Women’s experiences of symptoms of early menopause – Part 2

I’ve always been a very even tempered person, and I started getting what I could really only describe as temper tantrums [laughing].

I’d be driving down the road and everything was fine, and then someone would cut me off, and I would just fly into this emotional rage and think I was going to ram the car. So I would pull over to the side of the road and take my keys out of the ignition and sit on it, in case I actually did [laughing] ram the car in front of me, which I never did. But, eventually the emotional outrage would pass and I could go “Oh, well, I don’t know what that was all about”, and start the car up and drive off again. So there were things that were clearly outside of my character that were going on that couldn’t be explained; for any reason. So that was the lead-up to it.

I don’t sleep as much anymore because I wake up absolutely drenched a few times a night and the hot flushes get so bad that I just can’t concentrate. I can’t do anything.

I’m not as social as I was any more and that might come down to being way too tired but I’ll still go to things like baby showers and weddings, of course, and birthdays. But I think for me, it’s more about the fact that I’m too tired to go and do these things. I think my friends picked up on that, and I guess I don’t get invited to things anymore because they know that I’ll probably say no, and it’s not that I don’t want to. It’s just that to try and put that in at a night time, I just can’t do it.

You are young, so you feel young, but then your body starts to change so much that you don’t necessarily feel as physically vibrant as you did. Before early menopause I felt full of beans, and after menopause, I mean, I still have a lot of energy, and I still work a very physical job, I’m just more tired. I think it just kind of goes with the territory [laughing]. Also insomnia, or partial insomnia doesn’t help because post-menopause, sleep was just never the same [laughing]. And I hear lots of women say the same thing.

I have noticed some cognitive decline in the last probably four years and I wonder if that’s due to getting older. So maybe more at an age where I would have naturally gone through menopause. Because other things have also worsened during that time as well. I don’t know, though, whether it’s partially due to my heart condition and the fainting disorder. So it’s hard for me to separate what might be the cause of some of these things. And I see a neurologist as well. So some of the things that I notice is memory; in terms of particularly short term memory.

And also, just being forgetful, that sort of thing. But the other thing I noticed is that the ability to task switch or to apply myself to high cognitive demand tasks for any period of time, I just get fatigued. So I’m way more fatigued now than I used to be. And my ability to do two things at once is decreasing and impaired. And some of the things I do, and I find it so frustrating, is being a facilitator, you’re often talking to somebody and scribing at the same time. Now I can’t do that, so I have to stop talking while I scribe. And I also noticed that when I’m scribing, I’ll sometimes leave out letters, all that sort of thing.

So just that kind of cognitive stuff. The advice from the neurologist just to slow down, be more mindful, because they think it’s a cognitive demand kind of thing. But it’s hard to do in those sorts of roles. And I find at the end of the day, I will literally sometimes drag myself out of a workshop because I am just so tired.

I find my skin gets extremely flaky. So even if I’m more than a day late with changing my patch and go, “oh no, I meant to change my patch”, often what will make me think is, “Gee, why is my arm flaking or why is my leg flaking,” and there have been some times where I’ve ripped my skin because I’ve been itchy and scratched, and my skin has just been fragile and flaky. So I try not to itch, but rub myself with some olive oil, because I’ve been very blessed that my grandparents have olive trees, so we get really pure oil, and I rub myself down with that. I’ll often be found in my dressing gown, with cotton wool and olive oil, and I’ll just rub myself down, and it works better than cream.

So I had what they call a BSO or a bilateral salpingectomy-oophorectomy done in 2013, which essentially put me straight into menopause. I think they call it the premature menopause, which when I was younger than 40, happened because of the chemo treatment. And that was sort of temporary during the treatment. I honestly can’t tell you what the symptoms were there, because all the symptoms were tied in with all the cancer treatments and all the chemo and all the radio. And that makes it really hard to say, “Okay well it was definitely this and it was definitely that, that was the early menopausal symptoms.”

But honestly early menopause is nothing compared to breast cancer treatment. But it’s one of those contributing factors to being worried and stressed about your health, because you don’t quite know sometimes when you’re going through those menopausal symptoms. You don’t quite know if they’re menopausal or if it’s something to do with the cancer coming back. And that was the most stressful thing of all, just understanding that you’ve just got to give it time and you’ve just got to learn what your body is capable of.

You do have at our age, some silly people saying things like, “Well, at least you won’t get your period anymore” and that is heartbreaking because I would have my period every single day if I had a choice to still be fertile [laughing]. So that’s pretty mean. And weird things, like at our age, we’re not in our 50s, we’re not expecting menopause. So I had all these boxes of tampons and pads and stuff and I just looked at them, like, “What am I going to do?” I gave them away to my sister. You’re not prepared, and it’s very unnatural at our age to be feeling infertile.

My mum was very concerned. She said, “How come you still haven’t got your menstrual cycle back?” I say, “I’m okay. It’s not too bad, you know.” Because I used to have fairly bad menstrual cycles, like about a day or two, I would be in pain, and then I’d have to take painkillers, and then I have this whole wheat bag, and then I feel really lousy, and then I had these food cravings. So I don’t miss all of that; physically, I don’t miss any of that.