Looking back, the symptoms were all there. Periods that decided to disappear for months on end at random? Tick. Spots that cropped up for no apparent reason? Those too. Stubborn pockets of fat that made no sense given that my diet was well-balanced and I exercised regularly? Yep. Joy.
And yet despite troubling my doctor for years about the first two (it never even occurred to me that the third could be the result of an underlying cause), it was a facialist at Vaishaly’s eponymous clinic who told me that the pattern of my spots strongly suggested PCOS, aka Polycystic Ovary Syndrome, a hormonal disorder affecting up to 13 per cent of women of reproductive age.
