Danya Potgieter and her husband, Shandor, were trying for their second child when she got some shocking news. At just 34, she discovered she was in perimenopause: her chances of falling pregnant had plummeted to a mere 0.001%.
‘I was broken,’ she says. ‘I’d never even heard of perimenopause. I thought menopause was something that happened to older women. Looking back, however, I did have a lot of the symptoms.’
Danya had ascribed her irregular periods to the Mirena, a hormone-releasing intra-uterine device, which she’d had for five years. The Mirena is known for causing light periods or sometimes even stopping menstruation altogether.
She went to her gynaecologist for a check-up because she wasn’t getting pregnant as easily as she had expected, and was told something didn’t look right: her ovaries had shrunk. Blood tests confirmed that her oestrogen levels were low and her follicle-stimulating hormone levels were very high. She was in perimenopause.
‘It was a real shock, especially because two of my close friends got pregnant on the first try at around the same time. I regretted that we’d waited so long to try for a second child. I
