Highland woman speaks out about the detrimental impact of menopause

A woman from Caithness tells her story about transitioning from perimenopause to surgical menopause.

Transcript

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.