SHORTLY after my 40th birthday I decided that there was just time to squeeze in a longed-for third child.
Two previous pregnancies, in my late thirties, had been a breeze. My mother gave birth to me when she was 43, so if I was following in her footsteps, which is usually the case with mothers and daughters, I was hardly running out of time.
As soon as I missed a period I walked confident and glowing into the chemist for a pregnancy test. It was negative, so I did it again.
Still negative — no baby. When I missed another period a few months later I did another test which also failed to produce the desired result. What was going on?
I could be missing periods through stress or recent weight loss, the doctor mused. He would run a few checks. He would even, he said almost laughingly, check that I wasn’t premenopausal, although, he assured me, that was highly unlikely given my mother’s history, the fact that I had no typical menopausal symptoms, and was a good ten years off the average age of menopause (52). I was stunned when he called me back to say that, according to the results of the blood test, I was already “way past” my menopause.
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There would be no more babies.
No one expects an early menopause to strike out of the blue. But it can, so if there is a test to predict how many years you have left, I urge every woman to take it.