Journalist Jancee Dunn thought maybe it was her heart. She thought maybe she was pregnant. She thought, "I guess I'm just sweaty now." There she was, right on time and experiencing a variety of perfectly common indicators of a normal biological process, and yet, she says, "I was so clueless about symptoms of menopause. And I'm a health writer."
That Dunn should have been so perplexed isn't so perplexing. Menopause, after all, is a double whammy of taboo topics: female aging and female fertility. To acknowledge either, let alone both, seems like an admission of defeat — even among the people we trust the most. "I had never had a conversation with my mother about menopause," Dunn says. "Never. I hadn't talked about it with some of my friends."
