Marcelle Gomez.
Menopause. It is something that impacts us all. Either as a born female who will experience it at some stage in her lifetime or a man who will need to support those in his life who will experience it, menopause is something we all need to know about.
Yet, when the hot flushes hit me, I was completely unprepared.
Like most things that only women experience, menopause is a societal taboo. It is not something that we talk about openly (although I feel that paradigm is now starting to shift), nor is it something that we know much about.
Growing up, I knew it was something that my mum went through, but it was never something we talked about. Other than the end of her menstrual cycle and the propensity for hot flushes, I didn’t know anything else about menopause.
I’m not sure how much of this was amplified because of my cultural background (I am first generation Lebanese) but I felt completely unprepared for this significant life experience.
I had started to notice some changes in my body over the last couple of years. It began with having trouble sleeping through the night, something I had never experienced before.. I had unexplained weight gain that despite doing all “the right things”, I was unable to shift. In fact, it just kept piling on. My headaches and migraines were getting worse, and I was experiencing extreme and random temperature changes. To top it all off, I was experiencing brain fog, losing my words and forgetting my train of thought mid conversation. At the same time, I had some significant life changes happening including the breakdown of my marriage, so I dismissed all these symptoms to stress.
When I talked to my GP about it, he prescribed me valium and sleeping tablets – treating the symptoms, not the cause. It wasn’t until I had my annual checkup with my endocrinologist a few months later did she tell me I was in perimenopause.
There are over 100 symptoms of menopause and most of these are not specific to menopause, and there is no single “menopause” test, so it requires an educated expert to correctly identify perimenopause.
This is not a usual experience for women entering perimenopause. According to the recent Australian Senate inquiry into menopause, most doctors only receive one hour of training in menopause! If this doesn’t outrage you, it should. By 2025 there will be 1.1B women worldwide in menopause and the medical establishment globally is ill equipped to support these women through a significant and natural hormonal shift. Most women suffer in silence as their quality of life is severely impacted.
I decided very quickly that I would not be one of those women. I took it upon myself to educate myself and urge you all to do the same. I attended a SXSW panel on menopause with a friend (I will be eternally grateful to her for suggesting we attend – it was lifechanging), I’ve read three books on menopause (I highly recommend The New Menopause by Dr Mary Claire Haver), I am devouring social media content (there are many useful pages including @drmaryclaire @themfactorfilm @tamsenfadal), and I am talking to anyone and everyone about it. This includes my friends, my family and my colleagues. I did a session for the iProspect team on it a few weeks ago to help educate and destigmatise menopause. The conversation that happened off the back of it was wonderful, with men and women leaning in equally.
The most common response I get when I talk about being in perimenopause is “oh you are too young for that”. I find that both frustrating and dismissive.
There are three stages of menopause – perimenopause, menopause and post-menopause – with menopause being the blanket term used for this life stage for women.
Perimenopause can last up to ten years, meaning that women can start perimenopause in their mid-30s. The average age of a woman entering menopause (this is one day, marking one year from their last period) is 51 yrs old. As a 44yr old woman, I am right in the range for perimenopause.
The loss of estragon (the telltale marker of menopause) is devasting on a woman’s body – it impacts us mentally, emotionally and physically. And each woman will experience menopause differently, so there is no one size fits all solution. I’ve learnt it’s about trial and error (and ultimately patience) and ensuring you have a complimentary toolkit at your disposal.
For Australian women, the Senate Inquiry is an encouraging step in the right direction. Hopefully all the recommendations are implemented – that doctors are better educated and informed about menopause, that HRT medications are subsidised and made more affordable for women, that more money is invested in research into menopause (currently there is very little in women’s health issues in general), that businesses create and implement policies to support women through menopause and that all Australians are better educated and informed. Ultimately, we want women to be provided with the support they need to effectively navigate menopause and the changes that come with it. This is about thriving, not just surviving.
October was Menopause Awareness Month, so as we now look ahead, my ask of you is this: don’t dismiss women going through menopause, let’s open the dialogue and keep it open. When we remove the taboos, we empower people and we create change.
Marcelle Gomez, national MD iProspect, a dentsu company