“For a long time, I felt like everything about me was disintegrating. I was in this spiral. And it eventually led to me being in such a dark place mentally,” she added.
By 2018, Rodrigues said she was going through pretty severe depression. “All I could feel was this darkness descending, just overwhelming everything. Everything was in a shroud,” she said.
“I felt like, is this what it is like to be middle age? Is this what they mean by twilight years? Surely, there has to be a better way to age, right?”
SEEKING HELP FOR HER MENOPAUSE
Things reached a tipping point and Rodrigues began researching menopause in 2018, seven years after she menopaused. She was 51 then and decided to see her gynaecologist about going on hormone replacement therapy (HRT).
HRT is one of the most commonly prescribed drug treatments for menopause, and replaces oestrogen and sometimes progesterone, hormones that the body no longer produces in sufficient amounts after menopause.
As HRT is known to increase the risk of breast cancer, Rodrigues underwent a mammogram and BRCA gene test to check if she is a carrier of a gene mutation which increases her risk of getting breast cancer. She tested negative for both.
She also did a bone density test, which revealed that she was close to having osteoporosis as a result of menopause and the lack of oestrogen, she said.
“It was a blow to me because I’m active. I do a lot of weight-bearing exercise, but yet my bone density was so low,” she said.
She added that this could explain why she felt fragile – it was a signal from her body that she had weak bones and could not bear a fall.