You have got to see the new Netflix documentary, Queen of the Mountain: The Summits of Lhakpa Sherpa.
No one is putting this together: She was 49 or around it when this was shot in 2022 – squarely in middle-to-late peri.
Lhakpa, who is from a small village in Nepal, holds the world record for most Mount Everest summits for a woman. No one else is even close. This film chronicles her 10th summit, and it’s just as unlikely and dramatic as the previous nine. The story of how this illiterate mother of three, who works at a Whole Foods in Connecticut and crowd-funded her summit, came to do all this is riveting, heartbreaking, inspiring and mind-expanding all at the same time. And if you look at it through the lens of the menopause transition? It goes to a whole other level.
The narrative you see here is nothing short of a menopause heroine’s journey. When Lhakpa – who turns 51 in September – says “my 10th summit. My darkness I leave behind”, I got shivers.
Talk about trauma: this woman has been through it. At the outset of the film, like so many people and families, she and her two daughters are living with the remains of domestic abuse: buried pain and trauma.
Then there is the secondary story, a perimenopause plot twist: And then just when she’s nearing the top, she has to halt the upward trajectory for a few days because her period is so heavy.
It’s not like I’m diagnosing anyone, but this tracks with perimenopause. And for a woman who has made it through so many dark nights of the soul, it was fascinating to watch her struggle not to go under as she faced just one more.
I mean, this is not a woman who would let something like this get her down unless it got her down. But you can feel her dark night of the perimenopause damn soul come in your bone-mineral-density-diminishing bones when she compares herself to a dirty Hartford raccoon no one would ever love.
“It feels like I’m dying,” she says, trudging along. “I had a period, very badly. My period just came, two, three days. So heavy period.”
And then!
“Normal people rest. I fucking keep walking.”
There are so many takeaways here. But the biggest is that when we answer the midlife call to face our darkness, often right in the middle of when it all feels like it’s coming crashing down, the only thing we can do is just keep moving forward, no matter how slowly. That movement changes us, and creates a ripple effect all around us. This is why we are here.
As British director Lucy Walker put it: “By the end, Lhakpa’s healing her own family and inspiring her own daughters.”
I’d love to ask Lhakpa what her life has been like after this experience, after getting all of that pain up and out. Where she is at in her transition. If she has or had any other perimenopause symptoms. If she felt lighter by facing her shadows, on her own and with her girls; if she shed any of the pain that’s always been a part of her parenting, and the hurt and shame that she has been embedded in her version of romantic love. If she really did leave the darkness behind; if she feels more peace. If she feels more free.
»» For another great mountain climbing/menopause story, read Shelly Horton’s Allie Pepper has reached the summit of Mount Everest but menopause was her greatest uphill battle.
Hotflash inc hot tip
This week’s podcast is a tight edit of my previous interview with Dr Vonda Wright, a Florida orthopedic sports medicine surgeon, who is getting a lot of attention this week after publishing her review paper introducing her concept of Musculoskeletal Syndrome of Menopause in the journal Climacteric. (I’m taking a closer look at that this forthcoming week)
In the podcast, Dr Wright talks of course about the power of hormone therapy, about ‘green leafies’, protein and lifting heavy. Also something close to my heart: jumping.
She points to data that shows jumping up and down 20 times is enough. If that hurts, she says, use a rebounder. “NASA has amazing data that when astronauts come back from space, they put them on trampolines and use a rebounding technique to stimulate bone and muscle,” says Dr Wright.
And if that hurts, her advice is to do it in a pool.
"Stand up for what makes sense.”
- Professor and progesterone researcher Dr Jerilynn Prior telling medical students at the University of British Columbia that the prevailing beliefs about perimenopause are don’t stand up to the data, which shows estrogen is often higher than normal during perimenopause.
Monitoring the menopause gold rush
Regulators are coming for menopause supplements. Supplements can’t claim to prevent, treat or cure menopause symptoms – yet they are doing that all over the place. In the US, Advertising Standards Authority has issued rulings and is calling out two brands on this: Happy Mammoth’s MenoDaily and Feel’s Menopause. Over in the UK, regulators banned ads for the supplement company KeyForHer and two products from Rejuvit: Rejuvit Ageless Vitality and Rejuvit Graceful Ageing.
Over in the Australia, Women’s Gynecology Research director (and Hotflash inc podcast guest) Martha Hickey told the ongoing senate committee women are being bombarded by untested claims on social media.
"There's an enormous and growing range of products and devices available, and social media is a way of these manufacturers reaching a large number of women," she said. "It's really difficult for people who are looking for help, and to know what works and what doesn't."
When you feel terrible, it’s so easy to grab at anything that sounds good – and you can waste a lot of money that way. I like to say I could have probably bought a whole Bitcoin with what I spent on trying to feel well in perimenopause.
However: You would think medical boards would have similar teeth to call out specific doctors who make over-the-top claims about hormone therapy – let alone prescribe supra physiological (aka dangerous) levels of them – because for all it’s benefits, HT is a powerful intervention with risks and side effects.
• Perimenopause 90210: Jennie Garth tells her 1.3 million IG followers “menopause is a minefield, both physically and mentally” (and shares that that she too is also suffering from body pain, aka a symptom of MSM)
• “When researchers from Yale University looked at over five hundred thousand insurance claims from women in various stages of menopause, they found that three hundred thousand of the claims were related to patients seeking medical assistance for significant menopausal symptoms — and that 75 percent of the patients left without treatment.” DMG Dr Mary Claire Haver writes What Every Woman In Menopause Should Know Before Visiting The Doctor for Mind Body Green.
• Poosh tackles flooding (the kind Lakhma had on the mountain): The lesser-known menopause symptom we should be talking about And also progesterone, in a two-part series. Part 1 is live: Are Progesterone Levels Making Your Skin, and Everything Else, Haywire? Notice how the alternative part of the sphere is miles ahead of the mainstream? As they say in the crypto world, first they mock you…
• Gloria magazine gets on the T bandwagon: The Controversial Treatment Supercharging Women’s Libidos featuring American Lady T leader and Wake Her Up founder Marcella Hill. Hill is candid about how low libido impacted her marriage in what will ring bells for many of us. She also, as many women do, talks about how happy she is with pellets, followed by a series of doctors talking about how bad pellets are.
• I don’t think you have to dig this hard anymore for menopause depictions on-screen, but this is a fun list nonetheless. Menopause on screen: 5 moments that made me feel seen
I am a big fan of this supplement for many reasons: it stopped my hot flashes, which meant I could sleep. There are dozens and dozens of studies on how it works to improve blood flow, with knock-on effects for arteries and health. I met the co-founder of Morphus, Andrea Donsky, before she launched the company through TikTok and we became friends. You could not meet someone more careful and precise about ingredients, or the information she imparts. Do your own research, but if you are in the US and want to order anything from Morphus, feel free to use my link and save 10 percent with this code: save10hotflash .
What I’m doing:
• Recovering from a 3-day bacteria infection that moved from my head to my toes. I feel like I’ve had a kick in the ass and a reboot all in one. Hallelujah for health!
• Reading Prune Harris’s Your Radiant Soul: Understand Your Energy to Transform Your World. This stopped me in my tracks: “if your member of your childhood is that it was fun, awesome, and empowering, then your energy systems are likely in much more cohesion than if you remember it being challenging, painful, embarrassing and thoroughly unbalanced”. Stay tuned for lots of energy and midlife content.
• Obsessing over this 3D model of our reproductive system. Shivers.
Have a great week.