Esther McCarthy: What I learned at a midlife breakfast
There was talk about the changes that take place with our bones and muscle mass, one woman was refused HRT
“Looking after your vagina is a full-time job.” There’s a pause in the room, and then a ripple of agreement, recognition, and applause.
Dr Sinead Hurley, from Menopause Care Ireland, who has just said those words, looks startled at the response and has to wait a moment before she continues her talk. Everyone is turning to each other, with little light bulbs over our heads. It’s so much WORK. Another time-consuming, costly job to add to the list. And our list is already the length of a stretched bra, defying molecular physics, gravity, and sense.
The event is called The Midlife Breakfast, organised by The Pink Ladies, to support breast cancer services at CUH so she’s preaching to the choir, to be fair. The audience is a certain demographic. That era. (I can’t wait for Taylor Swift’s MidLife Era Tour, it’ll be all flat shoes for her plantar fasciitis and sparkles on her Tena Lady Super pants.)
Anyway, Dr Sinead is there in the Lookout Room (look out! falling oestrogen!!!) of the River Lee Hotel, speaking about advancements in perimenopause care.
Also on the panel are nutritional therapist Tara Dorgan and osteopath Alex Daly. We are hanging on to their every word because we can identify with everything they are saying. We can’t sleep, our bones ache, our libidos are rashing, our vaginas are changing colour, texture, and elasticity. (Sorry, that makes it sound a bit like a Willy Wonka magic candy, except instead of a delicious treat, we get labia minora tearing, bladder incontinence, and an itch so intense and relentless it would send a man screaming to a padded room. Try singing a whimsy ditty about that one, Gene Wilder.)
Anyway, the atmosphere in the room is inclusive, understanding and we learn a lot. There’s advice on nutrition and supplements. We are all googling the shilajit out of shilajit under the table. Bacopa Monnieri is another herb I’d never heard of. It’s supposed to be very beneficial for... eh.. gimme a sec, it will come to me... wait, I’ll search it up... oh it may help improve concentration and memory. I’m all for it, I just keep forgetting to order it.
There was talk about the changes that take place with our bones and muscle mass and how to manage all the delightful arrays of new discomforts and pain that come with this next stage. The women in the room talk about being gaslit, one woman was refused HRT, and another lady spoke of being misdiagnosed. The issue of older ladies, our mothers, our grandmothers, our aunties (us soon), who have chronic UTIs but because vaginal pessaries or oestrogen creams aren’t prescribed/can be distressing to administer for the patient, they suffer on. Because women’s health is grossly neglected, underfunded, and under-researched.
This is the generation that was given even less education about their bodies than we were; they had no voice, no safe spaces for learning, no mornings like this. They had no birth control, never mind an oestrogen spray paid for by the government. They were told to be quiet, endure. They ‘suffered from their nerves’, they were (whisper it) ‘going through the change’. They were the women who could be committed to a mental health facility by their husbands if they were acting too mad. And now they are old ladies suffering from urinary tract infections over and over again. Ones antibiotics don’t cure.
The morning finishes with a talk by neuroscientist Prof Siobhán O’Mahony. She’s a lady who is fierce interested in the whole brain-gut relationship. She told us men and women’s gut biomes are different but the research, shock, horror, mainly focuses on men. She collected data showing women around the age of 45 reported severe cognitive and emotional symptoms.
Another pause for the ripple of acknowledgement in the room. She said we hear about hot flushes and bad sleep — but the real worry for women is their brains. She knows women who were terrified they had early dementia because their brain wasn’t working the way it used to. So she created a clinically validated synbiotic supplement along with Dr Eimear Gleeson called FemmeBiome, developed specifically for women in midlife.
Eh, nice one and all, Siobhan, but I’m there congratulating myself for wearing matching socks, she’s off using science to create a solution, with a side plate of highlighting systemic misogyny in the field. Let’s just agree we’re both slaying dragons.*
Dr Sinead calls perimenopause a rollercoaster. I agree. It’s a fluctuating, nauseating, unpredictable ride. But as long as we can become advocates for ourselves and our bodies, back each other up, we’ll be ok. And we can share what helps us, and scream loud enough about it, so younger women in the queue behind us can have an easier go of things.
I’ve been to a lot of these types of events, and they are brilliant. The step is getting all our men to go too.
* On inspection, I was not, in fact, wearing matching socks.
