Menopause is really not that bad.

[DaisyRayi]

Misleading title kind of hoping for more traffic.

I could probably do some research and read up about it but what exactly is it that happens to women when they go through menopause.

You hear about women having their careers ruined etc.

Not comparing things but during pregnancy and post patrum I was feeling very doom and gloom but only realised the feelings were due to the pregnancy hormones now that I’m back to normal.

I like the thread title !! My whole life I've heard how awful going thru "the change". There was no stigma in everyone saying this, just a dark shadow in the future we got often reminded of in any puberty class or tv sitcom. In recent years, MNers hype it up hugely, and there is a new concept : "peri", sometimes starting from age 31-32. Every single possible symptom of ill health you can think of gets blamed on menopause, on MN boards. Seems there is no other physical cause of ill health in women age 50+... or is it 30+.

I'm mid50s & mine has been an almost complete non-event so far.

I bristle at the saturated media coverage (can't turn off the tv or radio fast enough), but what most upsets me is the idea that I need special treatment at work because of my life stage. How dare I be typecast like that.

FFS, if you're ill, work should try to support you. Whatever the cause of the illness. That is an obvious principle I can support.

my work have events and policies all about menopause but zero about miscarriage, which is far more traumatic.

Having had 4 IVF mc’s, when between 6-9 weeks pregnant, I know how traumatic mc is. However, the sadness and pain does lessen with time -although never fully goes, Menopause though is ongoing and is causing me far more physical and mental issues in my work and day to day life. It’s been ongoing for around 8 years now.

I feel a huge pressure in that regard to pretend I'm OK and doing fine when I'm really not

This. There have been many days when I've been awake most of the night and I could really do with going back to bed and taking it easy but I've had to get up and get on with it, present a training course, drive to the other end of the country or whatever I need to do. Even though sometimes I can barely remember my own name, let alone the complex technical information I need to talk about.

The flooding was a nightmare for me but I'm thankful it only happened a couple of times and wasn't in a situation where I wasn't in a place to deal with it because the first time it happened I looked like I had been disemboweled and felt as such too. It was during lockdown and I'd just set off on my daily walk so wasn't far from home when I had horrendous cramps that made me feel like I was going to pass out. I staggered home and cleaned myself up and went to bed for the rest of the day.

Sone people do suffer badly with menopause - these people have been let down historically because Most of those can be helped with hrt

Others have no problems at all and these are being let down by the negative assumptions made about menopause

Others find life is better

I so agree with this

I'm out through the other side. I would say it feels like a huge release to have the fear of an unplanned pregnancy taken away. It's nice to not have the inconvenience of periods. I had hot flushes at night for a while, but - and this is a big but - I noticed that when I stopped sharing a bed with DH, with him snoring, waking me up, grabbing the duvet off me, etc - i stopped having them. So I go for weeks in the spare room with some insomnia but no hot flushes, and then when I get stressed they start again. As for the insomnia, I find that if I get up and go to the loo I will go back to sleep again, even if I didn't really feel I needed to go.
Another observation is of someone I worked with. When she was put on a customer facing role she seemed to have a permanent hot flush, but when she was in the backroom she was fine. So I think for me, and her, there's an element of stress for hot flushes, and if you can eliminate the stress trigger ( which you might not even be aware of) then they can diminish.

it can vary widely and not everyone is automatically going to suffer in the same debilitating way

But equally, not everyone can rely on sailing through, getting to their late 50s realising they haven't had a period for a few years so realising that it happened some time ago without them noticing.

👏

My periods stopped. That was it.!

I mean maybe I was a monstrous nightmare to live with, but I am not aware of it😁

You can't generalise really. It's like women and periods, some suffer terribly with them, some have bearable , manageable ones and others sail through them.
It's the same with the menopause.
One size doesn't fit all.

Totally agree.

That’s all we need isn’t it, women minimising other women’s experience with menopause because they don’t have the same experience themselves 🙄.
Wait..hang on.. that’s called being a man isn’t it?!

@lljkk I have found my people 👋.

To be honest I am amazed that you did not know it can vary widely and every woman has a different experience

People are illogical about it. My late 30s friend has had various chronic, minor health issues since I have known her (13 years). She now blames them all on 'peri' 🤷‍♀️

Jesus, I think you might be my long lost twin! Believe me, the way things have panned out in my family, you could be🤣🤣🤣

When I was younger and at work my older colleagues were going through the Menopause and I used to think it can’t be that bad🙄.
But I am now been punished for been unkind I’ve got every symptom going but the worst is the lack of sleep . So don’t be like me and think it won’t happen to you .

It does not take a long stretch of imagination that some women are a lot more affected than others. What a shitty post. Why did you bother posting at all?

This is what puts me off reading round it at the moment.

DMum had surgical abrupt one and seemed okay.

I've had terrible periods in my teens and 20s - that gets dismissed by some posters on here often with glib have you gone to a GP - went to many over the time period and got fobbed off so I learnt to manage. I heard terrible labour and birth stories - mine worst thing was how quick later ones were - often found HCP and DH in denial.

So I wonder if I'd be better off just dealing with any symptoms as they arise rather than reading extreme cases and then worrying.

I often think I'm in perimenopause partly due to weight gain but Dh has also put on a lot of weight in last few years and he's clearly not. I've had periods of being anxious but I've had those before - (some pill related) and I am trying to get out of a life rut and doing new things is scary. I am having stomach issues round menstruation - which are a pain which then make me think perhaps I should be reading up.

I got osteoporosis and didn't have more than a couple of hours sleep for about 4 years.

I felt like death and couldn't walk up the stairs by the time I finally, after 7 years, got HRT.

I had to prove all this with my Fitbit before they would even look at me having hit the menopause.

I hit menopause at 42, finally got HRT at 49, and lasted another 4 years before taking early retirement at 53. I genuinely do not know how I would have lasted working a full time job until 67. I couldn't physically do a full time job now, at 56 to be honest. It is only that I had a pension fund that I could access at 55 that meant I could retire early.

This.

Well you may well do. For some of us, it is the only thing keeping us alive.

Hilarious post OP.

If you've not experienced it the posting a thread with this title is just.... offensive frankly.

You are dismissing the collective experience of millions of women.

Clearly it's not the same for every woman (no big shock after the range of experiences with periods and birth surely) - but a straw poll of all my peers shows that everyone is experiencing symptoms and just having to muddle through.

The medical establishment is generally anti HRT which means that women are encouraged to suffer in silence (no surprise there...)

AM not going to go through my experience or anecdotes as there's a lot of proper research already out there. But it is a big deal and it does affect every woman in some way. For some women it's really quite catastrophic mentally and physically and that cannot be downplayed.

It always seems to be the people who have a relatively easy menopause who think everyone else is exaggerating or being dramatic. You don't hear people who have a horrible time with menopause berating others for pretending they're ok. Mine has been manageable, but not easy by any stretch of the imagination, and I don't have too much trouble understanding that I'm somewhere in the middle of a huge spectrum of menopausal symptoms and difficulties.

Have a bit of empathy if it's going ok for you, instead making other women feel like shit.

What's probably changed the most is that now we're allowed to talk about it.

Previous generations of women have probably just mostly suffered in silence, excepted making pointed comments about going through the <whisper> change.