Happy Menopause

Comedian Anne Gildea has launched a new show called How to Get ­ The Menopause and Enjoy It. Here she is on the joys of the elasticated waistband and her journey to enlightenment

I have been a comedian for over thirty years. Once I was brimming with a level of youthful vim my elder self might be jealous of, but age also brings pragmatism.

And all the joys of menopause. Why look back? Especially since more and more, I find I can hardly remember a thing. So, with my bespectacled eyes on the future, I’ve launched a new comedy show. The title, How to Get The Menopause and Enjoy It, is at once defiant and contradictory. Which is what all the best women are, I think.

Initially I chose the ‘M’ word as a call out to the audience I was interested in talking to: Women. Women with a few years under the belt, up for having a laugh about the quirks and pitfalls of mid-life. The word ‘menopause’ isn’t something that is going to have fellas rushing the door in fairness. But there have been a few in the audience every night, and they are always glad they came and laughed along. Menopause is a very inclusive condition after all. You don’t have to get it to suffer from it. As my boyfriend’s always telling me.

Here's the thing that surprised me though: As I began to read up on menopause the project turned into something entirely unexpected.

An education. I was stunned by my ignorance of what menopause is, what its ramifications are, how common that lack of knowledge is, not just amongst women, but the medical profession in general, and how badly such information gaps negatively impact women. The stories women share with me after performances continue to educate me. And sometimes it breaks my heart.

Along the way I got the reason for all those unexplained bodily changes that accumulated as I pushed past forty. Menopause! There was the unaccountable weight-gain. Despite zero change in my habits, I was piling it on. It was goodbye size 10/12, hello elasticated waistband. The menopausal connection? The weight gain wasn’t just the slowing metabolism associated with aging, but as a woman’s body ceases to produce oestrogen, it simultaneously tries to hold onto it, and oestrogen is stored in her body fat. Thanks oestrogen!

There was the vertigo: The sudden bouts of a sensation of being all at sea, just walking down the street, having to hang onto a lamppost or lean against a wall until the moment passed. I had breast cancer in my mid-forties, these episodes left me sure it was back, spread to my head, causing havoc. I spent a fortune on scans. What an irritating waste. Yes it’s great when you spend three hundred euro on a scan and it’s all clear but a bit of you can’t help going ‘I just spent three hundred euro on a scan and…nothing.’ Years later, researching the show, I discovered that a fall in oestrogen can affect your inner ear, and hence your balance. Knowing that earlier would have staved-off much worry.

HEALTH IMPLICATIONS

The most cringe-inducing symptom was the change in body odour. The only way to describe it is that I began to smell like a tom cat on the prowl. Th kind of cat that used to rule the farmyard, the big fella with the one eye. I became, how might you put it? Atrociously pungent. I’d be out and about, mixing, chatting whilst maintaining ludicrous distances from my fellow conversationalists hoping they weren’t thinking ‘Holy God, she stinks.’ The menopause link: Hormonal fluctuations can cause changes to the ‘scent’ of your sweat, compounded by the fact that you are perspiring more anyway. Those fluctuations can also impact your sense of smell. Do you actually stink, or is it all in your wonky nose? Such conundrums are the delights of menopause.

Not to mention all those other symptoms, that I discovered are so common: Vaginal dryness, low mood, irritability, forgetfulness, brain fog, tinnitus, hearing loss, loss of libido, loss of drive, energy and motivation, general fatigue, urinary urgency, the new moustache. Well, this is just getting older isn’t it, I’d think, as I was waxing my ‘tache. And finding myself back in the ‘panty pad’ territory, I thought I’d left behind when the periods stopped.

That’s almost by the by, the biggie, that your periods stop.

Menopause, ultimately, is all about the end of fertility, The name itself derives from the Greek, pausis meaning ‘cessation’ and menos meaning ‘month’.

The stop of the monthlies. Or ‘reverse puberty’ as Sally Anne Brady described it in a seminar I attended, via her brilliantly informative Facebook group, The Irish Menopause. The reproductive hormones that our bodies began to produce when we were eleven or twelve, oestrogen, progesterone and testosterone, decline and cease. From beginning to end of menopause, we lose ninety nine percent of them. The most compelling thing I learned from that seminar is that menopause is not just about the potential flare up of those symptoms around the time of hormonal decline, but that our bodies are left in a state of long-term hormone deficiency. This deficiency can have massive implications as we age. Research shows that women suffer twice the rate of dementia as men, heart disease becomes a major cause of female mortality, and loss of bone density and osteoporosis occur earlier, and are more prevalent, in women than in men.

Those three issues, involving brain bones heart, are particularly associated with the fall in oestrogen caused by menopause.

This knowledge begs the question, is there anything you can do about it? Of course. The symptoms of hormone loss can be ameliorated by hormone replacement.

A no brainer. Or it would be if information around HRT was readily available. But through a combination of fears of a link between breast cancer and HRT, and a lack of general medical training around menopause, a fog of mystery and misinformation shrouds that potentially hugely beneficial treatment.

The cancer link can be attributed to the globally reported research results of the American Women's Health Initiative (WHI) study published in 2002. But what was touted as incontrovertible evidence of cancer-risk and HRT, was subsequently reanalysed and reassessed and the consensus amongst menopausal specialists now is that the benefits of HRT far outweigh the risks, and it should be considered on a woman-by-woman basis.

Such misinformation has had a devastating effect for women for whom HRT could have proved beneficial. After my show I have spoken with women who were plunged into menopause post hysterectomy, suffering longterm negative health impacts that they subsequently appreciate could have been entirely off -set by HRT. But that HRT had been denied. One woman I spoke to told me her doctor said he didn’t know much about menopause and HRT, because it was a woman’s issue.

Personally, I realised that the chemotherapy I underwent for cancer eleven years ago had plunged me into the menopause.

Understanding that clarified so many subsequent health issues. Since reading up on menopause I went to a specialist. I’ve been fourteen months on HRT, and here’s just a few things of the many things

I’ve noticed: My knees no longer creak like door-hinges in a horror film, I can leap about the place and not wet my pants, I feel cognitively up to speed again, and not to be too graphic about it, my vagina is no longer a wizened prune. And I’ll never go near an anti-depressant again.

And sex isn’t history anymore. Oops, TMI. But it's true. A bit like my show. One thing that I have realised through doing this show is how important it is for women to keep the menopause conversation going.

I hope you’ll come along and join the chat. And, most of all: have a laugh. P.S. I remain a fan of ­ the Elasticated Waistband.

Upcoming gigs in May – The Presentation Centre, Enniscorthy May 21st and The Whale Theatre, Greystones, May 27th & 28th. Other dates on annegildea.com

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