You’re at work, in a meeting or giving a presentation to a room full of people and suddenly you have no idea what you were going to say, it’s completely gone.

You work in a scientific or high tech environment which involves technical terms that you’ve been familiar with for your entire life but suddenly you can’t remember the terms or what they mean.

You’re picking your kids up from school and you go over to one of your child’s friend’s mothers, but you can’t remember the child’s name even though they’ve been to your house on multiple occasions.

Sound familiar? When that happens to us, our first thought is probably “I’ve got early onset dementia!” So we get stressed out and anxious and we start noticing how many times this happens to us and it begins to happen more and more frequently until we feel like we’re unable to function properly, so we quit our jobs because we don’t feel like we’re capable of holding that position any more.

We go to our GP and they probably give us sleeping tablets and SSRI’s. They might say to us, “It’s probably menopause, you’ll be okay in a few years”. Years! What do we do in the meantime? We don’t feel that we can function, so we get onto social media and, if we feel confident enough, join a few groups and discover that so many other women are experiencing this yet our doctors told us nothing about it.

Join me in conversation with Julia Browne, co-founder of Peri-Pausers, a group determined to bring this lack of support and information to the attention of the government.