Three doctors in fourteen months. That is my number.
The first one said it was work stress. He asked me how many hours I was putting in, I said sixty sometimes more, and he nodded like he had solved it. Take a break. Reduce screen time. Try yoga. He wrote it on a prescription pad. Yoga. For what I now know were hot flashes, heart palpitations, and a memory so shot I had started writing my own name on sticky notes in case I forgot it mid-thought.
The second doctor ran a thyroid test, found nothing, and told me I was probably anxious. She was not unkind about it. She prescribed something for anxiety and sent me home. I took the tablets for three weeks. Nothing changed except I felt slightly numb and slightly embarrassed, as if I had been manufacturing symptoms for attention.
The third doctor was a gynaecologist. My cousin had seen her and mentioned perimenopause almost as an aside, the way you mention something you are not sure is relevant. I almost did not make the appointment. I was 39. Perimenopause was something that happened to your mother. Your mother's mother.
She asked me to describe my periods. I told her: irregular for the past eight months, sometimes 21 days apart, sometimes 45, once so heavy I soaked through my clothes at a client meeting and had to walk out pretending to take a call. She listened without interrupting. Then she ordered a hormone panel, FSH, LH, AMH, oestradiol, things the previous two doctors had never mentioned.
The results came back within a week. She called me herself. Meera, your hormones are consistent with early perimenopause.
I sat in my car in the parking lot of my office and cried. Not because it was devastating. Because someone had finally said a real thing. After fourteen months of being handed explanations that did not fit, someone had given me the right one.
I am not fixed. There is no fixing. But I am managing it now. I know what is happening in my body and why, and that is more than I had before. If I could say anything to the version of myself sitting across from Doctor Number One being told to try yoga: push harder. Ask for the blood tests. You are not imagining it.