You wrote the list on your phone before the appointment so you would not lose your nerve.

The four a.m. waking. The rage that arrives over a dishwasher. The joints. The word that will not come when you are mid-sentence in front of people.

They took blood. You waited eight days.

Then a receptionist said the word normal down the phone and you stood in the car park holding your own symptoms, with nowhere to put them.

Here is what nobody told you. The test you were given is the test the national guideline says not to use.

A couple of years ago we did a weird lab experiment.

We took an extract of Italian Kiwis…

Applied it to a cluster of melanin cells (what dark spots are made of)...

And watched as the melanin cells MELTED before our eyes.

18 months of further lab work followed.

Until we perfected a simple, at-home treatment that “melts” away the appearance of dark spots in as little as 15 days.

Here's the really crazy part…

It’s 20 TIMES more effective than the common ingredients you find in dark spot creams…

And doesn’t cause any burning or skin irritation.

Follicle stimulating hormone is the instruction your brain sends to your ovaries. As the supply of follicles falls, the brain raises its voice, and FSH climbs.

That is the theory the blood test rests on, and in a body that declines steadily it would work.

Your body is not declining steadily. In perimenopause the ovary is erratic rather than exhausted.

Some cycles it responds fully. Estradiol can surge higher than it ever did in your thirties, and a high estradiol pushes FSH straight back down.

So a raised FSH on one Tuesday can be a normal FSH a fortnight later. The number describes an hour, not a phase.

After years of constant bloating, stomach cramps and adult acne that wouldn’t go away, I was so desperate I would’ve tried anything.

That’s how I came across a bizarre “neon root”, recommended by a doctor.

I took it before bed and by morning, my bloating was completely gone. I woke up with a completely flat stomach!

By day 3, the stubborn acne on my face completely disappeared. 

If you want to clear your skin and fix your gut by tomorrow morning, you need to see this:

The National Institute for Health and Care Excellence, in its menopause guideline, is explicit.

Do not use a serum FSH test to diagnose menopause in women aged over 45.

Diagnose perimenopause on the basis of vasomotor symptoms and irregular periods, without laboratory tests, in otherwise healthy women over 45.

Consider an FSH test only for women aged 40 to 45 with symptoms including a change in their cycle, or for women under 40 where menopause is suspected. And in that last case, two samples taken four to six weeks apart, because one is not enough to conclude anything.

Your normal result was not evidence that you are fine. It was the wrong instrument, applied on the wrong day, against guidance that says not to apply it at all.

Do this. Print the recommendations section of that guideline and take it with you. You are not arguing. You are citing.

Then bring clinical data, because the diagnosis is clinical. Three months of cycle dates. Your top three symptoms scored out of ten, once a week, written down.

That is the evidence base the guideline actually asks for, and almost no woman walks in holding it.

I understand that a normal FSH does not rule out perimenopause at my age, and that diagnosis is clinical. I would like to discuss managing my symptoms.

Say it flat. Do not apologize in the middle of it.

And ask for thyroid function to be checked, because an underactive thyroid mimics almost this entire list and it is the one blood test genuinely worth having.

You were not told you were fine. You were told what one Tuesday looked like.