Suzanne Harrington: Would there be a shortage of HRT if it wasn't a woman's problem?
'Imagine if it were not only women who endure menopause – imagine the speed and efficacy of the supply chain then, if it were more than merely women affected by its interruption'
Maybe when Irvine Welsh wrote the opening words of Trainspotting – “The sweat wis lashing oafay Sickboy” – it was in reference not to opiate withdrawal but to HRT, or the lack thereof. Even with an open window on a cold day, the sweat is lashing off of all of us who cannot access what we need. Not heroin – oestrogen. How very foolhardy of those in charge of supply chains to let this happen. How very rash to allow a shortage of the one thing that keeps menopausal women from killing you all with our bare hands.
We are coming for you, with our overheated bodies and our anxiety turned to rage, our thinning vaginal walls and our thinning hair and nails, our overactive bladders and insanity-inducing insomnia, our sagging skin and drooping libido and headaches and fatigue and aching joints. We are coming for you, if only we could remember where you are. Or who you are, or who we are, or which way is up.
If the brain fog ever clears, we will hunt you down, you careless withholders of HRT, you bumbling clowns who have deprived us of the patches and gels we so desperately need, who through disorganisation and incompetence and callousness have created empty shelves in chemist shops. The contents of which make the difference between our ability to pootle along amiably or wanting to burn the house down and strangle the cat. Not just the cat.
Imagine if it were not only women who endure menopause – imagine the speed and efficacy of the supply chain then, if it were more than merely women affected by its interruption. There would be not so much a supply chain as a speedy, shiny helter skelter, a network so finetuned it would regularly break the land speed record whizzing HRT to every corner of the land 24/7, its distribution given the same nee-naw-nee-naw status as live organ transport. But because it’s only middle-aged women fanning themselves by open windows while rage-crying about monkeypox / Ukraine / Uvalde / foodbanks / Liverpool losing the title, the HRT shortage is just a few paragraphs on page eleven, below the bigger stories about men.
Meanwhile we kick the duvet off and pull it back up, kick it off and pull it back up. We put things in the oven and forget about them until the smell of blackened dinner - or the smoke alarm, whichever gets there first – reminds us not to (unintentionally) burn the house down.
We talk to each other using words we don’t usually, like shatavari, and bulk order black cohosh in the hope it will work. We have the chemist on speed dial, and go on a lot of long walks. Alone. It’s safer that way – for you, not us. And were a partner’s eyes to flicker ceilingward for a nano-second, or were he to sigh even infinitesimally, he had better have his running shoes on. And be facing the front door.
Ignore our hormone dysregulation at your peril, people.
