The This Morning regular, Eva Speakman has revealed that she has been dealing with a recent health battle, and broke down in tears as she opened up about her condition.
Appearing on the the latest Mile Fly Club podcast, with Laura Hamilton, Eva revealed how she has been suffering with the perimenopause, but didn’t even know that her symptoms were related to the condition at first.
The ITV’s This Morning star said: “The only reason I found out I was in the perimenopause Laura, is because my hair was falling out and my concept of the menopause was always hot flushes and your periods stop. That’s what I thought, but I had neither of those things, and it was because of hair loss and really severe joint pain, and I kept going back to the doctors and they’d say ‘there’s nothing wrong with you.'”
After continuing to seek doctors help, she finally got the diagnosis that she needed, and was prescribed HRT (Hormone Replacement Therapy).
As Eva took time to reflect on her experience with the condition, she admitted that at one stage she even thought that the symptoms could be that of early onset Alzheimer’s: “My concentration was horrific, I struggled with remembering people’s names, there was genuinely one point were I thought I’ve got some form of Alzheimer’s here that’s happening at early onset becuase of my memory.”
Having first suffered with perimenopause two years ago, Eva spent the following years raising awareness of the condition, but she broke down in tears as she revealed to Laura that symptoms had returned earlier this year: “I just had this influx again, of symptoms, weight gain, the memory thing, grumpy, joint pain, I can’t sleep and I’m like ‘what the hell’s going on?’ I’m taking hormones, what can this be? And again, because you are on HRT there is this kind of ‘well you’re already on HRT, so we’re doing everything’. But, I was kind of no, there’s something not quite right here.”
But, after the condition returned, she decided to seek the advice of a consultant to try and get a better understanding: “What I hadn’t appreciated was that when you’re going through the perimenopause, you are still producing some hormones, but it’s in peaks and troughs.
“So what I hadn’t realised was that when you do actually get through it then, the production of those hormones is just fully stopped and I’d not evaluated since then. Literally within the last few days I’ve spoken to my consultant about it and just said, ‘I really need your help, because this is not right.’
“They said ‘look, this is pretty common’, nobody told me it was pretty common, so I didn’t expect this, I was flying high and suddenly felt like I fell on the ground with a thump and again you kind of feel like a bit of a fraud because you’ve been going on about ‘you can get through perimenopause’ and then I’ve hit the ground again.”
As she continues to manage the symptoms, she has started on a new course of medication that is helping her ‘get on the right track again’: “But I am now starting to pick myself back up again, and even knowing that this is a fairly normal thing and now were evaluating both my hormones and the administration of those again, because at the time I didn’t realise that there’s tablets, there’s gels, there’s sprays, there’s patches, I’m having a shift to that, so I’m on the right track again.”