Ida Tin’s “Dear Men” Series: Part 27 of 29 – Perimenopause

Dear Men, this is post 27 about what it feels like to live in a woman’s body.

It almost feels like breast cancer is this ghost station that we, as women, can all expect to stop at later in life—or maybe even earlier.

A scary probability: 1 out of 10 women being taken off the train and forced to visit that terrifying station of chemo, having their breasts removed, lymph nodes taken out, undergoing radiation, and taking poisonous anti-hormone pills while losing our hair. It is so real. I have seen people close to me go through this; I have seen the scars, the missing breasts. The women in my lineage who had cancers in their wombs had no scars to show—they simply died.

As perimenopause starts to rearrange my body and things begin happening that feel weirdly out of rhythm, I am trying to weigh the increased risk of some cancers from taking hormones against the even more diffuse sense of risk of losing myself if I don’t take them. My friend, who is a cancer doctor, lays out the statistics:

“The risk of breast cancer with estrogen Therapy is slightly increased, but only with long-term use. Statistically, all Danish women, whether they take hormone therapy or not, have a 10 percent lifetime risk of developing breast cancer.

If you take a combination of estrogen and progestogen for five years or more after the age of 50, your lifetime risk of breast cancer will increase by 1-2 percentage points, bringing the total risk to around 11-12 percent. If you continue for 10 years, the risk increase is approximately 3-4 percentage points.

For comparison, your breast cancer risk increases by a similar percentage if you drink more than two glasses of wine daily, smoke, or have a BMI over 30 after menopause.”

And then, what about ovarian or cervical cancers? I don’t know. Is this one of the things I should learn? The learning list seems to never end when it comes to female health, and even after visiting my gynecologist, I leave with even more questions.

Art by Kyle Leuck

-This post by Ida Tin is shared on LinkedIn and is republished here with her permission. The SheSight Team has not made any changes to the content.