About Frances Holloway

At 42 I felt fit, confident and happy in my own skin.

At 45 came the recurrent UTIs, anxiety that had no reason behind it, a panic attack, joint pain, and a growing collection of symptoms I kept solving one at a time.

I still had my periods. I didn't have hot flashes. So I never put perimenopause in the question.

I researched for years, saw doctors and specialists, read the medical material, joined enormous groups of women comparing notes, tried things, discarded things, and slowly built a picture that made sense.

I'm not a doctor and I'm not a menopause expert.

I'm the woman who went through it, did an unreasonable amount of research, and built the resource I wish I'd had sooner.

Everything on Soothing Self is written under the name Frances Holloway. It is a pen name.

When I appear on video, it will be as an avatar rather than in person.

The symptom pages are the practical ones: what might be going on, what else it could be, what helped me, and what to ask your doctor.