Same Waiting Room, Different Decade

Have you ever sat in a GP waiting room and had the strangest feeling that you’ve been there before? Not literally.

I mean the feeling that this whole cycle- book the appointment, describe the symptoms, get sent for “one more test,” wait for results, book another appointment- is one you’ve watched someone else live through already.

For me, that someone was my mum.

My mum had me later in life, so I watched this properly for the first time as an adult, in my late twenties and thirties, when her appointments really started stacking up in her seventies.

And once I actually list out what she was dealing with, it reads less like a set of separate ailments and more like a filing cabinet nobody was cross-referencing. A pelvic floor prolapse. A fatty deposit building up near her left eye, which turned out to be linked to an underactive thyroid, nobody had thought to test. They looked at everything else other than her thyroid. Then there was shoulder pain.

Weight that wouldn’t shift no matter what she did, high blood pressure, angina. And, running underneath all of it, a medication list that at one point ran to twelve different pills a day.

Twelve. Prescribed, presumably, by different people, at different times, for different individual complaints, with nobody clearly responsible for standing back and asking whether the whole picture made sense together, or whether one thing might be quietly causing another.

It’s only now, doing the work I do, that I look back and think: that wasn’t bad luck. That was the system working exactly as it’s designed to work.

It’s not just a menopause thing

I work in women’s health, so most of the research that crosses my desk is about perimenopause and menopause specifically. There’s plenty of it, and it’s genuinely striking, surveys of women in their forties and fifties describing exactly this same loop, GP to hospital and back again, multiple investigations before anyone joins the dots.

But my mum’s story tells me this pattern doesn’t stop at menopause. It just keeps going, decade after decade, symptom after symptom, specialist after specialist, all the way into a woman’s seventies and beyond.

Nobody sat my mum down and asked whether her thyroid might explain the fatty deposit near her eye, the weight changes, and possibly even some of the blood pressure and heart strain, all at once. Instead she got a referral for the eye thing, a referral for the joint pain, a referral for the prolapse, and a growing pile of tablets to manage whatever showed up next.

That’s not one bad GP, or one unlucky patient. That’s what happens when a system is built to treat each symptom as its own isolated case, rather than to ask what’s happening to the whole woman in front of them.

Why “just raising awareness” hasn’t fixed it

This is where my workplace consultancy brain and my women’s health coach brain start talking to each other, because I think they’re describing the same problem from two different rooms.

For years, the answer to “women aren’t getting the care/support/recognition they need” has been: raise awareness. Run a campaign. Put up a poster. Have a lunch-and-learn. And awareness matters, don’t get me wrong. But awareness without changed conditions is just… noise. It’s a GP who now knows the word “perimenopause” but still only has a ten-minute appointment slot to investigate it. It’s a manager who’s done the training but still has no actual process for what to do when someone tells them what’s going on.

Psychological safety, and structural change alongside it, is what turns “I now know this is a problem” into “I now know what to do about it, and I’m not afraid to do it.” Without that shift, we just get better-informed versions of the same waiting room, generation after generation.

What I’d want my mum to have had (and what I’d want for my daughter)

If I could hand my younger self, sitting next to my mum in that waiting room, a short list of things to ask for or push for, it would probably look something like this:

1. One clinician who sees the whole list, not just the symptom in front of them that day, someone whose job is to ask “does this connect to anything else going on?”

2. A full thyroid check whenever weight, energy, mood, or skin/eye changes show up together, rather than waiting for it to become visible.

3. A proper medication review, on a regular schedule, once the list starts creeping past four or five items, not just adding one more to solve the side effect of the last one.

4. Permission to ask “why do we think this is happening?” out loud, rather than quietly accepting the next referral.

5. Someone in her corner who could help her make sense of the pattern across appointments, not just attend each one individually.

None of that requires a bigger NHS budget or a policy overhaul. It requires people, one conversation at a time, deciding that the loop stops with them.

I think about this a lot, both for the women I coach one-to-one, and for the organisations I work with who are trying to figure out why their most experienced women keep quietly disappearing from the workforce in their late 40s and 50s. It’s rarely one big dramatic thing. It’s years of exactly this kind of low-level, unresolved grind, at the GP and at work, wearing people down until leaving just feels easier than continuing to push.

My mum kept going, appointment after appointment, pill after pill, because that’s what you did. I’d love for the next generation of women, my daughter’s generation, to inherit a system where nobody has to end up on twelve medications before someone finally asks what’s actually going on underneath them all.

Get in touch if you’d like to know more.

P.S. If you’re wondering whether what you’re experiencing right now fits a pattern worth naming, take my free quiz here, it takes a few minutes and might join up some dots for you, the way I wish someone had joined them up for my mum.