This morning I called the director of Lab Services at the City Hospital. I asked if my American doctor (the Hormone Doctor) faxed lab requests to them, would they do the tests and send the results back to the American doctor. After waiting for a reply all day, I was called in the late afternoon and told that this would not be possible at their lab.

Tomorrow I will call another hospital and another lab.

I will not give up! I have decided that a favourite pastime of doctors is to see how far they can push women like me. We are easy prey! They see a 50 something woman walk into their consultation room and they think, “How crazy can we make this one before she stops seeing me”. According to the doctors I have seen, being 50 years of age determines immediately that my symptoms are either hysterical or menopausal. They are idiots if they think that after 50 years of living my goal in life is to be “hysterical”. If “hysterical” is what I wanted, I would have crawled in a hole 30 years ago. Of course they do not use the term “hysterical”. They use terms like panic issues and depression. Crazy is what they really mean. Menopause is a normal phase in life. It certainly does not come with the debilitating symptoms that I experience. But then maybe I am “one of a kind”.