The Personal Things I've Been Ignoring.

And yes, my creaking knees and weakened wrists are on the list.

I would say that - on the whole - I’m pretty good at keeping an eye on my general health and wellbeing and tackling any issues as and when they arise. (Woohoo, go me!) I know you didn’t ask for this bit of information, but it’s important context for what follows so please bear with.

(Also, it is very much not a given that I would be good at keeping an eye on my general health: lots of people don’t, especially when they are busy with work and kids and elderly parents and leaks in the roof and saving for a new boiler and of all the other things that life might entail. It’s hard to prioritise yourself when you perhaps have other people to care for and your days are jam-packed.)

Now I wouldn’t say I’m Simon Cowell-level good at keeping an eye on my general health, but that’s mainly because I don’t have a medical centre in my £1.6 million winnebago that comes with all the equipment necessary to monitor my vital statistics. Indeed, I don’t own a £1.6 million winnebago in which to install a medical centre in the first place. Or any winnebago. (Also, if I had constant access to my own medical centre, equipped with heart monitors, ear monitors and a special glove that can remotely detect heart attacks, I would get nothing else done.)

Photo by Clay Banks on Unsplash

I just make sure I go to any screening appointments I’m summoned to, try to be familiar with what’s normal for my own body and attempt to keep a certain level of self-awareness that means I notice if there are any significant changes. That’s pretty much all any of us can do, surely, short of having one of those mega-MRI-scans I keep seeing advertised.

(Would you have an annual whole-body MRI scan if you could? If it was affordable? The more I see these services advertised the more I wonder whether we’re missing out and at a disadvantage if we don’t have one or, if people are relatively healthy to start with, scanning every tiny bit of the body is just unnecessary overkill? I suppose that it would always catch things early if there was anything amiss, which is an amazing thing, but would it also create lots more health anxiety? Thoughts in the comments…)

Anyway the point is, I’m usually pretty good at keeping an eye on my general health and wellbeing, so it makes what follows even more weird and surprising: because the fact is, I’ve had a number of bothersome health and wellness issues that until quite recently I had been completely ignoring. Just blatantly pretending not to notice!

No, worse than that, actually: issues that I’d noticed, but then decided to simply accept. Accept as being part and parcel of being alive, being 45, without even really questioning if I could do anything about them.

How defeatist of me.

I say the word bothersome, which sounds pretty cute and politely British, but some of these things were severely affecting my day. I thought I’d list them and tell you what I’ve finally started to do about them, because a) I’m feeling pretty pleased with myself and the level of proactiveness I’ve suddenly managed to conjure up and b) it might be helpful to anyone who has similar issues.

(Should have really written those the other way around, so that the charitable reason appears before the self-serving egotistical one but I like to keep things real.)

My Thinning Hairline

First though: this post is very kindly sponsored by a brand I’ve had a beautifully long relationship due to the fact that their LED masks are the best in the business and have had a dramatic, visible effect on my skin. Yes, it’s CurrentBody.

You can find dozens and dozens of places where I’ve raved about their LED masks (I use both the Series 2 LED Face Mask and also the Neck and Decolletage mask) and I really would not be without them. They’re not “quick fix” solutions, these masks, they require commitment and consistency and patience, but I saw significant visible changes after a few months of use and am still using them religiously, years later.

(More info in this post, if you want to hear more.)

But we’re not talking skin here, we’re talking hair. Specifically my gradual thinning of, around the temples and hairline, and also my (hopefully temporary) Telogen Effluvium, which is when more hair than usual is pushed into the resting-and-shedding stage of the growth cycle.

Not the first item that was on my original “things I’ve been ignoring and now I need to take action on” list, but definitely something I’d have shunted down the line until later.

I have long been fascinated by the CurrentBody Skin LED Hair Growth Helmet; Rich started to use it last year, every night without fail, and within a few months I could definitely see new growth. He has fallen off that particular wagon because he’s been down in Dorset so much, doing stuff at the new cottage, but I was heartened and surprised by the results that he had, so much so that I am excited to try it for myself and see what happens.

What also excites me about the CurrentBody Hair Growth Helmet is that the clinical trials on home LED devices for hair loss seem so very promising. And not just clinical trials conducted by the brand, but much larger, peer-reviewed studies that show really good results. CurrentBody’s own clinical trials on a group of 31 people (who all had mild to moderate hair loss) showed a 123% increase in hair growth rate and 72% reduction in hair loss after just 12 weeks of using the Hair Helmet on a daily basis.

Incredibly impressive and I can’t wait to see what the difference might be for my own hair. Here are some before photos of the areas I’m going to concentrate on, namely the temples and front hairline, where I have had thinned patches since my pregnancies and also a constant halo of weird flimsy nothingy hairs:

The benefit of the Hair Helmet over surface treatments (serums, etc) is that the Helmet works below the surface, stimulating dormant hair follicles and encouraging them to re-enter the active growth phase faster. (I’m hoping this will support the Telogen Effluvium side of things as well as the thinning.)

The specific red light wavelengths from the LEDs also help to boost blood flow in the scalp and support repair, which in turn should have an effect on growth. And apparently the LEDs help to improve scalp inflammation and oiliness, though these changes are possibly harder to gauge if you’re not working under scientific test conditions!

Tron.

CurrentBody promise visible results in 12 weeks, so I will be back to you with an update. I can’t imagine it’s going to be a very taxing trial period: I absolutely love wearing my CurrentBody masks, I find it very relaxing and imagine I’m lying on a beach! The Hair Helmet is even easier - the same 10 minutes a day, but just plonk it onto your clean head and relax. It even has build in Bluetooth speakers so that you can listen to True Crime podcasts and Death Metal or whatever it is you listen to in order to relax.

Tron turned on.

I have a 10% discount code for the Hair Growth Helmet, RUTHHAIR - it’s £649.99, so the code brings it down to £585. It’s obviously a very sizeable investment, so I think it’s well worth reading through all of the info on the website (and other sites) and looking at the before and after photos. I thought that these were particularly compelling:

Let me know if you’ve been trying the Hair Helmet - I see a lot of excellent videos and pictures online, where everyone looks like an extra from Tron, so do fill me in with your results so far if you have any.

The CurrentBody Hair Helmet is here online.

Onwards with my small catalogue of complaints:

My Exploding Knees

My knees started aching at the end of last year and gradually got worse and worse and by March this year they were so painful that I couldn’t do certain essential movements. Squatting down to get something from the floor, for example was absolutely out of the question and to climb up steps or stairs, I had to turn sideways and shuffle up them like a crab because the pain of climbing them normally was too much!

How long did it take me to seek help, once I’d got to this near-incapacitated state? Eight weeks. And it wasn’t that I didn’t have the time to seek help, I could have made the time: I just sort of accepted that I was going to have bad knees for the rest of my life and that they would probably get much worse. That it was my destiny.

Completely ridiculous. Luckily one of my school mum friends is a physiotherapist and also very no-nonsense and just looked at me when I started telling her about it and how long I’d been going sideways up the stairs and said, very sternly but with a slight look of exasperation, book an appointment.

I’m going to write a whole post about this, but it turns out that my five years of doing high intensity Peloton spin-cycling and no other type of exercise or strength training means that I’ve just been making my legs go round and round and round really fast using my muscles in one particular way and all of the other muscles have been screaming

“RUTH! What the actual fcuk! We’re wasting away down here while the knee muscles (or whatever they are called) are doing the equivalent of the Iron Man competition every week!”

Dedicated post on knees is a-coming, but safe to say that the first physio appointment completely changed a) the way I thought about my knees and legs and muscles in general and b) the way I exercised. I’ve been doing strength training and Barre classes on my Peloton app to build up all of my leg and bum muscles and have been loving my workouts!

I can now squat, really quite proficiently, and am pleased to tell you that when I climb the stairs I do so in the traditional way. But more on this, as I say, later.

My Weak Wrists

Ditto the weak wrists. Except that I’ve had those, to the point where I can’t use my hands to push myself up off the floor, for ELEVEN YEARS. I first noticed the extreme weakness and pain when I had my first baby and I’d finished a year of breastfeeding where, let’s face it, you spend quite a proportion of your time holding a heavy item (the baby) in your arms with your hands at a weird stress-position angle.

Apparently it’s quite a common thing. Loose ligaments during/after pregnancy + holding a baby for long periods of time + (probably) also holding your iPhone whilst the baby is feeding and doom scrolling for hours on end. Recipe for disaster.

Anyway, I have exercises for my wrists to strengthen them and the muscles that work with them. The progress seems to be slower/negligible, if I’m honest, but I am not ignoring this matter again! Back I go to the physio, as soon as I have a moment and the back-to-school chaos is over…

My Fatigue

I was very, very tired all the time for quite a long while. And of course anytime I mentioned it, a million people screeched PERIMENOPAUSE, because that is apparently the answer to everything these days and no other causes of tiredness exist, but I personally do not buy into this new belief that absolutely everything is linked to perimenopause, or menopause itself and that other things can feasibly be going on to make people knackered.

Mine turned out to be low iron. I knew I had low iron, I’ve had low iron for years - probably since before kids, so over a decade - but when I had my bloods done it was even lower than usual.

I’d dallied with iron supplements in the past but none had really agreed with me; this time around I did quite a lot of Googling and (sorry) used Google AI to whittle down the many options to one that would be completely suited to me.

And, miraculously, the one it recommended was really suited to me. I have nothing bad to say about this iron - it’s the Solgar Gentle Iron 20mg - and my energy levels have steadily increased. Slowly but surely.

I mean I have two kids and about eighty thousand business ventures going on so I’m never going to feel massively perky, I don’t think, not in the near future, but I feel a hell of a lot better than I did in March.

My Annoying Piles

Well, we all know how this one turned out. How rude. You take action on something, something really quite demoralising and embarrassing, and then you go through a procedure that’s like the sort of thing they might do on a farmyard, to livestock, and then you have twenty-four hours of intense pain, and then it turns out the thing you thought was a pile wasn’t a pile at all and all the piles they did the procedure on were ones you were completely unaware of and could quite happily have lived with.

You can read all about that experience here. I won’t be messing about in that department again, if I can help it, mark my words!

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Righty-ho, on that jolly note, you can now all get on with writing down any health or wellbeing issues that have been concerning you and promise yourselves you’ll take the time to look into them. I can’t tell you how glad I am that my knees were a fixable problem - I was sure it was my joints going, or arthritis, and that I’d have to build some sort of funicular to get me up and down my driveway.

(Although: not a bad idea!)