If you live in the New York metropolitan area, then you probably know Tamsen Fadal as a long-standing and familiar presence reporting the Evening News on PIX11. However, for hundreds of thousands of followers around the world, she’s best known as a leading menopause influencer on TikTok and Instagram.
As a menopause advocate, she’s using her voice and her highly visible platforms to not only share her menopause story but to share insights and information with others who are struggling through their transition. In doing so, she’s reaching hundreds of thousands with a real-time and authentic representation of navigating the menopausal transition as it comes day-to-day.
Mapping Her Menopause Journey
Now postmenopausal, Tamsen’s story of navigating the menopausal transition is similar to many others. However, what’s different is that because of her work, her experience has played out in a very public way. Rather than shy away from it, she decided to embrace the opportunity to leverage her public platforms to make a difference for others.
“In 2019, I was on the air, and it was a Friday night,” she recalls distinctly. “I was getting ready to do the business report and had been having some issues with the teleprompter. I would look at a word, and I’d be like, what is that word? I couldn’t get it. It wouldn’t come out.”
Tamsen says that what she now knows was brain fog was compounded by a nagging anxiety that, for her, was atypical.
“I was getting very anxious on the air. I’d go on [air] and feel nervous, which I hadn’t experienced in decades. On-air jitters had never been a real problem for me. I don’t want to imply that being on camera is always easy-breezy, but I wasn’t an anxious person and this was my job.”
She says that for a while, every time she was on the air was like the first time. To compensate (and mitigate her anxiety), Tamsen says that she began to over-prepare for newscasts and became obsessive about studying her notes to ensure she knew all the words that would be programmed for the teleprompter.
“It was kind of crazy. I mean, basic, easy words – I’d have to skip them in the prompter. And I knew a lot of my sentences didn’t totally make sense if you were really listening.”
This went on for about six months before one particular night, she started to feel “that hot blast feeling from inside.” In the moment, she didn’t identify it as a hot flash, but she recalls feeling nauseous and like her heart was racing out of control.
“I could hear my heart beating in my ear. The louder it got, the more anxious I became. And I remember thinking, ‘I’m going to pass out. I don’t know what’s going on.’ It was just a vicious cycle. And I said out loud – because I work in a studio of all men – ‘if I fall over, somebody catch me.'”
Fortunately, she didn’t fall over, but she did have to be escorted off-set following her segment. Even with this experience, it would take weeks and a series of frustrating doctor’s visits to realize that she’d had a hot flash and was in the very late stages of perimenopause.
“I didn’t realize that I had been having so many of the symptoms all along because I have endometrial polyps. So I was bleeding all along. I’d get the polyps removed, and then they bleed again. So I thought those bleeding cycles were all periods. I actually never had the 12 months of no bleeding, which typically signifies that you’ve reached menopause, so I didn’t know.”
It would take more than a year after her initial doctor’s visit to settle on a treatment plan that both addressed her most disruptive symptoms and that she felt comfortable pursuing.
Trial and error on the path to treatment
It was late October 2019 when she experienced her public hot flash hijack at work. That following week she made an appointment with a gynecologist. She had blood work done, which ultimately confirmed that she was in the late stages of perimenopause. After reading her results and doctor’s notes about her “hormone markers” in her patient portal, Tamsen was floored and very confused.
“I’m thinking, what the hell do I do now? I don’t even know what that means. It was pretty overwhelming.”
She was even more astonished by her doctor’s response to her plea for guidance. After scheduling an in-person follow-up with him to discuss the results and implications of her blood work, her astonishment and dismay quickly changed to anger and frustration.
“He basically said, ‘There are a lot of different options, but most of the time, people get through it. It’s going to take a little while, but you’ll get through it.’ And I thought, what the hell kind of answer is that?”
She quickly scheduled an appointment with a female endocrinologist who issued another series of blood tests and confirmed that she was in perimenopause. Tamsen says that the interaction with her endocrinologist was equally frustrating.
“After she asked me a few questions, I said, I’m anxious all the time, and I’m depressed. So she prescribed me Lexapro, progesterone, and estrogen, and she’s like, ‘When I get to your age, I’ll take these for sure because I want my skin to look good,'” Tamsen recounts. “And I thought, I’m not here about my skin… I don’t know what’s going on here. What about my mother? Should I be taking these? I don’t know.”
Her fear and confusion were exacerbated by the fact that her mother succumbed to breast cancer decades earlier, at the age of 44. Tamsen was just 20 years old at the time of her mother’s passing.
Given the lack of breast cancer research at the time (the mid/late 80s) and the controversy of the Women’s Health Initiative study in the early 2000s, which egregiously made a blanket link between HRT and an increased risk of breast cancer, Tamsen’s concerns were understandable.
“My mom was diagnosed at 44, and she died at 51 of breast cancer. So estrogen, to me, was a big no-no. After losing my mother, I knew that it would never be part of anything I did,” she laments. “I just always thought it was bad. But I didn’t necessarily know why. I don’t eat a lot of soy. Don’t eat a lot of tofu – because of the breast cancer.”
Tamsen says that even though she left the endocrinologist’s office that day with prescriptions for hormones and an antidepressant, it would be another eight months before she would begin hormone therapy.
Instead, she resolved that she would manage her symptoms through diet and lifestyle changes and embarked upon a treatment path free of pharmaceuticals.
She consulted several wellness practitioners, including a homeopathic doctor and a supplement specialist. She became more intentional about what she was putting into her body and went “hardcore vegan”.
“I tried everything.”
While she had moderate success with Lexapro and through lifestyle modifications, her symptoms ran the gamut.
“I had total brain fog, no sleep, and really bad hot flashes that would come on at 4:00 in the morning,” she recalls. “Then I’d fall asleep for 30 or 40 minutes and wake up feeling exhausted. It was a vicious cycle that pretty much played out the same way every day.”
She adds that although less frequent, she continued to struggle with word recall and reading the prompter, when on the air.
It wasn’t until she met Dr. Tara Allmen, who she interviewed for her podcast, Coming Up Next with Tamsen Fadal, that she began to seriously rethink her position on hormone therapy.
“I spoke with Dr. Allmen about my experience, and she says, ‘You’ve got to read my book, Menopause Confidential.’
Tamsen read the book and subsequently made an appointment with Dr. Allmen.
“I went to her and said, ‘look, I was given estrogen, progesterone, and Lexapro for all of this. How do we even know which one works? And she said, ‘Well, since you started Lexapro, I don’t want to take you off that. But I do think that you should start the hormones because right now, your estrogen just went off a cliff, and the Maca and other supplements you’re taking aren’t fully addressing your symptoms. You can keep supplementing, but you should do this too.’ So I did.”
She says she saw a complete change in a matter of weeks. Specifically, her hot flashes have significantly reduced, and the brain fog is much less than before she began taking the hormones. While it’s not always perfect – she occasionally loses words – she feels more like herself and less like a “space cadet.”
Because of her family history, she’s had an annual mammogram since her early mid-30s. Now 52 and postmenopausal, her use of hormones is closely monitored. She continues her yearly mammogram and gets ultrasounds as needed. Tamsen has a good relationship with her doctors and feels like an active partner in her care and treatment plan.
Transitioning from whisperer to a vocal advocate
A journalist and news anchor for almost three decades, Tamsen began her career in journalism right out of college, first working in radio and later moving to television. She’s been with WPIX-TV (PIX 11) in New York City since 2008.
While she shies away from being called a menopause “expert,” arguably, that’s how she’s seen by her hundreds of thousands of viewers and followers. As of publication, she’s got more than 400K followers on TikTok and just crossed the 1M follower threshold on Instagram.
After spending just a few minutes scrolling through her feeds, it’s not hard to understand the appeal. Of Lebanese and Italian descent, there’s an unfiltered and vulnerable authenticity that initially seems at odds with her stunning yet unassuming beauty.
“Somebody said to me today, ‘Are you a menopause expert?’ And I said, No, I’m more like a menopause whisperer or a menopause advocate.”
Whatever you call her, she’s been an engaging and compelling storyteller and representation of what modern menopausal transition looks like – and we need to see more of it.
She started talking about it on social media because she’d never discussed it on television. She says it wasn’t really a conversation that was out there or anything that was covered.
“Initially, I started talking about [menopause] quietly on social media and through my podcast. And the more I talked about it, the more I realized that it wasn’t a conversation that was being had…anywhere.”
Tamsen was compelled to keep the discussion going because, for her, it felt like a therapeutic way to deal with what she was experiencing herself, having gone through a semi-public hot flash incident while on set at work.
“In retrospect, it was important for me to have a conversation for myself. But then I started realizing there were so many people that were also having the same symptoms and desperate to talk about it with someone. I was having the same insecurities – the same pain.”
She recalls that one of the first videos she did on TikTok went viral, quickly amassing more than one million views.
“It was just me listing the 34 symptoms of menopause. Very straightforward – very simple,” Tamsen says. “I wasn’t dancing, I wasn’t singing, I wasn’t pointing. I was simply listing the symptoms of menopause. It couldn’t be more boring or understated.”
That’s when she realized that a sizable community wanted to have “the menopause conversation.” Bit by bit, she would interview different heads of companies for her podcast and be introduced to incredible people who were making a significant difference in the [menopause] space and trying to normalize the conversation.
What started as a simple post on TikTok has evolved to include a range of projects aimed at making menopause a mainstream concern. In addition to using storytelling techniques to educate and inform about all things menopause on her social channels and podcast, Tamsen is currently working on a documentary with her friend and partner, Joanne LaMarca, a former producer for The Today Show.
“We want to reach the masses. We’re not trying to do anything but educate and give voice to the stories that so often go untold. I’m excited about that.”
When asked what she hopes to accomplish by using her voice this way, Tamsen is unequivocal.
“I hope that using my voice makes it okay for somebody else to use theirs. I want that other young girl who grows up without her mom or doesn’t have a sister to talk to, to know more than I did. I think that that’s really important.”
Tamsen says it wasn’t just a hot flash that day on set. It affected her confidence at work. It affected how she viewed herself. It affected how she interacted with her husband. It made her question her sanity.
“I don’t think of menopause as this little transition that we’re all going to get through. I think of this as something you have to be aware of so that you can take control of it, and then you can get to the other side hopefully with a lot less frustration and fewer questions than I had.”
To learn more about Tamsen and her menopause work, you can follow her on TikTok and Instagram and check out her podcast.
Create Account or Sign in to post a review