In Her Words

Age: 38 My Story I was thirty-six when my periods started doing something strange. Not dramatically strange, not the kind of thing you’d ring your mum about. My cycle had always been predictable, almost boringly so, just a shift. Twenty-eight days, give or take. Then suddenly it was twenty-three days. Then thirty-five. Then I’d skip one entirely, and just as I started to wonder, it would come back heavier than ever, like it was making up for lost time. I didn’t think much of it. Bodies do odd things sometimes. I’d had two children; my son was five, my daughter had just turned three, and I assumed everything was still settling after that. I was tired, obviously, but who isn’t with two small children and a part-time admin job? I drank my coffee. I got on with it. But there were other things I couldn’t quite file away so neatly. The heat, for one. Not hot flushes, at least not what I imagined hot flushes to be. More like a sudden internal warming that would rise through my chest at odd moments. Waiting at the school gates. Sitting at my desk and lying in bed at night, pushing the duvet off, pulling it back on, pushing it off again while my husband slept through the whole performance. Then there was the sleep. Or rather, the waking. I’d fall asleep fine but jolt awake at three in the morning, completely alert, my heart beating a little too fast, my mind already racing through tomorrow’s to-do list. I’d lie there for an hour, sometimes two, then finally drift off twenty minutes before the alarm. And the anxiety. That was the one I really couldn’t explain. I’d never been an anxious person, not particularly. But something had crept in, this low hum of dread that sat behind my ribs. I’d be driving to the supermarket and suddenly feel like something terrible was about to happen. Nothing had happened. Nothing was wrong. But my body didn’t seem to know that. I went to the GP about the anxiety first, not the periods. I was embarrassed, actually. I sat in the waiting room rehearsing what I’d say, trying to make it sound reasonable. I told her I’d been feeling on edge. That my sleep was disrupted. That I sometimes felt like I was standing slightly outside my own life, watching myself go through the motions. She was kind. She asked about stress, about the children, about work. She mentioned a low mood questionnaire. And I filled it in, and the score was borderline, and she suggested we try some talking therapy and see how things went. I didn’t mention the periods. They didn’t seem relevant. It was another six months before I brought them up, and only because they’d become impossible to ignore. One month I bled for twelve days. The next, nothing at all. I was getting through super-plus tampons in a couple of hours. I started carrying a spare pair of trousers in the car, just in case. This time I saw a different GP. She was younger, maybe my age. She asked how long this had been going on. I said a year or so. She asked about other symptoms: sleep, mood, temperature changes, joint pain, brain fog. I said yes to nearly all of them and felt something peculiar as I did, a kind of slow recognition, like watching a picture come into focus. “Has anyone mentioned perimenopause to you?” she asked. I almost laughed. “I’m thirty-seven,” I said. “Isn’t that a bit early?” She told me it wasn’t. That perimenopause can begin in the mid-thirties for some women, sometimes even earlier. That the average age people think of late forties, early fifties is for menopause itself, not the transition leading up to it. The transition, she said, can last years. I sat in my car afterwards and cried. Not because the news was devastating, but because I’d spent over a year thinking something was wrong with me, with my mind, my resilience, my ability to cope, and it turned out my body had been doing something completely natural that nobody had ever warned me about. Not my mother. Not my friends. Not any of the pregnancy books or health-visitor leaflets or well-woman check-ups. Nobody. Looking Back What I keep returning to is how invisible it all was, not just to the people around me, but to me. I had no template for this. When I thought of perimenopause on the rare occasions I thought of it at all, I pictured women in their late forties. Women whose children had left home. Women who looked older than me. I didn’t picture someone still wiping yoghurt off a toddler’s chin. Someone who’d only just stopped breastfeeding. Someone who still got carded at the off-licence occasionally, if the lighting was right. And because I couldn’t see it, I looked for other explanations. I told myself I was burnt out. I told myself I wasn’t exercising enough. I downloaded a meditation app and lasted four days. I bought iron supplements based on a quick internet search. I quietly wondered if my marriage was the problem, if motherhood was the problem, if I was the problem. The anxiety was the cruellest part, because it made me doubt my own thinking. When you feel dread for no reason, you start inventing reasons. You start scanning your life for evidence that something is genuinely wrong. And you find it, because if you look hard enough at any life, you’ll find cracks. I was so focused on holding everything together that I didn’t stop to ask whether the ground had shifted underneath me. What Helped Me Getting the blood tests done was the first step. Not because the numbers told a clear, tidy story they often don’t, my GP explained, since hormone levels fluctuate throughout perimenopause but because the process of being investigated meant I was finally being taken seriously and including by myself. The second GP