Age: 44
My Story
I keep a notebook in my handbag. Not a journal, nothing so grand. Just a small, lined notebook from WHSmith that I use to write things down before appointments so I don’t forget them. Shopping lists, questions for the dentist, things to ask at parents’ evening ordinary stuff.
But for about two years, that notebook had a different kind of list in it. Symptoms. Written in my own handwriting, getting longer and messier every few months.
Waking at 4 am. Heart racing. Periods every 19 days. Heavy. Clots. Joint pain in hands; mornings worst. Mood drops around day 14. Itchy skin. Can’t concentrate at work. Headaches before period. Feeling flat. Weight around middle. Can’t lose it.
I’d written that list, or versions of it, so many times. I’d sat in waiting rooms with it folded in my lap. I’d rehearsed what I’d say, how I’d say it clearly and calmly, so I’d be taken seriously. And each time, I’d leave feeling like I’d somehow explained it wrong.
The first time I went, I was forty-one. I told the GP I was exhausted and my periods had changed. He nodded and said it was probably stress. He suggested I try to get more sleep. I wanted to say that I was a full-time office manager and a mother of three, and that “try to get more sleep” was not actionable advice, but I smiled, said thank you, and left.
The second time, about eight months later, I went back for the joint pain. Different GP. She ran some blood tests: thyroid, iron, inflammation markers. Everything came back normal. She said that was good news, and it was, but it didn’t explain why my fingers ached so badly in the mornings that I couldn’t open the jam jar. She suggested ibuprofen and glucosamine.
The third time, I specifically mentioned perimenopause. I’d done some reading by then. I’d been on forums. I’d started to piece together that the things I was experiencing might be connected, not separate, random ailments but parts of a single picture. The GP, a third one, because the rota never seemed to land me with the same person twice, looked at my notes, said my bloods had been normal, and told me I was “a bit young to be worrying about menopause.” He said it gently, almost reassuringly, like he was doing me a favour.
I sat in the car afterwards and felt something I can only describe as small. Like I’d been patted on the head. Like my own knowledge of my own body had been politely set aside.
My husband asked how it went when I got home. I said, “Fine. They don’t think it’s anything.” He looked relieved. And I put the kettle on and carried on, because that’s what you do.
But things didn’t get better. They got more complicated. The brain fog thickened. I’d stand in the middle of a room and forget why I was there. I’d search for words mid-sentence, ordinary words like “envelope” or “Wednesday,” and my mouth would just stop while my brain flicked through files. At work, I started writing everything down because I couldn’t trust my memory anymore. I’d double-check emails three times before sending them. My manager asked if everything was all right, and I said yes, and then I went to the ladies’ and stood there with my forehead against the cool tiles for a minute.
The anxiety got louder, too. Not panic attacks I’ve never had one of those but a persistent feeling of unease, like I’d left the iron on. A tightness in my chest at odd moments. A sense of dread when my phone rang, even if it was just my sister.
And through all of it, the periods. Every nineteen days, sometimes seventeen, sometimes flooding so badly I had to leave a meeting once with my cardigan tied around my waist. I started keeping a change of clothes in my desk drawer. I wore dark trousers exclusively, Monday to Friday, for over a year.
I stopped going to the GP. What was the point? I’d been three times and each time I’d been told it was stress, or normal, or nothing. I started to believe them. Maybe this was just what forty-two, forty-three felt like. Maybe everyone was quietly struggling, and I simply hadn’t noticed.
Then my friend Priya mentioned she’d found a GP at a different surgery who had a special interest in women’s health. “You should see her,” Priya said over lunch one day, pushing a name and number across the table on a torn piece of napkin. “She actually listens.”
I nearly didn’t go. I’d lost confidence in appointments by then. The idea of sitting in another consulting room, reading from another version of my list, and being told I was fine I couldn’t face it. The notebook sat on the kitchen counter for three weeks before I made the call.
Looking Back
I think about those two years now, and what strikes me most is the energy it took. Not the symptoms themselves, though they were exhausting. The energy of advocating for yourself and being turned away. The energy of doubting your own experience because someone with a medical degree has told you there’s nothing to find.
I wasn’t angry with those GPs, not exactly. They were busy. Appointments are ten minutes. They were looking at individual symptoms: the fatigue here, the joint pain there, and each one, in isolation, probably looked like nothing much. But nobody joined the dots. Nobody stepped back and looked at the whole picture: a woman in her early forties whose body was changing in a dozen ways at once.
And I played a part in that, too. I was polite. I was measured. I downplayed things. I said “a bit tired” when I meant “barely functioning by three o’clock.” I said “my periods are a bit heavier” when I meant “I bled through my clothes at work.” I’d been taught, without anyone explicitly teaching me, to take up as little space as possible in a consulting room.
What Helped Me
The appointment with Priya’s GP lasted twenty-five minutes. I know because I checked the clock, stunned.
She let me talk. She didn’t interrupt. She asked follow-up questions, not just “how’s your sleep” but “what time do you wake, and what does it feel like when you do?” She asked about my cycle in detail. She asked about things I hadn’t even connected: the dry eyes, the receding gums, the fact that I’d lost interest in sex so gradually I’d barely registered it.
And then she said, “I think what you’re experiencing is perimenopause, and I think you’ve been experiencing it for quite some time.”
There was a pause. I’d been waiting to hear that for two years, and now that someone had actually said it, I didn’t know what to do with it. I think I nodded. She passed me a tissue, and I hadn’t even realised I needed one.
She didn’t rush to solutions. She explained what was happening in a way that made sense not a lecture, more like someone drawing a map of terrain I’d been stumbling through in the dark. She laid out options. She said we could take our time deciding what felt right. She gave me leaflets and a couple of websites and said to come back in a fortnight, once I’d had a chance to think.
When I got to the car, I rang my husband. “She believed me,” I said. And then I sat there for a while, because that sentence she believed me was doing something enormous inside my chest that I didn’t have words for yet.
After that, things moved. Not quickly, not dramatically, but in a direction. We tried some things. Some helped. Some didn’t. We adjusted. I started sleeping a little better. The fog began to thin. The periods didn’t magically regulate, but I had a plan now, and the plan had been made with me, not around me.
I told my colleagues. Not all of them, but the ones I trusted. My manager, who’d noticed I wasn’t myself, said, “Thank you for telling me. What do you need?” And I nearly cried again, because it was such a simple question and nobody in a professional setting had ever asked me that before.
What I Wish I’d Known
I wish I’d known that being dismissed doesn’t mean you’re wrong. That normal blood results don’t rule out perimenopause. That a GP saying “you’re too young” might simply mean they haven’t had enough training in this area and that’s their gap, not yours.
I wish I’d known to ask for a longer appointment. To bring my list and read from it without apologising. To say “I’d like to discuss perimenopause” right at the start instead of waiting for them to suggest it.
I wish I’d known that finding the right person to listen might take more than one try, and that giving up on being heard is the most expensive thing you can do.
And I wish I’d known that “normal” blood work and a body clearly struggling are not mutually exclusive. Both things can be true at the same time. I needed someone to say that to me, and for a long time, nobody did.
Reflection
It’s been about ten months since that appointment with Priya’s GP. I still see her. I still bring my notebook. But the list is different now. It’s shorter. Some of the things on it are even positive: slept through until six, good week at work, went for a swim on Saturday.
I’m not the same woman I was at forty-one, standing in that first consulting room trying to sound credible. I’m less polite about my own health now, in the best possible way. I don’t minimise. I don’t apologise for taking up time. When something doesn’t feel right, I say so, clearly, and I stay in the room until I’ve been heard.
Last week, a colleague younger than me, maybe thirty-eight, mentioned she’d been having terrible night sweats and didn’t know why. I watched her shrug it off, the way I used to. I waited until we were alone and said, “Can I give you a name? She’s a GP. She’s really good.”
She looked at me the way I must have looked at Priya. A little hesitant. A little hopeful.
“She listens,” I said. “That’s the main thing.”
Every woman’s experience is different. This story is shared to help others feel less alone and is not intended to replace professional medical advice.
