HFYH: Menopause in Breast Cancer Survivors | Dr. Corrine Menn, OB/Gyn

**Dr. Vonda Wright** (0:03)
Hi, I'm Dr. Vonda Wright, and this is HOT For Your Health. Join us for conversations on the bleeding edge of science, health and culture as we bring you tech innovators, thought leaders and the movers and shakers who are transforming science fiction into your new health reality.
Hi, everybody, I'm Dr. Vonda Wright. Thank you again for joining us on HOT For Your Health. And today, I am really excited about our guest because she is bringing to us a wealth of knowledge about a subject that there is such a knowledge gap in. So Dr. Corinne Menn is an OB-GYN, OB-GYN doctor, who is also a North American Menopause Society certified expert and works with Alloy as a consultant to help women all over the country, not only with their menopause journey, but in your case, really specifically answering questions for women in populations, subpopulations, who really, really, really have to fight for menopause care. So I'm so excited to have you here today.

**Dr. Corinne Menn** (1:23)
Well, I'm so excited to be here, and I just love that we've got other medical specialties out there, like orthopedics, who's actually interested in talking to women to understand that your hormones and menopause affect every part of your body. So thank you for being someone who's not the menopause expert who's promoting and understanding that it affects every subspecialty.

**Dr. Vonda Wright** (1:49)
Oh, it absolutely does. And I want you to tell my audience about your own story and specifically what you do for the women you serve. But in my office, I mean, the reason I'm doing this is briefly in two seconds. At 40, I was in the best shape of my life and I had just started a huge practice. At 47, I thought I was gonna die and I didn't know why, right? And at 57, now I feel like I've kind of mastered this through self-education, talking with amazing people like you.
But every single day, Corinne, can I call you Corinne?

**Dr. Corinne Menn** (2:26)
Yes, please.

**Dr. Vonda Wright** (2:26)
Every single day, women in the demographic that we serve come into my office with shoulder pain and because I'll listen and take the time, women are weeping because they just wanna be heard. They do not wanna be gaslighted and told, which I say online, which really speaks to a lot of people. They say to me, I think I'm falling apart and sometimes I think I'm crazy, which could never, it is so far from the truth. So that's why I have this passion within me. But talk to me about why you are so passionate about this other than training and OBGYN, and the populations that you serve that are special.

**Dr. Corinne Menn** (3:07)
Sure, of course. So basically when I was 28 years old, I was a second year OBGYN resident. My mom, so this is 2001, another whole long story for another time, but my mom died pretty suddenly of ovarian cancer, and she was only 54 And so I was just trying to deal with that. At the same time, I felt a small lump in my breast. We had no breast cancer or ovarian cancer in our family history.
And to make a long story short, 20 years old diagnosed with ERPR positive, HER2 negative, stage two breast cancer, newly married, like I said, in the middle of my OB-GYN training, starting to think about maybe wanting to have a baby, like, you know, just seeing it like my, my beard. Yeah, just the normal life stuff. And I was now thrown into this cancer diagnosis. So at the time, fast forward, I had bilateral mastectomy, multiple surgeries, reconstruction, chemotherapy.
And due to my breast cancer treatment, which again, this would be an entire podcast in itself.
But I went through like early premature menopause three times, twice temporarily due to medication from chemotherapy. And then again, from some ovarian suppression medication. And then finally, a number of years later, after I did have a healthy pregnancy after breast cancer, I chose to have my ovaries taken out.
Not because I carried the gene, the BRCA1 or 2 gene. At the time I was tested negative, and we'll get into that, how it's important to know about your genetic risks. But I just didn't feel something was right. I was like, my mom died of ovarian cancer. I have breast cancer at 28 Doesn't make sense. Something's wrong with my genes. Just take these ovaries out, lunge down to surgical menopause. And you would think an OBGYN would know how to deal with that, but we got no training in our, in our, in my training. And when I was coming of age, as a, you know, a newly graduated OBGYN, it was around the time that the Women's Health Initiative, you know, caused everyone to really fear estrogen and fear hormone therapy. So I think I, like a lot of OBGYNs, kind of been for the next 10 years, just I had all these ideas that were actually wrong about menopause and I didn't have enough training. And I was really struggling personally and seeing more and more of patients in my office, you know, with symptoms. And I said, oh, I've got to do something for me.