The Greenwich Doctor Who Told Me I Am Not in Menopause

You start hearing about perimenopause in your forties. Menopause itself usually arrives somewhere in the early fifties. And over the past few years hormone therapy has moved from whispered about to openly, enthusiastically recommended here in Greenwich.

So when my period disappeared for several months, barely into my forties, I did the math the way most women would. Early, yes. Unusually early. But bound to happen eventually.

I had my hormones tested. I was told I was in the early stages of menopause and started on an estrogen patch and progesterone.

And it worked, or it felt like it did. The first weeks were close to euphoric. The patch gave me what felt like a little boost and the progesterone gave me the best sleep I had had in longer than I want to admit.

But something in me kept insisting this was not menopause.

Dr. Messer has published peer reviewed work on pituitary disease. She thought of it because she knows it. That is the entire difference between a diagnosis and a guess.

I went for a second opinion with Dr. Caroline Messer, a double board certified endocrinologist who founded Well by Messer after more than a decade running a private practice on the Upper East Side. She now sees patients at the Greenwich office.

Our first consultation lasted an hour. By the end of it she had laid out three possible explanations for what was happening in my body. Not one of them was menopause.

Her leading theory was a benign tumor on my pituitary gland, small enough to be invisible in daily life, producing too much of a hormone called prolactin. Prolactin is the hormone that rises during breastfeeding, and one of its jobs is to quiet the signals that drive ovulation. It suppresses GnRH, which in turn lowers LH and FSH, which drops estrogen and stops the cycle entirely. The medical term for that absence is amenorrhea. The tumor itself is called a prolactinoma, and it is the most common type of pituitary tumor there is.

She sent me for bloodwork that same day at her Greenwich office, then repeated it a week later to confirm. My prolactin was high. She ordered a pituitary MRI. And unsurprisingly they found a small benign tumor, doing exactly what she had described sixty minutes after meeting me.

She started me on Cabergoline, a small pill you take twice a week to lower prolactin and hopefully bring your cycle back. Two hours after the first dose, I got my period.

One consultation. One hour.

What stays with me is the counterfactual. Without that second opinion I would still be on hormone therapy for a condition I did not have, treating a symptom while its actual cause went unexamined. I had never heard the word pituitary applied to anything in my own body.

Dr. Messer has published peer reviewed work on pituitary disease. She thought of it because she knows it. That is the entire difference between a diagnosis and a guess.

Well by Messer is a full team, endocrinologists, gynecologists, internists, psychologists, dietitians, all under one roof in Greenwich, which means your care actually gets coordinated instead of scattered across four waiting rooms. If you want a doctor who will sit with you for an hour and think, go to Greenwich and see her.

For me it was quite literally life changing.