Katie on Michael:

My early memories of my dad are of him making up outlandish bedtime stories for me. I think he had probably thought of Harry Potter before Harry Potter was even written. I was absolutely fixated.
Later on, we would have conversations around Friday night dinner and I became much more interested in his work.
I was 43 when my perimenopausal symptoms began and they lasted for four years. I just felt really flat, really tired, very teary, no mojo. I had brain fog, I couldn’t concentrate. I had to leave my job because I just couldn’t function. I went to loads of different doctors and they misdiagnosed me with early dementia, depression, anxiety, heart issues, bone issues, everything.
I eventually went round to Dad, burst out crying and said: “I think I’m going mad. I don’t know what’s wrong with me.” He said he thought it was hormones, but I said it couldn’t be since I was having periods and I didn’t have hot flushes. He suggested I saw a gynaecologist who specialised in menopause and within a half-hour consultation, she said it was the perimenopause and started me on HRT. That was a light-bulb moment. HRT has rewound my clock 30 years. I have more energy than I’ve had since pre-kids.
After my diagnosis, I started a Facebook group called The Latte Lounge. I wanted it to feel like a place where you could go and chat to women and compare notes on the menopause and other mid-life issues. I then built the website with a medical advisory team because these women needed proper support and signposting.
There have been so many really bad myths about HRT causing breast cancer because of the WHI (Women’s Health Initiative) report, which was a flawed study. So it was really important to me that I had Dad on the advisory team to myth-bust and say to him: “Look. They’re all being told this and it’s not right, is it?”
I love working with Dad. I was always a bit in awe of him. It’s taken me to this stage in my life to realise that actually Dad is a communicator. When he gives his talks, he’s very creative and people love that. I might not have his scientific brain, but he’s given me the ability to know how to communicate and to empathise with other people.
It’s like carrying the baton. Dad brought me up to treat everyone as if they were my family. I think I’ve taken that on, so that with every woman that comes into The Latte Lounge, while I can’t medically make them better, I can make them better by imagining they were my own family member and looking after them in a different way.
There is nothing in Dad that does anything for personal gain. It’s all for women and for the memory of his mum, who died of breast cancer. People like my dad are few and far between.

Michael on Katie:
I come from a medical, scientific family so I confess to having been disappointed that none of my three children were the least bit interested in the biological sciences, medicine or healthcare. They are good kids, we all get on very, very well together, but they ploughed their own furrow.
But there was a pivotal moment when Katie was in her early 40s and she had a series of health problems. She was very depressed and very unhappy and not the Katie I had known in the past.
She was shuttled here, there between specialists and I was going out of my mind because I didn’t think any of the medical doctors were looking after her or diagnosing her correctly. I suggested she went to see a menopause specialist and the specialist instantly made a diagnosis of perimenopausal symptoms and put her on hormone replacement therapy. Within a month, she was back to my old Katie, my daughter.
I was identified as a breast surgeon, but people have a completely wrong idea of what my work entailed. They think that I cut breasts or bits of breasts off. But that’s the least of the job. The most important thing is that I was involved in the totality of women’s health.
Equally important to the management of breast cancer is the management of the menopause. The idea that giving women oestrogen is going to cause breast cancer is simply not true. My default position if a woman is suffering symptoms of the menopause is that you have the responsibility for improving her quality of life. If she is suffering with oestrogen deficiency syndrome, you give her oestrogen.
The problem with this approach is that when prescribed the combined form of hormone replacement therapy, that’s progesterone and oestrogen, there is a risk of the increased incidence of breast cancer, but it’s the progesterone that is the culprit, not the oestrogen. Women must be given the information to make an informed choice.
I was absolutely delighted when Katie set up The Latte Lounge. It wasn’t that we weren’t already bonded, but this has bonded us even more. Here we have common interests and common passions.
What makes menopause activists passionately angry is that women are patronised. They are fed untruths.
So part of our campaigning together is to make it mandatory that this is a topic which is taught in medical school and post-graduate courses. That’s what’s needed — education.
One memorable occasion was when we appeared together on Sky News. We had both been invited due to our credentials and half-way through the interview, the news anchor asked Katie: “Is that your father?” We fell about laughing.
Through her work with The Latte Lounge, Katie’s shown her potential. If she had been taught science well, she might have reached this point much earlier in her life, but it’s come about because she had to face the problem head on and then immerse herself in science. I’m very proud of her.
She has now reached a point in her life where I can genuinely call her an eyshet chayil. What is particularly lovely is that her children look upon their old grandparents as friends. We do stuff together and that’s of course because in the middle, we’ve got Katie.

www.lattelounge.co.uk

Read more: Me&you: Lily Ebert and Dov Foreman