In the meantime, moreover, what are women doing to make their lives bearable if they cannot get hold of the oestrogen gels, sprays or patches they need to treat their symptoms? Some, already, have been turning to the internet to try and purchase the treatments now missing from pharmacies. Nokes herself is among them. “People like me are going online to try and buy it,” she says. But this is not without risk. “Women really might [end up buying something unsafe] and that’s the danger,” warns Nokes. “You like to think you’re doing your research and buying the right stuff, but you never really know.”
It didn’t work in her case anyhow. After ordering her treatment online last week, she received an email 24 hours later telling her it wasn’t available.
Others, dubbed HRT tourists, are looking abroad. “We shouldn’t have to be going on the black market to try and get a prescription or asking friends overseas to try and get hold of some oestrogen,” says Katie Taylor, founder of the Latte Lounge, an online support group for women in midlife and menopause. “We hear women saying on our Facebook group, ‘you can get it over the counter in Spain, it’s slightly different to the one in the UK but I’m sure it’s fine’, or ‘if you Google, you can get it privately here’, and that’s dangerous because it takes time to find the right level of HRT and your medical history needs to be taken into account.”
Others are driving to multiple pharmacies searching in vain for supplies. Without it, some are left feeling desperate. “The highest rate of female suicide is in 44- to 55-year-old women. It’s not a coincidence,” says Taylor, whose own menopause symptoms were so severe she quit her job in marketing and communications at 47.
Lancaster, too, knows all too well how some women feel unable to carry on with untreated menopausal symptoms. “It can get to a devastating point where women are taking their lives,” she says.
“My dad was a lawyer in a big firm in London and just a few months ago had the news that an ex-colleague took her own life because she was on antidepressants when the treatment she needed was HRT,” she says. “It’s horrible to think in this day and age that kind of thing can happen.”
Through her own campaigning, she has “spoken to very successful women, CEOs, who without HRT have felt like they can’t possibly be responsible for all these people when they’re having meltdowns, feeling they can’t cope”.
