Dr Caoimhe Hartley

my low histamine you won't be able to eat anything yeah exactly I cut the alcohol and the caffeine out because of my bones I mean oh for god's sake life's not worth living are you seeing because of our we are in Ireland actually I think that we're the oldest mothers

It really is.

Yeah.

If you go back to what we were saying about ADHD and cognition and all those things occurring at the same time, you're having that happen at a point in life where there's all these demands of you.

Maybe you're working, maybe you've young kids or older parents or just society in general doesn't give women of this age breathing room because we're grown ups.

Whereas if you're going through puberty, et cetera, and hormones are all over the place and that's affecting essentially how your brain is functioning, you've all this leeway.

Because you're a kid, like it's fair enough.

I just, we don't afford any leeway to women going through this in midlife because as I say, they're grownups.

So the, you know, I think the attitude is get on with it.

You're trying to juggle all of these big high responsibility things.

So that's tough.

The other thing I think that's really interesting about having babies later, and I'm not aware of any data, although there may be data about this, so again, don't quote me, but like I hear from loads of women that symptoms started after their last pregnancy.

So lots of women will have a pregnancy later.

And it's really after that, it's like they never recovered almost.

Yeah.

Which I think is interesting.

I wonder biologically, is there something to that?

I suppose it's maybe just harder to rehabilitate your ovaries after, you know, if you've had something like a pregnancy later in life.

I don't know is the honest answer, but there's a commonality of women telling me, look, I had my last baby and it's really since then.

And it's often women who've had babies in their 40s.