I wanted to fix my painful periods—I didn’t know I’d be ending them for good

I was a teenager, maybe 15 years old. I was sitting with my mom at the beauty salon after school. We called the salon owner “Aunty Julie.” She did facials and eyelash extensions, and my mom was a regular client. While I quietly did my homework in the corner, the two of them discussed the unedited details of their lives. Frustrations at work and at home. Managing a household, dealing with their kids. The physical symptoms they were dealing with, as they both faced something called “menopause.”

“Is that when you take a pause from men?” I truly didn’t know the term and was thinking of “The Men All Pause,” the ‘80s bop by Klymaxx. My mom and her friend stopped talking and stared at me. Then they laughed until tears fell from their eyes.

Aunty Julie and my mom were in their fifties. As a teenager, that seemed ancient, decades in the distance. I assumed that menopause was a thing that I didn’t have to think about because it was so far away in my future. Turns out, menopause was closer than I could have imagined.

By that point, heavy periods were already a monthly burden for me — and they became even more difficult as I got older. In my early 30s, I realized something wasn’t right. My monthly flow became draining and debilitating, with heavy clotting and urinary bladder compression that made me have to pee constantly. A pelvic ultrasound with my OB/GYN confirmed what I already knew: Thefibroidsthat plagued my family had come for me too.

Fibroidsare non-cancerous growths on the uterus that occur most commonly during the reproductive years. Estrogen and progesterone feed fibroids, so they tend to shrink after menopause when hormone levels drop. While the cause is often unclear, research shows that having a family history and being Black are both risk factors — and both risk factors that apply to me.

My first attempt to remove them was a myomectomy, but it was a painful failure. While the ultrasound showed my fibroids could be easily removed, when I was opened up with a C-section-like cut, the doctor discovered the fibroids were actually attached to my cervix, and she was unprepared for such an intense procedure. So, she stitched me back up to heal for eight weeks from a procedure that did nothing to help my heavy bleeding.

After that, I still wanted to resolve my fibroids and decided with my doctor to try the less invasive route of embolization, a procedure where a radiologist injects tiny particles into your uterine arteries, blocking blood flow to the fibroids. Over time, the fibroids shrink and die.

It was supposed to stop the endless, exhausting periods caused by my fibroids — I didn’t fully realize that one of the possible outcomes would be early menopause. After all, while it is a possibility, early menopause is an uncommon complication from the procedure; a small, long-term study foundno evidencethe procedure advances the timing of menopause in women before the age of 45 years.

Yet that’s exactly what happened to me. “When you embolize, or block off, the uterine artery, the particles that are used to block the artery can potentially get into other vasculature [veins], including vasculature that supplies the ovaries with blood,” says Dr. Kiarra King, M.D., a board-certified OB/GYN in Chicago. “And if that happens, then there can be a compromise in ovarian function, which can cause menopausal symptoms.”

The average age of menopause in the United States is 51. Menopause between ages 40 and 45 is considered “early menopause,” and before 40 is called “premature menopause.” About 5% of women experienceearly menopause, and roughly 1% of women go throughpremature menopause. Because of my fibroids treatment, I experienced menopause a full decade earlier, at 41; a follicle-stimulating hormone test suggested I had entirely skipped past perimenopause and was in early menopause.

The good news: My debilitating heavy periods were gone, which was a relief. But in their place were challenging symptoms. Hot flashes that woke me up in the middle of the night, drenching my pajamas and sheets. Brain fog and depression that drained my physical energy and social battery. I struggled with anxiety, which manifested in upsetting behaviors I never had before, like skin picking and insomnia.

The truth is, I’ll never know if my procedure alone jumpstarted me into early menopause, because I also have several other risk factors for it: Women who started their period around or beforeage 11are more likely to go intoearly menopause. Like with fibroids, early menopause is far more common forBlack women. Checking these boxes can sometimes make this path feel inevitable for me. And also frightening, aspotential effects of premature or early menopauseinclude negative effects on cognition, mood, and cardiovascular, bone, and sexual health — even an increased risk of early death. Hormone therapy has been shown to lessen some, but not all of these risks.

When I think about the things that are helping me through this transition, I can’t help but think back to my mother and her salon visits with Aunty Julie, because talking with other women going through the same thing has been vital for me. Recently, I shared my symptoms with my closest high school girlfriends. Turns out we’re all going through similar things, to different degrees, at different stages. We were just shouldering our burdens quietly and shuffling through life as best as we could without acknowledging our painful, challenging truths with others — the conversation to see what we shared was cathartic.

My other source of solace is reminding myself that, despite how under-resourced menopause research is, this is still probably the best time in history to be going through it. There’s so much more attention and open discussion about the topic than ever before, and so many more resources — including in-person or virtual menopause groups — to bring us comfort and support.

So, if I’m sweating through my sheets at 3 a.m., at least I know I’m not doing it alone — and someone in the chat probably has a better pajama recommendation.