What the menopause taught me about standing up for my health

There was a particular morning in late 2021 when I sat in my bathroom in the dark, waiting for a hot flush to pass before I could face the camera. By then I had spent nearly two years wondering why my brain felt wrapped in cotton wool, why my temper was fraying at the edges, why sleep had become a negotiation rather than a rest. Looking back, the symptoms had been whispering for years. I had simply become very good at talking over them.

The perimenopause did not politely knock. It walked in, sat down and started rearranging the furniture. What it left me with, though, was something I did not expect: a fierce commitment to advocating for my own health, and a much louder voice on behalf of women whose symptoms are still dismissed. The lessons did not arrive gently, but they have shaped every conversation I lead now, through This Girl Is On Fire and the speaking work I do on stages across Australia and beyond.

The diagnosis that changed everything

I had spent much of my broadcasting career asking the questions. Sitting opposite doctors, campaigners and chief executives, I knew exactly how to draw out the information I needed. None of that helped when I became the patient. The GP I saw first looked at my chart, suggested I was "a bit stressed", and offered me a course of sleeping pills. I took the prescription, drove home, and cried in the car for twenty minutes.

The second opinion was different. A female GP in Brisbane who specialised in women's hormonal health listened for nearly half an hour. She sketched out what was happening to my oestrogen, my progesterone and my cortisol. She explained why I was waking at 3 a.m. with my heart hammering against my ribs. She did not rush me. For the first time in months, I felt like a collaborator in my own care rather than a nuisance. That single appointment taught me more about agency than any leadership seminar ever had.

I often reflect on that shift now, and I keep coming back to something I wish I had understood earlier. I wrote about it in the one leadership lesson I would give my younger self, and it is this: the most important person you ever lead is yourself. Until I sat in front of a doctor who treated me as a partner in the conversation, I had not realised how rarely I was doing that for my own body.

Reading the signals my body was sending

Once I started paying attention, the list grew quickly. The trouble with perimenopause is that so many of its symptoms can be explained away by other things. Mood swings, brain fog, joint pain, restless sleep, a sudden intolerance to anyone chewing loudly. Each one felt, on its own, manageable. Stacked together, they were quietly dismantling my confidence.

Looking at it written down, the pattern is obvious. Spread across months, it was anything but. If you are noticing a similar cluster, here are some signals worth raising with your GP sooner rather than later:

• Periods that arrive closer together or further apart, with heavier or lighter flow than usual
• A sudden inability to concentrate during meetings you used to lead with ease
• Night sweats that leave the bedding soaked, not just slightly warm
• Mood changes that feel disproportionate to what is actually happening in your life

These are not character flaws. They are data points, and they deserve a proper investigation rather than a brisk reassurance.

What I learned about hormone therapy

The "H" word still makes a lot of women flinch. I flinch along with them, partly because I grew up hearing scare stories about breast cancer and blood clots, and partly because the conversation has been polarised for so long that nuance was lost. What I learned from specialists in Sydney and from reading the latest guidance from the Australasian Menopause Society was that the picture has changed significantly.

For many women, particularly those under 60 and within ten years of their last period, the benefits of body-identical hormone therapy can outweigh the risks. It is not right for everyone, and it certainly is not mandatory. What was transformative for me was the simple act of being offered an informed choice rather than being told to put up with feeling half of myself. My GP walked me through the research. We discussed my own family history. Together we landed on a plan, and within weeks I felt the scaffolding starting to go back into place.

I am not a clinician. I am a woman who had to push her way to that conversation, and I want other women to know that the door is wider open than the old headlines suggested.

Navigating the Australian healthcare system

Speaking as someone who lives between the UK and Australia, navigating the Australian system during a hormonal crash was its own education. The country offers real strengths: a strong network of GPs trained through the Royal Australian College of General Practitioners, world-class menopause researchers, and free resources through organisations like Jean Hailes for Women's Health. The challenge is that not every GP has had detailed menopause training, and a fifteen-minute appointment is rarely long enough to unravel years of symptoms.

I learned to prepare the way I prepare for a television interview. I wrote a one-page summary of my symptoms, my cycle changes, my sleep pattern and my mental health. I printed it. I handed it across the desk. I asked explicit questions. It was the only way to make a short appointment feel long enough.

If you are booking in with your GP in Australia, here are four questions worth bringing with you:

• Could my symptoms be hormonal, even if I am still having periods?
• What are my options beyond oral contraceptives or antidepressants?
• Can you refer me to a clinician with a special interest in menopause, ideally one listed with the Australasian Menopause Society?
• Should I have my thyroid, iron and vitamin D checked alongside any hormone work?

Coming prepared turned every appointment into a working session rather than a hopeful chat, and it meant I stopped wasting the time I now guard more carefully than ever.

Conversations with my daughter

The hardest audience I have ever faced was not a studio of a million viewers. It was my daughter, sitting at the kitchen counter, watching me cry because I could not find a pair of matching socks. She was a teenager, and she was terrified that what was happening to me would one day happen to her.

We have had many talks since. We have talked about periods, about moods that feel like weather systems, about the importance of tracking what your body is doing month to month. We have talked about not suffering in silence because someone at school once told them that girls are "dramatic". I made a point of saying the medical words out loud. Perimenopause. Menopause. Oestrogen. Progesterone. The vocabulary is part of the armoury, and it should not belong only to the over-forties.

Being honest with her has also changed the way I show up publicly. When I told the story in Azay Art Magazine, the reaction from younger women was overwhelming. They did not want tips. They wanted permission to start the conversation earlier, and they wanted their mothers and bosses to be able to join in without embarrassment.

The workplace reality

For a long time, I tried to outrun my hormones. I would arrive at the studio armoured in make-up, having had cold flannels pressed against the back of my neck by a kind make-up artist who knew exactly what was happening and never once said a word. That quiet support kept me in work, but the cost of pretending was enormous.

I eventually started having proper conversations with producers. I asked for cooler studio lights. I requested breaks during long recording days. I let people know that I might need five minutes without explaining why. None of it dented my professional reputation. If anything, it made me sharper, because I was no longer spending half of my energy managing a secret.

That shift taught me something I now apply across the board. There were brand partnerships, panel invitations and travel commitments I had to turn down in order to protect my recovery, and I wrote about that whole process in my piece on how to say no to opportunities that don't serve your growth. Saying no was not weakness. It was finally believing that my health was worth the lost fee.

Becoming an advocate beyond my own story

Once the fog lifted, I could not go back to the version of me that nodded politely when a doctor brushed off a concern. I started saying the loud thing in the room. I wrote about it. I spoke about it on stage. I built a programme, This Girl Is On Fire, around the idea that women deserve access to evidence-based information about every transition, not just the ones that come with a marketing campaign attached.

Speaking has become the main way I share what I learned, and I have written a practical guide for women who want to do the same without a publicist in the corner. It sits on my site alongside this article: how to build a speaking portfolio without a PR agency. It draws on every stage I have been booked for since that first GP appointment in Brisbane.

If there is one thread running through all of it, it is this: the menopause did not rob me of anything I needed long term. It taught me how to ask for what my body requires, how to refuse what it does not, and how to stand in a room full of experts and insist that my own lived experience counts as expertise. That is the most valuable lesson a transition has ever given me, and I wish someone had sat me down a decade earlier and said the same.