Sometimes it begins with crippling body pain. Brain fog that makes you fear Alzheimer’s. Exhaustion that no amount of sleep can fix. Symptoms that send women from one specialist to another—without anyone connecting the dots.In this deeply honest conversation, renowned journalist Shoma Chaudhury shares her personal experience of menopause for the very first time. She speaks candidly about years of unexplained pain, memory loss, thyroid issues, fibromyalgia, emotional changes, family, intimacy, and why even someone with access to the best doctors didn’t realise menopause was at the root of it all.

You wake at 3am, soaked. You forget a word mid-sentence in a meeting. You cry at things that never used to touch you. You are 46 and you are wondering whether this is menopause, ageing, or the beginning of dementia.

Dr Sarah McKay is an Oxford educated neuroscientist. In this episode she explains what is actually happening.

Estrogen regulates the neurons in your hypothalamus that detect body temperature. As your hormones start to fluctuate, that thermostat narrows and becomes hypersensitive. A tiny rise in body temperature now reads as an emergency, and your brain fires the sympathetic nervous system to cool you down. Asleep, you cannot act on it, so your brain wakes you. Do that for months and the rest follows. Fog. Wired and tired.

When menopause is surgically induced, there is no gradual transition. Your estrogen goes to zero overnight. Mahua Moitra describes it as falling off a cliff, and she fell off it eight weeks before fighting a Lok Sabha election.

"I had lost my house. I had lost my membership to the Lok Sabha. And I had also lost my uterus."

On Menopause: It Was this All Along, she gives Roshini Sanah Jaiswal the account she never got from anyone: what surgical menopause actually does. Night sweats soaked her through for months. She didn't sleep properly from January to October. And like many women, she refused HRT at first, convinced she could push through it, until her sister told her to stop acting like she knew everything and get help.

They also talk about why menopause has no word in our languages, why it remains a privilege of the rich to even discuss it, and what it would take to reach the women going through this alone. Her message to the 45-year-old listening in fear: you are not alone, and you are not going mad.