A friend spoke with her doctor, a leading menopause specialist, after hormone replacement therapy. He had been scrubbing with Oestrogel for over a decade; its turbulence of night sweats and the epic anxiety of the late 1940s, which HRT brilliantly cushions, was a thing of the past. Surely it was time to cool the turkey?
But the doctor was adamant that “a woman in her profession” should not stop; who risked thinking confusedly, sleeping poorly, and performing poorly in his stressful, high-level work. Stay tuned, keep HRT forever, was the message. And so, fearing failure, he did.
“What’s the final game here?” she asks. “Do we wear patches of progesterone until they sink into our coffins?” Apparently. Another friend, now 61, reports that an 80-year-old man was treated