Canadian TV host Melissa Grelo won't stop 'screaming from the rooftops' about menopause: 'We deserve better'

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About a year ago, Melissa Grelo woke up feeling like she had been beaten up, down and sideways. “There was a lot of swelling and joint pain. It was like, ‘Whose body is this?’” she says. “I started to get very scared because the stuff I was going through was so alarming.”

In hindsight, the 47-year-old moderator of CTV’s The Social acknowledges there was something going on physically long before that day. In her early 40s, she recalls having heart palpitations. Her doctor had referred her to a cardiologist, but she still wasn’t getting any answers.

“The funny thing was that although I was a super-healthy woman in my early 40s, they found no underlying medical issues. Not one practitioner, including the cardiologist, ever said the words, ‘Maybe it’s your hormones. This could be perimenopause. This could be the beginning of your menopausal journey.’ Not one,” Grelo recalls.

‘Why have I never been taught about this?’

That's when Grelo began doing her own research, which included sitting down with her health-care practitioners to learn why someone like her, a person who was very in tune with her body, was waking up in a body that felt alien. The more she learned, the more she realized she was entering perimenopause.

“Why have I never been taught about this?” she questions. “Why have I, as a very educated woman in my 40s, never been sat down by anybody, who said, ‘Hey, there’s this thing that could start to happen at around this age, so be ready.’”

Grelo remembers asking her girlfriends about perimenopause, but they were equally in the dark. “There’s a major gap in our knowledge about something as fundamental as menopause even though every single one of us is going to go through it,” she adds.

While most people have an idea of what menopause means, many haven’t heard of the term perimenopause, the period prior to menopause when a woman’s ovaries gradually stop working. Symptoms can range from mood changes to headaches, to hot flashes and night sweats.

“It’s in line with our general lack of education in this space,” she says. “It’s always been a term but menopause was barely spoken of. So why would a term like perimenopause be? That would require that we discuss, understand and accept menopause as a whole.”

‘Cruel’ timing for women

Perimenopause wasn’t something Grelo’s mother, Clarita, spoke to her doctor about. In 1977, she was age 37 when Grelo was born; two years later she gave birth to Grelo’s sister, Rosanna. Almost instantly after becoming a mother, Clarita entered perimenopause. In addition to having two small children, she was the sole breadwinner while Grelo’s father, Frank, tried to get his business off the ground.

“There were so many competing pressures and demands on her that the idea of stopping to even understand or ask questions about what was happening to her body and her brain was a luxury,” Grelo says.

A few years later, Clarita had a full hysterectomy that put her into “instant menopause” and required hormone replacement therapy. “This was before the WHI [Women’s Health Initiative] study that really scared women about the use of hormone replacement therapy,” Grelo says. “Her doctor was pretty progressive.”

Even though her mother’s menopause story is unique even for her own time, there are some common threads that cut across the generations. “Perimenopause and menopause tend to crop up precisely when women are at the peak of family stress, aging parents and career stress,” she relates. “It’s a convergence of events that is very cruel to us.”

The misogyny of menopause

Gender conditioning also has a lot to do with it, Grelo adds. “I think we’ve internalized that part of womanhood is just suffering. Whether it’s menstrual cramps or labour pains, for example. The crushing pressure of parenting, the crushing pressure of caregiving for aging parents, the crushing pressure of keeping up a household. We’ve been conditioned as a gender to simply shoulder the suffering.”

For many women, particularly those in high-profile careers, menopause can also mean it’s time to step aside. As a woman who works in television, Grelo knows and appreciates how important visibility is.

“Menopause is taken to mean that you’re old, you’re not sexy and you are no longer relevant,” she says. “It’s like, ‘Thanks for all you’ve done, but now you’ve got to step aside and let the young’uns through. Your time is over.’”

Grelo says most women who work in television and media will deliberately hide the fact that they’re going through perimenopause and menopause because they fear it might risk their livelihoods.

“The exception is people like me,” she says. “I’ve been warned by many colleagues, ‘Be careful how much you talk about it. Be careful.’ I’m very deliberate when I do things like say my age on television. I’m one of the few women in this industry who’s got the balls to do that, because there is an extreme fear that as soon as you say that, you are writing your ticket out of the business.”

Menopause myths

Grelo believes there’s still a lot of mystery surrounding hormone therapy. “It used to be called hormone replacement therapy and the big myth is that hormones are dangerous for women at this stage of our lives,” she says. “While there are some cases, the vast majority of us would actually be good candidates for hormone therapy if we so choose and if we so need.”

Grelo says one of the biggest myths about menopause is that women who are in perimenopause or menopause are no longer relevant. Part of the problem why there isn’t enough support for women going through menopause is that in the past, there haven’t been enough studies on women who are going through this phase of life. “But that’s improving,” Grelo says. “I think this is where awareness-building helps because money flows where the energy is going.”

Grelo notes the “groundbreaking” bill that was passed in the United States in March which ensures there’s a percentage of funds that is annually allocated by the government towards women’s health.

However, things are not as progressive here in Canada. “I hope to keep changing that and just keep screaming from the rooftops that we deserve better. Things are improving but is it happening as fast as we would like it to? No,” Grelo says. “That’s why the pressure has to continue.”

Celebrating ‘clarity and freedom’

When it comes to her own journey, Grelo says perimenopause is shaping up to be her best era. “There’s so much clarity and freedom that comes with this phase and we don’t talk about that enough. I think we need to celebrate that more.”

Of course, she acknowledges there are women who suffer badly during this stage of life, “but it’s not forever and not everyone is going to go through it in a rough way,” she emphasizes. “A lot of us have a lot to look forward to on the other side. Now that I’m having terribly irregular periods, I am so over the guessing game.”

Grelo hopes that women will no longer feel ashamed of menopause and that things will be vastly different for younger generations. “I have a daughter and she’s watching me," she says. "I’ll be damned if I’m going to raise her not to be proud to be in whatever stage of life that she’s in. I’m not ashamed to say, ‘Yeah, I’m in perimenopause. It’s a shit show.’ But there are so many negatives to staying silent, and there’s so much to gain by just letting this finally be out in the open. That’s what I’m trying to do.”

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