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Patsy quit her job. Susannah quit the city. Now they’re on a quest to find the path through the wobbly middle of their careers. This podcast is for every woman who’s asking “What now?”.
Hosted by Susannah de Jager and Patsy Day, The Wobbly Middle features interviews with famed city superwomen, dazzling entrepreneurs and revolutionary midwives and doctors who reveal what they’ve learnt through their own wobbly middle experiences.
[00:00:07] Patsy Day: Susannah.
[00:00:08] Susannah de Jager: Patsy.
[00:00:08] Patsy Day: Tell me about your Wobbly Middle.
[00:00:10] Susannah de Jager: I'm still in it. I don't think it's necessarily something you move through, I think it's something you move in and out of at different moments in your life. For me, I stopped working just before the pandemic. I had been in the same firm for nearly 10 years and I thought I'd re enter something relatively similar in short order. Then COVID struck and gave me the space to slow down, step off the merry go round and realise that perhaps I didn't want to step back in. I became clearer about what I didn't want. What the pause didn't give me was clarity on what I did. That's where the Wobbly Middle comes in. In my case, it was the gap between knowing what I didn't want to do and navigating towards new goals, objectives and values. It's the excitement of that opportunity, but also the slight dread of the uncertainty, doubt and the feeling of back to square one and also giving up a really well formed identity and potentially an entire sector's worth of knowledge. That space is the Wobbly Middle. Now, Pats, your turn.
[00:01:09] Patsy Day: Well, I stepped away from my lawyer job after the pandemic and I was pretty done in and so I signed myself up to 12 months on the sofa. I read a lot. I watched a lot of TV. I was very good at doing nothing. As with any 12 month subscription, I was too lazy to cancel it and it's sort of auto renewed, twice and so here I am in year three of my gap year and like many of my girlfriends in my 40s, I'm trying to work out what comes next. But before I even get there, I'm trying to work out how I work out what comes next.
[00:01:48] Susannah de Jager: We're definitely not alone. In the six to nine months that you and I have been putting together The Wobbly Middle, we've seen the start of a real conversation around the potential of women at this stage of their lives, but also how lonely and intimidating the journey through it can feel. There isn't a friend I speak to who doesn't immediately understand what The Wobbly Middle means and hopefully it resonates with those listening as well.
[00:02:12] Patsy Day: Over this first season of The Wobbly Middle, we'll be speaking to some brilliant women who have changed paths, pivoted, or started up something new on their own. We'll be discussing all the life affirming and often disruptive questions around our careers at midlife.
[00:02:27] Susannah de Jager: Welcome to The Wobbly Middle, a podcast about women reinventing their careers, with Susannah de Jager and Patsy Day.
[00:02:35] Patsy Day: Our first guests are especially perfect, doctors Susanne Hooper and Melanie Hacking, founders of the Oxford Hormone Clinic. Not only did they pivot in their 40s, but they are also doctors specializing in perimenopause and because we are whole beings made up of body, brain and soul, in trying to work out what comes next, understanding what may be happening with our bodies is a key piece of the jigsaw. Hello, both. Thank you so much for coming. Susanne, I'd like to leap in with you. Tell me how you ended up specialising in fertility.
[00:03:14] Susanne Hooper: Well, it's a slightly long story. So my background is anaesthetics. So I was training in anaesthetics, many many years ago now and then I had my children and I decided to have a break. So I stopped working for a good eight, nine years and then I wanted to get back into medicine, back into working and at that stage, I also, I moved into Oxford from London and I remember interviewing for anaesthetic posts and that was quite difficult because they needed me to retrain. It was a bit long winded and then they said the only way to do it is working as a locum anaesthetist. I could start straight away, but having been away for eight, nine years from doing medicine and let alone anesthetics, I really didn't feel that I was safe, a safe option. So by accident, I had a colleague of mine who said, don't worry, come and work with me. He was a gynecologist and he took me under his wing and he gave me a chance and with him, then I started to do reproductive medicine and started fertility clinics and that's how I ended up in this field.
[00:04:32] Patsy Day: So there was an element of someone giving you a chance, but also of mentorship.
[00:04:37] Susanne Hooper: Yeah, definitely a mentorship, definitely, you know, a support, not only in the field, but also just support as a woman, you can do it, come on, you know, you've got the knowledge, you've got the energy, you can do it, the belief in me and that's just what I needed after not having worked for eight, nine years from a colleague, you know, not from your husband or your friends, but someone who knows about the field.
[00:05:04] Patsy Day: Medicine is very institutionalised in that way in the sense that you do your, you know, you follow a set path and do you find that doctors are good at mentoring each other generally, or do you feel you were just lucky?
[00:05:19] Susanne Hooper: Definitely, I was lucky. I also find that the people, the doctors themselves are very good mentors, but the whole bureaucracy behind it is very difficult and that doesn't allow for women to come back or anyone to have had a break to come back easily. You can easily come back as a locum. I don't think that's safe. They shouldn't do that. But otherwise it is really hard and there is not a lot of options. So, I think it's I was lucky to have found this person who helped me along and you know, took a gamble with me.
[00:05:51] Patsy Day: Turning to you Mel, when we first met, you said that you had your first baby two weeks before you read your final exam, which is startling and certainly speaks to resilience. But then you went on to become a GP specialising in fertility. When did you start to identify the gap in menopause care?
[00:06:17] Mel Hacking: Similarly to Susanne, I had a career break to have my children. It was quite a long career break and I think with a lot of interests that spark in your life, they will often come from a personal experience. I had a short episode of subfertility before I had my first child and so I became a bit interested in that field and then similarly to Susanne, when I returned to work, it was quite an opportune moment where somebody had a vacancy and I went back to work. Again, somebody giving me a bit of a chance. It wasn't going for interviews and doing it sort of through the front door, it was an opportunist moment where I managed to take up my career about 10 years after my previous employment and then my current role, which is being involved in a hormone clinic, specifically for perimenopausal and menopausal women, that again sparked from an interest from my own personal experience. So I think both things are quite linked for me. Perimenopause and menopause is obviously still within the field of reproductive medicine and I work in that field in the NHS as well as in my private clinic. But in terms of sparking my interest, I think I felt that the women I was seeing in my NHS clinic, specifically those women who were very young when they experienced this, weren't getting the support I felt they really deserved and I think they are a specific population of women, that really deserves some extra help from the medical profession, I just saw that as a massive gap.
[00:07:48] Patsy Day: And when did the sort of light bulb moment go off that it was going to be a change in your career that kind of fostered this further support for these women?
[00:07:59] Susanne Hooper: Well, I mean, I think similarly to Melanie, when I was in the fertility clinic again, you had these women who were suffering and first of all, they were sub fertile, couldn't have a baby or it was difficult and I could see that they were actually in the perimenopause and you wanted to refer them somewhere and we were doing secondary care, fertility in different hospitals and again, by chance, we met, we knew each other from fertility and we kept on talking about cases and kept on talking about patients and what do you do, where do you, and we both realised there is nothing, there is nowhere and I think at that stage there was a talk about menopause and we both attended it because we were interested and that talk was really inspiring and about a year later COVID hit and I think at that stage we met a few times, we talked about how to best help these women and then we had a bit of time on our hands during COVID and I think that was the moment where we thought, actually, let's do something about it.
[00:09:00] Patsy Day: And how did you actually take the first steps? What were they?
[00:09:03] Mel Hacking: I think we got together with a good friend of ours and we talked around this idea. I think the two of us together, having never done anything like this before, never worked on our own, so we'd always been part of a team, the NHS is really good at teamwork. This particular idea we had was very much us standing on our own and doing it alone or as a pair and we met up with a friend and said, you know, we're having this idea and what do you think? Would you support us in this? And then after that we realised, I'm not sure that we need somebody to back us up, we don't need the authority of anybody else. We do have the skills, we're just not feeling very brave at this particular point in time, but let's take the next step. So that's sort of how we did it. We didn't overwhelm ourselves with thinking too big, but we just chipped away and then started building a website. I think that was...
[00:09:59] Susanne Hooper: Yeah, that was it and we had, I think, a support also from our other halves, I think they were very supportive by, you know, saying you can do it. But this definitely gave us the support that we needed, medically, we were ready to do it. So there's, again, two things to it. Are we medically good enough to do it and then it's the personal, do you have the drive and the energy to start your own business? That's a whole different story and that's the one that I think we both were more afraid of than the medical bit.
[00:10:33] Mel Hacking: I think this is the bit where If I look back at that time in my life, there is absolutely no way I would have done this on my own.
[00:10:39] Susanne Hooper: No.
[00:10:41] Mel Hacking: The fact that there's two of us bringing different skill sets, I think is the magic of what we're doing still today, isn't it? That we have brought such incredibly different things to the table. I'm not quite as brave as Susanne. Susanne's just a, let's get on to the next thing. I think I'd still be sitting here pressing the button to activate the website if I'd left my own devices, I would never have felt ready. I think we complement our skill sets so well, don't we?
[00:11:06] Susanne Hooper: Yeah, but you are really thorough in your thinking and rethink things and go like, Oh, hang on, but we forgot about that. So that's very helpful as well where I would have just steamed off in one direction and I think you went like, no, we can do this and we can do that. So I think, you know, we weren't best friends, you know, we weren't, we didn't know each other. I think we know each other professionally and a little bit socially, but.
[00:11:31] Mel Hacking: Played a bit of tennis together. We played in a...
So you knew, what you were like under pressure.
[00:11:36] Susanne Hooper: Yeah, we had the, we knew we were, you know, competitive enough to see you through and probably have the same values. I think that's the key thing. We knew, well, I knew that, you know, you had the values that I was looking for a partner.
[00:11:51] Mel Hacking: Yep, integrity, loyalty, drive and hard work, a lot of hard work involved.
[00:11:56] Susanne Hooper: Yeah and also, you know, doing it by the books and evidence based and not just on a whim or something. Yeah, so yeah.
[00:12:04] Patsy Day: I think those values really come through, you know, when I've spoken to you before and when I've looked at your website, you know, the drive is to educate and inform and help women in this phase of their life. A lot of people are looking to make changes to their careers in their 40s, they are, you know, for various, for a number of reasons. If COVID hadn't happened, if you hadn't opened the clinic, where do you think you would have been in terms of your working lives?
[00:12:33] Susanne Hooper: Probably still working for the NHS and doing the clinics there. I don't know where we would have been. I mean...
[00:12:39] Mel Hacking: I would have still been plodding away with my, so we both still do a day a week in the NHS and that's really important to both of us to maintain. There are pros and cons to working in a small team versus a big team. I really love my day in the NHS, I don't want to give that up. But I probably would just have been doing that one day and I would have been filling my time with other things, perhaps. But this is giving us an extra dimension to our week, isn't it?
[00:13:03] Susanne Hooper: Definitely, yeah.
[00:13:04] Mel Hacking: It's hugely different being an employee versus an employer. Part of our job at the hormone clinic is, a big part of it is seeing patients and that's still the bit that I think both of us really enjoy the most. But around the edges are other sort of more, I guess, business tasks aren't there, in terms of maintaining websites, doing lovely things like this and meeting new people.
[00:13:27] Susanne Hooper: I agree with Melanie, I think the satisfaction of having the time to talk to a patient versus in the NHS where you are not given the time or the follow ups that you would like, that is huge. You really think you give good care.
[00:13:43] Mel Hacking: I think that's also freedom and creativity, isn't there? So the creativity, we've got an absolutely gorgeous clinic. Again, we found that slightly randomly, didn't we? very lucky with, the premises that we've got. We've furnished it, put lovely white desks in, made it all bright and inviting. That for me, I love interiors, so having the ability to set up my own workspace and have a lovely desk to come to on a Monday morning, that for me gives me a huge sort of boost and improves my work and quality of life and then creativity in terms of the website and Instagram.
[00:14:17] Susanne Hooper: It was fun doing something new, you know, something different and there was a lot of moments where I went, Oh my God, it's actually not that easy, you know and yeah, so many learning moments and that's good in, I'm not old, but you know, I'm not the young generation who has grown up with computers and doing, you know, the whole social media bit behind it, the whole website. At first, we thought, there's no way we can do it. But actually, you know, once you start, you just have to start and then it comes, you learn by doing it.
[00:14:50] Mel Hacking: You feel very exposed putting yourself out there. I remember that very clearly when we first opened the doors, when we first did our posts on Instagram and you think, gosh, everybody's going to be looking at me and thinking, how does she think she's able to do that? Why is she speaking on this topic? So that for me was a huge learning curve and just having to keep going with that and try and reduce some of the negative chat that can creep in and give you doubts.
[00:15:16] Susanne Hooper: Which is that it's the not being confident chat that is popping up in your head and I don't know if that's a female thing or if that's just...
[00:15:25] Patsy Day: Did you help each other with that?
[00:15:27] Susanne Hooper: Yeah, I think so because whenever Mel was down I tried to boost her and whenever I was down she definitely helped me a lot and said, come on, we can do it and yes, absolutely and I think that's when Mel said, you know, couldn't have done it without each other. I think that's what you meant, isn't it? Because we both have moments in our lives where we're going like, what am I doing?
[00:15:47] Mel Hacking: We've got another wonderful colleague that works with us, and she gives us a lot of confidence. She helps us with our social media, and if we're doing a little recording, and, you know, we're struggling to find the words, or it's not quite flowing, she very calmly and quietly at the end of that take will say, Let's do that again, shall we? There's never a criticism, but it's just calmly, give it another go and I think that's a really sort of, it's a core thing, just don't panic, give it another go and keep moving forwards.
[00:16:19] Patsy Day: It feels that moving forward is quite iterative. I think sometimes we think we need to have the finished vision, or we can't do anything until everything is in place. But what you're saying is that it is quite iterative. Start building your website, find your premises, speak to people. It's not a case of, only do it if you have the answer to everything.
[00:16:39] Susanne Hooper: Yeah, I mean, I think that's important that you don't think open the doors once everything is in place, you can't wait for that moment, otherwise, yes, we wouldn't have opened. You just have to go for it and then I think also, people are okay with when they know, you know, you've just started and explained, look, I'm sorry, but you know, the, you know, the website doesn't work quite yet they're happy, they are understanding that, you know, you just started and as long as you explain and are true to yourself and to the patients, it's fine.
[00:17:09] Patsy Day: Mel, going back to what you said about social media and where you first put your video up and you thought everyone was looking at you, what would you say to someone to help them overcome that feeling that they're exposing themselves?
[00:17:24] Mel Hacking: Yeah, I mean, I don't think you'll ever completely overcome it, but I think accepting it is important and probably you're more of an expert than you think you are on that subject and if you speak with passion and give it a go, you'll probably do better than you imagine and it gets easier as time goes on, doesn't it?
[00:17:42] Susanne Hooper: Yeah, it gets easier, definitely.
[00:17:44] Patsy Day: And what would you say to your thirty year old self about where you are now?
[00:17:48] Susanne Hooper: Oh, that's a tricky one. I mean, thirty, I would have never thought I would be able to do this. I'd never thought myself setting up my own business. Especially also, I've grown up in Switzerland and Switzerland is quite straightforward. So you either are an academic or you do an apprenticeship and setting up your own business is not something that you do and coming to the UK when I was quite young, in my late twenties, that was a first eye opener. Everyone seemed to be opening their own business or having their own business and I was very much in awe and then I worked in the NHS and I would ask myself, I said, I'm not going to be able to do that, I'm not, I don't have the confidence, I'm not that power woman and suddenly here I am having done it myself and I, so when I look back, it's like, I don't, really know how it happened and I, it, just evolved.
[00:18:43] Mel Hacking: Yeah, well I see you as one of those people that was always going to it. Yes, you always have got that sort of steely determination, drive. So it doesn't surprise me you run your own business. It really surprises me that I run a business. so my thirty year old self, there was no way I would have predicted this in my future. I wonder whether when you get into your forties with a bit of life experience behind you, now is your moment a little bit. So there maybe is something different in you. I think you build your skill set, don't you, in your twenties and thirties? And maybe by your forties, you're thinking, right, now is my moment, give it a go. So hitting my mid forties, I think you develop a little bit more of a screw it mentality, what have I got to lose? You feel a little bit less judged by other people, you care a little bit less about other opinions. So I think that was, again, a big thing for me that you don't necessarily foresee in your thirties.
[00:19:41] Susanne Hooper: No and I think in your thirties you still wanna please or you wanna, yeah, you wanna please, you wanna do your best, you feel, not confident, you always feel others are better than you. For me, it was having the children, which I had to protect them, I had to stand up for them, I had to be a bit more bullish, you know, even for school or for whatever reason, you know, suddenly you, you have to and I don't know if it was that or just becoming older and more experienced that said exactly what you said, you know, actually now is the moment or never and we have so many more years, hopefully in good health, to be able to do something good.
[00:20:19] Patsy Day: I think that point that you make about women in their 40s There's something going on that's changing and I love the idea that, and this is what this podcast is all about, thinking about what happens as we step away from a period of our lives and into the next in our forties and fifties and I think women do have a sense that this is now their time to step back in. The only slight issue is that's when perimenopause begins to hit and you seem perfectly placed to talk about it. So I wonder if you could tell me a little bit about the women you see coming into your clinics. How do you see perimenopause affecting their working lives or their sense of place in the world?
[00:21:05] Mel Hacking: You're absolutely right and this is the bedrock of the community that we're helping in our clinic. We see women of all different ages, so in their late 30s, 40s, 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s. But the majority of women will come to us in their 40s and 50s, and they will often be at quite a low ebb when they come through the door, and that will often manifest in terms of low mood and anxiety. So I think for those of us who are hitting that age, if we get a hot flush or a joint ache, we've got a few more clues that this might be perimenopause. In practice what we see is that women will often have had low mood or anxiety for several years and then they maybe get another symptom that adds to the clue that this is all part of a hormonal change going on within their body.
[00:21:53] Susanne Hooper: Yes, I think contrarily to the belief that it always starts with a hot flush, it's not. The most women we see it started with irritability, low mood, you know, low confidence, low drive, fatigue, rather than typical hot flush.
[00:22:08] Mel Hacking: Again, we see a whole gamut of different women. Some women aren't working, some women are working. Those that are will often want to be making changes at work and a lot of the time that's because they are suffering from poor sleep, they may have a bit of brain fog, suddenly don't feel quite able to do the role they've maybe happily been doing for the last twenty years or so and that can really rock women's confidence and I think because we see it so often, it's very clear to us that if they get the right treatment and support, it's They don't necessarily have to change their job or cut down their hours or give up altogether and I think there's a real problem in the workforce of women who maybe don't identify that not only are they going through midlife where you have quite a lot of pressures on you from a family point of view, but there may well be a hormonal element that is making there work-life balance even harder.
[00:23:02] Susanne Hooper: And sadly often they don't dare to speak up at work or they don't feel confident enough or, you know, to speak to their boss about it because maybe there is no guideline on what to do and they often feel guilty. So when they come to us they often feel guilty that they can't do their job anymore, they have brain fog and it's very sad to see actually, I think.
[00:23:26] Patsy Day: I liked your description on your website, there's a little clip of you explaining what brain fog is, and it's so reassuring to know that it is actually a thing, it's a neurological thing, do you mind explaining it here?
[00:23:41] Susanne Hooper: Yeah, I mean, it really exists and people who go through it, that's the moment where they go, Oh, now I know what it is. So it's finding it difficult to find words, suddenly having a blank, can't remember what they wanted to say, but it goes even further. So it's also memory loss of things they have, knew before, they suddenly just cannot recall and...
[00:24:04] Mel Hacking: That can be very difficult in the workplace when you've got to remember passwords and logins.
[00:24:09] Susanne Hooper: Yeah.
[00:24:10] Mel Hacking: And sort of, you know, how many passwords do we need to remember? So you can lose your confidence that you can actually do the job you've happily been doing for a long time. Going back to the brain fog, it's more than just being a little bit forgetful, that there are brain scans that have been done on women where they have blocked the hormones that are analogous to experiencing menopause and on the MRI scans, you can see that different areas of the brain don't light up as well when you've got your hormones compared to when you had your hormones blocked. So it's a very real physical thing happening within the body. It's not just that you haven't had enough sleep or just that, you know, you're getting older, it is really biologically connected to the hormonal changes.
[00:24:54] Susanne Hooper: And then you can really see those women spiraling into this vicious circle. So the brain fog, especially for work, then that knocks their confidence, they're not going to be prepared and then it makes them more anxious and more even irritable at home and then even more sleep deprived because they're worried and so it spirals out of control and often with a little bit of help, just cutting that out, everything falls into place again.
[00:25:21] Mel Hacking: Yeah, you're absolutely right, because I think women of our age have got such a lot to give and we need to be supported in optimising our health so that we can carry on and give back and do the jobs we want to do or start those businesses that we've always had in mind. So I think, you know, anybody who has any symptoms they think might be connected to the hormones, do a bit of reading, get some research done, there's plenty of information out there, get it from a reputable source and see if it makes sense to you. I think often women know what the right thing is for them, they just need the confidence to act on it and speak to the right person about it, whether that's a trusted friend or a health care professional and see whether or not there is anything they need to add into their lifestyle or routine or maybe even considering adding hormones.
[00:26:08] Patsy Day: There is a lot more in the media now and a lot of women are speaking out exactly on brain fog, how it made them feel, someone left their job because they thought they had early onset dementia, but there also seems to be similar to the quite polarized debate on childbirth, you know, trying to get this message through that HRT can be very helpful, against the backdrop of sometimes a push, no, this is just natural, everyone goes through it and it's just your body will rebalance and...
[00:26:39] Susanne Hooper: Well, I compare it often to something like diabetes or low thyroid function, you know, those are hormone deficient states and we supplement them, we don't, it's not really a treatment where you give a lot and overdose, you just want to give enough for the symptoms to go and to have a long term health benefits. But we're not adding more than the body needs, we just want to keep the physiological level for a little bit longer because we live so much longer.
[00:27:08] Mel Hacking: And also I think with childbirth, childbirth's a natural process, but we intervene medically because we know we can improve outcomes, we can save women's lives, we can save babies lives, you know, that's a dramatic example. Blood pressure is another thing, that's natural as we get older, we will develop hypertension because our arteries are getting stiffer. We know that if we don't treat people with high blood pressure, they'll have poor outcomes, have strokes, heart attacks, and die early. Menopause is a health risk, so we lose our hormones, our risk of cardiovascular disease goes up, our risk of osteoporosis goes up, there are things we can do to intervene to replace those hormones and there's really good evidence now that replacing hormones in the right women, which is the majority, to offer it to them that your outcomes are better. HRT reduces all cause mortality and I think that's a really powerful message.
[00:27:59] Susanne Hooper: Yes, I agree and I don't know why that's...
[00:28:01] Mel Hacking: Lot's of very good data on that, so the NICE guidelines, the majority of women, benefits outweigh risks.
[00:28:08] Patsy Day: So what changes would you like to see in the next five years with regards to menopause care?
[00:28:14] Susanne Hooper: I think women should have access to a professional, easier access to talk it through, that would be my key.
[00:28:23] Mel Hacking: Ideally longer than five minutes with a GP because with the best will in the world, you can't cover everything in five minutes and GPs are stretched as it is. So ideally a health professional within each GP practice that's got good training in menopause that can spend, you know, 20 minutes, half an hour talking to their patients.
[00:28:41] Susanne Hooper: Elsewhere in Europe you have that. So in Switzerland and in France you have a GP, a family GP, and then you have a trained women's GP and that women's GP sees female through puberty, so oral contraceptive pill, through pregnancy, and through the menopause and they see them once a year, they have a scan, they have a health check and they do all of that. So, the whole burden doesn't lie on just one person, there's a split responsibility. So you have your woman's GP and you have your normal family GP for other things and in the UK, you don't have that. So one GP has to do it all and it's a lot to ask.
[00:29:20] Patsy Day: Interestingly, I was reading there's a pilot, I think it's the Northampton Police Authority. They are offering women who come in to find themselves in custody. So I think if someone's arrested or is for some reason coming into their remit, they are now trialing a program where they ask those women if they want to speak to a health expert about menopause.
[00:29:44] Susanne Hooper: Wow, because I also think that people forget that, I mean, I feel that the work we do is more than just looking at the menopause. We see the women in mid life, we try to, you know, assess blood pressure, other lifestyle risks that they have as well to prevent and I think we can prevent a lot with providing not only information, but maybe even HRT for reducing long term health risks. The NHS should wake up because that the costs of long term health problems is huge and if we can reduce that by one good informative half an hour consultation, they should actually look at that.
[00:30:24] Patsy Day: I'd like to end on a hopefully positive note. Tell me about the post menopause bump where we've come through the other end of our wild hormones in our 40s, can you give us some good news?
[00:30:37] Susanne Hooper: Well, I think for a lot of women, the symptoms will go. So after the last period or the menopause, when you, have normal periods a year later, the hormones stop fluctuating and I think that's when most women feel better, but then there are still the long term health risks that you have with low oestrogen. So don't forget those. But from a symptomatic point of view, I think yes, after those fluctuating perimenopausal years, most women will eventually feel better. But don't forget the length of those years can be very different from five to ten years in my experience.
I guess.
[00:31:16] Mel Hacking: and some women unfortunately will continue symptoms for quite a long time. But most women will come through and, you know, feel back to their normal selves and I think there's also a real sense of confidence that women get in this second half of life. It's not all over when you hit 50, you've still got many productive, happy years to give and I think some of those responsibilities, when they have lessened, you know, with your children, maybe with parents, I think it can be a real positive phase of life. You have more freedom, you maybe have some more financial independence, more time on your hands, less work pressures, so I do feel very upbeat. I feel like there's great things lying ahead.
[00:31:58] Susanne Hooper: And you can make a mistake. It's just, you know, you trial and error, you've kind of, I feel like I've, done my bit, now I can just do what I actually enjoy, yeah, I think there is a real positive side to post the bump, yeah.
[00:32:14] Patsy Day: I think that's a great place to end. Is there anything else you'd like to say?
[00:32:17] Susanne Hooper: No, just, you know, please do give it a try and then if anyone has any questions just, you know, just email us or ask us and yeah, we're here for them.
[00:32:27] Mel Hacking: Thank you very much for asking us to share our story. I hope it's been positive and yes, we're very approachable. So if anybody wants to get in touch through Instagram or through our website, we're quite responsive. So very happy to be available to people.
[00:32:41] Patsy Day: Thank you so much.
[00:32:42] Susannah de Jager: Patsy, I found that interview so interesting. Thank you for leading the charge on that one.
[00:32:50] Patsy Day: Oh good. I thought they were wonderful. What really came through was their warmth and I love when I see in women's relationships how they build each other up. I was also really interested in how passionate they were about deconstructing myths around hormone replacement therapy and after the interview, Susanne mentioned that only 15 percent of women between the ages of 45 and 64, in this period of their lives, are taking some form of HRT there's a big gap between who's receiving treatment and who could possibly benefit from that treatment and Susanne and Mel's passion really came through on that front.
[00:33:37] Susannah de Jager: No, I really agree. I found the whole thing so inspiring and I loved the dynamic between them. It was really fun to observe and it felt like they were really excellent at empowering one another and giving that confidence and for me, that was the number one thing that came through was, you know, find a partner that pairs up. They talked about actually their husbands also being super supportive, they spoke about mentors. I got that real sense of they've built a fabric around themselves and their business, they spoke about their social media colleague, all of those people just helping add to their framework and depth of confidence and I thought that was lovely and that was my main takeaway.
[00:34:16] Patsy Day: Yes, it's a reminder that when we do take big steps in our lives, when we do pivot, change direction, that we're not alone, we have a support system around us who want us to do well and to succeed.
[00:34:29] Susannah de Jager: Yeah, and I think that's a wonderful note to leave it on. Patsy, thank you so much for the interview and to those at home, this has been The Wobbly Middle. Thank you for joining us.
[00:34:39] Patsy Day: Thank you. Goodbye.