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Four doctors told my mother her joint pain was "just her age."
My mother used to sing in the garden every morning. I want you to hold onto that, because by the end of this you're going to understand exactly what it costs a woman to lose it — and you're going to recognise it, because it's happening to someone you love right now. My name is Claire. My mother is Pat. She is sixty-three years old and two years ago she disappeared in front of me, one small piece at a time, and not one doctor could tell me why. She didn't get sick. There was no diagnosis, no scan, no terrible phone call. It was quieter and crueller than that. She just stopped. Stopped singing. Stopped gardening. Stopped getting down on the floor with my daughter. Stopped sleeping. Stopped being the woman who raised me. And the whole time she smiled and said she was fine, because that is what women of her generation do — they suffer in silence and they call it coping. I am writing this because I almost lost her to that silence. And I am not going to let it take your mother too. — Let me tell you who my mother was, so you understand what was stolen. Pat raised three of us more or less alone after my father's heart gave out. She nursed him through his last two years without a single complaint. She hosts every Christmas, twelve of us round a table built for eight, and she does it on her feet for three days. She is the one the entire family rings when something has gone wrong and nobody knows what to do. And every single morning of my entire childhood, she was out in that garden by eight o'clock, on her knees in the beds, singing. Half the time the radio, half the time nothing at all, just the sound of a woman who was happy in her own skin. I grew up hearing it through the kitchen window. My own daughter grew up hearing it. That sound was my mother. Two years ago it stopped. — It started so small I told myself I was imagining it. A stiffness in her hip in the mornings. "Bit creaky today," she'd laugh. She was sixty-one. Everyone's creaky at sixty-one. That's what I told myself. Then the few minutes of creaky became twenty minutes of not being able to walk straight. Then her hip became both hips. Then her knees, on the stairs. Then her hands — my mother, who could fillet a fish and ice a wedding cake, couldn't open a jar of jam. She'd hand it to me across the kitchen without a word and something in my chest would crack, because she wouldn't ask. She'd just quietly hand me the jar. Then came the night I'll never get out of my head. We were staying over. I got up at four for a glass of water and the landing light was on. I found my mother sitting on the edge of her bed in the dark, both hands gripping the mattress, just sitting there. She'd been awake since two. She couldn't lie on her side anymore — thirty years of sleeping curled on her side and now it sent a bolt of pain through her hip that woke her gasping — so she slept flat on her back, when she slept at all, staring at the ceiling. She looked up at me and she was embarrassed. My mother, embarrassed, in front of her own daughter, at four in the morning, for the crime of being in pain. "Go back to bed, love," she said. "I'm fine." She was not fine. — And then the worst one. The one I have to make myself remember. My daughter — Pat's only granddaughter — had built something out of blocks and she ran to show her nana, the way she'd done a hundred times, expecting Nana to get down on the floor with her the way Nana always had. And my mother didn't. She stayed in her chair. And she said, "Bring it over here, darling, let Nana see it from here." My daughter's face did something small and confused, and then she carried her little tower over to the chair, and I stood in the doorway and watched my mother choose her chair over the floor because the floor had become a place she could no longer get up from. That was the day I understood my daughter was going to grow up with a different grandmother than the one she'd started with. A grandmother in a chair. And I went into the kitchen and I ran the tap so no one would hear me. — So I did what you do. I tried to help her fix it. We tried turmeric — everyone says turmeric. A bottle from the chemist, two a day, three months. Nothing. Collagen. Glucosamine. The big yellow bottle. Nothing. I took her to her GP myself. He pressed her hip, glanced at an X-ray, and gave us the sentence I have come to hate more than any words in the English language: "It's just wear and tear. It's her age. Take some ibuprofen." Her age. As if my mother was a worn-out kitchen appliance you keep until it dies. Physio. Twice a week, four months. Cortisone — two injections, eleven good days the first time, barely a week the second, then the pain came back worse, like it was angry it had been interrupted. Over a thousand pounds. Two years. And my mother got smaller, and quieter, and further away, and the worst part — the part that still makes me furious — is that she started to believe them. "Maybe this is just how I am now," she said to me one afternoon. My mother. Who nursed my dying father. Who feeds twelve at Christmas. Giving up. I wanted to scream at every doctor who'd shrugged at her. Because not one of them — not one — ever told us what was actually wrong. — It took a stranger at my sister's wedding to do that. Seated next to my mother at the rehearsal dinner was the groom's mother, Sheila — early seventies, sharp as a tack, walked to the pub from the next village and didn't mention it. I watched the two of them talk for half an hour, and I watched my mother's face change in a way I hadn't seen in two years. On the walk back, Mum told me what Sheila had said. Sheila had been exactly where my mother was. Stiff, shrinking, told it was her age. Until she found out it wasn't her age at all. It had a name. And once she knew the name, everything changed. The name is hormonal inflammation. When a woman goes through the change, her whole inflammatory system shifts — and in so many women it floods the joints and never switches off. That's the deep ache. That's why it starts in one place and spreads everywhere. That's why it's worst in the morning, because it builds overnight while she sleeps. That's why turmeric and collagen and cortisone and ibuprofen did nothing — because every single one of them was aimed at the wrong thing. None of them touched the actual fire. My mother had been suffering for two years from something with a name, and four medical professionals had handed her ibuprofen and called it old age. — But here is the part that nearly didn't happen, and it's the part I most need you to hear. When Sheila mentioned turmeric, my mother almost laughed in her face. "Tried it. Did nothing." And Sheila said: you tried the wrong one. The turmeric my mother had bought from the chemist — the one nearly every woman buys — is around three percent curcumin. Curcumin is the only part that actually fights inflammation. Three percent. The rest is filler. My mother had spent three months swallowing a capsule that was ninety-seven percent nothing and then concluded turmeric was useless. The version that actually works — the version in the real studies — is ninety-five percent curcumin, with black pepper extract so the body can absorb it instead of flushing it straight out. Not three percent. Ninety-five. My mother hadn't failed turmeric. The chemist had sold her a watered-down imitation of it and let her believe she'd given it a fair go. The brand Sheila used was called She Again — the concentrated version, ninety-five percent, with the black pepper, made specifically for the hormonal inflammation that was eating my mother's joints alive. Two capsules in the morning. That was the whole thing. — I'm going to tell you what happened, because I was the one watching, and I watched my mother come back to life. The first fortnight, nothing. We'd braced for that. Week four, I heard it. She was at the kitchen sink washing up and she was singing. Under her breath, something I didn't even recognise. She didn't notice she was doing it. I had to leave the room. Week six, my daughter ran to show her a drawing, and my mother got down on the floor. She just lowered herself down onto the rug and sat there with my little girl, and got back up afterwards, and nobody made a thing of it except me, standing in the kitchen with my hand over my mouth. By high summer she was back in the garden. On her knees in the beds at eight in the morning, secateurs in hand, doing the roses she'd let go wild for two years. She came in for lunch with soil on her forearms and I realised I'd been grieving that exact sight without knowing it. And then one morning she rang me from her car after a check-up, the bloods all fine, told to carry on exactly as she was. And underneath her voice, on the radio, I could hear her singing along. My mother was back. The chair didn't get her. My daughter has her grandmother — the real one, the one on the floor, the one in the garden, the one who sings. — So now I'm the stranger at the rehearsal dinner. I'm your Sheila. If you are watching your mother go quiet — if she's handing you the jar instead of asking, if she's choosing the chair over the floor, if she's awake at four in the morning telling you she's fine — she is not fine, and it is not her age, and she does not have to vanish into that chair. It has a name. It's hormonal inflammation. And the reason her turmeric did nothing is almost certainly that she was sold the three-percent version, like my mother was, like nearly every woman is. The strong one — ninety-five percent, built for exactly this — is called She Again. It's a smaller company and it sells out, so if it's gone when you look, get on the restock list, because it's worth the wait. Don't let her disappear an inch at a time the way I almost let my mother. Don't wait until your child is carrying a drawing over to a chair. She's still in there. Go and get her back.
