Jo O’Halloran was in her early fifties when the symptoms she and her friends had heard so much about started to appear.
‘I was always tired,’ she tells me.
‘I was working a fairly busy job and caring for my ageing mother, so you expect to be tired, but this was quite severe. I also had nausea, brain fog, constipation, cramping in my stomach and things like that.’
When Jo spoke to girlfriends around the same age, they were quick to reassure her: it’s menopause. ‘Part of me thought, “Oh, well, I suppose I just need to get on with it”, but the fatigue began to be really quite extreme,’ Jo recalls.
She saw her GP and explained her symptoms. He ordered a blood test, which came back within the normal ranges, which left Jo thinking perhaps she’d been overstating her symptoms.
‘I went away going, “Okay, am I making this up? Am I really this tired?”‘ Jo says. ‘So I decided perhaps I needed to improve my lifestyle. I bought a treadmill, started getting fitter, eating better, all those types of things, but the exhaustion was just constant.’
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