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Evening Standard
Evening Standard
Entertainment
Dominique Hines

Davina McCall feared she’d lose her job due to menopause memory fog

Davina McCall is now a campaigner for HRT

(Picture: PA)

Davina McCall has admitted that she thought she’d lose work because of memory blackouts during menopause.

The Masked Dancer UK judge, 54, revealed she experienced such bad brain fog that she was filming with interior designer, “Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen and I couldn’t remember his name”.

She added: “I thought I was going to have to give up my job – and I love my job. I was just at a stage where I thought I really knew how to do this job and then thought, ‘you are going to take it off me.’”

The TV presenter, who also said she thought she was “going mad”, spoke out on ITV’s Lorraine on Thursday. She told host Lorraine Kelly that she was too ashamed to speak to her production team about her menopause symptoms.

The mother of three, who eventually found relief through hormone replacement therapy or HRT, added that she felt quite lonely going through the entire process.

McCall joined the likes of Mariella Frostrup and Penny Lancaster in Parliament Square in 2021 to celebrate the Government’s reducing the cost of repeat prescriptions for hormone replacement therapy (PA Wire)

However, McCall, who is now a campaigner for HRT, wanted to reassure women going through the change that they are not alone.

“It’s so lonely [going through menopause], I thought I was disappearing and my world was getting smaller and smaller,” she said.

“I felt very lonely and isolated,” she said.

“‘It’s only when you come out of the grey, you think, I haven’t belly laughed for months …

“It can be a fantastic time in your life, of freedom. It’s just the next stage.”

McCall recently did documentary Sex, Mind and the Menopause – the follow-up to her 2021 programme Sex, Myths and the Menopause, which explored menopause myths and the taboo around HRT.

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