For London student Soe-Myat Noe, menopause came as an unexpected consequence of cancer treatment.
By Deirdre Finnerty, Elise Wicker and Yazmina GarciaImagine you're in your teens or 20s and you find out you're already in menopause. It wasn't how Emma, Soe-Myat and Elspeth had pictured their early adulthood. Their diagnosis was the start of a lonely journey to learn about a life event all women will experience with age but rarely talk about.
Emma is part of a group of women affected by a condition called Primary Ovarian Insufficiency - which refers to any form of menopause under the age of 40. Most of the time there is no known cause and women with POI can experience menopausal symptoms until they're in their 50s. Emma knew next to nothing about menopause, except what she'd heard from older women in the busy Manchester hair salon that she worked in. The future she'd imagined - looking after two children of her own - had been taken away.
"I abused my body with alcohol and sex… I didn't realise how much I needed to talk about it to someone," she explains. "Everything that was happening to me, I always associated with older people… I felt like I skipped a whole chunk of my life." Dr Nighat Arif's social media accounts are full of messages from women who have had similar experiences. She calls for a "better understanding of the nuances" of menopause care among healthcare professionals and wants women of all ages to "break the taboo" around it.
In her surgery, Dr Arif also sees other, rarely discussed consequences of POI - like painful sex and loss of libido.Elspeth Wilson, 23, understands this all too well. Diagnosed with POI when she was just 15, difficulty with sex is an obstacle she has navigated throughout her whole dating life. "It's reassuring to just have that space to ask those questions and vent… If you have the ability to talk about it in a way where you have no ounce of shame, it's way easier."
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