Loving and losing Nutkin

My grandmother used to tell me a possibly apocryphal tale of my return home from the hospital as a newborn. Apparently, my mum placed me on the bed and nipped out of the room to get something, but on her return moments later I had vanished. Panic ensued until I was found down the side of the bed with the newly acquired boisterous Rottweiler puppy, happy as a clam. So began my love of dogs, or so the story I like to believe goes!

The Rottweiler puppy, Heidi, grew into a strong and fearsome beast whose lead would be attached to my pram to help my mum haul me up the steep hills of our Kent home. Heidi would also guard me in the days when it was still normal for mothers to leave their babies outside the high street butcher or baker. When Heidi eventually succumbed to cancer, another Rottweiler, Tilly, came to live with us. Tilly truly was a queen amongst dogs. We children were able to wrestle with her while she only ever moaned gently in mild protest. She was the softest, sweetest creature you could ever meet but try to enter our home uninvited and she took on the appearance of a hell hound! All it took was “it’s ok, Tilly” as any of the family opened the door and she would return to complete docility. Tilly absolutely hated thunder and during storms would be found trying to cram her bulk into the back of wardrobes.

By this time we were living on the edge of a windswept moor in Yorkshire and black clouds were gathering in the form of my mum’s breast cancer. During the course of my mum’s five year long illness Tilly’s black furred neck absorbed buckets of my tears. I clung to her and she pushed her strong body back against mine to let me know she was always there for me. When my mum died, a confused Tilly’s basket was often surreptitiously moved into my bedroom and when my dad was away with work we would be virtually glued to one another.

I went away to university completely unmoored by mum’s illness and death. I was like a tiny boat tossed around on a wild sea and would remain so for many years. While I was away Tilly became gravely ill and my dad had to do her the kindness of ending her suffering from bone cancer. At this stage of my life I had effectively stopped myself from feeling anything, as a defense mechanism, so I can’t actually tell you how I felt. Feelings were far too painful to allow. In a decision characteristic of the stupidity of many I made around this time I allowed myself to be persuaded to seek comfort in the form of a tiny abandoned brindle Staffy pup that I was to call Pickle. I let myself love her but I should never have taken her on as my life wasn’t set up to give a dog the care and attention it needs. I came to London to find work and secreted poor Pickle in my rented home, unknown to my landlord. It broke my heart to have to leave Pickle at home while I worked, as Staffies are very needy dogs who don’t do well in their own company for extended periods. Her reproachful eyes when I returned home filled my already guilt filled soul to overflowing. Eventually I split with my boyfriend of the time and Pickle had to be rehomed. She went to live with a family who ensured she was never alone, but for years after I would have constant nightmares where I had to try to save her from peril. I resolved that I would have to wait until the time was right to get a dog.

Many years passed as I spent my 20s and 30s living a wild London life and finally getting the mental help I had needed for so long to deal with my mother’s illness and death. Then I met Tim. They say things happen when you are finally ready for them and when I met Tim that was certainly true. Years of damaging relationships finally gave way to real love and care. One of our favourite pastimes became weekend walks in Greenwich Park “stalking” dogs we loved. I see couples doing this now and am frequently approached by them, so now realise this wasn’t as nuts as it felt at the time! We married quickly and hoped to start a family. However, it was not to be. Within months of our wedding we discovered that I could not have children. The sudden and hopeless diagnosis was shocking and my heart was broken. The discovery of my infertility also coincided with things going very wrong at work. In the end I accepted redundancy and left. At the time we were living in a rented house and Tim, being the loving man that he is, was immediately on the phone to our landlords begging them to let us have a dog. A cat was deemed acceptable but Tim asked whether a dog as small as a cat would be ok and this is how we ended up falling in love with miniature dachshunds.

Searching for a puppy was the beginning of my putting my broken heart back together. In short order I found someone who had a little girl puppy dachshund and I went up to be interviewed by the breeder (exactly as it should be!) to check I could provide a good home. Luckily I passed the test! In February 2010, just after my 39^th birthday, Nutkin came to live with us. She was a thing of utter beauty and I fell head over heels in love with her. Here, at last, was something I could love totally unconditionally. We became inseparable. A year later our little family grew as we brought a second dachshund puppy, Snake, into our lives. We felt like a slightly odd, but very real, little family. We were healing after all the pain.

I should have known it was all too good to be true. We were too happy. Life was good. Nutkin was such a character. Greedy and lazy, she loved to be held in my arms and would stay there quite contentedly for as long as I could hold her. Her warm, slightly rounded body filled the space where a child should have been and she was just fine with that. A few weeks ago I had a little chat with Nutkin about how she had to promise me to live to a ripe old age. I wanted to see her face go grey and for her to finally, painlessly succumb to old age many years from now. This wasn’t to be.

A week and a half ago Nutkin tripped on the stairs and had a fall. She seem a little shocked but fine physically immediately afterwards. But when I came home from shopping later on she was subdued and not herself. I took her straight to our local vets who said she was probably just bruised. Oh, if only I knew then what I know now. It haunts me, tortures me, but I wanted to believe the vet. Why didn’t I insist on a referral to a specialist there and then? But I didn’t. I wanted to believe she was ok.

In the evening Nutkin seemed fine. She was walking ok, ate her dinner hungrily and snoozed in her sleeping bag as normal. However, when we were woken by the alarm the next morning Nutkin didn’t leap up to attack our faces to demand her breakfast as she usually would. Her back legs were completely useless and she couldn’t stand. My insides turned to ice and I rushed her straight to the vet. He examined her and immediately referred us to Fitzpatrick Referrals, aka channel 4’s Supervet. By the time we got Nutkin to Fitzpatrick’s, which is over an hour’s drive round the M25 from our South East London home, she had lost any sensation in her back end. Colin the vet, told us that she had a burst disc and it was pressing on her spinal cord. Surgery at this stage would give her a 50/50 chance of being able to recover enough to walk again. It was a no brainer. Just do it. I’d have sold a kidney to pay for it if we hadn’t had insurance. Not operating because of expense was as inconceivable to us as it would be if it was your child. She is, was, our child.

After surgery Colin called me to let me know that she had come through it ok and her spinal cord looked healthy. That said, because she had lost all sensation in her body below the burst disc she would need to stay at Fitzpatrick’s for a couple of weeks to see if she stood a chance of the spinal cord recovering from the compression and Nutkin being able to walk, or at least go to the toilet by herself. In the first few days after surgery there was not much change but she seemed to be recovering well from the operation. Seeing her was heart breaking as she didn’t understand a thing of what was happening to her. We had to face the fact that she might never walk again and may, in fact, always be incontinent. This was scary but I told myself that, if a vet nurse can learn how to express a dog’s bladder, I could too. I researched other dogs with paralysis and saw how happy they were. All that mattered was giving her as happy a life as we could. I could do it. When I got the news that Nutkin had recovered an inch more feeling down her back I was overjoyed. Any progress was a brilliant, brilliant thing.

Then on Friday morning I got the phone call. I have always hated phones. My reluctance to answer phones frustrates my husband immensely. But when my mum was ill every ringing phone seemed to bring more terrible and terrifying news. So it was on Friday. Colin said he had examined Nutkin that morning and, after how pleased he had been with her progress the previous day, she seemed suddenly worse. There is a very rare condition called myelomalacia where the spinal cord starts to die after injury. It’s excruciatingly painful and results in death within a few days. We had three choices: an MRI scan, wait and see or euthanasia. The world stopped. I stopped breathing. We gave the go ahead for the scan and waited for a return call. Two hours later the call came that was to break my heart into smithereens. My dearest, darling baby girl, my love, my life, was dying of myelomalacia and there was only one choice left, to end her pain.

So she’s gone and I am broken. Tim is broken. Snake is alone for the first time in his life. I am no stranger to grief and grief this is. As real as any I felt for my mum or the children I will never have. I feel like I am walking around with my chest cut open. I don’t know how I will cope. She’s everywhere and nowhere. My arms are achingly empty. But cope I will because that’s what we do. I’m sure this piece feels like it ends abruptly but that’s exactly how I feel right now. A sudden stop. An unwanted end.

I wrote this to try to help myself a tiny bit by expressing my grief and to try to explain to those whose first instinct is to think “it’s only a dog” why, for me, such a statement is a nonsense. Dogs are my life as people are my life. My love for them is no less real, no less important. Nutkin saved me in a way no human being ever could. She helped me put my shattered heart back together. Now I have to try to do so again.

Intermission!

As I’m off on my much anticipated hols tomorrow, there will be a two week intermission before I pick up “What it feels like to be a fertility statistic” again. See you soon!

 

Think we don’t need to discuss fertility issues publicly any more? Think again

This week Kirstie Allsop has caused a stir with her admission that, if she had a daughter, she would tell her to delay university for a time, consider having children young and focusing on a career later on. She didn’t say, as many have claimed, that women should forget about educating themselves or having a career at all and to focus only on finding a man to marry, before popping out kids. She merely put her thoughts out there. The one non negotiable in woman’s life is that her fertility will end long, long before her life. Better health and much longer life expectancy hasn’t seen our fertile years hugely extended. Yes, some women are lucky and are very fertile well into their 40s. Many, most, are not. Kirstie’s very reasonable point was that university is moveable. Our fertile years are not.

Now, some women will decide that they don’t want children at all. Some that they aren’t at all ready in their 20s, for whatever reason. That’s all fine. At no point in the interview does Kirstie claim that women should not do what feels right for them. The key question we all must face as women is: what will I regret not doing most? If you are certain that having kids matters to you then maybe the powerful social pressure to go straight to university from school might be worth resisting. I’m 43 and there was never any question that I would go to university, as soon after school as possible. Far from allowing women greater freedom to choose the life we wanted, it felt like we simply exchanged one set of expectations for another. How about feminism embracing the idea that having choices is what truly matters?

The reaction to the piece has included some entirely predictable, and entirely unsisterly, attacks from journalists Zoe Williams and Hadley Freeman. Mother of two, Williams rolled her eyes and affected ennui at the mere mention of a fertility window. Apparently, it is all that has been written about since she entered journalism. Right, Zoe. Right. Freeman wrote a hilariously disingenuous piece attacking Allsop for presenting a view that differed from her own and for talking about something which women all apparently already know. So we have all the solutions do we, Hadley? Everything is rosy in the garden of fertility and it doesn’t need to be discussed by anyone anymore?

The thing is, it does need to be discussed. Going to university straight from school, when we will be working til 70 and have zero idea what the world of work is like, is insane for both men AND women. Yet bright kids are still pressured into doing it. Women are still very much looked down upon for having children young, particularly if they show academic promise.

Then there is the whole fertility issue. The NHS actively discourages women from taking any other control over their fertility beyond offering contraception. Want to be proactive about your fertility? Try asking your GP for a blood test to work out the state of your ovarian reserve and see how you get on! Maybe if all women had access to, at the very least, cost price fertility services through the NHS, we could consider the topic of the fertility window to be old news. But we don’t have anything like this. Women are still very much in the dark on most issues relating to fertility and all too often are forced to navigate the quackery of the internet rather than get sound advice and help from a medical professional.

So, sorry, Zoe and Hadley, until these issues are resolved I think that all contributions to the debate are very welcome. You might want to have a bit of a think about why you are so keen to shout another woman down.

What it feels like to be a fertility statistic – part 2

I did eventually peel myself off my living room floor, but I was in deep shock. Mercifully, my job came with the perk of private health care so I was able to make an appointment to see the consultant recommended by the GP within days, rather than the weeks or even months I would have had to wait with the NHS. The hospital was only a five minute walk from my house and within a week of first hearing about my blood tests I was sitting in front of a very kind man who had the unenviable task of explaining to me that I most likely had premature ovarian failure. More blood tests and a scan to check that I didn’t, in fact, have ovarian cancer, confirmed this diagnosis.

I remember reading about women who had had an early menopause and thinking “how awful” but never in a million years had I thought it would happen to me. The average age for a woman to go through the menopause is 52. Under 30 you have a one in a thousand chance of premature ovarian failure. Over 30 that rises to one in a hundred. As it turned out being on the pill, as I had been, on and off, since my late teens, had masked what was going on. My menopause had actually begun some years before, which at least explained why my skin had got bad, I’d gained some weight and I’d developed PMT. It turned out that, incredibly, at 38 years old I was post menopausal. I would never have another period. My ovaries were completely non functioning.

All my adult life the comforting thought of IVF had lingered in the background. It was the fertility insurance policy. The media was chock full of celebrities conceiving “miracle babies” thanks to IVF. When I’d been single my friends and I had often joked that there was always IVF if we didn’t meet the right guy until 40 was in sight. Even if it meant financial penury at least you would most likely end up with a baby. Except, I wouldn’t. In order to have IVF you have to have functioning ovaries and I didn’t have them. IVF was completely and utterly out of the question. No clinic would touch you with an FSH reading of over 12 IU/L and mine was a spectacular 74 IU/L. This sudden absolute stop to any thought of ever having my own child was physically shocking. We had only been trying for a baby for 5 short months and the end of the road had been reached at breakneck speed. Despite the kind and gentle manner of my consultant, it was almost impossible to process all this. I think my husband and I were in some sort of suspended animation, going through the motions of functioning, but not really fully present.

There was one option: egg donation. Despite the fact that my ovaries had packed up shop early doors every other part of my 38 year old reproductive system was apparently in working order. If I could procure an egg it could be fertilised by my husband’s sperm and, with the aid of a load of hormones my body could no longer produce by itself, I could carry a pregnancy to term. Initially, this option gave us hope. Although the baby would not be genetically mine I would have carried it, given birth to it and even influenced which genes were switched on or off, thus creating a child that would be ever so slightly different to if its genetic mother had carried him or her. From having spent most of my adult life being terrified of giving birth I was suddenly desperate to experience it. Egg donation wasn’t perfect but it would give my husband his own genetic child and I would get to experience most of what other mothers do when they have children. I was given a referral to one of London’s most prestigious fertility clinics.

There were, however, some obstacles in my way. Firstly, where on earth would the egg come from?? The ideal scenario would have been for me to have a sister who could have donated an egg. Or a female cousin. I had neither. Women did donate eggs either to get IVF at a reduced cost or through sheer altruism, but this was rare. If I went for this option I would have to go on a waiting list and it was not clear how long this would take. Unlike in the US or Spain, in the UK it is illegal to pay someone to donate eggs or sperm and those donating are not allowed anonymity. I could have tried a clinic in Spain but this didn’t sit right with me. I wanted my child to be able to find out who its genetic mother was. It seemed very unfair of me to bring a child into the world and deny them this right. Others feel differently about this, but that’s how I felt and how I still feel. I was also worried about the idea of women being coerced by poverty into selling their eggs. The Spanish clinics cannot guarantee that the women who donate to them are not in this position. It didn’t feel right at all. One thing I was realising was that I would have to confront a lot of questions about morality. How far would I go to have a baby? Most people never have to give any of these questions any thought.

In my constant trawling of the internet in research on egg donation I came across an article written by a British fertility specialist saying that if women wanted to have any hope of securing an egg they would have to cast their net wide. All social interactions with fertile women had to be considered potential opportunities. When I think back on this now I feel sick, but at the time, in the grip of one of the most powerful urges I have ever felt, it seemed acceptable. That said, I didn’t go that far. Instead, some women I knew were pretty quick to offer. It’s a kindly reflex to want to help a friend who is suffering infertility in this way but the problem is that the offer is usually made impulsively and, on entirely understandable reflection, rescinded. I understood completely and bore not a shred of ill will to anyone who did this. It was very kind of them to even have wanted to help.

These were dark days for me. As a woman I felt like I was slowly fading away. I remember during an appointment at the fertility clinic being told that I had a very healthy womb lining and being pathetically grateful for this meagre evidence of functioning femininity. We went from highs at believing we might actually have a baby to terrible lows. I desperately wanted to do everything I could to help my dear husband have his own child. After all, he was fully functioning. He could have a child with, gulp, another woman.

However, I was starting to experience a rising anger with fertile women. The whole sorry dance over procuring eggs was starting to make me feel awful. I felt like I was begging fertile women for crumbs from their table. It was beginning to poison me. The much talked of waiting list for eggs transpired to be a myth. You had to pay a few hundred pounds to even put your name on the list but it might be years before you heard anything. Then there was the cost of the process. The NHS doesn’t fund any aspect of egg donation. Not even the normal IVF part. We had some savings that we had been intending to use as a deposit for a house but obviously it is a big gamble. Each go would cost over £10,000 and it often took a few goes to even get a positive pregnancy test.

Very suddenly I knew what I had to do. I told my husband it all had to stop. I couldn’t go on with egg donation. We’d been married less than six months and life was wretched. Even if we could find an egg, fertility treatment itself puts relationships under enormous strain. I had reached rock bottom and the only control I had left was to say “no, stop”. It made me feel strangely myself again to take some form of control over my life back. I didn’t want to feel so obviously like a lesser woman any more. I wanted to try and get some of me back.

What it feels like to be a fertility statistic – part 1

So it turns out that I am a demographic. I am extremely zeitgeisty. No, this doesn’t involve full sleeve tattoos, an enormous Victorian gentleman style beard, or even living in Haggerston. Instead I am part of a rapidly growing group: women who will never have children. Now a fifth of all women will reach the end of their childbearing years without having procreated, something which last happened when a sizeable proportion of a generation of young men were wiped out in the First World War. And this group is growing in size. If you are a graduate the likelihood you will never have kids is even higher, with a quarter of all grads now reaching their mid 40s without having had a family. A quarter! It’s also worthy of note that nearly a third of men will now never have kids.

I don’t know about you, but if I had been asked to guess these stats before I researched them I would have put them much lower. Families are everywhere. When I married at 38 five years ago I was certainly very keen to be part of this culturally dominant group. My peer group were having no problems starting families. Time and again friends and acquaintances in back end of their 30s conceived with quite staggering ease. Pregnancies followed weddings sure as night followed day. Now, I’m not daft, I knew that I had “left it late”. I was fully aware that I was skidding into the casino in the minutes before it closed finally ready to roll my dice. I just didn’t know they were loaded against me.

How did I reach my late 30s without having had kids? Many reasons. Lives are complex. Mine had been especially so. Maybe more of that in another post. Suffice to say I hadn’t been lucky enough to find myself with all my ducks in a row until I met my now husband at 37 yrs of age. To me having a family was the biggest thing I could do. It was a commitment that deserved sturdy foundations. I needed stable finances, a job that allowed me paid maternity leave and, most of all, a decent, reliable man in whom I had a high degree of confidence would hang around to be a good dad. I don’t think any of those are wildly outlandish requirements. Do you?

We married on a perfect, blue sky day, somewhat improbably, in March in North Yorkshire. We felt extraordinarily blessed. I’d timed coming off the pill so that conception on our wedding night wasn’t out of the question. By the middle of our amazing Argentinian honeymoon I knew that I would possibly already be pregnant. But I wasn’t. No matter. I’d do what I was good at: research the hell out of the mofo and do everything I could to optimise our chances. Out came the ovulation prediction sticks and the cycle tracking. In I dived to the online fertility forums. Who knew conception was such a tricky business! At school we had been led to believed that a lad getting mildly excited in our general vicinity was fraught with pregnancy danger. I had no idea that conception was only actually possible within a window of hours each month. But even with this military style organisation and planning it didn’t happen. Also, I was becoming aware that something wasn’t right.

I didn’t feel great. My moods were all over the place. I put this down to the stress of getting married, moving house and trying for a baby. But then my ovulation sticks started telling me that I was permanently ovulating. Of course this couldn’t be possible. Separating the medically factual wheat from the quackery chaff in many Google searches I discovered that a couple of conditions could cause the sticks to show positive all the time. One of them was polycystic ovary syndrome. My super regular cycle had also started to go a bit haywire. My periods were slow in arriving. So I booked in to see a GP for some tests. Getting fertility blood tests on the NHS isn’t straight forward. In order to get approved for any kind of investigation you have to have been trying to conceive for a while. Even over 35 they won’t do any tests until you have been trying for at least 6 months. So I had to lie.

Two weeks after my blood test, and 5 months after my wedding, I returned to see the GP. He told me that my numbers (he didn’t specify which) were “a bit high” but nothing much to worry about. I should leave it another 3 months and if nothing had improved I should come back. OK, I thought. He’s a medical professional. I trust him. Almost as an afterthought I asked for a copy of my test results. Once home I popped the numbers into Google. In less than 30 seconds I was reading something that nearly made my heart stop in my chest. It had to be wrong, I thought. I tried another site. Same information. They both said that my follicle stimulating hormone (FSH) levels indicated that I was menopausal. Menopausal. MENOPAUSAL. At 38. The GP had said that my levels could drop but everything I read said that once FSH levels rose they did not ever fall back. Follicle stimulating hormone is what the brain produces to tell the ovaries to produce eggs. Normally, these levels rise and fall during our cycle. When the ovaries start to fail the brain produces more and more FSH to try and get the ovaries to do their job. But it’s a hopeless task. Highest normal level for a fertile woman would be about 17 units per litre. At 19 IU/L you are considered menopausal. My FSH reading was 74 IU/L.

I began to panic. I grabbed the phone and asked to speak to the GP. The dissonance between his “you’re probably fine” and what I had just read, muliple times, was too great. I was told he would ring me back. I tried to stay calm, but I was shaking. As I waited I read more. I’d been having hot flushes and night sweats for a couple of years. It seems mental now but I had just assumed everyone got them. Now they made sickening sense. I have a vague recollection of speaking to the GP when he rang back, sounding annoyed to be bothered. He told me off for not mentioning my hot flushes and said, somewhat irritably, that, yes, it was possible that I was menopausal, but unlikely as I was far too young. He said that if I really didn’t want to wait 3 months they would “allow” me to come back. I made an appointment for the next day with one of his colleagues.

That was how I found myself sitting in front of another GP the next day with hot tears pouring down my face as he, gently, told me that, no, my FSH levels wouldn’t fall and, yes, I was most certainly menopausal. He told me he would refer me to a very good consultant, at the time I had no idea of how fortunate this specific referral was to be. I left the consulting room and managed to get home somehow. I spent the next 5 hours lying on my living room floor unable to stand up.

What it feels like to be a fertility statistic – an introduction

In a few days I head off on what I am grandly describing as a second honeymoon. It’s a trip that has been long in the planning and I can’t quite believe it’s about to happen. It’s been just over 5 years since I got married and the intervening years have, at times, been very tough. I’ve been meaning to write about it for a while, but the time never felt quite right, and I was apprehensive about penning one of those autobiographical sob stories so frequently found on the internet that come across as emotionally parasitic to me. I wanted to write something positive but, until now, I hadn’t found myself in quite the right place. Now suddenly I feel like I’m ready.

It was August 2009 when I found out, definitively, that I would never have my own child, as I was unfathomably post menopausal at a mere 38 years of age. Since that day I have fought to deal with both the knowledge that I would never have children and also the health problems associated with the early failure of my ovaries. It’s been a long road, but finally I genuinely feel happy with who I am, where I am in my life and optimistic about the future. Maybe some of my experiences could be useful to other women? Or even men who are doing their best to support them. Who knows. Maybe no-one will read any of it and the only thing that happens is I experience a vague feeling of catharsis. I’ll take that!

So, school’s (or the OU) out for summer and I’ve got the time to write a series of blog posts about the things that have gone on over the past 5 years. I’ll post when I can. Apologies in advance for any gaps! Feel free to comment on any of the posts. It’s always good to get feedback.  

Ignore the imbecility of the Guardian: the menopause is wretched and we should say so

This morning the Guardian made me angry. Now, this isn’t all that unusual but today they really surpassed themselves. You see, Joanna Moorhead has decreed in Comment is Free that women, most specifically Tracey Emin, must not talk about the menopause in anything resembling negative terms. Moorhead has decided that it is a failure to womankind to deviate from the script on menopause being a wonderful time of freedom and new opportunities. Apparently, for Moorhead, and ‘many of us’, menopause is a time of ‘celebration’ and ‘expanding space’. I have no reason to doubt that Moorhead is herself telling the truth but she identified herself as peri-menopausal earlier in the year so part of me is screaming ‘You don’t know the flipping half of it, love. Just you wait!’.

For those who have made it this far into the text and not shuddered at talk of one of the very few genuine ‘women’s issues’, I shall explain why this enrages me. You see, it’s been quite some years since I was peri-menopausal. I experienced a premature menopause in my mid 30s and am now, at 41, post menopausal. When you first begin to lose oestrogen it’s a gradual thing. You start to notice slight changes. Worsening PMT. Bouts of acne. A general sense that something is changing for the worse. I thought that my thyroid function was awry at first, having had lost half of it to a tumour, but tests proved that its function hadn’t worsened. When I started having night sweats and hot flushes I thought little of it. I just assumed that these things happened to everyone as they got older. Needing the loo twice in the night had started to get annoying but, again, I just thought that this was normal. I also had been experiencing pains in my hips and knees for a couple of years. During the night I would end up in quite a lot of pain if I lay on one side for long. However, it wasn’t until I got married, started to try for a baby and started to experience irregular periods for the first time in my life that I began to realise that something might not be right.

A few visits to the GP ensued where I was patronised and fobbed off. Luckily I am a pretty tenacious person. After the GP finally agreed to a blood test and gave me the results telling me that he saw no issues in them I went home and entered the results into the Google. Within seconds I knew that my follicle stimulating hormone levels indicated that I was, shockingly, menopausal at 38. Not just at the beginning either. I was at the end. I never had another natural period. A scan subsequently revealed that my ovaries were shrunken like a pair of pickled walnuts. Now, on one hand I knew I was facing up to the fact that I would never have a child, so my mood was bound to be very low but I had, by this point, sunk into a horrendous depression. I began having panic attacks and gained a stone in weight without changing my eating habits. My skin was turning to dried up paper in front of my eyes. Each morning new lines greeted me in the mirror and my skin all over my body was flaking off and horribly itchy. I found myself struggling to remember simple things and my previously sharp mind was severely blunted. I couldn’t think quickly or concentrate on anything. The most shocking aspect of all this was the speed with which it happened. It rushed up on me. And I will tell you this: Tracey Emin is 100% correct. It feels like death is at your shoulder.

Oestrogen is the elixir of youth for women. As soon as it goes we start to age in every possible way, visibly and invisibly. A bone scan revealed that I had full blown osteoporosis. I had ‘the bones of a 60 year old’ according to my consultant. My knees, hips and back were by now all constantly painful. I couldn’t even sit down without experiencing pain. This was being caused by the rapid depletion of collagen that was also showing so very obviously on my newly and suddenly lined face. Despite all this, I consider myself relatively lucky for one thing: my BUPA membership meant that I got referred with great haste to one of the country’s foremost gynaecologists who specialises in menopause treatment. When he told me that HRT was going to eradicate ALL my symptoms I damn near wept with relief. The thought of being stuck in that hell forever chills me and I would quite literally physically fight anyone who ever tried to deny me my daily oestrogen gel. It took 2 years to get to the right dose, as they start you off at the lowest possible, but within a couple of days of first taking it my symptoms started to be gradually alleviated.

Now I am as near to ‘normal’ for a 41 year old woman as I will ever be. For this I am immensely grateful. That said I will never be the woman I was before all this started. I am on the maximum dose of oestrogen supplement now so this is as good as it gets. I have come to terms that some things are forever lost. My sex drive is a glimmer of its former self, something that I find enormously upsetting, not least for my poor, wonderful husband. I tried testosterone supplements but it just made me incandescent with anger and gave me giant cystic boils on my face. I had to stop taking it. Keeping my weight down is very hard as I can now eat about half the amount of food I used to be able to without gaining weight. However, running and weight training have been a real help.

So that’s my story and why I get thoroughly annoyed with women who try to claim that the menopause is a glorious time of rebirth and wonder. It could well be for some women but none that I know! I count myself lucky in some ways that it happened to me in this unusual way as I know women who are dealing with it at the expected age and find themselves on the receiving end of some appallingly substandard medical ‘care’. The good old NHS does so enjoy telling us that it knows what is good for us better than we do. So when I get misguided women like Ms Moorhead trying to shut down genuine and open discussion of the problems women experience it makes me rage. Some women do sail through the menopause but many do not and we fail them by pretending that the loss of oestrogen isn’t really the beginning of the slow slide towards death. It flaming well is! There is also much guff spoken about how you just have to ride the menopause out and it will all right itself. This is not true for many women. My consultant treats a woman in her 70s who cannot come off her HRT as her symptoms are constant and completely debilitating. This denial of reality has played a large part in discouraging women from helping themselves with HRT. This has meant that many women will have suffered disability as a result of bone breaks resulting from osteoporosis. It will also have meant that women will have had heart attacks and died before they should. A small number will also have increased their breast cancer risk through taking HRT but, as the daughter of a woman who died of breast cancer, I can tell you that it’s a risk I have to take for a half normal life. So, I say bollocks to the Guardian and its pathetic attempt to get us to pretend that menopause is wonderful. It isn’t and the sooner we tell the truth and deal with the realities the better.

Do we really need childminders to have qualifications?

The amusingly named Professor Cathy Nutbrown writes in today’s Times on the ‘scandal’ of nursery staff or childminders being allowed to care for pre-school children whilst lacking basic literacy and numeracy skills. She rails against the disparity between the need for qualifications to pursue a career in hairdressing or animal care but not in infant care. This ‘scandal’ is now to be dealt with by insisting that we ‘raise the bar’ for all those who care for young children and insist on a minimum of level three qualifications to do these jobs.

Now, while I can see the advantages in all those who care for very young kids being highly educated, I also think that it ignores some basic realities. Is it a coincidence that youth unemployment has been steadily climbing while we put more and more jobs out of the reach of young people with no qualifications? Being unburdened with exam success did not used to make you a pariah. People used to be able to succeed in many areas without being academically minded. My own dear mother would now be barred from her chosen jobs of nursing and equine care by prohibitive qualification requirements. She made a wonderful nurse, caring and conscientious, but a degree in nursing would have been beyond her abilities. Yet, oddly patients did not go uncared for on her wards. The idea that my mother would have also been prevented from being a groom by virtue of her lack of qualifications is still more baffling. Why are we seeking to make so many jobs beyond the wildest dreams of those who don’t do well at school?

Of course none of this would be a problem if we had a school system that churned out Professor Nutbrown’s dream of “high calibre workforce” but we don’t. Oddly, her solution to the problem of poor schools is to make nursery workers more accountable, not teachers. I couldn’t read or write before I got to school, aged 5, and it has not held me back. I spent my nursery days grubbing around in a sand pit, whilst my parents read to me at home at bedtime. Quite why we need nursery workers to take the role of parent is beyond me.

So, today I pity all the poor people who are now worrying about losing their jobs because they don’t fit this hilariously unrealistic model of who should care for young children. I also pity all those poor kids languishing in the bottom sets at school knowing that there will never be a job for them when they leave. Placing all these restrictions on the labour market, whilst being completely unable to equip all school leavers for this market, is a recipe for high unemployment.

You can stick your staycation up your arse and f*ck off while you’re doing it

The pictures in the guidebook looked so lovely. Awe inspiring peaks, immense glimmering lakes and everywhere a lush, strokeable green peopled with smiling outdoorsy types whose cheeks are flushed from an honest day’s striding up a hillside. See, the penny should have dropped as I marveled at the lushness, but it didn’t. Buoyed up with all this talk of patriotic holidaying at home, so modish that it even merited its own new buzz word, the “staycation”, him indoors and I decided to eschew the glamour of France and take our miniature dachshund on a hill walking jaunt to the far more authentic Lake District. We found a gorgeous little cottage on the incomparably beautiful Ullswater and started planning the lovely walks we would take. When I look back on those optimistic times now, sitting at my desk in my house in London when I should still be in the Lake District, I can just about manage a wry smile.

As we drove north on Saturday, in our flip flops, we watched the temperature gauge in the car slowly tick down. When we had left London it had been a balmy 26c and I had imagined myself a little tired of summer. A cool breeze would be lovely and it would certainly be good to be able to snuggle down under a duvet at night rather than fidgeting fitfully on top of said duvet whilst sweating lightly. Somewhere around Nottingham it dipped below 18c, but I remained sanguine. Perfect walking temperature, I reasoned. It was only when it went below 14c and menacing black clouds began scudding low across the sky that I began to worry. The weather forecast had not been promising, predicting rain most days, but as one who spent her formative years in Yorkshire I was used to heavy showers. They rarely last all day. Unfortunately these ones did. By the time we arrived the temp gauge read 12c and the rain was coming down with a foreboding relentlessness. All thoughts of spending the evening sipping champagne in the cottage garden whilst gazing at the mighty Helvellyn were ruefully shelved, but we clung to our optimism and planned the purchase of some more sturdy walking gear the next day. After all, there is no bad weather, just bad clothing, right? Wrong.

On Sunday the rain had got heavier. As we drove over the Kirkstone pass into Ambleside we saw small, huddled groups of grimly determined walkers swaddled from head to toe in Goretex with only a small disc of water slicked, white face visible. They had all the gear but were enduring, not enjoying. The husband and I discussed whether we were the product of a society that had forgotten how to “make the best of things” as we searched the guidebook for the kind of gastropub that would act as a salve to our pampered, middle class souls. We found just the place in the Punchbowl Inn at Crosthwaite and took refuge in tempura prawns with a soy and ginger dressing and some delicious local lamb on a bed of couscous. The rain continued to fall incessantly which meant that we had great difficulty convincing our even more pampered London dog to do its business outside, even with the aid of a giant golf umbrella. Despite all this we had high hopes for the next day. Even a short break in the rain would be seized and we would hit those hillsides!

Monday morning dawned damp. And got progressively more damp. The white water streams coursing down the hillsides were spectacular but only when viewed from the inside of a car, a place with which all of us were starting to get disillusioned. In order to salvage some of the day we drove for an hour and a half to bear witness to the phone box in which Withnail exhorts his agent to “lick ten percent of the arses for me” in “Withnail and I”. On the way we saw a man cycle touring his way up a mile long hill in the driving rain on the A6. There was madness in his eyes. When we reached the phone box in the little village of Bampton I had my photo taken in it and we left. This small pilgrimage did little to lift our spirits and we were by now facing facts. The problem with holidaying in the UK is a simple one: rain. Rain pins you down and denies you the main enjoyment of pretty much all holidays, being out of doors. Be it walking out of doors, strolling out of doors, swimming out of doors or simply sitting down and drinking out of doors, holidays for the Brit are usually a chance to breathe fresh air for a change. Our staycation robbed us of that chance and as such, became profoundly unrelaxing. We checked the weather. No sign in a let up of the rain for the Lakes, but London was sweltering in temperatures pushing 30c. I tabled the option of doing a runner and was met with no resistance.

So, here I am. Back at home and sad to have not even been able to see most of the scenery in the Lakes as the clouds stole it. We didn’t manage so much as a stroll. So, frankly you can keep your staycations and your even more laughable “glamping”, which as far as I can tell is holidaying in a shed. The thought of having to camp through the last 3 days makes me want to rock gently and repetitively in my chair. Next year we are going to France to do a lot of sitting down and drinking out of doors. Enduring ain’t my style.

The invisible child free family

I read a startling figure in The Times on Saturday. They claimed that there are 7.3m couples living without children in this country. Seeking to verify this figure I turned to the Office for National Statistics. However their website is so unwieldy and labyrinthine as to be unusable. As a result I have not been able to verify this figure 100% for the UK, but if you compare it with figures available for the US and Australia it seems about right. It is likely that Germany has an even higher number of child free households. Obviously the Times number will include those who may go on to have children and empty nesters, but this is still a surprisingly high statistic given the lack of representation childfree couples have in the media and political policy. They may as well be invisible.

Another way to verify these figures is to look at the growth in the numbers of women of childbearing age who do not have children. In the US the number of women without children aged between 40 and 44 rose from 10% in 1976 to 19% in 2003. This number is comparable with the UK, where a fifth of women now do not ever have children. Whatever the reason for this childfree life, be it choice or circumstances, this group is clearly part of a growing demographic.

So, why do these figures seem so suprising? Is there an assumption that there is something odd about remaining childfree? Researching opinion online I found some strange views of child free people. One woman remarked of a child free couple of her aquaintance that they were “overly involved in their work and seem to have a void that they are always suppressing (sic)”, as if finding work fulfilling and rewarding made you somehow weird. I also came across a comment that couples that did not want children “could not be in love” and were “selfish”, demonstrating the depths of some people’s prejudice against couples who choose never to have children. However, one phrase came up time and again: that a couple is “supposed to have children”. Of course, the drive to procreate is strong and the future of the human race depends on it but it is not beholden on each individual couple to ensure it. People do have a right to choose.

A large part of the pain of infertility, or simply missing your chance in your fertile years, comes from feeling that if you do not have children you will be forced to inhabit the fringes of society. If we did not have the notion of the family as having to contain children rammed down our throats by advertising and our politicians (I seriously thought that I would combust if I had to listen to Gordon Brown talk about “hard working families” one more time…) maybe more people would find it possible to accept that child free can equal happy.

Daniel Gilbert, a professor of psychology at Harvard and author of “Stumbling on Happiness” goes one step further. It is his contention that child free couples are happier than those with children. His research found that happiness levels of parents declined seriously after the birth of the first child, taking another nose dive in their adolescence, and only recovered when their children left home. Having looked online for opinion on this research I found that the only people who vehemently disagreed with Gilbert were those who were planning a child or pregnant with their first. Actual parents conceded that it could be true.

Having said that, I don’t think that anyone would argue against the notion that children can bring great joy to a parent. What would be nice would be if there was a more balanced assessment of what defines “family” life. Couples who do not have children should not be excluded from the notion of family.