A doctor’s battle with premature menopause and fibroids
FIBROIDS, which are abnormal growths that develop in or on a woman’s uterus, mainly affect women of African descent. On the other hand, premature menopause, which occurs when the ovaries decrease or cease the production of oestrogen — signalling the end of a woman’s menstrual years earlier than usual — is rather uncommon. But imagine having to deal with both fibroids and premature menopause simultaneously. This was the case for general and anti-ageing practitioner Dr Sandra Knight, who had to deal with both conditions while she was in her early 20s.
“Fibroids was a big problem. All my sisters had it; two of my sisters had surgery for fibroids,” she told All Woman.
“I was diagnosed with fibroids when I was 22 and the gynaecologist said to me, ‘Don’t worry about it. When you reach menopause they’ll go away’, and I said to him, ‘Menopause is 30 years away’.”
However, Dr Knight said that fate had other plans, as two years later she was fully into menopause, but with even more complications.
“I had chicken pox, and the virus caused an overreaction in my body to the invasion of the virus. My body started to attack my organs — my heart, my kidney, my ovaries, just everything. I was in the intensive care unit (ICU) and when I came out of the ICU I had severe hot flashes,” she said.
A medical student at the time, Dr Knight said she thought it was strange that she was having hot flashes since she knew it was a symptom of menopause. She said she kept going to doctors to find out what was happening to her, but nobody believed her when she said she was having hot flashes.
“It wasn’t until three years after that when I was so ill, that a gynaecologist decided to do some blood tests and realised that I didn’t even have a microbe of oestrogen left. You know what he said to me? ‘Young lady, I’m more of a woman than you.’ That’s what he said, and I said, ‘Well, that doesn’t sound good.”
She said the gynaecologist explained that she was going to age faster than everybody else and her bones were going to get brittle, among other things. And so she walked out feeling like death was knocking on her door.
“So I started to research it. It’s pretty uncommon. But it doesn’t have to be as overwhelming as how it happened to me. Sometimes you have symptoms and signs and sometimes you don’t. But the regular ones are that your period stops like how mine did and you start having hot flashes, your mood is different, the way you think is different, and you get this constant brain fog where your brain shuts down on you. It’s like a hangover, it’s terrible,” Dr Knight explained.
While she was able to go overseas and get help, she was also engaged at the time to a “nice young man who wanted children”.
“So that was a problem, but the options for us were surrogacy, which we looked at, and in vitro fertilisation, which we did, and we ended up with one daughter who I am most thankful for.”
Despite having to go through such an ordeal, Dr Knight is vibrant and willingly shares her experience with a smile. She also advises women to be on the lookout for any symptoms of premature menopause and reach out to their doctors.
“The main thing to look out for in terms of premature menopause or premature ovarian failure is the fact that you really start to get hot flashes, mood swings that are out of this world, the constant fatigue and tiredness, and difficulty having children,” she said.
