‘Are you afraid of falling over?’ asked the bored young radiologist, as he started filling out the forms.
I had been recalled to St George’s Hospital to have a bone density scan. I must explain that the issue of whether or not my bones are disintegrating has been somewhat tinged with hysteria ever since I managed to get myself told off by an Oxford professor for not taking HRT.
I rang her to get a quote for an article I was writing about yoga and why it might be helping me through the menopause. One minute I was looking up a revered expert on physiology in the Oxford University experts’ directory. The next minute a really scary woman was barking down the phone, ‘Well, I don’t know anything about yogaaaah…’ — she said it as if it were a filthy pastime practised by ne’er-do-wells who needed rounding up and putting away — ‘…but I do know that you ought to be on HRT!’
And she said that very much as if she wanted to add the word ‘Madam!’ on the end of the sentence.
‘Actually, that’s another story,’ I said. ‘I’ve already written about that endlessly. But we are where we are. And I’m not on HRT, for reasons I won’t bore you with.’
She harrumphed: ‘HRT is marvellous. You need to get yourself on it.’
There was something in her voice, an edge of pure aggression that was really quite terrifying. She had to be taking it herself, right? And if this was an advert for it, then I was suddenly extremely pleased that my infuriatingly laid-back GP had failed to prescribe it.
Meekly, so as not to wake the beast, I told her I just wanted a quote on how exercise improves mood. ‘You need to get yourself on HRT,’ she insisted. ‘If you don’t, your bones will crumble.’
This brought me up short, because in all the hoo-ha about whether or not my GP was treating me correctly, it had never crossed my mind that, underneath the outer body chaos of sweating and panicking and putting on weight, my skeleton might be atomising.
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