There’s a time before menopause where hormone levels change and women are caught off-guard. As the number of eggs in a woman’s ovaries gets low, certain hormones are produced less, making others more dominant. This state can happen in women as early as their thirties. They may have mood swings, bouts of anxiousness and feelings of depression that they cannot really explain. Although often unrecognised the underlying cause is the change in hormone levels. It’s called perimenopause.For Clarissa (not her real name), her perimenopause state didn’t happen until she reached her fifties.“I started to feel grumpy, more grumpy than usual,” she said. In a long-distance relationship, she spends much of her time alone. “It’s funny because being alone I didn’t notice that I was really grumpy,” she said. “ You just go about and do the things you have to and don’t really think that you are in a bad mood,” she added.But when her partner came to stay, she soon learned that she was often grumpy and irritable.“I was told ‘you really are grumpy today’ quite a bit,’ she said. “I didn’t really notice until my relationship started to suffer. I guess you don’t really notice that until you have to interact with others,” she added.“I was irritable and the smallest thing could set me off. It was like a prolonged PMS,” she said.Clarissa said she wasn’t clear when her increased irritability started, but she said it might have been two years before her symptoms became more severe.“I noticed that when I would wake up, I would not feel joyful,’ she said. “This was very unusual because this is the way I have felt all my life on waking. Instead I would feel heaviness in my chest. Unhappiness. It was so unlikely me,” she added.A light sleeper, she said she noticed that she became unable to sleep. “I had a sleeplessness that came from a restlessness, a feeling of bouncing off the walls. It’s hard to explain, but this would go on for days. And it contributed to my grumpiness because I was not rested,” she added.Finally, about a year ago, Clarissa said she began to feel anxious, experienced shortness of breath and was often weepy.“I didn’t recognise myself,” she said. But she did recognise that it was probably perimenopause.“I talked to someone who had been through it and they recommended progesterone cream, where the progesterone comes from wild yams,” she said.Clarissa went to a local heath food store in search of the cream and more information. She found a book ‘What your Doctor May Not Tell You About Peri-Menopause’ by Dr John R Lee.“In that book I found a page of symptoms of oestrogen dominance and I had them all, even the shortness of breath,” she said.She was still apprehensive about using the cream but said while in the store another customer spoke so convincingly about her experience, that she decided to try it.And she said she’s been amazed with the results.“I feel like myself again,” she said.“You have to put it on an area that is not exposed to the sun. I put it on my chest or my underarm, twice a day,” she said.Clarissa said after about two weeks the irritability, anxiousness, shortness of breath, feelings of depression and weepiness, stopped. She’s been so overwhelmed by her experience that she wants all women to know about the product.“I can’t imagine how difficult it must be to go through this if you are a mother with three children, and going to work,” she said.She admitted that she is using the cream without her doctor’s supervision and said she tried to lower the dosage.“I took it down to once a day,” she said, “but when I cut back the dose of the cream, I started to get anxious again.”