Author of the week Philippa Forrester
Friend and TV host Anthea Turner helped the environmentalist find answers over her undiagnosed early menopause
Television presenter and author Philippa Forrester is recalling all the symptoms of menopause that she had in her mid-30s, which remained undiagnosed until she was 49.
“I had years of it,” says Forrester, now 55, who made her name on CBBC and appeared on
Tomorrow’s World, The Heaven
And Earth Show, Robot Wars and natural history documentaries, and has a new podcast, Conscious.
“I had hot flushes, night sweats, brain fog, putting on weight, all that stuff, which nowadays somebody would immediately go, ‘You’ve got the menopause, go and get your hormones tested’. Nobody mentioned hormones to me at that time.
“So my fingers are crossed that if the same thing is happening to somebody else, now they’ll know because we talk about it way more.”
She talks about her menopause in her new book, Wild Woman, which celebrates women, past and present working in nature around the world, from female conservationist heroes to botanists and those who do extraordinary work in the field, through grit and determination.
Her research takes her across continents and harsh landscapes as she records anecdotes of discovery.
Stories are interspersed with her own painful journey – a divorce (she was married to wildlife photographer Charlie Hamilton James for 18 years) and a reluctant return to the UK after six years in the wilds of Wyoming, her life in disarray, going back to the family home in South Gloucestershire with her three sons and dog, but minus her husband.
That was back in 2020, during Covid. She felt she had completely run out of fight, left to grapple with her overgrown substantial garden, feeling loneliness engulf her and her self-esteem at rock bottom.
“There was no joy,” she recalls. “The grief over leaving my wild home in America and all my friends – on top of the relentless pain of losing my husband, the man I loved and thought loved me – became too much,” she writes.
“There were feelings of loss about the marriage, then coming back here into this strange world – because we came back between lockdowns – and went straight into a lockdown. It was the weirdest of times.”
The depression that enveloped her had begun with menopause, family deaths, her son Fred’s cancer (he was diagnosed with a brain tumour in 2016 but is doing well now, she says) and finally with what she calls “my husband’s change of heart”.
“Obviously it wasn’t my decision.
Anyone who goes through any divorce knows it’s tough but when it’s out of your hands it’s even tougher.
“Anyone going through a tough time, whether it’s grieving a loved one or a shock, there isn’t a handbook on how to cope but there are people who’ve been through similar.”
She says there were duvet days when she didn’t want to leave her bed, or she felt unable to function because of mental and physical exhaustion. But Forrester finds inner strength outdoors.
The book records that slowly, through the seasons and her wild garden, which she gradually tries to tame, she finds a healing power in nature. She clears the silted pond, swims in the river, watches wildlife, contemplates the great outdoors and, as her neglected garden starts to take shape, so begins her recovery.
But the menopause – the fatigue, not sleeping, feeling depressed for years – had been a barrier to her happiness.
“I felt awful a lot of the time. I was really struggling with it and not knowing what was wrong with me. Another symptom I had was terrible migraines,” she recalls.
“A doctor, who was a woman, said to me, ‘Maybe you’re just a miserable person’. I took that on board for a while until another female doctor said, ‘I’m going to check your hormones’. She later told me, ‘I don’t know how you’ve been operating because you’ve got no hormones – you are meant to have some!”’
Forrester says she didn’t realise she had stopped ovulating, because she’d had her womb lasered and wasn’t having periods.
Today, she says: “We need to have our bloods looked at regularly. It’s tricky if you are still ‘cycling’ because you get different readings at different times of the month.
“But these things need to be paid attention to because, even if you’re not sleeping well, it affects every other aspect of your life. My ability just to be present in my own life, my ability to concentrate and write well, are affected.”
She stopped drinking and put herself through an intensive exercise and healthy diet regime to lose the weight she’d inexplicably gained.
It was her friend, TV presenter Anthea Turner, who told her to push for more medical opinions.
“She’s been there, done that and she was brilliant with me. She’s so good at all the anti-ageing stuff and she’ll always be there to listen.”
When she was finally diagnosed, it took some juggling to get her HRT right, she recalls, because she’s not good with artificial progesterone.
“The difference was extraordinary, even with things like aching joints, because I was aching all the time. By the end, I’d been completely through the menopause and my hormones were becoming non-existent.”
Her garden and its once disorganised state, seems to have evolved into a less frenetic environment, in parallel with her own state of mind.
“It felt like a metaphor, for sure.” At the beginning, she tearfully swiped brambles with a machete, cutting nothing, until she found a technique, a flow, which gave her the rhythm to move forward.
And the joy has crept back in. “There’s a gradual creeping of it [joy], rather than a sudden moment of enlightenment.
“Any big paradigm shift of change of circumstance for humans takes our brains a little while to catch up to that being a new normal.”
■ Wild Woman: Empowering Stories From Women Who Work In Nature by Philippa Forrester is out now, published by Bloomsbury Wildlife