Exhaustion. Dizziness. Heart palpitations. Rage. Forgetfulness. Menopause?

I was sitting in my kitchen a few months ago writing down all the changes that I’d noticed in myself over the past 12 months. There had been quite a few symptoms which I hadn’t really clocked at first but that had started to become more prevalent and that weren’t really in keeping with what I thought reflected my general lifestyle. I’d started to notice that I was TIRED. A LOT. And maybe not just tired, but exhausted. My sleep was regularly interrupted, sometimes by children and other times just because I’d wake up in the middle of the night for no reason. More recently I was starting to have these bouts of DIZZINESS, BREATHLESSNESS and HEART PALPITATIONS. As someone who has spent a lot of time upside down in yoga poses, this had never been a problem and it was something that caught me completely unawares. Even going into a standing forward fold sent my heart racing. I was also really IRRITABLE. And if I’m being honest, it was more than irritable, I’d feel these flashes of RAGE over the most innocuous things. Toys on the floor, shoes discarded willy nilly. It didn't feel like me and it was followed by terrible guilt.

The reason I was writing these all down is that my blood tests had come back fine, and I wanted to explore this further with the doctor. But the other symptom I’d been experiencing more than usual was FORGETFULNESS. And I didn’t want to be caught unawares when she called and have my mind go blank!

What’s interesting, is if you put those symptoms into an online symptom checker (which I don’t tend to do, but for the purposes of experimentation I just have), you get: endogenous depression, congestive heart failure, sleep apnea, age-related forgetfulness, heart rhythm disorder, carbon monoxide poisoning. Even when accounting for my age and gender (44 & female). Now, it’s definitely important to check these things out, and thankfully my heart seems to be in good nick.

But the reality is that I’ve started The Menopause. Perimenopause to be precise, because Menopause itself is a one-day event - the 12-month anniversary of your last period. So when you hear that the average age of Menopause for women in the UK is 51, they are talking about that one-day anniversary. We actually start to feel things much earlier. The time leading up to this big day is your Perimenopause, and it’s during this time that we experience a lot of the symptoms with Menopause. During this time, our hormones fluctuate all over the place and the way we experience symptoms can be pretty random. The period of time after the big day is Post Menopause where we may experience similar and new kinds of symptoms but where we also have an opportunity to emerge into what’s considered by many to be a second spring.

You might be thinking ‘why on earth is she sharing all of this with us? This is stuff we don’t talk about!’ But we should talk about it. I didn’t know any of this until I started to become interested in it as a strand of yoga which coincided with my initial experience of a lot of this. And yes, yoga can definitely help manage certain symptoms as a complementary therapy! But my goodness I couldn’t believe how much I didn’t know about something that is likely to affect me for maybe half my life given my age. I did think for a while that Covid restrictions were finally sending me mad. And that in starting to understand that The Menopause is more than hot flushes and that it doesn’t have to be something that ‘is just part of life’ I can make decisions now that will positively impact my health in later years. More of that another day!

So for now, if any of this is starting to resonate even just a little bit, here are some other symptoms that now completely make sense in terms of what I was feeling, but that I’d never thought to have mentioned to my doctor as part of the broader picture. Achy muscles & joints (particularly my lower back and hips), dry skin and brittle nails (Garnier have been making a fortune out of me for a year), weight gain (yep. I used to be able to shift weight very easily, not so much recently), more frequent cycles (did you know that your periods often happen more frequently when you first start perimenopause). There are loads of other symptoms too; low mood (that can’t always be helped with traditional anti-depressants), hot flushes and night sweats, itchy or tingly skin, UTIs or other urinary issues, breast tenderness, digestive issues, inability to concentrate. And this is not an exclusive list, it does go on!

This can be quite a daunting time for many of us. It’s definitely a time of great change. But knowledge is power and it helps us to frame our experiences in a way that can make this time in our lives much more manageable And that often starts with just being aware of what the hell is going on!

This is an area which I’m fascinated by, predominantly because it can have a huge effect on our health and well-being and because compared to a lot of other women’s health issues, it’s something that is not given a lot of time, thought or investment. I’ll be talking about it a lot (along with other non-menopausy things too!) and there are lots of resources out there.

Check out www.menopausedoctor.co.uk for starters. Easy to digest info from a reliable source.