I still have periods at 52 and just can't wait for the menopause! HANNAH BETTS reveals the negative consequences for her health - and career

Monday morning and I wake struggling and screaming from a psychotic nightmare, drag myself out of bed, knock back painkillers for my agonised lower body, then lie in a scalding bath until their blunting effect kicks in.

As for my mood, depressed doesn’t even begin to cut it. I feel cripplingly miserable, barely energetic enough to dress.

Of course, objectively, I can see that it’s a glorious spring morning. However, for me, there’s no objective about it. I’m almost 53, a week into my latest period and as wretchedly hormonal as a 15-year-old awaiting a maths test. Or should I say biology? Today’s question: ‘Why the hell am I still having long, regular, painful periods as I stagger towards my mid-50s?’

I’ve got menopause envy. I don’t fear the Change, I crave it. I’m tired of being left hanging on in generational limbo, writes Hannah Betts

Menopause and its myriad, deleterious consequences are never far from the news of late. Fabulous fiftysomething celebrities from Mariella Frostrup to Davina McCall spring about advocating meno action. Parliament boasts a UK Menopause Taskforce, the Government a menopause tsar.

And, obviously, this is all great, terrific, needed — progress not merely for women but mankind itself.

It’s just that, in my own case, I’ve got menopause envy. I don’t fear the Change, I crave it. I’m tired of being left hanging on in generational limbo. Give me my #menorights now!

First and foremost, I need my periods to stop: now, before the next one, due as I turn 53 next week (because this is how birthdays must be celebrated, with clots and cramps and a doom-laden brain).

I know menopause — officially the state following 12 period-free months — isn’t likely to be plain sailing, and can be accompanied by significant health issues. Women can face cardiovascular problems, brittle bones, urinary incontinence, challenges with sexual function and weight gain.

However, it is perimenopause — that phase in which hormones surge then plunge, hot flashes flare and rages erupt — that can often present the large part of the trauma. And it’s perimenopause that I assume I’m in the throes of now, or my body’s histrionic take on it.

After all, I traded my contraceptive pill for HRT a while back to treat hot flushes, yet there’s still no sign of endgame, where the well finally, blessedly, runs dry.

Instead, I endure potentially years more of the corpse-like perma-knackeredness of a woman slouching towards her mid-50s, with the physical and mental angst of a volatile teen.

My periods hurt, as they have always hurt. They hit full force every month and last more than a week. My mood plummets, my head and belly ache, I can’t sleep, my daytime lethargy is extreme.

As an extra sting in the tale, extended menstruation can also make you unwell. If you have early menopause (before the age of 45), you won’t benefit from oestrogen’s protective impact on bone density and cardiovascular health. However, late-onset menopause (classed as 55 years old or over) isn’t ideal either, as it increases the risk of breast and womb cancer (which my mother died of aged 69).

I worry about the effect on my partner, Terence, who jokes that he has to put me on monthly ‘suicide watch’. He must dread my cycle almost as much as I do.

Hannah says her periods hurt and have always hurt. They hit full force every month and last more than a week, she writes

From my teens to my 30s, my mental health used to hit rock bottom just before my period. Now, it is most problematic at its end, when, given that I am already a depressive, I alarm even myself with my despair.

And I don’t even want to think about the ways in which my periods make me a bad employee. The irony, of course, is that the menopause, when it comes, will actually be good for my career.

My inbox is crammed with emails inviting me to get involved with panels, protests and empowerment parties. I can’t seem to order coffee without someone bending my ear about adding collagen for vaginal atrophy, or how matcha might be better for oestrogen-drained bones.

Meno bonding is such a phenomenon that women look at me with suspicion when I don’t partake, as if I’m priggishly stand-offish; not playing the game by volunteering myself as part of the club.

You may say that I’m not far off the average shut-down date. Perhaps, but no one else I know of my age is in the same boat, with a cycle that shows no sign of diminishing, and I resent every second.

My mother and younger sisters all stopped bleeding bang on 40. They, and more particularly my brothers, are incredulous that I’m still complaining about period pain on the family WhatsApp, the chaps satirising me for ‘faking it in order to look young’.

‘Maybe you started later?’ experts attempt to console. I was 11, barely at secondary school, also an outlier until every other girl joined in around 14. ‘It’s not faaair,’ I want to bleat.

Forty-two years — and for what? It’s not as if I ever wanted children. Forty-two times 12 opportunities for fainting, leaking, pain, dizziness and depression.

I had my period during my first week at Oxford, my Finals, crucial job interviews and vital career moments, on countless holidays and while nursing my dying parents. But still they come.

Obviously, I’d like the village elder, not-sweating-the-small-stuff attitude that I’m told is the benefit of the post-period existence. But I’d settle for pain-free and not still in danger of becoming up the duff, however fashionable Tana Ramsay and co. make it appear. So here I am, still bulk-buying condoms just in case, while my friends enjoy their release from all that angst.

Frankly, I’ve had enough. It’s time to give up my Nurofen and broiling baths, my Tampax and torpor, for freedom and calm.

Mother Nature, I beseech you, give this battleaxe a break.