����vlog

Thank you very much. Thank you for allowing me to be here today. Thank you. Um, So I'm here. Thank you for allowing me to be here to testify. I'm in huge support of 1079, and I'll tell you why. My name is Halle Berry. I'm an actor and I'm in menopause and I have no idea. For about 10 years. I'm now 58 years old. For about 10 years I have been in menopause, Perry. Menopause and had no idea. None of my doctors ever talked to me about it, not my heart doctor, my cardiologist, my rheumatologist, my neurologist, my endocrinologist, none of them. My general practitioner, my gynecologist, nobody told me that when I got about 40, 42, 43, that this time of life was coming and that It would affect every organ in my body because estrogen is in every organ and tissue of my body and that I would be at higher risk for heart disease, osteoporosis, diabetes, which I already had. Nobody mentioned this to me and I felt alone. I felt isolated. I felt *** lot of shame. I thought I was going crazy. I had brain fog. I flooded my laundry room 3 times. I was raging my entire family. I was having heart palpitations, waking up in the middle of the night. Sure that I. I was having *** heart attack and that I was going to die and when I would go see doctors, they kind of gas lit me. They made me feel like I was over exaggerating. I'm an actress or I'm *** drama queen, and I knew that something was wrong in my body, but I just didn't know what. And then finally I got *** misdiagnosis by my gynecologist. He told me I had herpes and that kind of leveled me and I thought, well how the hell herpes. That's to find out that it wasn't herpes at all. It was just dry vagina syndrome, which is 60% of women have this dry eyes, dry mouth, and dry vagina, and there was help for me if I knew that that's what I was suffering from. Another doctor because of my dry mouth, tried to tell me, my rheumatologist that I had Sjogren's disease, and he wanted to put me on *** bout of steroids that I would be on forever, which would be *** path I wouldn't want to go down, especially if you don't have Sjogren's. It was just dry. My eye doctor could not tell me that the glands in my eyes were drying up. Now, I'm seeing this doctor for 15 years. He only told me that it was dry eyes, my glands were drying up due to menopause when I almost started to lose my eyesight. And I said, Doctor, why didn't you tell me this before? Now I'm required to get *** treatment that is $8000 that insurance doesn't pay for and I might have lost my eyesight and you know what he said to me? He said, I couldn't tell you you're in. Menopause. Like he could hardly say the word, and I thought, what do you you can't say the word. How can you treat me, doctor, if you can't even say these words to me? You'd rather me lose my eyesight than tell me I'm in menopause. So what that taught me was our doctors aren't educated. It's only one chapter in medical school. That's about half *** day. That's all the training our doctors have gotten. Only 13% of doctors. in our country understand our bodies and as women we're half the population and as women we're spending half of our life in menopause because we now know it starts early 40s we're living until 80 and nobody understands our bodies and how to treat us so I urge you please pass this bill. We need more education. Women deserve the support. We deserve to live good quality lives and get the treatment so that we can do that so. Thank you for listening to my story and uh thank you.