They tell you how to start HRT. Nobody tells you how to stop.
I thought the hardest part was starting HRT — I was afraid of it for two years before I finally dared to begin. I was wrong. The hardest part was stopping it, when every symptom came straight back. Even so, I came out of HRT a winner.
Four lovely years ended with one sentence.
I was on HRT for four years.
I'm not going to play it down. Sometimes it made my heart flutter and I still got some hot flushes — but it helped me a great deal.
Before that I woke up every 90 minutes at night, the shirt on my back wet. On the drive to work I had bad crying fits, especially if I was listening to something melancholy. Some days I would have up to 8 hot flushes and my fuse was very short.
At 51 I felt as if my days were quietly starting to run out.
With the patches my life was much more comfortable, until my prescription started to run out and the doctor said:
"You have been taking hormones for too long already."
I said okay.
I didn't ask anything. It didn't even occur to me. They were the doctor and I was the patient. It seemed to me like just the next step — the way a prescription ends. I thought it would fade out gradually. A week, two, and the body would adjust.
The reality was something else.
Nobody told me how hard it would all come back — like being hit by a train.
14 April. 2:47 a.m.
4 days after stopping I woke up in the night at 2:47.
I didn't understand right away what had woken me. That feeling that starts somewhere behind the breastbone and moves up to your neck — in four years I had almost forgotten it.
I went to the kitchen. I sat down on the floor because the tiles were cold. I sat there for twenty minutes.
I thought: all right then. One night.
But it wasn't one night.
The next night was the same. The one after that was worse still. By the tenth day I hadn't slept properly for a week and I started to understand that this was not the body adjusting.
This is a step back into the time before HRT.
And the days were actually worse than the nights. A night you get through — you're just awake and waiting.
But the next day the obligations come anyway and nobody cares whether you slept.
One Friday I gave a presentation in a meeting and in the middle of a sentence I couldn't remember a colleague's name. I've worked with them for eleven years. I could see them, I knew exactly who they were — but I didn't remember the name. It was so embarrassing.
That evening my husband said, without my having told him anything:
"You didn't sleep again."
I was back at the point where the people around me noticed the change. I thought it couldn't get any worse, and I was wrong yet again.
Nobody told me how to go on.
I booked a follow-up appointment with the doctor.
I said the symptoms had come back, that I hadn't slept properly for weeks and that I couldn't go to work like this. I was heard out politely. The answer I got was:
"That is to be expected. It usually passes on its own in time."
And that was it!
I don't blame anyone. They were probably telling the truth. Time does heal all wounds, but I walked out of there, stood in the car park, and I didn't have a single next step. Only "wait until it passes".
I had coped with the sweating before and I would cope again.
The hardest part was that for years I had felt like myself and then it was taken away from one day to the next… But nobody told me how I was supposed to go on from here.
Where was I supposed to look for help now?
I wasn't going to just sit on my hands and wait for it to pass.
Oh, I tried everything!
I started with lifestyle.
Honestly, I didn't have much choice once the prescription was gone.
Some of those things I had already tried before HRT. That's why I ended up on HRT in the first place, but I thought maybe this time they would help more if I was more consistent.
- Giving up alcohol
- +25 €
- Window open at night
- 0 €
- Exercise
- −90 €
- Meditation
- −12 €
- Magnesium
- −30 €
- Melatonin
- −12 €
- Private doctor's appointment
- −75 €
- Total
- −194 €
My sleep really did get a little better. The mornings didn't. At three in the afternoon I still fell into the same hole. And at what cost?
My whole life revolved around menopause.
Three months. And I was out of ideas.
I was quietly starting to accept that maybe this was my new normal now. That I just had to "wait" until it got better.
But luckily lightning can strike out of a clear sky too.
The most unexpected conversation in the kitchen.
At the end of May my husband and I were at his brother's place for a birthday party.
Marika is eight years younger than me and we have never been particularly close. I would never have guessed that we would start talking about such personal things in the kitchen.
But she brought it up herself. Her cycles had become irregular and her sleep broken. She had been to a gynaecologist and had been prescribed HRT — patches.
"I just don't dare," she said. "I've heard so many horror stories. Side effects, risks, all of it. I thought I would try something natural first — maybe I won't have to take hormones at all."
She went quiet for a moment.
"Then again, I've heard that if you don't relieve the hot flushes at all, the risk goes up for bone thinning, dementia, the heart…"
I stood there with a cup of coffee in my hand and realised how funny it was.
She is afraid to start.
I am afraid I will never get it back.
"So what are you taking?" I asked. She showed me a jar of Menovera Menopause Relief on her phone.
I've always been rather sceptical about food supplements. I've seen those ads where someone loses ten kilos and gets their life back. I'm not stupid!
But Marika wasn't selling me anything. She just talked about her own experience, how it had helped her so far, but that she was still waiting to see.
That evening I ordered the 90-day supply, because I had nothing left to lose.
Since they advertise a 90-day money-back guarantee, I thought that if it didn't help me at all, I would simply ask for my money back.
They say lightning doesn't strike the same place twice, but sometimes even proverbs are wrong.
