Sonia

In my, probably mid 30s, around 35, 36, I started to skip periods. And I had always had extremely regular menstruation, literally 28 days sometimes almost to the hour every 28th day. I had never, ever had issues with that. And the periods started to skip I guess during a time of stress, I was working really hard, my job was extremely physical, the hours of my job were very demanding, split shifts, early starts, late finishes, that sort of thing. And I guess I didn’t sort of think terribly much of it for a couple of years. I just thought it was stress and overwork, and that sort of thing. But then the gaps between periods got longer and longer, and I started to experience night sweats. And I became concerned at that point, not because I thought that I was going through menopause, it didn’t occur to me. But probably about seven years prior, I had been sick for two or three years with chronic fatigue syndrome. And I’d been really sick for two or three years, it took a long time to recover. I’d lost a lot of weight, my body was really in almost total shutdown for a good couple of years. But I had slowly regained my health, and gone back to work, and here I was for many years already working, full time, and life had gotten back to normal, until the sort of mid 30 mark. So when I started to experience night sweats, I was concerned that it was some sort of return of an auto-immune condition.

I saw a number of GPs for maybe four or five years, between say 35 and 40. And I happened to move from one side of town to the other in that time, so my GP changed, and I didn’t always see the same GP. I was always seeing female GPs, because I wanted to go to GPs who had an interest in women’s health, so that was always whom I saw, but they were differing. And most often they would do blood tests – looking for all sorts of things.

The thing that triggered [my earlier] chronic fatigue was that I had a couple of bouts of glandular fever. That tipped into the chronic fatigue. So, you know, they were rechecking for glandular fever, they were checking for auto-immune stuff. I was checked for cancer at one point. But no one in that five years ever mentioned that I might be experiencing peri-menopause, or an early onset menopause. It was really only after it had gone on for about four years, in which time periods still came, but very erratically. I also had a number of periods that were exceedingly heavy and painful, which were a little frightening [laughter] at the time. And the night sweats sort of continued on and off.

And it was only when I got to about age 39 with a number of blood tests in fairly close succession that one GP noticed that basically my thyroid was completely out, that I was oscillating between hyper and hypo, that – so two suggestions sort of merged at the same time. One was Hashimoto’s, and the other was early menopause. But because I guess both of those things essentially came into play at the same time, and of course my blood test results were constantly all over the shop – sometimes my thyroid would be normal, sometimes my periods would kick back in, it just fluctuated fairly wildly with periods of stability, and – no GP sort of stopped me in my tracks and said “Listen, we should just monitor this constantly for every two months or three months” or whatever it is, for a year or for two years, I would just get these differing results, and the GPs would just be, “Oh, I think it’s this or I think it’s that, or, you should go on thyroxin” or whatever it was.

… there’s lots of women like me, who have gone through early menopause, or who have Hashimoto’s, or who have had some combination of both, because there tends to be anecdotally online certainly a correlation between Hashimoto’s and early menopause. And auto-immune disorder and early menopause, that is something that appears again and again and again online. … So I sense that one [chronic fatigue] sort of went into the next, which is Hashimoto’s, and for me the managing of early menopause and what that was – I don’t separate that from managing the Hashimoto’s. … So I just see what I’ve experienced replicated over and over again in other women’s stories. And it seems to me that’s kind of un-ignorable, you know.

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 make sure that I get a breast check every two years, I make sure that I get a DXA scan every two years, but no [health practitioner] sort of has the finger on that pulse, other than me, it’s very self-driven. […] So I get my hormone levels and thyroid levels tested. Most importantly I get the auto-immune antibodies tested for thyroid disorder. I get cholesterol, Vitamin D, iron. I do a mammogram every two years since diagnosis of early menopause, because that, that was recommended to me actually at the time, and so was DXA scans every two years. So I do both of those. I’ve always done pap smears so I still do those. I think that might be it.

All through my life I had sought complementary medicine, unless I couldn’t, or unless they weren’t working. So I don’t eschew medical models completely, but if I can avoid it, or otherwise deal with it, I do. But the hot flushing was extreme, and I was 40 and very reticent to go on HRT at 40. And obviously there’s all sorts of studies all the time about HRT and its efficacy, so I just didn’t want to go down that path so early in my life.

Obviously there was a struggle with fertility, you know, for a couple of years until diagnosis, and certainly through that time there were all sorts of suggestions about ways that I could have children, yep, all sorts of suggestions, yeah [laughing].

How did you take the advice?

I knew that it was well-meaning, you know, and sometimes I was up for having that conversation and sometimes not. It did become sort of wearing as it went along, because I think – I mean, I don’t want to speak for anybody else – but I wonder if it’s a common experience for women who in some way are struggling with a declining fertility, whether they have a diagnosis or not, one knows that there is some sort of issue there. And in that time, of course there is, I think, a lot of fear and anxiety for most women that maybe this is something that’s not going to happen. And that brings up a whole lot of emotions and shifts in perspective that one has to make about one’s life and one’s future.

So you know, there’s a lot going on for women in that time. And you know, it’s like when you talk about a problem and someone throws a whole lot of fix-it solutions at you, it’s not necessarily what you need. Sometimes you just need to talk it out and have someone just sit with. Yeah, I probably didn’t experience a whole lot of people being able to just sit with, yeah, people wanted to fix things for me. [But] It was very well meaning, and I get that.

[My friends] were as supportive as I think they could be. But what’s interesting is, you know, many of them were like mothers of very small children, and they were dealing with, you know, sleep deprivation and crying babies and up all night, and you know, maybe their second or their third child, and partners that were working long hours, and you know, all of the stuff that goes along with very young families. And here was I in menopause. So not only dealing with that grief, but also trying to cope with the physical transition. And, you know, I don’t think anyone sort of really got it. Not that I blame anyone at all for that. But it was extraordinarily isolating, really isolating.

Did you change the way you socialised with them at all for a while ?

Probably for a while. I would say maybe for the first year post-diagnosis, because I think in a way I was in quite a lot of shock. I probably socialised less, yeah. And I probably disengaged a bit from everyone’s children – not completely, I mean, I still saw everyone’s kids. But I definitely pulled back from socialising, because I just wasn’t always up to either being around everyone’s kids and celebrating, you know, birthdays and milestones and whatnot. And sometimes I just wasn’t up to it because I was really in a lot of grief, yeah. … I mean, I certainly didn’t pull out altogether, but there was a change. And there was just a lot of grief to work through. So anyway I just felt sort of quiet and, you know, like I needed quite a bit of space, yeah.

I work in the hospitality industry, and I worked in a particularly busy restaurant at that time, frantically busy, the possibility of taking breaks was simply not there, and financially I was not able to take any sort of time off work. And I did simply work through it. And of course everyone works through menopause. However my work was exceedingly physical, physically, not only exceedingly physical, but exceedingly physically stressful, just the physical output that I had to do every day. And it was enormously detrimental to my health.

And there were days that were just terrible. The only break I ever remember taking is, I was at work one day, and I was actually having a period, it was one of the last – it might have even been the last, I don’t actually remember, but it was certainly one of the last. And it was extremely heavy and painful. And I actually just had to go upstairs and kind of double over and lie down for half an hour. But I couldn’t take the shift off or go home or whatever, so that’s what I did, and it was hard.

And also no one really knew what, what was going on and you can’t say at work, you know, “Oh, I’m sort of in the middle of menopause.” It just wasn’t on [laughing]. So yeah, I just worked through it. But it was enormously detrimental to my health to do that, I wouldn’t advise it to anyone.

The best thing I ever did for my health going through menopause and beyond is to slow everything right down. I changed to a much less stressful job within the industry. I worked way fewer hours, and that’s had an enormous financial impact, but my health was more important. So that’s what I’ve done.

And even once I had shifted to the next job which was sort of much easier going, still physical but easier going [laughing], I went through a period of terrible hot flushing for quite some time. And I would just go and stand in the cool room, like, 20 times a day. And I was forever throwing clothes on and off, yeah. And I think also it’s, you know, women don’t really talk about the effects of menopause terribly much. Of course people say, “Oh yes, I’m hot flushing,” or, “Yes, I don’t sleep.” But constant hot flushing has a sort of terrible effect on the body, and it’s really exhausting. It’s just really wearing to raise temperature, drop temperature, raise temperature, drop temperature – at one point I must have been doing it 30 times a day, when it was really bad.

I guess I would also want to say this to other women – yes, there is this sort of enormous shift in identity and things are thrown up in the air, and it takes a while to land, and things land on different ground in a different sort of way, you know. But I’m healthy … and even the things that I thought I wouldn’t get over like the grief over not having children, it passes, and you know, like every kind of loss, it moves and it changes. And – look after your health, look after your health!