Menopause affects every woman, and yet so many approach it with shame, fear, misinformation or silence.
Why is no one talking about this? Who has the correct information? And how can we get it?
That’s how Menopausing by Davina McCall and Dr Naomi Potter has come about. They give you the information you need and the treatments that might help you, so you can make an informed decision about your life and your body.
Read an exclusive extract from Davina below…
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Menopausing is more than just a book, it’s a movement. An UPRISING.
I don’t know about you, but it’s quite weird because I can literally pinpoint the first moment when I think my perimenopausal symptoms started. It’s a bit like when a huge, famous event happens, like the death of Princess Diana or Barack Obama becoming President of the United States; I just remember where I was, what I was doing, what I was wearing, what my hair was like … everything about that moment. I was forty-four when it started. I remember because it was so WEIRD. The best way I can describe it – and I’ve heard other women describe it like this, too – is that I just lost something of myself. I changed. I couldn’t quite pinpoint how I’d changed, but I’d definitely changed. I didn’t feel myself.
It was back in 2012 and I was on a Garnier shoot in Prague, working with this amazing director who was asking me to really release my inner beast and be very free with all my movements. I remember feeling more self-conscious and awkward than I would normally and wondering why that was. And each night, when I went to bed – I was there for maybe three nights, in a really nice hotel – the sheets were all lovely and crisp and I’d wake up in the middle of the night and they would be soaking. In the little dent in my neck there’d be a pool of water and I’d be shivering from being cold, because I’d got so hot, then wet, then cold, and I’d have to get up and change the sheets.
I found this particularly horrible because I was a heroin addict a very long time ago, in my early twenties, and the last time I’d sweated like that was when I was using, when I was basically going through cold turkey. I felt SO revolting. With losing all of that sweat and everything, I felt my entire body had turned into a prune, too. My legs were suddenly super-dry when I got out of the shower. My skin was so different; it looked a bit crepe-y and I had to pour moisturiser onto it. I felt as if something changed with my hair, too. And it felt like it had all happened overnight.
Part of me was just thinking, God, maybe I’m ill, maybe there’s something going on, maybe I’m out of kilter, maybe I’m not eating properly, maybe I’ve got some kind of virus? At the time, it didn’t cross my mind that the sweats were a symptom of perimenopause. But what was interesting about my perimenopausal symptoms was that they just came and went, a bit like my monthly cycle. It seemed very random. I didn’t have night sweats every night; it was only at certain times during the month. But the other things – the suddenly feeling old, the groaning when I put on my socks, the sensation of my body feeling tired, my mood swings – they felt more constant. It didn’t feel like PMS (premenstrual syndrome), it felt like something else. But I didn’t know what that was.
One of the worst symptoms was vaginal dryness, which is a miserable, horrible symptom – so much so that I have a whole chapter devoted to it later in the book. I was sore when wiping myself after a wee, with no natural lube to stop the chafing of the loo roll … TMI?
Get used to it. This book is going to be full of it.
Then there was the forgetfulness: my phone was in the fridge, my keys ended up in the bin. This reached really really frightening levels, I forgot EVERYTHING. Words, names, events… everything! I think what frightened me most was what happened to my brain, because I work in a job where I wear many different hats for many different TV shows, and I am expected to bring a different kind of energy to each show. And I did a LOT of live television at that time. I remember doing a live TV programme and talking to the contestants, and occasionally looking at them and thinking, I can’t remember your name. Then thinking to myself, what was their name? And I don’t know if any of you can relate to this, but it wasn’t like something where you just follow the normal neural pathways to remember a memory, when I was looking for this name in my brain, there was nothing there. I literally couldn’t think of ANYTHING.
The complete brain fog I put down to sleep deprivation. I thought, well, I’m just not getting enough sleep, that’s why I can’t think straight. And the way that I was behaving at home was, when I look back at it, unacceptable. I was just always a bit angry. A bit short-tempered, a bit slow, a bit eurgh. I’d lost my love of life.
Anyway … I can’t just finish that with ‘anyway’. And actually, I can’t just ‘anyway’ away that time either. That was quite a long period of my life and I wish I’d known, properly, what symptoms to look out for. I wish that someone that I’d worked with had noticed. I wish I’d learned about it in school so I knew what was coming. I wish that an elder stateswoman had spoken to me about her experience so I could flag up when I was experiencing those things myself. Because now we know that modern hormone replacement therapy (HRT), modern transdermal HRT (which means it is absorbed through the skin), is largely safe and, in fact, in many ways – and I’ll explain this in the book – good for us. I didn’t know that, and because of that I lost time in my life. I have spoken to many women in the last year, one of whom had lost nine years of her life fighting to get HRT. Nine years! Then when she got on it, four days later: fine. That’s what we’ve got to stop.
Around the time when I was really struggling with my symptoms, I was doing lots of live TV, but one show really sticks out. As well as forgetting the stars’ names, I was really messing up with my lines. Something weird happened to my eyesight; I just couldn’t read the autocue as fluently as I always had done before, and I felt like the words weren’t as clear as they usually were, like they were a bit fuzzy when the autocue was spooling forward. It’s one thing to make a mistake on a recorded TV programme, but while one fluff you can kind of laugh or joke about on a live TV show, you can’t dismiss several.
This lovely lady came up to me afterwards in my dressing room – she’s still at ITV now, she’s amazing – and she said, ‘Are you alright?’ And I said, ‘Yeah, yeah, I’m fine, don’t worry about me. I’m absolutely fine.’ And she said, ‘Oh good, because I was just checking, because you were uncharacteristically struggling with the autocue and I just wanted to make sure you were ok.’ And I was like, ‘Yeah, yeah, sorry about that. I’ll be fine tomorrow.’ Then she left the room and I just burst into tears. I felt SO bad. I felt SO ashamed, and also scared that I might lose my job, scared that she wouldn’t use me again, embarrassed that I’d messed up something that I literally can normally do standing on my head. I was really angry with myself that I’d made these stupid mistakes that I’d never made before. So I was doing one of those angry, sad, frightened cries where you’re all of those three things, and I just sat down in a chair and thought, what is going on?
Even then I still didn’t Google it. Still didn’t think about putting two and two together.
But I did talk to my cousin, who is my sort of age, and she said, ‘Have you thought it might be the menopause?’. And I was like, no, I hadn’t thought that. And she was like, ‘Yeah, I’m going through something similar, I think it’s the menopause.’ Or perimenopause, but we didn’t know what we were talking about at that point – it was like menopause was it, basically, as far as we knew.
Cut to two years later. I’d already called a doctor, worried that I had Alzheimer’s. The doctor said, ‘You haven’t got Alzheimer’s, because if you did you wouldn’t be calling me to ask me if you had Alzheimer’s, one of your relatives would be calling me to ask me if you had it.’ She said, ‘What you’ve got, probably, is cognitive overload. You are very stressed out, you’ve got a lot going on, and you’ve got three small children; you’ve just got too much on your plate.’ And that did make me feel better, but I still thought, God, I just can’t think straight. And I’m normally so on it. I’m normally firing on all cylinders, and at the moment I feel like I’m firing on half a cylinder at most.
I had had moments where I’d sat in the car, having shouted at my kids to try to get them into the car, all three of them, to go to school at the same time. The way that I avoided becoming shouty mum when they were really little was to set my alarm half an hour earlier, and that had worked. But no amount of setting the alarm earlier seemed to be working this time, and I remember sitting in the car one day and saying, ‘Look, I’m sorry.’ I put my head on the steering wheel and had a little cry. I said, ‘This isn’t Mummy, I don’t know what’s happening, but I’m really sorry and let’s go to school.’ And I just sort of pretended to be happy all the way to school.
Then in 2014 I did the Sport Relief challenge for charity, and that was CRAZY. Five hundred miles, from Edinburgh to London. On the first day of the challenge, doing hours on a bicycle, my period had started. I wasn’t sure when my period was coming or how long it was going to last anymore, as it was all over the place by this point. I had a tampon in (sorry if this is TMI…), and while cycling 130 miles on the first day in the rain the tampon string rubbed and blistered my labia. I had a huge blister and I had to get on a bike every day in soggy cycling shorts for the following seven days – then run a marathon! And, not only that, it was a week when I think because I was very stressed, I got night sweats maybe every other night, and I just wasn’t sleeping. I was ABSOLUTELY BROKEN. I mean, new levels of broken. The weather was biblical, I had a period, I was perimenopausal.
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Menopausing by Davina McCall and Dr Naomi Potter.
Menopausing is more than just a book, it’s a movement. An uprising.
For too long, women have had to keep quiet about the menopause—its onset, its symptoms, its treatments—and what it means for us. Menopausing will build an empowered, supportive community to break this terrible silence once and for all. By exploring and explaining the science, debunking damaging myths, and smashing the taboos around the perimenopause and menopause, this book will equip women to make the most informed decisions about their health…and their lives.
Menopausing will also celebrate the sharing of stories, enabling women to feel less alone and more understood, and talk openly and positively about menopause.
- No more scaremongering: just evidence-based info
- No shame: real women, real menopause stories, real empathy, real community
- Honest, no-holds-barred advice: Dry vagina? Zero sex drive? Hair loss? We’ve got it covered
- The start of a movement: to get everyone talking about the menopause in every home, GP surgery and workspace
