Look, perimenopause is really no walk in the park, says Sarah Catherall, but there’s also something we don’t hear mentioned a lot: there’s something wonderful on the other side – the postmenopausal calm.
Welcome to Midlife Musings with award-winning journalist Sarah Catherall. Sarah has spent more than 30 years writing for publications such as New Zealand Listener, The Post, The Spinoff, Vanity Fair and the BBC. She’s also the author of How to Break Up Well: Surviving and Thriving After Separation. Sarah is currently embracing her midlife years and in this instalment she writes about the trying to stay sane amid the anti-ageing movement.
When I was in my mid-forties, perimenopause arrived overnight, striking me with constant fatigue, brain fog and flatness. This was a decade ago, when my periods were sporadic, often off schedule like a Wellington bus. When they finally arrived, they drained me of every bit of energy. I expelled blood clots which looked like a monster from Stranger Things. One month I bled so hard I could barely get out of bed. The following month, there was a mere trickle.
Why had my mother not told me about this hellish life stage? But in her generation, menopause was not talked about: it was a put-up-and-shut-up experience for baby boomer women and those before them.
Of my girlfriends, I was the first to go through perimenopause. I was grumpy and snappy with my partner and my daughters, who were teens at the time. My brain was wrapped in a fog I couldn’t seem to lift. I couldn’t be bothered about much. I had never realised that my moods were affected by my estrogen levels until they started leaving my body. Without this hormone flooding through my bloodstream, I lost my happy spark, I couldn’t sleep, and when I woke each morning, my sheets were drenched.
Apparently one in five women experience depression during perimenopause and menopause. I was one of those 20 per cent, and I couldn’t get myself out of the fug.
I was 48 when my doctor told me I was officially in menopause. She assessed my symptoms and suggested hormonal patches, plus progesterone. I slapped a patch on, and the sudden surge of estrogen sent my body into a hot flush panic. I couldn’t regulate my body temperature. I dreamed like crazy. My body hair grew and my breasts swelled.
But two weeks later, I felt better, more like my old self. My partner and friends noticed that on HRT, I seemed happier, more settled. The brain fog lifted. I was sharper, more focussed.
This was only eight years ago when I first went on HRT, when there still seemed to be stigma for taking hormones and there was no such thing as menopause work leave. I was at the start of a movement, because now we talk more openly about menopause – hear hear – and a whole industry has sprung up around it.
One of my fears was the possible health implications of going on HRT. My doctor warned that HRT could cause blood clots or breast cancer.
Blow me down when I was diagnosed with breast cancer 2.5 years ago, when I had been on HRT for five years. Mine was estrogen-positive – the most common type of breast cancer and the easiest to treat. It was picked up early in a 3D mammogram: if you’re reading this and you’re due for a mammogram, please book it today (0800-270-200).
Since then, I’ve wondered: did I have too much estrogen, which caused part of my left breast to calcify and become cancerous? I don’t want to cause alarm because I will never know if HRT was a cause or part cause, and I know that HRT saved me from a lot of hell at the time.
But the result of my diagnosis was I was whipped off HRT and put on an estrogen blocker. I was worried about how I’d cope off HRT. But the good news is that because I’m through menopause, the blocker didn’t affect my moods too much. Poor Olivia Newton John had to go off her estrogen blocker because it made her depressed, and I know other women like this.
Such is the juggle of being a woman though: coping with a rollercoaster of emotions which come and go with hormones. I don’t think I would have gone off HRT in any hurry without my breast cancer diagnosis.
In my mid-fifties, I’m cancer-free and I’m through menopause. I feel like punching my fist in the air and crying “Whoop whoop’’. I haven’t had my hormones tested but I just know I have reached it because my emotional state is back to how I felt when I was a prepubescent girl growing up in Napier, when I was unfazed by much.
I remember interviewing a woman in her late sixties when I was perimenopausal years ago. She raved about a “post-menopausal calm’’. She seemed chilled, and she was right. When you’re in the thick of the emotional rollercoaster that is perimenopause, it’s hard to imagine you’ll ever feel normal again.
Well, good news: one day you’ll feel a lot better. And let’s celebrate the (hopefully) 30 years we have from when our last periods stop as our time. A couple of centuries ago, menopause stood for death and decline because most women didn’t live many years beyond it.
Grind through it girls. You’ll get there, and there’s – hopefully – a lovely, calm time ahead.
