I just haven’t got a very good impression of the NHS lately. One thing you have got a choice of four doctors but I don’t get on particularly well with all of them. The one I’m seeing at the moment for my hiatus hernia I’ve known him for years, been there for years – pictures on his wall of when he was a rugby player – but you go in and he’s looking at his computer screen and they’re all very much like that. You walk in and they say ,Good morning, how are you without even looking at you. I could be somebody completely different and I swear he wouldn’t know who I am. And he fiddles with his computer, Ah, yes, is it the osteoporosis and you say, Ye or N or whatever, I said I’ve been seeing him because I have a bad back and leg and he sort of looked at me and said, Hows your weigh and I said, I’m a lifelong member of Weight Watchers, I do watch it carefully, I’m slightly overweight but not excessivel. Do you take enough exercise I looked at him and I thought you’re about five stone heavier than you were when you took on this practice and I said, Well ye at that point I’d only got the one German Shepherd, I said, I walk several miles a day with my dog. I did have two, I’ve always walked for thirty odd years, rain or shine my dogs need walking so he said, Oh, righ, and you think he doesn’t know me. I’ve been coming to see you for years but you still really don’t recognise me or know me. And that’s the way I feel about most of them there now. So I’m always reluctant to change to another one who knows even less.

Because to me, a problem shared is a problem halved, particularly with somebody else whos going through it and I don’t particularly feel that a male doctor has got any idea what a middle-aged lady is feeling like. They treat you almost like you’re neurotic, you’re just a middle-aged neurotic lady whos got too much on her plate. I can remember at one time my doctor actually said to me, You’ve got to change something in your lif because I honestly was neurotic at the time and as a throw away remark he said, Change your job, change your husband, but change somethin. And it was a throw away remark but in retrospect it was stupid. He hadn’t got a clue and I don’t think a lot of male doctors have. I’m sure there are some nice ones out there whove researched it and know what they’re talking about but I think they’re few and far between in local practices.

I think probably my moods affected him more than anything. I was being a very unreasonable lady and he’s got a short fuse, much shorter than mine, so it wasn’t good for us.

Because I think you do sort of shut in on yourself a bit, you’ve got a problem, your husband doesn’t particularly want to know about your female problems, or at least mine didn’t, he’s still very macho man and you haven’t always got someone just to have a chat with.

So did you talk to him about it at all?

Not terribly. He was doing sometimes twelve hour days, he would come home from work, he didn’t want to hear my problems and we’ve got two kids that were squabbling, doing their homework, television programmes going on all over the place. He didn’t want that, he didn’t need it and I’m the sort of person that feels I can deal with things. I’ve always dealt with things myself.

I’m quite a positive person and I like to learn new things, do new things so for me it gave me more freedom because the menopause finished sort of early fifties and I’d made my mind up to retire at 55 anyway if the business would allow it, which we did. We sold the business and moved on, so it’s all very positive for me, it just allowed me to move on to the next thing and take up new hobbies.

And what are you looking forward to most as you get older?

Travelling more. Now I haven’t got my dogs, we’ve decided we’re going to spend more time actually travelling to places we’ve never been. I’d like to see Eastern Europe, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, further away because we could never do that when I’d got family and other things here. Just learning new things.

Was it heavy bleeding?

Not all the time. It was clotted at points, which I think that’s when it started really getting to my brain that this was totally inconvenient. If you went anywhere you had to go prepared so it was actually interfering with my general life.

It affects almost everything you do, as I say, even going shopping, you’ve got to go prepared. I needed to know where the nearest loo was. Even going out for meals with friends, everything like that, it does affect you and it affects how you feel. And your moods, your tempers and not wanting to go out and holidays become even more difficult, you’ve got small children who want to go swimming.

And then I think it must have been, I’m trying to think when it was, must have been after about six years it became that my periods were going on and they were forced periods because of the HRT, but they were lasting longer than the days that I had off and I was feeling generally unwell and the doctor was still quite happy that I should stay on HRT. All that he really checked was my blood pressure and my weight and they seemed to be okay. Eventually he referred me to a gynaecologist at [name of hospital] it was quite quick and they did a scan and said that I’d got quite large polyps and fibroids. And they whipped me in the hospital quite quickly.