I’ve been on and off HRT like a teenager on a rollercoaster. Slapping an oestrogen-loaded patch in the direction of my right buttock over this past year, I’ve approached HRT like a new lover. Vigorous enthusiasm at first, thanks to feeling generally more alive, you know, down “there”, I’ve even rediscovered the desire to masturbate! Dusting off my vibrator one morning, I could have high-fived the mirror in celebration. Two whole orgasms in a month instead of the recent none whatsoever. Not all women experience a surge in their sex drive while on HRT, but bearing in mind I used to have a razz on my vibrator daily – regular orgasms have health benefits, such as improved skin and stress release – my orgasm hiatus came as a shock. In menopause, my sex drive plummeted to nonexistent.
As with all new lovers, the shiny excitement begins to dull after a while, and soon enough, you find yourself staring at the mirror, wondering where you went. My HRT dose, it turned out, was far too high, and so, after a few weeks, when water retention began to make me look, and feel, like an overstretched sausage, bloated and annoyed at having gained circa 10lb in a month, I shoved the sticky little dots to the back of the drawer. “There must be an alternative,” I wailed down the phone to an American friend whose medicine cabinet is so well stocked she could set up her own A&E. Well, yes and no, was the conclusion we drew after an hour of debating natural hormones over synthetic.
