Living with Menopause after Cancer | Dani Binnington & Rachel Bowman | EP 103

Thank you.

And you said, you know, you felt like you were on your own.

Rachel, do you have any statistics at all that say just how many people could be affected?

Yes.

So we know at the minute that there are around about 186,000 women every year diagnosed with cancer.

The majority of those women will face some sort of treatment that will push them into either a permanent or temporary menopause.

So those treatments could be, for example, chemotherapy.

It could be radiotherapy in some areas of the body because we're talking about all cancers, not necessarily breast cancer, which first comes to mind.

It can be surgery to remove the ovaries like Danny has experienced, or it could be endocrine treatment.

A lot of women who do have breast cancer will have an oestrogen or a hormone-driven cancer and therefore will be given medicine to put them into menopause to stop them producing those hormones.

So we know that there is almost 200,000 people a year.

Many of them are surviving, which is brilliant, thanks to all the amazing things of the developments in medicine.

But then they're left with sometimes hugely debilitating symptoms.

And just to give you a bit of an idea of the kind of longer term picture, there will be, we're told by the WHO, the World Health Organization, 16.3 million women annually diagnosed with cancer by 2050.

And 2050 isn't really a long way off.

Wow.

And, you know, one of the other groups that I would probably add to it is because my mum had breast cancer and she was a long way past menopause.

But actually, one of the things that surprised us was when she had the treatment, which was oestrogen blockers, she went through a second menopause and she said that this one was far worse than the first one.

So in terms of severity, when we say that around about three quarters of us experience menopause symptoms, one in four experience serious symptoms.

I would say it sounds like you have more of a cliff edge menopause transition rather than perhaps those of us that experience it more the natural route.

And yes, our hormones fluctuate, our change.

It's not great when anybody experiences symptoms.

But at the same time, for you guys, it's just pretty much all condensed into a short period of time.

I think what's really important, and you do that so well in so many of your other Lunch and Learns, Deborah, is everyone's experience is so unique and so different.

And we really have to work hard not to compare ourselves to others.