TV and radio presenter Zoe Hardman isn’t the kind of woman you’d typically associate with menopause. After all, doesn’t menopause happen much later in life? Her story is a reminder to us all that it’s never too early to start educating ourselves about the stages of menopause and also looking into our own family history.
Before I’d interviewed Zoe, I’d never asked my mother about when she went into menopause. As someone who is about to enter her 40s, it was something in the not-so-distant future, but nothing to worry about now. Only, for some women, it is. Zoe’s sister Kathryn went into menopause when she was just 32. Devastatingly, by the time she had her diagnosis, it meant she lost the ability to have children. For Zoe, early menopause started the year after her son Kit was born. She was 37. It started with mood swings, uncontrollable crying, dry skin, sleepless nights, a non-existent libido, and a period of her life where she wondered if she’d ever find the old Zoe. The good news is, just over a year later, now on HRT, she’s back to feeling like herself – and you can too. Zoe shared her story at AllBright’s Let’s Not Pause menopause summit , in partnership with Vichy Laboratories (watch it here), and it was honest, at times heartbreaking, real and most of all, relatable. Here, we speak to her about her journey and why she wants women talking.
You have a family history of early menopause, and your sister Kathryn Price went through menopause at 32. A year after you had your son Kit, you started to notice some changes. Let's start with your sister and how her experience impacted your family…
This is a big one because this was the first piece of the jigsaw puzzle to be removed. Kathryn got married in the February of 2015 in Kenya, where my mum lives. She had this beautiful wedding, she got married to her university sweetheart and she was desperate to start trying for children. As soon as they had the wedding, she came off the pill. From the February through to the July, they were trying. As the months went on, she was developing symptoms which didn’t sound like pregnancy symptoms. She was complaining of headaches, feeling really tired and irritable and every month her period came, but they were getting lighter and lighter and then she didn't have a period for about three months. She thought she must have been pregnant. The pregnancy tests were coming up negative and we were really confused. It was a long and extended period of confusion in the family about what was going on. Kathryn was getting more and more anxious and more and more upset, as you can imagine. She started describing things like night sweats, excessive mood swings, intense periods of crying, she was foggy. Headaches were severe. She was finding driving difficult. I remember ringing up mum and saying, “There's something wrong with Kathryn. This isn't right.” We were quite concerned about her health. In the July, she did a blood test. There was a hormone that showed up in the bloods called prolactin. You only have prolactin if you are either going through the menopause or you have a brain tumour. At this point, she was only 33-years-old and they were like, “Well, she can't be going through early menopause so it has to be the brain tumour.” She then went through three or four weeks thinking that she was dying. It was horrendous for her. In the meantime, she had another round of blood tests and it showed her estrogen levels were through the floor, her AMH levels were through the floor and her FHS levels were spiking. Everything pointed towards the fact that it wasn't a brain tumour - she was in menopause. What had happened to my sister was, she'd been masking her menopause with the contraceptive pill. Feeding the body estrogen every month, so the body thought that it was fine. She was having bleeds and it was at the point when all the estrogen left the body, that she discovered she wasn't in early menopause, she was in menopause. There were no eggs left. Sadly, my sister can't have children and it really, really broke us as a family because we just lost my dad. It was the only thing that she ever wanted. It brings me to tears even thinking about the pain that she went through at that point, it was horrendous for her. My mum as well - she was grieving the loss of never having grandchildren from her and it was a big moment. It was really sad.
To have the ability to have children taken away from you, if children are something you want, is just so unfair, isn't it?
Awful and it broke up her marriage. That was another sad thing. The marriage ended and she was just left feeling, what now? I had this whole idea of my life, women that choose to have children, they have this image, don't they? In their life of what it's going to look like and it was just shattered in one conversation. That was done. They tried to go down the adoption route, but eventually it just burst them apart. Kathryn was handed a really bad card.
What changes did you start to go through that made you think, hang on, I might be going through early menopause?
At that point, when she had been given that diagnosis, it was then more of a case of like, this is a ticking time bomb here. I didn't really know anything about it. We'd had the conversations with my mum, and in her defense, she had said to us, "You guys, don't hang about because I went through it at 40, grandma went through it at 41. The likelihood is it will happen around that age." We didn't think it was going to be taking place seven or eight years before that. I was very, very lucky to have my children. Incredibly lucky. I count my blessings every single day that I was able to do that. It was about a year after Kit was born that I started to experience the lows. My moods just plummeted through the floor. I couldn’t get out of bed, or stop crying. My periods never really settled down either. They were super light, like a day or half a day, then they would disappear and then they started speeding up. Apparently, that's quite common. 28 days, 21 days, 14 days. My whole body just felt like it was in flux. In 2019, I hadn't had a period for 48 days. I just knew at that point, it was a combination of the cycle changing, but also not being able to sleep as my night sweats were insane. I was pouring through sheets. My mood swings - it almost felt like I was going mad. It's so scary at the age of 37.
You had young children at that age, and often people just attribute the exhaustion to the children. And yes, you are exhausted from the children. But add in early menopause and that’s a lot to deal with…
I think that's why a lot of women don't necessarily go and beat the doctor’s door down, because they put it down to just being exhausted from life, exhausted from children and career or whatever it is and they just get palmed off a lot at the time with like, “you know what? You're probably just a bit low or you're just a bit tired or try not to do so much”. Inherently as women, we're all juggling a million plates. It was my husband Paul, who said to me, "We can't carry on like this anymore for you. You’ve got to go and seek some help now." Plus, my libido had completely disappeared which was the essence of who I was in a way. I didn't think I was ever going to want to have sex ever again which was so frightening for me and for us as a couple. I went to see the doctor in the January of 2020. She was absolutely amazing and she just said, "Right. Let's do a blood test, let's see what's happening." That was when everything started to unravel.
How did it feel when you did find out that you were in early menopause? Was it a relief that you had an answer?
In a way, yes. It was like, okay, it's happening now. But also, just really, really hard because I was only 37 and I just thought, how is this coming now for me? I was hoping and praying that I could hang on to enough of me to be able to keep my marriage together and my work together and my life together, but I didn't really know if that was going to be the case.
How did you finally feel like you had some control back over your mood swings? And during that time, how did you function day to day?
I don't know if I did function really. I was a bit like the walking dead. That was the January, February, March. I had a real tragedy happened in the February, a friend of mine killed herself. Somebody very, very close to me and at that point I thought, oh no, this isn't going well. I remember the day of her funeral, I called up the doctor and it was in the March and I said, "Look, I'm not sure I'm going to get through, I can't wait for the final blood test to come in. I have to have some HRT." Because my mum has been on HRT since she went through it and it has been amazing. They gave HRT to me. Within two or three weeks, I started to feel like myself again. The bone aches stopped and I just saw the light. Genuinely, I could get up in the morning. All my energy was coming back, my hair stopped falling out, my skin wasn't so dry, the fogginess was clearing. It was like slowly, slowly walking up a flight of stairs. A great feeling.
Tell me about your experience with HRT?
Firstly, no woman should ever live without estrogen in her body. I have no understanding why that is not said out loud enough because the lack of estrogen in the body has very, very detrimental effects to women. In terms of having really bad bone issues, problems with your heart, problems with your libido, problems with your hair, your skin. The list is just basically endless as to why we shouldn't live without it. Firstly, there was so much scaremongering around hormone replacement therapy years ago, linking it to breast cancer. HRT for me is absolutely essential because it feeds the body with estrogen and that's what we need to function on a level to be able to get through life. I tried to go through the homeopathic route because I'm a Chinese medicine lover at heart and I had three months of acupuncture which took the edge off me slightly and I was also on Chinese herbs, but fundamentally it wasn't really kicking it for me.
Can you talk me through how your skin changed during menopause?
The worst one for me was hair because I had this beautiful head of hair during pregnancy. I get that after you go through pregnancy, you do lose hair, but this was on a different scale. I literally lost half a head of my hair and the elasticity in things goes because the collagen depletes. When we lose our estrogen, we lose our collagen. And actually that's one thing I want to say, alongside HRT for me, collagen has been the big, big changing point and the big savior really. And I take 10 milligrams of Kollo Health each day. You put it in water and mix around and take it every day. And actually an Australian brand called JS Hair & Energy. The skin on my legs was very dry. Everything goes dry and you lose a lot of hydration and everything starts to age quickly. I felt like I aged five years overnight.
What advice do you have for women on navigating menopause with their partner?
It’s really important to say that men will never really understand it because they will never truly be able to get inside of our minds and our bodies and feel how we feel. I was very angry at the beginning, "why doesn't he understand? Why can't he get it?". It’s not their fault, they just never will. What we can do as women is to really break it down for them. I had to bare my soul as to how I was feeling. I sat him down every however often it was to say, this is how I'm feeling right now. It was really hard to say things that I had to say to him about my body changes, but I just knew that I needed to do it for the sake of our marriage. The sex elements of it and our intimacy was the hardest part. I just was like, "Please bear with me, hold my hand through this. This is how I'm feeling, this is what physically is going on and I just need you to stand next to me." And he did. He's an incredible man.
You're approaching your 40s. Tell me, does life get better with age and how has your outlook on life changed since your 20s?
Oh my gosh, yes! In my early 20s, I had a severe eating disorder, I was navigating the world of TV and entertainment, my parents were not in the UK, I had no support network, I couldn't hold down a relationship. I was all over the place. Even though I've been through the biggest change in my life, genuinely, maybe just slightly behind kids maybe, I feel the happiest I've ever felt. I feel confident, sexy, I know who I am, I know what I want, I have a great business, my career is going well, my relationship is good. And there are days when I think, I've been dealt a bit of a shit card and then I think, well, why have I? I've got two beautiful children, I'm in a great marriage and everything else is going really well. What I want to say to women reading this is that, do not stop trying to figure out what's wrong and do not stop. We come from the shut-up culture as women. Be quiet, shh-shh, shush up. I won't be shushed. Go to that doctor and if they tell you that it's probably because you're a bit irritable or a bit low or X, Y, and Z, you say, no, no, no, no, I want a blood test. Figure out what's going on. Also, when it comes to figuring out the right course of action, do your research.
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