them about my sore breasts. They sent me for a mammogram which showed that I had very fibrous breasts.
I remember the nurse saying to me, “yes, you know that can happen, usually in menopause, but you’re too young”. I continued to deal with the tender breasts for about a year after that but I wasn’t worried, because I had had the scans and there was nothing wrong, so I just put up with it.
And then the second symptoms started to show. It’s quite embarrassing to speak about and I don’t think people talk about this issue enough. But I had vaginal dryness so badly that I had to stop wearing jeans.
I self-referred to one gynaecologist who said “you must be allergic to something – you just need to wash with E45 soap”.
I was so fed up that in 2018 I went to another private doctor. I was 43 then and told him I hadn’t had a period for four months and asked if I could be in menopause. He did some blood tests and based on those he said, “I’m sure your period will come back”. When I pushed him on the possibility of menopause he was reluctant to consider it and said it would be “the end of your womanhood”.
I said, “Sorry, what?” I had told him that my sex drive was lower than it usually was. Rather than offering me a sensible medical solution he then said “if you’ve got no sex drive you need to do something about it because if you don’t have sex with your husband, then he’ll just find another woman”.
I was horrified. I thought, “Is this really happening in my life?” It was like a bad dream. I remember calling my husband who reassured me and said, “take no notice, babe” and was super-supportive, as usual.
Throughout all of this, the anxiety started to creep up on me. It could be about anything. If someone said something as anodyne as “can we talk later” it would play in my head so much. Before that, I was quite a ballsy, strong, confident person. But I had become worried, stressed, and a little bit neurotic about things. Driving became, and it still is, scary for me. I was very jumpy. I didn’t know what was happening to me.
You talk about bad days but this was more like bad years. As well as all the other symptoms, I couldn’t grow my hair past my neckline, I had bad brain fog and was getting very poor sleep. My babies had finally started sleeping through the night, but instead, I was being kept up by perimenopause.
Although my periods had fluctuated, it was only when I hadn’t had one for a year that I was in no doubt that I was going through menopause. By now I was 45. I called my GP and said I just want you to know for your records that I haven’t had a period for a year.
Because I had a history of low BMI, she said they would do some blood tests on me. When the results came back they showed I’d been through the whole thing. I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. She asked what my symptoms were and I told her I couldn’t sleep, I sweated, I had vaginal dryness and she offered me HRT.
I said yes, and the vaginal dryness went almost immediately, then the sweating at night started to go, then the sweating in the day started to go. I just started to feel myself again. It was a massive relief. For six years, I’d been suffering such awful perimenopausal symptoms and no one had recognised what it was.
Once I knew what was going on, I could really address my symptoms holistically, with exercise, food and supplements alongside the HRT.
I have now even started my own natural plant-based supplement brand. I feel let down that I wasn’t diagnosed at the time when I was 39 and that’s why I want other women to be aware of it so that they can question their own doctors if it happens to them.
As told to Miranda McMinn
Reminder, this is a Premium article and requires a subscription to read.