KATE MUIR: EPISODE
BOOK: LINK
TRANSCRIPT:
Colleen: Welcome to Hot Flashes and Cool Topics. We are excited today for the
conversation with and you’re welcome to the show.
Kate: – Thank you for having me here to
cause as much trouble as possible. (both laugh)
Bridgett: – Sounds like you’re gonna be – – A
disruptor.
Colleen: – A perfect fit. Yes, a disruptor. Well, we’re excited to share that your
book is out, How to Have a Magnificent Midlife Crisis, Rethink, Reboot, Revive,
and Thrive. And I’m holding it up for the YouTube people. People can see it, but
the audio, not so much. But, you know, I just finished the book and I really liked
that you kind of did it from a different lens. We obviously on our podcast read a
lot of books about menopause mid -life. This one, first off, Bridgett and I were both
excited. You talked about neurodiversity, which I don’t think we’ve had in a book
discussion to date. You also talk about taking mushrooms and your psychedelic
experiences, is another thing. But when I say it’s from a different lens, you’re
not trying to speak as a doctor. You’re saying women,
I’m going through it. Here’s what I learned. Can I help you? Was that on purpose?
Kate: Yes, because I know I’m not medically qualified. But in this world of the digital
menopause, which has sort of risen on Instagram, like a kind of little digital
tiger, You know, you really, really have a lot of very informed doctors on Instagram
and around the world. And what I did was everything that I write about, I read the
science paper. And I got taught to read science papers by some of the brilliant
doctors in England. So I back up my stuff, but I never say this is your
prescription. But I also want to be human about it because I think the whole
menopause experience can be just seen as a medicalized experience and in this book I
talk about mind and body and spirit but I always have my hormonal glasses on
because I didn’t understand how important hormones were until about five years ago
and now I realize they are incredibly important in women’s brains.
Bridgett: Right you know
that and that’s what I liked about it how you divide it the book into three parts
and then you have sections on all the other parts. And when I started reading it,
it’s so amazing Colleen and I have been doing this for five and a half years. And
you made these connections that had never occurred to me before about the hormones,
relatability to when women have postpartum depression, when you have,
when you are going through menopause, when you are going um, neurodivergent, you
know, being neurodivergent, the connection with that in hormones. And I thought that
makes so much sense. Why did I never think of that before? Can you talk a little
bit about how the relationship with hormones and those occurrences in your life,
what differences that can make?
Kate: Yeah, women already know this. They all know their
hormones affect their mental health. We’ve known since we were 12 or 13 and had our
first periods and got really angry with our mum. You know, literally, we have known
all our life, but we have not been told the science. And when you see some of the
graphs and the pictures of the science, I mean, I do talk where I talk about
hormones throughout women’s lives. And one of the things is, I show that picture of
the menstrual cycle that you would get out of the encyclopedia, your doctors, and it
shows that blip in the middle that rises up, the hill of the estrogen, the
ovulation in the middle, and you think, oh, well, that’s fantastic. What that graph
doesn’t show you is testosterone. And then when you have your ovulation peak,
you also have this peak in testosterone. And all this time we’ve been told
testosterone, men, Arnold Schwarzenegger, you know, all this stuff, give your hairs on
your chin. It is one of our most prolific hormones when we’re between about 18 and
22. And that testosterone leap is our creative leap.
It’s our energy leap. It’s our muscle running leap. It’s a really powerful thing
that goes along with ovulation, yet we have not been told about it. And suddenly,
when you see the graph and you think, oh, okay, so my estrogen’s up and my
testosterone, I am a super being at the middle of the month, I should use those
superpowers and you know at the end of the month obviously eat Ben and Jerry’s and
just chill, but you know the way that that gives you the tools to control your
life and we’ve understood it a bit but not enough, and then again I was doing work
on postnatal depression and when you look at the graph yet again of what happens to
estrogen and progesterone, which are like 3,000 times your normal rate, 48 hours
after that baby comes out, you are at zero. It is the worst rollercoaster fall,
you know, that empty tummy feeling that you could possibly have. And then 10 % of
women get postnatal depression. And I interviewed a really, really great
psychotherapist in Australia who’s done a lot of work in mental hospitals with women
who are in post -natal depression and just giving them a little bit of their natural
hormones back to bring them back because not all of us can cope with that kind of
car crash and you would think well that’s really logical we’ve lost our hormones
they disappear overnight let’s give us a little top -up they’re perfectly safe they’re
a body -identical copy of our own hormones. This is like a mad thing that the
medical establishment can’t possibly see, but all the really forward thinking
intelligent doctors and indeed women are seeing and understanding and realizing that
progesterone and estrogen give us it back and it might help us over this blip. And
then again, perimenopause. Oh my God. I mean, that is your ultimate mad roller
coaster of hormones and you’ve got your estrogen rocking up and down and sometimes
it goes higher than it does in your normal menstrual cycle and I think afterwards
we should talk about the perimenopausal sex surge but we won’t just now that’s
rocketing up and your progesterone. You want to relax and go to sleep and
hormone be our friends. Then hormones can be crashing way, way down and that’s when we start
to throw things. And you see that in perimenopause and you see that chaos and it
is completely invisible to us from the outside. But we know, women know that there’s
something wrong, there’s just something off, all sorts of strange things are
happening. They’re getting these giant periods, I call them tsunami periods. And
that’s because they’ve got high estrogen. You know, you don’t need to be a
doctor to work that out, you know, that’s just the mass of the two
hormones and that there needs to be balanced. So suddenly looking at all that
through hormones and then looking at what it was like not to have hormones, but
also experienced it myself as a patient and as a human and as a working mom.
Very humbling kind of moment to realize that you thought you’d been running on your
own genius. In fact, you’ve been running on hormones. And when they ran out, you
were rubbish.
Colleen: It’s also interesting because you talk about in the book that not only can you get
the rage, which a lot of women are like, why do I want to kill everyone, but also
trauma can come up again in menopause. Can you talk about that?
Kate: Well, people who
have, say, you know, suffered childhood abuse or been in a difficult marriage or
whatever, when those sort of loving comforting hormones go away and you are left
raw, often all that comes back. And we’ve done big studies on mental health in the
kind of biobank archives in the UK, and what we’ve discovered is that bipolar
disorder suddenly pops up, hasn’t been there before, suddenly pops up at perimenopause
women in their mid to late 40s and we also see people who haven’t had depressive
symptoms for a very long time, KABOOM! Suddenly, it’s again perimenopause which I
call menopause’s dastardly little sister because you don’t know it’s there until
it’s got you. And again, these mental health issues, I’ve written a whole chapter on it
and that there is a serious mental health crisis. And, you know, about half of
women, even if they’re not having some breakdown of some kind or leaving their
marriage or walking out of their job, they’re feeling low. And there’s a word they
use called anhedonia. Just means, I’m sure you know, just not
caring about stuff. And, you know, it says that that doesn’t matter.
And it does because we can get up and walk out of there. And also, even if you
don’t take HRT, knowing what’s going on and knowing it’s not you,
it’s your hormones can make a big difference to the way you look at yourself from
outside and what you decide to do. So I think the knowledge is huge power, whatever
way you use it.
Bridgett: Right. I felt like when I was going through peri-menopause, I
didn’t know what it was. I didn’t know the word peri-menopause. I knew menopause,
not peri-menopause. And then just, you know, our generation, we’re looking back.
That’s what happened to us. I think all of
us just want the people, the women after us to know this is what’s coming.
So you have this this book and all the things ready for you.
Kate: Can I
ask you guys, what were your angry moments in peri-menopause?
Bridgett: Change in schedule, changes, if I expected things to be and something came in and
something had to change my schedule, that would mess me up.
Colleen: I had a father on hospice. I had a daughter
who was ill and I blamed it all on the life experiences of why was I so angry
that all of this was happening at once. And in retrospect, I think a lot of that
was hormonal too. I mean, yes, it was life experiences, but I think it was
exacerbated by the fact that my hormones were on a roller coaster ride. ride.
Kate: Yeah,
I think you’re right. We’re like a super tanker. All this stuff,
we’re going forward, we’ve got the sick mums, the three kids, the full -time jobs,
you know, the people, other people’s mental health problems, supporting people. And we
just don’t even see ourselves. We just
disappear and we’ve got to keep the tanker going. And I talk about it in the book,
you know, I jumped off the tanker and some of us just can no longer cope and you
don’t know. You don’t know until you’re actually in the air. You go, oh, I’ve
jumped off the tanker.
Bridgett: I jumped off the tanker. I quit my job,
which you mentioned all these women that leave their job during that time and I
did. I was a teacher and I left teaching. It was probably the adedonia.
Everything felt flat, something that I once loved just felt flat. So it
is really, it’s just amazing, um, the things that hit me in there.
Colleen: And then you
also talk about the things, um, you know, that was how not to despair or disappear
at work, which I thought was so interesting too, uh, for women that we face.
And the dementia that’s what I wanted to talk about. You spend a lot of time
because you have personal experience with your mom about dementia and you
really share some great information and advice for women. Can we talk about that?
The chapter of how to dodge dementia.
Kate:- Yeah, well, my mom and dad both died of
different kinds of dementia. My dad had vascular dementia, which is basically, you
know, the kind of, you know, the blood vessels and all and the veins and arteries
all clogging up in your brain. and you know he had a series of mini -strokes and
my mum eventually had Alzheimer’s so I experienced both vascular dementia and
Alzheimer’s which was so much worse and I started you know because you think oh my
god I probably got the Alzheimer’s gene I am my mother’s daughter how am I going
to deal with this myself and you look at what the science was around and this was
in 2015 my mum died I couldn’t find anything. I couldn’t you know I’d be
searching as an investigative journalist for the latest science papers for the answers.
There were no answers and we tried various Alzheimer’s drugs on her and then I
started researching the menopause book I wrote before this and I came across this
research in America in Arizona Dr. Roberta Brinton who had done this amazing research
which showed that in the big insurance databases, women who had been on HRT were
something like 70 % less likely to get Alzheimer’s and dementia and even Parkinson’s
sometimes. And obviously that’s a healthy user bias. But these big databases were of
kind of middle class women who had health insurance kind of equally. And you were
looking at a fairly comparable set of people. And when I saw that, And I thought,
well, I absolutely understand what HRT has done to my brain because it’s brought my
memory back. It’s making my gray matter work, my white matter connections are
connecting. I can remember names of things. I have not lost my memory, you know, and
I really had lost my memory. And I thought, well, you know, what does this mean in
the big picture? And then I looked at the HRT stats. And then, of course, I looked
at women in early menopause who get menopause in their thirties and forties. And of
course, they’ve got a much higher rate of Alzheimer’s and cardiovascular disease and
dementia. And of course, you realize, when the hormone bank is empty, you are not
protected in the way you were from those diseases. And almost, you know, that you
can’t necessarily say just lead a healthy life, just eat a good diet. My mom was a
healthy walking person who ate quite a good Scottish diet, but she wasn’t, you know,
she wasn’t eating rubbish, and she wasn’t drinking too much, and she wasn’t smoking,
and she got Alzheimer’s. And I thought, well, all that, oh, just eat healthily,
you’ll be fine. Yes, that’s absolutely true. That is part of the game. And I put
that in the book that, you know, if you eat, did you ever see the film Super Size
Me?
Bridgett: I remember it. Yes, yes.- Yeah, McDonald’s every day and he passed away.
Kate: – Yeah, McDonald’s every day. And
after a month, basically they said to him, your liver has turned to pate, I
remember that line. And he had huge cholesterol, his blood pressure was up, he
wasn’t cognitively as good as he was. And so we are aware that absolutely rubbish
ultra -possessed food does affect your brain. But for women, why are two thirds of
Alzheimer’s patients female? And this is the question that obviously everyone’s asking,
and it is hormonal. It does, you know, the ground zero, as Roberta Brinson says,
is perimenopause for Alzheimer’s. And that’s when we should be looking particularly if
you are a child of Alzheimer’s like me, can I take hormones? Will they do me good?
What are the safest hormones? What are the good options for me. And how do I look
after my lifestyle? And you know, yeah, don’t smoke, don’t drink a lot,
take plenty of exercise, you know, but we all kind of know that. And it’s the
other layer that hormones can give us. And I think it’s criminal that we’re not
being told this is women, because you can’t say, oh, let’s just wait for a 20 year
trial to see if anyone gets, you know, this or that, I’m going, I am not going to
wait 20 years. I’ll be dead in 20 years. I want to live a life with my brain
working for the next 20 years. So I’m not going to wait till you do a trial on,
you know, estrogen and Alzheimer’s, because estrogen makes me feel great. And I am
going to be very interested to see what happens in the brain. And of course, you’ve
maybe had a run, but Dr. Lisa Mosconi, who wrote the book, The Menopause Brain, is
absolutely love her. And I would recommend that book to everybody who,
particularly who is a child of Alzheimer’s because it is life changing and also
thank God it’s something positive that we can do and I think it’s so important you
know, particularly if you sat through someone dying of Alzheimer’s and forgetting all
their nouns and forgetting who you are you know, It’s a, you know, that is a
horrible thing and you do not want to do that to the next generation. And so I
feel really voluble about trying to get this out there, that message.
Bridgett: – Right,
and you address as well, because we’ve dealt with this also where a group will say,
there’s not enough evidence, then another group will say, there’s some studies out
there. There are studies. And if we are feeling this way, and I really appreciate
that you address that in your book. I have experienced backlash between
different groups saying there’s not enough evidence and some saying, Hey, we’re going
to look into it if it’s there. So I do appreciate you
addressing that. Can you also talk about the genetic variant? Because you talk a lot
about that in the book that you can test for.
Kate: The APOE4 gene,
yeah, the APOE4 genetic variant, which people have, but if you’ve got two of,
you know, you’ve got a larger chance of getting Alzheimer’s. And they’ve looked at,
there’s one small study that looks at giving estrogen to people at risk of
Alzheimer’s. I think it is one of the Masconi’s studies and it really shows it has
an effect particularly good on those with the APOE4 variant.
So that is really worth looking at following and the Alzheimer’s charities in America
are very good. They are following and so they’re financing some of the research on
this. In the UK they are way behind, but you know, Maria Shriver, she is very good,
she’s working across that story. And I think if you are in that position, you want to
follow those people and wait as the science unfurls, but you know,
why not take action?
Bridgett: – Right, I just thought that was important because people don’t
even realize that they can have genetic testing to see if they have any of these
genes that might lead them to get Alzheimer’s. So I think it’s really important for
people to realize that there are tests out there they can be doing to be proactive
with their health. – Right, right. Yeah, I think I had, it was like one of those
where you send off and get your ancestry thing and I had one marker for late
onset. And I believe it was, oh gosh, the real, oh Chris Hemsworth, I was like,
you know, the real good looking guy, Chris Hemsworth, he had 4 markers. HRT can possibly
help with bone density.
Kate: Not as a treatment, but to maintain bone density and it’s
FDA approved and it’s also NHSR National Health Service approves it as to help with
bone density. And there’s two things you’ve got to do with bone density. Well,
three, actually, you’ve got to follow Dr. Vonda Wright on Instagram, because she’s
absolutely brilliant. And she’s an American doctor. But you’ve got to lift heavy
weights. And you ain’t going to build your density by lifting little pink weights.
You’ve got to go Schwarzenegger, Patrick Schwarzenegger or Arnold Schwarzenegger. You
choose, but you need to lift serious weights so that you can only manage a few
reps. And then you’re going at the point at which you go, that is when your bones
density is increasing. And that’s when you strain and your body goes oh my god
better make some more, better make some more muscle better make some more bone and
bone and muscle completely you know connected in in a process together and just
nobody told me hormones make bones, hormones make bones work and your bones turn
over all the time like a tree branch they’re not pieces of glass you
know they are whipping things and you know as the calcium gets worn out, the
hormones are pumping in again, you know, it’s an in and out, an in and out
process. And, you know, when your hormones go away, it’s like you’ve lost the petrol
in the engine. And it really, really means that in, it starts in perimenopause.
From perimenopause through to the other side of menopause, you lose 10 to 20 % of
your bone density, which is why one in two women get a break from osteoporosis
after the age of 50. And I just know two women in my street. I’ve been through
their hip operations with them and, you know, their thinner frames and walking frames.
And I know exactly what it’s like and how long it takes to recover. And I keep
thinking, oh my God, what if you had been in the generation that had rubbery joints
like mine and strong bones because, you know, I’m weightlifting,
I’m eating lots of calcium based foods, I’m taking vitamin D, and you know,
I’m taking HRT, so I’m doing the four things that will keep my skeleton happy.
Right. And I see them, and these are fantastic, feisty, strong, intelligent women who
are kind of trapped inside their own bodies and can’t do what they want to do in
later life. And I just think we need to think about osteoporosis when we’re 40,
you know? – We do, great. – Women who’ve had eating disorders, anorexia, bones are
often really, really weak. And so you particularly need to pay attention if that has
been your past life as well, or you’ve taken a lot of exercise or whatever it is.
Bridgett: – Yeah. – Think about it now. – If you break those hips. I mean, if you break a
hip, oh my gosh.
Colleen: Can we also talk about something that Bridgett and I were a little
hesitant when reading and that was the cold swimming? The wild swimming?
Kate: Oh,
you want to do cold swimming?
Colleen: Oh, yes. Okay, because we were both like, do we have
to do the cold swimming? Are you in Austin or where are you?
Colleen: We’re in Nashville, Tennessee. Nashville.
Kate: So the opportunities for cold swimming
are not as good as they might be there.
Colleen: We’re landlocked.
Bridgett: We do have pools!
Kate: So
you need a little bath with ice, don’t you? You need a plunge pool. So no,
but where I live, obviously, London, it goes down to about one degree in winter,
and I swim all the time at the Parliament Hill Lido, which is a big old 1930
swimming pool with no heating. So most of the year it is screaming cold but
they do have hot showers and we go in for it if we can. If it’s one degree we do
one length, if it’s four degrees we do four lengths you know and basically work our
way up so we don’t die in the water, but it took me ages to get used to it and
I wear little rubber gloves as well because my fingers get really cold because I’ve
got like reynards syndrome so I get terribly cold fingers But it is so good for mood
and it’s in the kind of, well, it’s sort of body and spirit,
because it really, really is good at lifting depression. They’ve done some studies
here in England and Portsmouth, the coastal town, and they took a bunch of people
and put them on antidepressants who needed help. They stayed on the antidepressants
and they went to the beach to sit there and be outside and the other half went
cold swimming and the half of the group that went cold swimming just had so much
better mental health and the other thing that’s happened to me and you know studies
back it up but I haven’t had a cold for three years and that’s been amazing. It
really lifts your immunity. It lifts your brown fat which is your kind of radiator
to burn things off. So in so many ways it is really good and it’s a laugh,
I love it. I go with my friend Deb and she’s a film critic and a TV critic.
So basically we get in the pool and we’re in chatty lane and we swim up and down
quite slowly because we’re a bit rubbish and she reviews the TV for me, I’ll have
the latest Netflix. And so I just get that and then I get out after, you know,
10 minutes, and I don’t need to waste time reading TV reviews. I’ve got the whole
day sorted. I’m in a good mood, you know, and it just is, and also if it’s
horrible weather and it’s pouring and it’s dark and you go there and you have
overcome everything by 8:30 in the morning, so you feel great ’cause you’ve kind of
tackled it and the rest of the day is like, how could it be any worse.
Bridgett: I thought
that was so funny. I love the chatty lane. I was like, Oh, I would be in the
chatty lane for sure. But yeah, and I had to look up. It’s so funny. I used to
swim like just on swim teams when I was younger. And I was like, what’s this robe?
And I went, Oh, that’s what the swimmer’s wear after their meets.
Kate: So it’s like a giant plastic, waterproof bathrobe lined with fleeces.
But it’s like wearing a huge sort of kingly cape. You feel very kind of
enormous in it and powerful and warm. And you can completely change inside it. And
it’s really, really good. I’m sure like LL Bean has one.
Bridgett: The swim teams used
to have them in the winter after. And you included in the book that
you’ve got to put this warm stuff
on. You don’t want to get frostbite.
Kate: You were much, much less likely to ring in sick to work. It really knocked out about a
third, I think, of people who were ringing in sick. So basically, it just lifted
people. And God, that’s simple. Everyone can afford a cold shower.
Colleen:- Yes.
When the second part of your book, which is talks about the body, we’ve talked
about the HRT discussion, but you also are very specific on a chapter on the
clitoris and on “Viva La Vulva,” which I thought were great. So,
you know, we love Rachel Rubin, she’s been on the show, but can we talk about
that?
Kate: I think that women don’t realize that, yes, it’s hormonal, but it’s
also psychological. It’s kind of a combination of the body and the mental when
you’re talking about your sex drive and vaginal dryness and all Yeah,
yeah, yeah, it’s massive this and it’s such an easy one to solve and I
must say for some of my friends I have really got some very nice presents back
after I’ve explained to them about vaginal estrogen and their sex life because they’d
be saying to me oh god you know it’s really painful. I can’t have sex with my
husband anymore it’s just like it’s like you know just feel like my vagina feels
like a crisp packet. It’s horrible you know really difficult and then you say
well vaginal estrogen, here you go, use it for a month, you know, you get it, you
just get it easily from your doctor and in fact you can get it for $20 in
America, you know, and it’s not that expensive. Put it on every day and basically
it puts the collagen back in your vulva and your vagina and everything becomes
stretchy and comfortable and soft again, which really, really helps having sex. It
also really, really helps not having UTIs because if you’ve got skin that might rip
or painful dry skin it’s much more likely that the bad bacteria can take hold in
your urethra and things like that and your urethra and your vagina and your clitoris
the whole vulva area is all one vast area. I didn’t know this word till three years
ago, vaginal microbiome and I call it the vagibiome in the book for short and
basically we’ve all been talking about our microbiome
up of local estrogen, which is just a cream or a gel or a little pessary, you
stick up a couple of times a week. And there is no risk, and the science is out
there with 50 ,000 women, there is no risk of cancer because it’s basically like
just skin cream. You’re not really, you know, putting estrogen all over your body.
So if you had breast cancer, you’re not having sex anymore with your husband because
your vagina is really dry, you can use vaginal estrogen and that’s what all the
really serious doctors sort of say. And so that is a fantastic uplift in your life.
And then you’re thinking, well, but what’s happened to my libido? And we did big
surveys here in the UK of 4 ,000 women, 45 to 55. And 51 % said menopause has
really affected my sex life. And they weren’t just saying, you know, my vulva’s
uncomfortable or whatever. They were saying psychologically, you know, your body feels
different, your testosterone is starting to go down. Now your testosterone doesn’t
crash like your estrogen and progesterone crash. And you’ve had lovely people on here
talking about testosterone on previous podcasts, but it goes down very slowly.
And it’s basically it’s at the end of its tether by the time you’re 50 or 60.
It’s not really working very hard on your libido. And I know you can get
testosterone, it’s not on licensed from the FDA, but you can get it compounded in
America. And here you can get it on our National Health Service for your libido.
If you go in and say, Oh, I’m not serving my husband right now, I really need
help with my libido, please could I have some testosterone? And there’s very much,
it’s like, you are failing to make his relationship perfect. Rather than,
would you just like to do this on your own? You might just, or would you like to
do this with another woman? It’s very, very old fashioned. And the idea that
testosterone is only prescribed for the beta, when we know absolutely that it makes
a difference to your mental health, to your own, to your getting up off the sofa.
It helps increase your bone density, if it’s with estrogen, you know, it helps you
build your muscle, and you know, it just gives you a lot of oomph, and it’s lovely
having oomph when you want to get something done. So there’s all that is coming
into your kind of sexual bag of things that you’re dealing with. And you know,
for some people, the testosterone can really make a difference and make really
improving orgasm as well, if I may say.
Colleen: – Right, yes you may. (laughing)
Kate: – And also,
you know, things that I talk in the book about, you know, we’re of a generation
that just didn’t get taught any of this stuff. It wasn’t even known. And also
things like the clitoris. I mean, we didn’t really understand what a clitoris was
like. We thought it was just a wee P -like nodule, you know, at the end of the
vulva. But then my friend, Portia, who’s quite radical, printed me out a 3D clitoris
in pink to hang on a Christmas tree. It was massive! It’s like half your hand,
it’s got big legs, you go round towards your vagina.
And no wonder we didn’t know that. You know, all that area, you can feel that, you know,
your body sensors are different in those areas. And we knew that they were extra
sensitive, but it’s basically the long arms of the clitoris going from the head
right down, you know, into the other bits of your vulva. And, you know,
that’s why it’s such a pleasure to be stroked all over the place. And, you know,
all these things that really, you know, we’re sitting there and we were never taught
it in school or anything. No, it was just a drawling.
– My friend, Rachel Rubin came
along and had lots of hopping little clitorises on her videos. But you
know, it’s such a joy. And a lot of that is just really good fun. I mean, it’s
just, oh, that’s fantastic. I’ve got one of those, who knew?
Bridgett: – Right, and just the
discrepancies that you addressed too between women, study on women and study on men.
And you know, women, which I didn’t learn this until we started doing our podcast,
that we, that is when we are in our reproductive years, we are producing more
testosterone than any other hormone. I didn’t, you know, I didn’t realize that until
we did this, but just the whole discrepancy. And I did not know that in Great
Britain or the UK that you could get testosterone, even if it was for that,
like here we have to get it compounded.
Kate: You know, it is so difficult for one tenth
of what men use, the tenth of the men’s gel. That’s what I do.
Bridgett: You know, you asked also
something that really surprised me and I can try to remember what chapter it was
about after women had hysterectomies. Oh, yeah. and they put a pellet in sometimes?
I had never heard that.
Kate: Yeah, yes, no idea.
That’s a good idea because, and I was talking to an older woman about her, her
hysterectomy when she was quite young and that the doctor, when he did the
hysterectomy, put in an HRT pellet and said, look, that’ll keep you going for six
months because you’ve come out of that crash of the hysterectomy, you’ve got
this bit of your body just empty in the middle, you really kind of feel that and
you feel it psychologically and the idea of doing that sort of bareback with no
hormones is terrible that we let people suffer that crash and we didn’t look after
them and cushion it and the idea you could pop in a pellet and give people a ride
out for six months and then they can decide what hormones they want to take and
how much. It just seemed you know, a wonderful thing. And I’ve just met so many
women who were given nothing after their hysterectomies, younger women who were just
left high and dry and often, you know, with suicidal ideation ’cause they didn’t
know why and they didn’t understand that removing that body part and that, you know,
their ovaries was such a massive thing. So yeah, and hysterectomy is so common.
Colleen: – It is, it is. We had Dr. Lauren Streicher on to discuss hysterectomies. And there’s
so much that we learned that we had no idea. You know, you think you go in for
just a hysterectomy, but what do you want removed? Do you want everything removed?
Do you want just pieces removed? Like it will affect not just your libido, but so
many other facets of your, you know, the way that you live in your mental health.
And I think that kind of leads us into the third section of your book, Spirit,
because I do think that women go into what is menopause and they wanna know
logistics, but they don’t really talk about the changes that are happening in your
spirit, in your energy. And we have found in our discussions, a lot of post
menopausal women are just discovering this creativity that they had forgotten many,
many years ago. But in your section, you talk about things like women and wine,
digital detox, which is, I can’t even imagine how hard that must be to just say,
okay, here’s my phone. I’m not going to use it anymore. You know, that’s, but it’s
important because you don’t think about that as being something that can reenergize
your spirit. And also you talk about divorce and how that affects. Why did you feel
it’s so important to add that into the book?
Kate: Well, I got divorced myself and it
was a huge part of my official midlife crisis and I didn’t quite realize how you
just have no idea how devastating it is because you are just the center of a kind
of bomb that goes out and hits children and husbands and all the people around you
and so I really wanted to write about it honestly and quite sadly as well but also
that you do come out the other side and that you can regenerate after divorce
and also you know the person you were at 25 when I met my first husband it’s not
the person you are at 50 and neither is he and unless you both negotiate all the
way about your growing up together and what your needs are and how you structure
this vast supertanker family you’re running or whatever your business you’re running
together whatever you’re doing you can’t really expect it to just keep on
working and you need to negotiate and speak and we don’t do that and I think
that was one of the things I wanted to say is like you know this couple who does
a living thing and you need to look after it and you need to revise it every year.
I talked to a great a couples therapist who does fantastic workshops with
couples who are happy together but would like to be happier and you know the idea
that we strive to be happier rather than, oh my god we’re going to crash everything
you know I think that’s really sort of inspiring as we learn more I
just felt I knew nothing and no one had told me. I mean you do a brilliant podcast
which covers lots of these things but a few years ago no one had told me anything
about any about any of these things. And I really didn’t understand also like how
when your brain rewires and you have a different brain and your gray matter has
changed. And even if you’re taking HRT, the amount of hormones has changed and what
they’re doing in your brain. And maybe you’re titrating it. So your brain is really
steady every day and you wake up the same person every day. Well, that’s unusual
because we’ve never woken up the same person every day since we were 12, you know, since we
got our periods. We’ve lived in a hormonal bucket, a hormonal cycle, and suddenly
we’re calm, either without hormones or with the hormones the same every day, and
we’re powerful. And, you know, we’re not looking after all these people, and maybe
we’re not looking after our aging parents, and we’re looking at our career, or, you
know, I’m hoping we’re looking at politics, and maybe having older women in politics,
wouldn’t that be a good idea, you know, that we would keep going until we would
say 79 and run a country. And, you know, where are the women of that wisdom and
age? Why aren’t they there? You know, I want them up there for me, and I want to
be part of that next generation of women that are not going to disappear. And, you
know, but those sort of spirited women that will go and challenge the status quo.
And God, how much we are needed, you know. Yes, we do. It was,
you know, when you brought up to after a parent dies and the number of the divorce
rate, I, I did not.
Colleen: That’s another thing that your book that just went, wow.
Why, you know, that’s something I never thought about and the correlation there just
and friendships that die as a result.
Kate: Well, yeah, I found that really upsetting.
It was one of the, I wouldn’t have factored that into divorce at all, that you
will lose your couple friends. And, you know, there were friends that we’d gone on
holiday with since our kids were, well, since they were babies actually, and we’d
been going on holiday with them together for 18 years, 20 years or whatever it was.
And, you know, those kids had grown up, I’d, you know, taken the lice out of
their hair, you know, the other kids, you know, we made little videos together and
you know, I was great friends with her mum and then divorce came and it was a
male friendship originally and we women just moved apart as the as the men moved
apart and she said to me quite recently, I saw her again and she said, “we were
collateral damage in your divorce, weren’t we?” And I was like, yeah, sorry,
we can do something about it now. And I sort of mourned, I really mourned that
friendship. It was a big thing for me. And that’s difficult,
isn’t it? And I’m glad she spoke about it. We spoke about it. And I think you
were talking about friendships the other day, know, um, you know, whether they’re
there for a reason or a season or whatever. Um, but that, that was a lifetime
friendship that, that got a big kick.
Colleen: Yeah. There are so many things that dominoes
that happen in one relationship ends more like you said, if a parent is
sick or dies or external factors that can create that wedge that you just can’t get
over and but there’s also a creative awakening that you talk about towards the end
of books So I think that’s a great place to kind of give a little like positive
Kate: Most the book is actually incredible because every woman who tells me their story
has a kind of resurrection, And so it’s all the struggle but that those the women
who are in my book are all survivors they’ve all come out the other side and
they’re all very empowered by what has happened to them and I think that is really
uplifting for other people but my three friends who I interviewed in the creative
renaissance chapter. One was a teacher who walked out of her job with hot flushes,
depression, and psychotherapy for a year. I thought I’m never doing that again.
And then confronted kind of her menopause for who she was, you know,
really, really was feeling so depressed. She was at risk of suicidal ideation.
And then, you know, made a comeback, got HRT, started campaigning on Instagram as
menopause Whilst Black, which is a fantastic Instagram worth following.
And she became a fashion designer. And she designed stuff out of old coffee bags
and African materials and, you know, things curtain she finds in charity shops and
she’ll come in and sort out your wardrobe as well. And, you know, I loved her and
her story. And that sort of she upcycled herself. Do you know what I mean?
Yeah. And those kind of stories are just so powerful and so uplifting and also it’s
time to do mad stuff like um friend who I’m going to see tonight actually uh was
uh I met her buying a school uniform she became a psychotherapist you know stopped
being a mum what full time then she joined Extinction Rebellion the climate change
radical group and looked after the sort of young kids doing the wild stuff in
Extinction Rebellion and you thought well I would never have guessed that in the
uniform department of the primary school that you were going to be in this climate
change radical at 60. You know yeah, let yourself go do the things you care
about you know whatever they are. I think that is you know both creatively
politically whatever it is I just think going to stop you, you know,
and you don’t care if anyone’s laughing at you, you don’t care. Yeah, that’s gone.
Bridgett: That’s like some of the great gifts, the great gifts of this age. There’s a
a lady out that it’s, I’ve seen in the past few weeks. The We Do No Care
Club. Just Being Melanie, Oh my goodness. She’s so funny. Have you seen her? She’s on TikTok.
And she said, I just started, we don’t, we don’t care club. She’ll have like a
little piece of napkin with marker on it.
Colleen: She had no clue that it was going to go
viral around the world this one was like I think she’s as shocked as everyone else
that it took off. Yeah, it’s awesome It’s one of the gifts. Yeah, and it is and
it I mean we earned privileges in this stage of life and creativity I liked one of
the comments you had in the book is that you’re craving the opposite that we have
experience so far. And I think that’s a great way to look at it. And I also
wanted to mention that the book is out now, but in the U .S.,
you can get it at amazon.uk in Audible. It will be out eventually in the U .S.
But if you can do it on Audible at amazon.uk, because I want to make sure that
people have access.
Kate: Read by me. Yes. It’s a Scottish accent that you’ll understand.
Bridgett: I love it though. I mean, I love the stories in it and I love the humor in it,
you know, so I was reading it on a plane and I was, you know, you’re kind of
like people look at you when you start laughing, you know, but that’s okay.
Colleen: So
people are like, you were crazy on the plane.
Bridgett: But you know what, I don’t care.
There’s lots of such on humor around menopause, which is sort of such wisdom as
well.
Kate: I was thinking about a quote I was putting up on Instagram from Margaret
Atwood, who says, “Menopause, definition, “appause while you consider men.” (laughter)
Yes. Yes, yes. Well, there you go.
Colleen: Well, thank you so much,
Kate, for coming on the show. We’ll have a link to the Amazon.uk in our show
notes. We appreciate the book and we appreciate you sharing it with us
Kate: Oh, well,
thank you. And I’m on MenoScandal. Yeah, Instagram.