When Janet Roach started experiencing menopausal symptoms at 44, she would make light of hot flushes when they happened at work. “I’d be sitting in a meeting and would feel heat radiating from the bottom of my feet all the way up my body. I’d be taking layers off. It used to be a bit of a running joke.”
Six years later, those symptoms had progressed into brain fog, periods of sleeplessness and depression. “Sometimes we’d have a Teams meeting and by the time we’d hung up, I’d forgotten what it was about,” says Roach, who works as an insurance claims specialist at the Financial Services Compensation Scheme (FSCS), which protects customers if their financial service provider goes out of business. “I was crying a lot and I didn’t understand why. I was fed up with myself and I thought other people must be fed up with me too.”
