Lauren Chiren shares her journey through early menopause, and how her story inpired others
In her late 30s, Lauren Chiren from Bristol was a new mum to a young son and enjoying her career, working as senior executive in a financial services firm, focusing on regulatory and compliance change.
She had clients across the globe. Her days were long, her job complex – but Lauren loved it.
“I enjoyed that. I thrived on that complexity. I was sailing along in my career, completely loving what I was doing,” she explains.
Yet, one day, things started to change.
“I would find myself sitting in meetings literally holding on to the arms of a chair because my heart was beating out my chest,” Lauren says. “I didn’t know what it was. It felt like palpitations or anxiety.
“Other times I would forget simple words like ‘plan’ during planning meetings.”
Things got so bad that Lauren began to think she might have early onset dementia.
“I’d watched my grandmother pass away from Alzheimer’s, and I could see some similarities.
“I was asking myself, Why am I not just sailing through every day like I used to? I was finding it harder to trust myself with the decisions I was making.
“This went on for about 18 months. I didn’t know what it was, and I thought, perhaps, I’ve got early onset dementia.
“Eventually I was thinking,
I don’t want to be the one that isn’t up to the job. I don’t want to be the one that’s weak and vulnerable. So I actually left my job because of it.”
However, three months after making the decision to quit, Lauren found herself at her GP surgery receiving a different diagnosis from the one she feared.
She was not experiencing symptoms of early onset dementia. She had gone through menopause.
“I had gone in because of low mood and had several appointments,” Lauren explains. “I was in floods of tears shaking, really upset. It was the only place that I could be myself and really lay out how I was feeling.
“I went through boxes of tissues in the surgery. On my third appointment, the GP said, ‘It’s not dementia – you’ve just been through menopause.’”
According to Lauren, being told her diagnosis changed everything in an instant. It explained her symptoms: the forgetfulness, the change in mood, feelings of anxiety.
“I was the happiest menopausal woman in Bristol – li
