EXCLUSIVE: 'HRT saved my life': Andi Osho shares powerful menopause insights after 8 years of symptoms
Andi Osho wants women to have the best menopause care possible, and shares insight into the important things she's learned eight years into having symptoms
Andi Osho is an actress, author, and keen menopause advocate. If you haven't seen her in the latest series of BBC hit Blue Lights, this is definitely one for your watch list.
If you also haven't heard Andi sharing her insight and wisdom about perimenopause and menopause, you've come to the right place.
We got to sit down with her and ask about what she's learned about menopause, and everything that comes with the condition that women need to seemingly fight to get basic care for, and remains poorly understood.
The actress started getting symptoms around eight years ago, but they became "really pronounced" in the last three years. In her early 40s, some of the symptoms Andi noticed will likely sound familiar.
These included not being able to lose weight no matter what she tried. "I was going to the gym all the time, trying fasting and calorie restriction and still not being able to shift weight," she says.
This was followed by "fatigue, joint pain, and dry skin." Like many women, Andi didn't initially put these down to perimenopause, but simply things that just happened.
It was until "the brain fog started," that she began to worry. "That's when the conversation was starting to crescendo and I could join the dots to work out what was going on," she says.
Andi says it took her so long realise she was in perimenopause because "the narrative, the public conversation just wasn't there." If this sounds familiar, you're not alone.
A landmark study by University College London (UCL) found that more than 90% of postmenopausal women were never taught about the menopause at school, with over 60% using words like "difficult" or "nightmare" to describe their experience because lack of open conversations about the transition left them not knowing what to expect.
Further evidence shows over half of GPs feel they aren't given good enough training to adequately treat menopausal women. Unsurprisingly, this can lead to multiple GP visits, frustration and women being dismissed or offered inappropriate treatments.
While Andi feels menopause awareness is "seeping much more into the public consciousness," there's still a long way to go. Her own lightbulb moment that made her stop dismissing her own symptoms came completely randomly, when she was at a book festival.
Andi accidentally ended up at a talk by women's health specialist, Dr. Nighat Arif - she hadn't intended to listen to the talk, just needed somewhere to sit down and eat her lunch and the Dr happened to be speaking.
"I was just sitting there and she was talking about perimenopause, and it was background noise as I was eating," Andi explains, adding that suddenly, she realised she had all the symptoms being spoken about.
"She's the reason I realised I was in perimenopause. The things that she was saying I was just like holy s***, I've had all those things that she's talking about," she says, adding that although this was an important moment in taking control of her menopause health, it had taken so long to get there.
Because of this, Andi has one important thing she can pass on from her menopause experience that she wants other women to start doing.
"Talk about it," she says, continuing, "because talking about it can cover lots of different things. Talk about it with your family, with your partner, with your friends. Because when you talk about it with your friends, especially your girlfriends it's a problem shared, literally."
The actress continues, "If you talk about it with your partner, they can support you rather than dismissing what's happening to you or not understand and use that as an excuse to not get involved.
"Talk about it to people who aren't your doctor, because then you might hear some other symptoms that you hadn't accounted for - the doctors unfortunately don't know everything, and a symptom may come out of a conversation with friends rather than a conversation with your doctor."
When asked if she has any regrets or anything she wishes she'd done differently when it comes to her menopause care, Andi is very clear: She doesn't want anything to be a regret, just a learning curve.
"They're not regrets, because I feel like when you know better, you do better, you know," she says, although there is one thing she'd do differently if she had her time again.
"If I was to do it again, maybe I would have started HRT earlier," she says. The actress credits HRT with something very profound. "I genuinely feel like it saved my life," she reveals.
Other than turning to hormone therapy earlier, everything to do with her menopause is an experience to build on, not something to look back on regretfully.
Something else Andi wants women to drop when it comes to their midlife hormonal changes, is the shame. "The more we can sort of shed any any embarrassment or shame, that's a burden that we're not having to carry around on top of everything else that we're going through," she says wisely.
