Melissa Kite started going through the menopause at 42 - while her friends were still having babies
Throwing off the duvet as my boyfriend slept soundly beside me, I leapt out of bed and bolted for the window.
Flinging it open, I gasped for air. I had woken in a terrible panic to find myself covered in sweat. What on earth was happening? I couldn’t cool down and ended up having to go out into the garden at 3am to lie on a sun-lounger.
Over the course of the next few nights, the same thing happened again and again. But since it was the middle of the summer, I put it down to the warm weather.
Every time I complained about the heat, my boyfriend, Will, would agree that it did feel very humid, and he was hot, too.
All the same, this didn’t feel right. I couldn’t explain it, but the heat seemed to be coming from within me, not without. It was as though I had become a walking central heating system, radiating an intense glow.
‘Feel this,’ I told a girlfriend, taking her hand and placing it on my neck one evening.
‘Dear God!’ she exclaimed. ‘You’re on fire!’
That was last summer and what a strange summer it turned out to be. I ended up sleeping outside on that sun-lounger most nights. Will laughed and put it down to me being eccentric.
But when the weather turned colder and I was still bolting outside in the middle of the night, even he started to think something must be wrong.
Then came the other signs. The usual 30 days between my periods became 40, then 50, before stopping altogether.
I went to the doctor, who ran some tests. A few days later, my most doom-laden fears were confirmed: I was, somehow, at the age of 42, starting the menopause. The GP was surprised and kept saying she wanted to run the blood tests again.
But it wasn’t a surprise to me. I’d been dreading it for years. My mother went through ‘the change’ in her late 30s, as did her mother before her.
I’d done well to get to 42, given my family history. My gynaecologist had warned me some time earlier that it would probably come early for me, too, as these traits are thought to be genetic.
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That did not make it easy when it finally arrived. For the menopause still makes a woman feel as though she is being officially declared redundant.
For me personally, knowing I could no longer have children was not an unalloyed shock.
I had been diagnosed with endometriosis in my 30s after failing to conceive. After flirting briefly with IVF, which I decided against, I gave up on the idea of having a child a few years ago.
That said, faced with the symptoms of menopause, a tiny part of me wanted to cling on. Before the doctor made her pronouncement, a faint little voice inside me had said: ‘Maybe, just maybe, this is one of those accidental, later-life, against-all-odds pregnancies.’
It was lunacy to think this, given my medical history. But the pressure on women to conceive is such that I don’t think we ever really stop thinking about it completely, even when our biological clock has loudly chimed midnight.
Melissa says she did well to get to 42 given her family history after her mother went through change in late 30s (picture by model)
Even though my life is full to the brim and I am perfectly happy not to have children, I wouldn’t be human if I didn’t still think about it.
Besides, I had read so many stories featuring women who thought they were on the change but turned out to be pregnant. So, despite all I had been previously told by the experts about being unable to conceive, I wondered forlornly whether that could be happening to me.
Life has a funny way of being cruelly poetic at moments like these. As I sat in the GP’s surgery, waiting for my blood test results, I found myself next to a woman in her 40s holding a newborn baby. She’d obviously had a later-life pregnancy, and as I watched her cooing at her beautiful baby, I kept thinking how I’d feel if that turned out to be me.
But my fantasy was short-lived — it was not to be. The GP was not smiling as she would have been if the blood test had said pregnancy, but scowling as if she didn’t know what to make of the fact that my FSH level — the measure of ovarian function — showed I was menopausal.
She seemed particularly put out by the results, as if she didn’t really know what to do with someone in this situation at my age.
I asked her whether I might get help with the night sweats, and she said she couldn’t prescribe Hormone Replacement Therapy because I was too young. Apparently, there is a slightly raised risk of cancer if you take HRT for too long, so the health service doesn’t want to start women on it too soon in case their symptoms continue for years. There is also, I found out later, a cost issue. They don’t want to pay for it for too long either.
The GP seemed at a loss to suggest anything else, so I determined to cope in my own way. It is now a year later, and my nerves are wearing thin.
Sleeping was difficult for Melissa and she would throw the duvet off, leapt out of bed and bolt for the window
I haven’t had a night’s uninterrupted sleep since this started, and the sweats now happen all day, too. Most days, the hot flushes come every half an hour. I wear a sleeveless top and cardigan at all times because it is the only way I can throw off a layer of clothing and get cool quickly enough.
My concentration falters a lot, probably as much down to the sleep deprivation as to the plummeting levels of progesterone, one of the key hormones that becomes lacking.
I find I cannot stop eating, and crave carbohydrates, probably as an energy boost because I feel so drained. I am putting on weight for the first time in my adult life.
Worst, though, are the panic attacks. No one warns that you are going to have these terrible moments of all-encompassing anxiety. They sweep over you most dreadfully at night. When I am about to try to get some sleep, I suddenly shoot up in bed gripped with worry, and before long I am fretting about everything that has ever gone wrong in my life.
Suddenly to feel you have to reassess everything you thought to be true is a symptom of the classic mid-life crisis we all make fun of.
But whereas a man responds by rushing out to buy a Porsche or by having an extra-marital affair with a girl half his age, a woman apparently has a two-year panic attack.
It is like everlasting PMT. I joke to my friends that I’ve been in a bad mood since June 2013.
I know all women go through this, so I don’t want to complain unduly. But the problem is complicated because I’m younger than most when they start this business. I also don’t have any girl friends of my age in a similar position in whom I can confide.
In the UK, the average age of menopause is 51, and comes when a woman’s natural supply of oestrogen dwindles and her ovaries run out of eggs
Every time I try to explain why I’m in a sweat and throwing off all my clothes, people say: ‘Oh but you’re too young!’ It’s a taboo subject at the best of times, but even more so when it happens early.
In the UK, the average age of menopause is 51, and comes when a woman’s natural supply of oestrogen dwindles and her ovaries run out of eggs. But while most women first experience menopause symptoms in their late 40s and early 50s, a lot of women do get them much earlier.
One study estimated that as many as one in 20 women goes through early menopause.
If a woman is under 40, it’s called premature menopause; for those between 40 and 45, it’s referred to as early-onset menopause.
I wonder if so few talk about it because there is a sort of shame attached, as if you have failed as a woman.
I suspect the stigma has a lot to do with women still being defined by their ability to produce children. Despite everything we have achieved in our professional lives, we are still judged on whether we have functioning ovaries.
When I went back to my GP last week, I all but pleaded with her for help. But she insisted she could not prescribe hormone replacement for a few years yet. I pointed out that by then, hopefully, I will be out the other side — if I am lucky.
If not, I dread to think what sort of state I will be in, or what mischief I will have got up to.
I’m not surprised menopausal women are caught shoplifting. I have nothing but compassion for them now I know what this is like. I have caught myself on more than one occasion heading towards the supermarket exit with a basket of strange odds and sods I had no idea I wanted and had forgotten I hadn’t even paid for.
Never mind baby brain — meno-brain is a whole other level of absent-mindedness.
The doctor said the only thing she could do was refer me to an ‘early menopause clinic’, although there is a three-month wait. But the last thing I need is to sit around in a bleeding-hearts NHS counselling group with other women who are having hot sweats. There would be so few of us present at any one time, as we all bolted to and from the door for air, that I can’t see it working very well anyway.
Also annoying are the suggestions of natural remedies, so numerous it is difficult to know where to start. I have been to health food shops aplenty where the shelves are packed with expensive alternative cures: soya, clove oil, vitamin B and black cohosh, whatever that is. I read the backs of the packets but have no idea whether this is just pouring money down the drain.
It strikes me as ludicrous that in this day and age, with all the technology we have, women are forced to resort to remedies doing the rounds a thousand years ago.
I have even bought a special magnet recommended by the singer Belinda Carlisle, which you fasten under your clothes against your stomach and it’s supposed to relieve the night sweats, although even the manufacturers don’t quite understand how. So far, I haven’t noticed a difference, although I’ve only been wearing it a few weeks, and it’s supposed to take several months to work.
There are lights at the end of the tunnel, though. My boyfriend has been wonderfully understanding. He tells me he loves me no matter what. And considering the mood swings he has to put up with, that is no mean feat.
I have also been much cheered up by the fact one of my friends has asked me to be godmother to her son. I am actually looking forward to the Christening in a few weeks’ time. I want to concentrate on the fact that life always goes on.
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