Like most thirtysomethings, I thought the menopause was an ugly but unavoidable metamorphosis that afflicted older women. It never crossed my mind that it might hit me before I'd found Mr Right, married him and we'd created at least three, preferably four, beautiful children. But a few weeks ago I asked my mum when she went through it. Her answer hit me like two sharp blows to the abdomen. Thirty-nine, she said.
The average age for the menopause is 51. When fertility experts talk of some people having 'the change' early, I figured they meant at about 45 which, to a woman in her mid-thirties, seems not just a decade off but more like a century.
But 39? It seemed hideously young. If it's genetic, and I assumed it would be, this left me only five years before my child-bearing years would be over.
At first, I did what all intelligent, mature adults do when confronted with some unpalatable truth: nothing except to pour myself a large glass of wine. But I couldn't ignore it for long. The tick-tock of my biological clock, which had been a constant but distant sound all my life, had erupted into a deafening alarm clock whose snooze button no longer worked.
So I contacted the pioneers of the revolutionary 'Wallace-Kelsey test' and asked if I could be their first human guinea pig. Last summer these two Scottish scientists discovered that it might be possible to predict the onset of the menopause by measuring the volume of a woman's ovaries and assessing the number of eggs she has left.
Their paper, published in the journal Human Reproduction, was picked up by the international media and the team was inundated with requests from thousands of childless women eager to find out when their clock would stop ticking. The discovery sparked a heated debate, with many women expressing unease about what would be the world's first reliable 'menopause test'.
'The last thing Bridget Jones needs is for science to enable her to schedule in a pregnancy for some distant moment in her self-obsessed life,' the author and broadcaster Yasmin Alibhai-Brown said. 'The successful young female professionals ... now also feel entitled to perfect partners, perfect bodies, perfectly formed, always delightful babies, delivered precisely when it is the right time for their busy mothers. It is both depressing and worrying that this goal is now within their grasp.'
The columnist and author India Knight condemned the test as another example of love being put on the back burner and of medicine overtaking nature in the field of conception. 'Many childless women seem to adhere to the notion that babies are pretty much like really sweet dollies,' Knight added.
Personally, I do not regard babies as playthings to be discarded once I'm bored. Nor do I think it is my fundamental human right to have one, perfect or otherwise. But it has been for me, as for millions of other women, something I always thought I wanted. Also, why should working women who want children have to juggle their options guided only by a ticking clock that refuses to tell the time? I was all for the test.
When I met Dr Thomas Kelsey, a computer scientist and cancer researcher at St Andrews University, and Dr Hamish Wallace, a consultant paediatric oncologist at Edinburgh University, they stressed they had rejected hundreds of similar requests because, for now, they are working purely with a hypothesis. However, as long as I stressed this fact and arranged a private internal three-dimensional ovarian ultrasound scan, they would analyse the results.
Before the test will ever become publicly available, they need to secure funding to carry out a large-scale, long-term research project with 500 women to see whether their theory proves accurate.
If so, they believe it will revolutionise the treatment of women requesting assisted conception, whether it is because they have had treatment for such illnesses as cancer, or they are considering delaying a family for personal or professional reasons. So far, the pair have analysed two sets of data: the first shows how many eggs on average a woman has at a given age, and the second details the size of a woman's ovaries as she ages. By uniting this information and creating a mathematical formula, they believe they can give a strong indication, within two to three years, of when the menopause will happen.
'Age affects fertility fairly profoundly,' said Wallace. 'But there is currently no reliable test of ovarian reserve for a woman to predict accurately her remaining reproductive life. This method may allow us to predict for any individual woman aged between 25 and 50 what ovarian reserves she has and at what age she is likely to experience menopause. It means we have the potential to be able to tell a woman how fast her biological clock is ticking and how much time she has before it runs down.'
I assured them I would take their word only as a guide, and promised not to take legal action if they got it wildly wrong. They warned of the possibility of finding abnormalities and asked whether I'd thought what I'd do if I found that I had few reproductive years left.
A few weeks later, sitting in a flowery gown in a quiet hospital waiting room, I suddenly had second thoughts. What if they found two ovaries, with only five years' active service left? Despite a knot of anxiety crippling my stomach, it was too late, and too expensive, to cancel.
I had the scan, which was over within minutes, and when I got home I weighed up my options. I typed 'single woman' and 'adoption' into Google. Encouragingly, I was informed that my desire was not unusual. Single women are increasingly adopting children alone. But then came a warning. 'If you are only looking to adopt a child to prevent loneliness, to keep you company, or because you think it might be a good idea, think again.'
So I thought again and contemplated asking one of my male friends to donate sperm. Then I thought about getting drunk and propositioning the first OK-seeming bloke I found. Or doing the lonely hearts. Or asking my ex, who would have made a wonderful father, to take me back. Or stealing my nephew. Or getting some eggs frozen.
Fortunately for my sanity, the ultrasound results arrived a few days later. They revealed that one of my ovaries was smaller than average, while the other was slightly larger than the norm. Using a chart and mathematical formula, Kelsey predicted a normal menopausal onset of between 50 and 51. I felt euphoric. However, his colleague Dr Rima Rajkhowa, a consultant in reproductive medicine at Ninewells Hospital, Dundee, cautioned against wasting too much time because of my mother's early menopause and my one small ovary.
So was it worth £250 and what am I going to do now? Even if the test has provided only a rough guide, it's information I wouldn't otherwise have had. Knowledge is power so, it was worth it.
Not surprisingly, most of those who have spoken out against the test were already mothers. An increasing number of women, however, particularly educated, professional ones in their thirties, are not. Government figures show that a fifth of British women are likely to remain childless, and a recent London School of Economics report says two-thirds are content to to stay that way.
However, an increasing number would trade in their careers to settle down and have babies. An intelligent woman is not supposed to admit this, but I think I might be one of them. I'm not a fan of Jamie Oliver's ubiquitous family, but when I heard Jools say something like 'All I ever wanted was the babies, the baking and the roses round the door,' I felt envious. That's pretty much all I ever wanted, but I was too afraid to say so.
I know I'm not alone. 'Marriage and children took a back seat for my generation, while we proved our mothers' battles hadn't been in vain,' said Jayne Marshall, 39, who works in publishing and is single and childless. 'We were told we could have it all. But we can't. I may have a successful career and great friends, but I've missed out on the most important thing of all. I would gladly swap it all tomorrow to fall in love and become a wife and mother.'
So, what am I going to do now, armed with this new information? I used to be with Phil Collins when he said you can't hurry love, you just have to wait. Unfortunately, the female of the species doesn't have the luxury of time. So I'm going to reassess my priorities. I'm going to stop waiting for Mr Right and go out and see if I can find him.
Read on ...
· angela.smith@ed.ac.uk
Email for information on TIMES (Trial Investigating Menopause Scotland)
· www.fertilityuk.org
Information and counselling on fertility
· www.menopausematters.co.uk
Clincian-led site providing information about the menopause
· www.infertilitynetworkuk.com
For people undergoing infertility investigation or treatment