STANDING in a queue in the supermarket Sandra Young could feel her blood start to boil.

Her eyes darted from the cashier to the painfully slow, fumbling customer in front of her trying to buy a lottery ticket.

She “tutted” loudly and with the heat rising in her face she blurted out: “Why don’t you open another till if you’re going to have customers taking so long?”

Then, dumping her shopping on the counter, Sandra sneered at the shop assistant: “I’ll come back when you are less busy!”

Sandra, now 52, is not a naturally impatient person, nor is she rude or antisocial.

She put this episode, and many she has had like it, down to one thing – the menopause.

Fiery hot flushes and equally fiery mood swings, memory loss, a loss of libido and weight gain are some of the symptoms woman complain of when going through the change.

Sandra’s menopausal symptoms started when she was 49.

Sandra, who lives in Clacton, says: “The worst part about my menopause was the anger! “You know how normally the people on Facebook use ‘to, two and too’ and ‘here, their and they’re?’ in the wrong context?

"Well instead of reading a comment and just laughing I found myself telling these people how ignorant their generation was! How they should have stayed at school instead of having babies!”

Sandra admits she was a menace to all shop assistants in a 100-mile radius.

She says: “If I was queuing behind someone who was a little slow I would tut like my grandma! I would argue with shop assistants, in fact anyone I would usually have found slightly irritating I wanted to actually tell them, in no uncertain terms, all about their shortcomings.”

Sandra had a lot of trouble dealing with the dreaded hot flushes.

“I would sit in front of a fan all day long or fan myself with a magazine to try to keep cool. At night I didn’t know what to do with myself. I would lay in bed baking hot but when I threw off the covers off I would be freezing cold at the same time,” says Sandra.

Deciding she could take it no longer, Sandra asked her doctor about going on hormone replacement therapy (HRT).

She says: “I ended up at my doctors saying “I’ve weighed it up and it is either HRT or I end up in jail! I literally felt like I might kill someone. I felt like I was going mad. I was 49 and my emotions were out of control.”

HRT has been a positive way to escape the symptoms of the menopause for Sandra.

She says: “Within a week my hot flushes stopped and within two weeks the public at large were once again able to go about their business.

“Another thing that was affected by the menopause was my short term memory and that’s still gone. Sometimes I forget to take the tablets and I find within a few weeks the hot flushes start again.

“It makes me realise how much I need to take it because I do not want to go back to how I was – no one would be safe!”

Sandra believes women need to prepare for the onset of the menopause.

She says: “Barricade your doors and refuse to let anyone in, because once it finds you there is no escape!”

MENOPAUSE: THE FACTS
 Premenopause is when periods have started to get irregular, but they do not yet experience any classic menopausal symptoms such as hot flashes or vaginal dryness. A woman in premenopause is usually in her mid-to-late 40s.
Perimenopause refers to women who are in the thick of menopause. Their cycles may be erratic, and they may begin to experience symptoms such as hot flashes and vaginal dryness. On average, women are about 47 when they hit the perimenopause stage.
 Menopause refers to your final menstrual period.
After more than one year of no menstrual periods due to menopause, any vaginal bleeding is now considered abnormal.
Postmenopausal is the last third of most women's lives, ranging from women who have been free of menstrual periods for at least one year if they are over fifty and for two years if they are under fifty.