It changed my Change of Life

There was a time when I could tell you everything you might want to know about hormone replacement therapy (HRT)– and even stuff you did not. Back then I was the women’s editor, so it fell to me to report on the Women’s Health Initiative in 2002, which revealed an increase in both breast cancer and heart disease in women on HRT.

HRT was bad, an unnecessary medicating of women as they went through the – whisper it – Change of Life, as they headed towards The Menopause (presumably so named because men no longer paused to admire the fecund female you once were).

Menopause was normal; medicating it was not.

As Germaine Greer said, we were treating menopause as “some sort of tragic full stop” that needed medical intervention. Henceforth we would tackle the craziness of raging reversing hormones with the help of soy isoflavones, meditation, yoga and K-Y Jelly.

I was rather sanguine about its coming – surely years away – even looking forward to embracing cronehood: I’d be an elder; there’d be no more pregnancy fears, no more birth control, no more sanitary towels… Until it happened to me, and there was no more sleep.

And there was no more ability to control my own body temperature, because sweat bubbled up at inconvenient moments, and I’d go purple because I was so hot. And so mortified.

Manmade fabrics became the enemy, at gym I sweated and struggled before I’d even started, and sleep, oh sweet sleep, I knew it less and less. The heat came upon me in my dreams and I awoke to throw the blankets off, then again minutes later to pull them back on because I was freezing.

Try that for a few nights – I managed two years – and then we’ll talk about medication. I tried, Lord, I tried. And then I tried HRT.

My doctor explained the Women’s Health Initiative research – which unintentionally damned a generation to hot flushes – had excluded women under 50, and women with perimenopausal symptoms … like me.

The average age of participants was 62 and the risk of breast cancer, while increased, was small.

Meanwhile the advantages – to bone density, to quality of life – were lost in the panic, along with a good night’s sleep.

And to think that once, with youth’s swagger, I trivialised the woes of middle-aged women.

HRT? I’m never going off it.