The Caregiver’s Crutch

Why Women in Healthcare Need Support During Menopause

Dedicated to all female healthcare professionals.

#WhoCaresForTheCaregivers

During menopause, I underwent several foot surgeries. While I was literally unable to stand, I was still responsible for carrying many others. That was the moment I understood something I had spent my whole career avoiding. To carry others, I first needed something to carry me. I needed crutches. Not only the literal ones under my arms, but the physiotherapist, the personal trainer, and the people who helped me get back on my feet. A crutch is not a sign of weakness. It is the thing that lets us keep going — and keep giving.

We enter healthcare to be caregivers. We spend our lives healing, supporting, and carrying others, and ours are professions made up overwhelmingly of women. Every one of us who lives long enough will pass through menopause — and yet the unspoken expectation is that we simply grit our teeth and carry on, even when the symptoms are overwhelming. (And as a dentist, I can confirm: grit your teeth long enough and they will crack.) Carry on in silence long enough, and something always breaks. The dialogue has changed more in the last five years than in the previous fifty, and I am grateful for it — and grateful to the Canadian Dental Association for opening a platform for this conversation. That collaboration is what fuelled my article, “Navigating Menopause for Dentists and Team Members” — written for the women who make up our caregiving profession.

The Risk We All Share

There is a real risk to every professional woman whose menopausal symptoms become unmanageable against the weight of her work and her life. Many of us had our children later than our mothers did, so we are raising school-age children at the very moment our bodies are changing. Many of us are caring for aging parents at the same time. Many of us still carry the larger share of responsibilities at home. The factor that determines whether our most experienced women stay in their professions is not the field itself — it is how a woman feels, how her health holds, and whether the stress she carries is matched by the support she receives. When we lose her, every profession loses decades of expertise, experience, and empathy that cannot be replaced.

So this is my call to every female healthcare worker reading this: let us band together and build a women’s menopause village. Not one woman quietly enduring beside another, but a true network — colleagues, mentors, friends, and strangers who become friends — who agree to hold each other up. We already know how to care; it is what we trained our whole lives to do. It is time we turn that same skill toward one another, so that no woman has to carry on alone. If each of us becomes a crutch for the woman beside us, none of us has to fall.

The Power of Hindsight — the Physiology Village

If you asked me what support would have made the biggest difference, my answer is simple: my village. I have been blessed with wise friends, peers, and relatives. But a physiology village — people who understood my changing body — would have changed everything had I found it fifteen years ago. Because the truth is plain: if I feel good, I can carry on, and I can carry others. If I don’t feel good, I can carry no one, not even myself. And after all we have given, we deserve to feel well.

The Village Has Branches

You don’t need to hire all of these people. Most are wise friends and resources you can call on, because every one of us has figured out something worth sharing. I think of six branches:

The Village Has Branches

You don’t need to hire all of these people. Most are wise friends and resources you can call on, because every one of us has figured out something worth sharing. I think of six branches:

• A professional mentor, to keep your clinical and practice goals moving forward.

• A trainer, physiotherapist, or fitness guide — in person or on a screen — to keep your body strong.

• A naturopathic doctor, nurse practitioner, or functional medicine practitioner who understands your hormonal changes, whether or not you choose MHT.

• Someone who simply listens — a parent, sibling, friend, pastor, or therapist — who lets you set the weight down when you need to.

• A book, that in some way acts as a source of light in your mind — something that, when you open and read or listen to it, you know so well that your mind calms amidst life’s craziness.

• A truly wise, possibly slightly older friend who helps you shift perspectives and takes you to a higher level of thinking — someone you would put in your contacts as “Sunshine in my day.” I have six Sunshines in my contact list, and they literally give me a bigger perspective on any situation in minutes.

Support, Without Demanding Disclosure

Some women find the new openness freeing. Others would rather keep it private, and not at work. We sometimes forget the quiet power of subtlety — of reading a colleague’s expression or mood instead of asking her to explain herself. The village offers acceptance and support to every woman; how much she shares, and with whom, remains hers to decide. For many of us, the workplace is the one place we go to lose ourselves in the work we fought so hard to do. Let each woman choose.

The Afternoon of Life

Did menopause change how I practice and lead? Parts of me are exactly the same; parts are entirely different. So yes — things changed. But a book with only one chapter, repeated over and over, would be a very boring read.

Because of the village I built and the lessons it taught me, I can say honestly that I love the late afternoon and early evening of my life.

It is time we stop expecting female healthcare professionals to power through their physical evolutions in silence. If we want to keep our most experienced, most empathetic caregivers in the professions they earned, we must become each other’s village — each other’s crutch. Let us band together and hold one another up.

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Read my full article, “Navigating Menopause for Dentists and Team Members,” in the latest issue of CDA Essentials, to learn how we can better support menopausal women in dental practice and beyond. This is just the beginning of the dialogue in supporting female healthcare workers.

My heartfelt thanks to Pauline Merindol at the CDA — an open-minded and genuinely lovely champion of this dialogue, whose warmth helped open the door for all of it. And thank you to Dr. Sanjukta Mohanta for so kindly connecting us.

#WhoCaresForTheCaregivers