A woman from Caithness tells her story about transitioning from perimenopause to surgical menopause.
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00:00 I'm Kirsteen Campbell, I'm 43. I've had a complex history of endometriosis for almost
00:06 three decades. I was 15 when I had my first journey and I had a hysterectomy when I was
00:13 26, leaving both ovaries. That made a massive difference to me, not having periods to deal
00:19 with and it did give me my life back for a while. I would say that I became perimenopausal
00:27 at 37, although it was very, very difficult to get anybody to acknowledge that I was perimenopausal.
00:35 I was classed as being too young, which I think is ridiculous. But I'm now classed as
00:43 being in a surgical menopause. Before my surgery, I had a lot of cold flashes. My body just
00:50 went severely, severely cold. It was so hard to describe and it was to the bone cold. I
00:57 was really fatigued, brain fog, didn't make any sense, trembling in my words, anxiety.
01:04 I've never been an anxious person in my life. Yeah, it was really difficult. I suppose I'm
01:11 the one that kind of set up a support myself for Rebecca and Claire. We felt quite passionate
01:17 about menopause because we see chemical menopause used quite often for young women for endometriosis.
01:23 They're given a GNHR analogue, which shuts down your ovaries and also seen a lot of young
01:29 women go into surgical menopause. It was something that we were quite passionate about. So we
01:33 decided to set up the North Highland Menopause Group, which we started back in May last year.
01:41 It's a busy platform. It's by far our biggest group, most active group, and it just gives
01:46 women a space to talk, to be themselves. If it's something that they feel a little bit
01:51 embarrassed about, or maybe they don't want somebody else to see, they can post anonymously.
01:56 And it's just empowering them to properly talk, to address. I mean, like libido, I mean,
02:03 that's a huge cause of breakdown in marriages. You know, they need to be able to talk to
02:09 somebody. They need to know they're not alone. We really do need to start in schools because
02:17 we're not teaching periods as they are either. You know, we really, really do need to go
02:21 into a route of everything. It needs to be taught menstruation right through any complications
02:27 so that they're aware when to seek help and so on and so forth. We need to see more education
02:32 for GPs, which I know that Professor Glaisir, that's the Women's Health Champion for Scotland
02:39 is working on at the moment to get more education for GPs around menopause. I mean, it's really
02:46 difficult. There's such a lack of understanding around women's health as a whole, but we need
02:53 to see these changes coming in because quite often with menopause symptoms, it can start
03:00 with depression and anxiety. And that's where women can spiral down a really dark hole and
03:05 it's really scary and you know we deserve so much better with it.