I don't think my story is gripping enough to be considered newsworthy. This is a shame, because it needs to be told. There are countless women who would benefit from reading it; who, I know, will cry with relief that this isn't happening only to them, and from the realisation that they're not going mad - or dying - after all.
I have never dreaded getting older. In my 20s it was something that happened to other people, so far off it barely merited consideration. Most of my 30s were spent being pregnant and raising two small children; I did not have the time or energy to dwell on encroaching middle age - and anyway, weren't we all being told that 40 was the new 30?
No one told me, however, about the part where you wake up one morning in your late 30s to discover that your body isn't quite what (or indeed where) it used to be. I never anticipated a time when doing a poo would become a cause for celebration, or when my pubic hair would start mysteriously disappearing only to reappear in other places - springing perkily from my nostrils, protruding at a jaunty angle from a hitherto innocuous facial mole.
Displeasing though these indications of incipient decrepitude were, they didn't worry me unduly. It was the manifestation of other, less explicable symptoms, which started three years ago when I was 38 and living with my family in Asia, that convinced me I was dying.
It all began with a weird twinging under my right breast, which moved round to my upper back and shoulder, rendering the whole area so uncomfortable that I stopped wearing a bra. I then spent several droopy-bosomed weeks hoping it would go away of its own accord, which, funnily enough, it didn't.
I went to the doctor, who, in true old-school British-trained doctor tradition, informed me that it was nothing more than muscle strain, and had me lie down on his couch while he cracked a few vertebrae. He then announced, with more than a hint of smug doctorly pride, that this seemed to do the trick for most people. Not being most people, I hobbled out of the surgery and spent the rest of the afternoon in bed, in pain - but temporarily reassured by his bluster that I wasn't about to keel over from some horrible disease.
More unfathomable symptoms were to follow, however: constant low-level nausea, heart palpitations, buzzing, electric shock-like sensations coursing through my body, fatigue, bleeding gums, back acne, sleep disturbances and, scariest of all, inexplicable weight loss. I ate all the high-fat rubbish I could lay hands on, yet every time I stood on the scales, I seemed to have lost another couple of pounds.
Coward that I am, I was too frightened to insist on any full-blown invasive testing. I did have blood tests for thyroid imbalance and diabetes, but both were pronounced normal. The doctor listened with stoicism to my ever-increasing list of ailments and referred me to a physiotherapist: he clearly thought there was nothing wrong with me. I wanted to believe him, but my body was telling me otherwise.
I became a bit of an emotional mess. I remember preparing the children's packed lunches and weeping into their sandwiches at the thought that they would grow up motherless. When I took them to school, I was all but overwhelmed by a yearning to join them in the classroom. To be handed a pencil and exercise book and precise instructions as to how my day would be ordered was a bizarre yet alluring fantasy. When my husband was home, I sobbed out my fears. He was sympathetic, but perplexed; he didn't think there was anything wrong with me that my mum visiting for Christmas wouldn't cure.
She came, took one look at my bony frame, hunched old-womanish gait and haunted expression, and marched me back to the doctor, whom I had been avoiding for a while. He put me on the scales, which revealed I had lost a stone in less than three months. Although I had coped successfully with living overseas before, anxiety rather than physical illness was the eventual diagnosis, and anti-depressants were prescribed. Looking back, I can see that some of my symptoms were indeed exacerbated by anxiety, but I started feeling ill before I started feeling anxious.
Christmas passed in a barely functioning blur. I spent most of my time upstairs either sleeping or crying, alternating between panic and despair, while my husband and mum gamely tried to carry on as normal in front of the children. It was a horrible time for everyone. I believed that I was either dying of some awful illness or going insane; there didn't seem to be any other credible explanation for what I was experiencing.
After a couple of weeks, however, the medication started to kick in. There was no great physical improvement, but the crippling feelings of fear and desperation subsided. A combination of acupuncture and antidepressants gradually eased, but didn't eradicate, the worst of my symptoms.
We moved back to the UK in 2005. I had been suffering from a sore throat for several months, which I had been assured would magically disappear once I returned to the motherland. Guess what? It got worse. Then the muscle twitches started all over the place - fingers, shoulders, legs, buttocks.
A local doctor tested my reflexes, told me I had postnasal drip (in other words, my sinuses were producing too much mucus) and recommended I take more aerobic exercise. He was friendly and concerned, but I knew we hadn't got to the bottom of the problem and could feel myself sliding inexorably down the slippery slope of anxiety again. It seemed that every time one ailment subsided, another sprang up in its place.
One day, in desperation, I googled "muscle twitches" and chanced on a wonderful website called Power Surge, where I was fascinated to encounter plenty of women who were experiencing, among other things, sore throats, broken sleep, crushing fatigue and digestive problems. And the probable cause, they concluded? Perimenopause. That delightful phase of between five and 10 years before entering menopause when, due largely to those crucial hormones oestrogen and progesterone being off-balance, women's bodies can start playing nasty tricks.
Many of these women had gone from being healthy, well-adjusted individuals to physical and emotional wrecks, in some cases overnight, as they experienced a multitude of weird symptoms for which their doctors could often find no cause - there are 34 symptoms listed on the site. Many of these women were, like me, in their late 30s or early 40s, doing their best to raise young children and/or hold down responsible jobs, while feeling that they were losing their grip on reality.
I went from experiencing an incredible sense of relief that hormone fluctuations could be the cause of my health problems to anger and incredulity that I had spent more than a year believing myself to be teetering on the brink of serious illness or insanity, with no indication from the medical practitioners I had seen that hormones could be the culprit. My mum - the voice of common sense - had mentioned that I might be perimenopausal, but when I had looked it up, the symptoms - night sweats, hot flushes and muscle stiffness - didn't seem to apply to me.
I have since discovered that perimenopause is a difficult condition to diagnose, and that not all doctors recognise it as a genuine medical phenomenon. The bewildering variety of symptoms, the unreliability of hormone testing at this stage of the menopausal journey, and the wide age range at which onset can occur often seem to result in confusion, and even misdiagnosis. In other words, unless you are over 45 and missing periods and having hot flushes, many doctors will not even consider perimenopause a possibility - yet I remain convinced that this is what I have been going through for the past three years.
In the absence of any clear diagnostic evidence, women are often told that they are suffering from depression or anxiety, and sent home with diazepam or Prozac, and it is implied that it is all in their mind.
While I appreciate that it is not easy for doctors to give a definitive diagnosis, I can't help but wonder what the situation would be if thousands of men in their prime were experiencing these symptoms. I doubt, somehow, that they would suffer in silence and drag themselves through their daily routine, feeling like shit but carrying on nonetheless. I doubt their doctors would be so dismissive - or just plain clueless.
As for me, I weaned myself off the antidepressants a long time ago, but still suffer from troubled sleep, constipation, mood swings, acid reflux, irritable bladder, muscular aches and pains (I could go on ...) - but hey, we all have to grow old sometime. Despite these niggles, I feel happier and more in control of my body, and appreciate every day how lucky I am to be alive. The important thing is that I now have a glimmer of understanding of what is causing all of this, and that has helped to allay the fear. Because it is the fear, in the end, that gets you .
· Do you have a story to tell about your life? Email it to my.story@theguardian.com
