Diary to help with the menopause (From Malvern Gazette)

Diary to help with the menopause

2:22pm Monday 8th October 2007

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WHEN Malvern housewife Susan Kelsey woke up one night in a dreadful sweat she thought she was coming down with some strange tropical fever.

She woke her husband Russell, who is a doctor, and he told her she was probably perimenopausal and promptly went back to sleep.

Before that night Susan had never heard of the perimenopause but over the next few months as she suffered a series of hot flushes, night sweats, tiredness and irregular periods she certainly became an expert on the symptoms.

"I spent the next few months reading everything I could about the perimenopause. I found some of the self-help books excellent but some were just downright scary," said Susan.

The self-help books and her doctor suggested she keep a diary of her symptoms to help establish what kind of treatment would be best but despite checking out bookshops and internet sites could not find a specific diary for recording and tracking symptoms.

"I tried using an ordinary A5 diary but my scribbled notes made it impossible to get an overview of all my symptoms," explained Susan, so she decided to invent a monitoring diary of her own.

The result is the Hot Flushes diary, a discreet and stylish black and pink tome, that aims to help women monitor their symptoms quickly and easily and enables them to see which outside factors such as diet, exercise or stressful life events affect them.

It was important to ensure the diary was medically accurate so it was very handy that Susan happened to be married to a doctor.

Although as a doctor Russell had offered advice and treatment to many perimenopausal and menopausal women he admits: "I perhaps never appreciated just how varied and distressing the symptoms could be."

When his wife mentioned creating a special diary he realised just how useful this would be to GPs and other healthcare professionals treating menopausal women.

"The idea was so simple I couldn't understand why it hadn't been done before," he said.

The Hot Flushes Diary also contains a charting system.The perimenopause is difficult for doctors to assess because of the many and varied symptoms over time, explained Dr Kelsey, and the charts give them data they can review at a glance.

The diary can be ordered direct from the couple's website, www.susan-russell.com, for £12.95 and has been endorsed by the UK's leading menopause expert Dr Heather Currie.

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