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Three years into menopause and I'm scared of my own kitchen. My right hip just gave out on the tile for the second time this year. I was 52. Three years past my last period. I had been carrying a clean roasting pan from the dishwasher back to the cabinet under the stove. My hip just stopped holding me. Not a slip. Not the rug. The hip itself. The outside of it. The part that runs from the top of the pelvis down the side of the thigh. It decided it was done. I caught the counter with my left hand, but I went down anyway as the pan came crashing down. I sat on the floor next to the pan for I don't know how long. Max came over and licked my face. My husband Mark was at the hardware store. I had a clear picture of him coming home and finding me there. The picture is what made me get up. ... Thankfully nothing was broken. Nothing tore. But in a way, that was actually the worst part. Because if I'd broken something, the hospital would have given me... a brace? Exercises? SOMETHING. But now, all I had was a sore butt and some bruises. I felt like I was going insane. I KNOW something was wrong with my hip, but my x-rays didn't show anything. I tried to convince myself that the fall I had 4 months earlier was just my new socks on bathroom tile. But then I started noticing things. Like the deep ache on the outside of my right hip when I sat too long. And I couldn't sleep on my right side anymore without a pillow between my knees. Now I can't even sleep on my side WITH a pillow. But the most embarrassing was how I had to stop walking Max past the elementary school because that 6 inch curb was just too much for me. I was 52 and I had started planning my walks around a six-inch curb. ... My husband Mark is the sweetest man on earth. Which honestly made everything worse. He started carrying stuff for me. Getting the laundry basket out of the basement. Saying "I got it" before I even asked. That wasn't the problem. The problem was the look on his face the second time he watched me hold the stair rail with BOTH hands going down. You know that look. The one your husband can't hide even when he's trying. It said the thing I'd been refusing to think for almost a year: She's becoming the woman I'm going to have to take care of. ... I'm only 52. My mom didn't need a walker until she was 76. My grandma made it to 81. I'd been telling myself for YEARS I had at least another 25 good years left in me. The math was off by 24. ... So I went to my GP. She's a good doctor, I genuinely like her. She listened. She felt around my hip. She sent me for the x-ray. X-ray was clean. She told me it was "probably just early wear and tear at your age" and that I should try stretching, take ibuprofen for the bad days, and maybe consider strength training and Pilates. ... Strength training. I literally couldn't get out of a low chair without pushing off with both arms. Pilates? Surrounded by 35-year-olds doing leg lifts in a wall of mirrors? On the side of my body that was the ENTIRE problem? I just thanked her and left. I sat in my car in the driveway for like 20 minutes. I had no idea what I was supposed to do with what she'd just told me. The bottle of ibuprofen in my glove box was the Costco size. I'd been refilling it for almost 9 months. ... So I started doing what we all do at this point. I started Googling. Not the fun kind of Googling. The 11-pm-with-the-laptop-on-my-stomach kind. The kind where you're actually scared. PubMed studies. Reddit threads. r/menopause was a goldmine. Women writing the EXACT things I was thinking. "Used to garden all Saturday. Can barely make it through breakfast now." "Can't carry groceries up the stairs anymore." "Two falls this year on flat ground. No reason." I wasn't crazy. I wasn't imagining it. ... Then I learned a phrase that changed everything. Gluteal Tendinopathy. GT for short. Basically, it's the tendons on the OUTSIDE of your hip. The ones that hold up the entire side of your body when you're standing on one leg. Even for the half second when you're walking. And they're slowly... unraveling. At the fiber level. The pain lives on the outside of your hip and runs down the side of your thigh. Sometimes all the way to your knee. Almost never in your groin. That's how you know it's not your hip joint going bad. It's the tendons. ... And then I found ANOTHER phrase that floored me. The Musculoskeletal Syndrome of Menopause. There's a paper from Duke and the University of Central Florida that says more than 70% of menopausal women get musculoskeletal symptoms. And 25% of us get DISABLED by them. Twenty-five percent. One in four. Tendons. Ligaments. All the cable-and-rope parts of your body that hold you together. And here's the kicker: most doctors don't know about this paper. They write it off as "wear and tear" and send you home with ibuprofen. I sat at my kitchen table at midnight and cried. Not from the pain. Because what was wrong with me HAD A NAME. And the doctor I'd trusted with my body for 11 years had no idea what it was. ... OK so now I had a name. And I was still no better off. I tried EVERY thing the internet told me to try. Pigeon pose every morning for 6 weeks. My hip got WORSE, not better. (I learned later you can't stretch a tendon that's already too loose. You're just making it more loose. I was actively making my problem worse.) I tried heating pads at night. The menthol-smelling creams from CVS. Glucosamine for three months. Yes, one of those magnetic bracelets, because I was THAT desperate. I tried 8 weeks of Pilates with a sweet 28-year-old teacher who kept giving me modifications and looking at me like she felt bad for me. I left every class feeling like I'd been shoved into a Halloween costume that didn't fit. I got a cortisone shot. I'll only say this once. It worked for 6 days. By week 3, my hip was WORSE than before the shot. Apparently cortisone just quiets the pain alarm without rebuilding the actual tendon. The orthopedist who shot me up never mentioned that part. I figured it out from a Reddit thread later. Then 4 months of physical therapy. $1,400 out of pocket after insurance ran out. The PT was lovely. She had me doing clamshells on a foam mat next to women recovering from full hip replacement surgery. I quit halfway through the second round of sessions because every time she made me lift my leg to the side, my hip would scream for THREE days after. So at this point I had: - Crossed off literally every option - Spent over $2,000 - Made zero progress - Plus a husband who was now carrying my groceries Awesome. ... That's when somebody on a different menopause forum mentioned a doctor in our town. A women's health internist. Not an orthopedist. Not a hormone clinic. Not a "wellness practitioner." Just a regular internal medicine doctor who actually takes menopausal women seriously. The post had three responses underneath it. They ALL said some version of: "she actually LISTENS." I called and made an appointment for 6 weeks out. That was the soonest she had. Her name was Dr. Foster. ... I want to be careful telling you about her office. Because when you finally find a doctor who LISTENS, you want to make her sound like a saint. She wasn't a saint. She was just a 49-year-old woman in reading glasses, with a Starbucks cup that still had the lid on it, and a legal pad. But she did the one thing I'd needed someone to do for 9 months. She let me finish my sentences. I told her everything. The falls. The Tuesday with the roasting pan. The 6-inch curb. The pigeon pose disaster. The cortisone. The Pilates studio. Mark's face on the stairs. She just wrote it all down. Then she did the same exam my GP had done. She pressed on the outside of my hip in three different spots. I jumped on the third one. She said: "Yep, that's your gluteus medius tendon. That's where it lives. You've been reading about Gluteal Tendinopathy, haven't you?" I said yes. She said: "Most doctors miss this. They write it off as wear and tear." And then she did THE THING. She turned her legal pad sideways. Drew a circle on the left side. Labeled it: "hips." Drew a circle on the right side. Labeled it: "gut." And drew an arrow between them. Going BOTH directions. ... "Most of the women I see your age," she said, "I'm drawing them this exact picture. The two circles. "And I'm telling them the same thing every single time. Your hip pain is not just a hip problem. It's coming from two places at once. And the second place is the one your other doctors aren't even LOOKING at." She tapped the left circle. "OK so this is the actual cable inside your tendon. Tendons are mostly collagen. Long, ropey fibers. "When you were 35, your body had an estrogen factory running 24/7. Estrogen tells the cells that make collagen to keep making it. The way oil tells a car engine to keep running. "When you hit menopause, that factory shut down." She drew a little line going down from the hip circle. "And here's the part that messes people up. "The same drop in estrogen does TWO things to the same tendon at the same time. "It makes part of the rope thinner, because you stop replacing the worn-out fibers. Loose. "AND it makes the rest of the rope stiffer, because the little bit of collagen you do make ends up cross-linked. Like dried spaghetti stuck together in a colander. Stiff. "So you end up with loose AND stiff. Same strand. Same joint. Same second. "That's why nothing works. "Stretching makes the loose part looser. Strength training hurts because the stiff part won't budge. Cortisone quiets the alarm and actually weakens the rope. "None of those things are wrong. They're all just halfway." I had to put my face in my hands. She didn't say a word. She just waited. When I sat back up, she tapped the right circle. The gut. "Now this is the second thing nobody is telling you. "Your gut bacteria help your body manage estrogen levels AND a healthy inflammatory response. "When menopause hits, the bacteria mix in your gut shifts too. You start carrying more weight in the middle. The bacteria that used to help balance everything drop off. The bacteria that drive low-grade gut irritation get LOUD. "And here's the connection," she said, putting her pen right on the arrow between the two circles. "Every pound that comes off your middle is a pound your hip tendons aren't being asked to stabilize. "So your tendon is starving twice. Once because the estrogen factory closed. And once because your gut, which used to help, has stopped helping." Starving twice. I've used that phrase about a hundred times since. ... Then she took a clean sheet off her legal pad and wrote three things on it. She said: "OK. I'm going to write down three ingredients that, in the research I keep reading, keep coming up together for women like you. "I can't actually prescribe these to you. Nobody can. They're supplements, not drugs. The FDA doesn't let doctors write prescriptions for supplements. "But what I CAN do is tell you exactly what to look for. "Find one bottle that has all three of these, in the form I'm about to write down. Try it for 90 days. Come see me in three months." She wrote: Turmeric extract. 350 milligrams. Paired with BioPerine. Moringa Leaf 7:1 Extract. L. Gasseri SBT2055. Then underneath, she wrote one sentence that I now have stuck to my fridge on a Post-it: "All three. Same bottle. The pairing is the whole point." I asked her why. She put the pen down. "OK so curcumin is the part of turmeric that does the real work. "The problem with turmeric is that your body basically can't absorb it on its own. Most of what you swallow just passes right through. "But there's a black pepper extract called BioPerine. When BioPerine is in the SAME capsule as the curcumin, it can boost absorption by up to 2,000%. "That's the pairing that actually lets it do its job. Which is supporting a healthy inflammatory response on the gut side. "That's the second circle calming down." She tapped the page. "OK now Moringa. Moringa leaf is an old plant. One of the most amino-acid-dense edible plants we've ever studied. "Proline. Lysine. Glycine. Those are the bricks your body uses to build collagen. "Plus the vitamin C from the same leaf, which is the cofactor your body needs to fold those bricks into a stable rope. "The 7-to-1 means 7 pounds of leaf concentrated down into 1 pound of extract. "It's the same plant women in three different countries have been brewing into tea for joints and tendons. For like 200 years." She looked up at me. "And L. Gasseri SBT2055. This is a probiotic strain I've been watching for a while. "A Cambridge study found that supplementing with this special probiotic strain for 12 weeks reduced overall body fat mass. "Less weight in the middle. Less stress on the tendons. "The arrow between the two circles, finally moving in the right direction." She looked at me over her glasses. "Find one bottle. All three. 90 days. "And the strength training and Pilates? Bring those back in around week 6. When the rope can actually take a load again. Not before. "Your old GP wasn't wrong. The order was just wrong." She stood up. She handed me the page from her notepad. There was a coffee ring on the corner. I still have it. ... I went home and put her page on the kitchen table next to my laptop. I Googled all three ingredients together. The first thing that came up that actually had all three in the same bottle, at the doses she'd written, was something called Provitalize. Made by a company called BB Company. Made in the USA. Over 2 million women have taken it. More than 3,000 reviews across Shopify, TrustPilot, and Google. 4.4+ stars on TrustPilot. I ordered the 3-bottle bundle. It showed up in two days. ... Week 1: I felt basically nothing. I'd read on the company's page that some women feel things in the first two weeks but most don't get the full picture for 8 to 12 weeks. Because the gut side takes that long to settle in. So I told myself: I'm in this for the full 3 months. I'm not counting days. Week 2: the first small thing. I sat through an entire episode of something with Mark, and when I stood up I didn't have to push off the arm of the couch with BOTH hands. Just one. He didn't notice. I did. Day 11: my hip flared. BAD. Worse than it had been since the Tuesday with the roasting pan. I was sitting on the edge of the bed at 5 in the morning, and I almost threw the bottles in the trash. I called my daughter Emma. She's a hospice nurse and I knew she'd be up. She said: "Mom. Did you change anything? Are you doing more?" And I realized... yes. The day before, I'd taken Max the long way around the block. Because I'd felt LOOSER. She said: "Mom, then it's not the supplement. Your tendon just noticed you're asking it to do more. That's what tendons do when they're coming back. You said 3 months. You're on day 11." I went back to bed. ... Week 3: I caught myself going down our staircase without holding the rail. And I don't mean the regular stairs. I mean our BASEMENT stairs. The ones that are steeper. The ones I'd been refusing to use for almost a year. I was halfway down before I even realized what I was doing. I didn't say anything to Mark. I just kept going down to get the laundry. Like a person who actually lived in her own house. ... Weeks 4 through 6: my hip stopped being the FIRST thing I noticed in the morning. I'd notice my coffee first. Then Max wanting to go out. Then maybe, eventually, somewhere down the list, my hip would chime in to remind me it was still there. That order was new. That order was EVERYTHING. ... Week 7: I walked all the way to the elementary school and back. Without rerouting around the curb. THE curb. The six-inch one. I stepped up onto it like a normal person. I stepped back down off it like a normal person. I cried in the driveway for about a minute. Then I went inside and started the laundry. ... Week 8: Mark watched me carry a basket up from the basement, and he didn't say "I got it." He didn't say anything. He just nodded. ... Week 10: I went back to Pilates. Same studio. Different teacher. Same wall of mirrors. The 35-year-olds were still there. I did the side leg lifts. The ones that used to make my hip scream for 3 days afterward. My hip didn't scream. It felt... warm. Worked. Like a tendon that was being asked to do its job again. And was actually remembering how. ... Week 12: I went back to Dr. Foster. She looked at her notes from August. Then she looked at me. She said: "You're walking differently." I said: "I know." She said: "What was it?" I said: "All three. Same bottle. 90 days." She laughed. She said: "I really need to write that down somewhere." ... That was almost a year ago now. I still take the bottle every morning with breakfast. I still order the 3-bottle bundle from the company's site. Because the per-bottle price is way better and I don't want to ever run out. I'm gardening on Saturdays again. I can lift the big bag of potting soil from the porch onto the wheelbarrow without even thinking about it. I sleep on whichever side I want. The basement stairs are just stairs again. Two smaller things I've noticed: My waistband sits looser without me even trying. Less load on the tendons. The arrow between the two circles, finally moving in the right direction. And the other thing is harder to put into words. I don't CHECK my hip first thing in the morning anymore. I don't catalog it. It used to be the first thing I knew about my body every single day. Now it's gone back to just being... my hip. The two falls happened almost two years ago. I haven't had another one. ... I know there's a version of me from a year ago reading this right now and not believing a word of it. The woman on the kitchen tile. The woman whose hip pain just got a name. The woman who tried the stretching and felt it get worse. Who tried the cortisone and the PT and the Pilates and is honestly about a week from just giving up. I was her. I get it. So here's what I tell every woman who messages me about hip pain in our menopause group: Find one bottle. All three. 90 days. The one I take is called Provitalize. It's a holistic curcumin and probiotic formula made by BB Company. It's the only one I could find that has all three of the ingredients Dr. Foster wrote down. In ONE capsule. With the BioPerine in the same capsule as the curcumin, so your body can actually absorb it. And FOS in with the probiotic strains, so the bacteria have something to feed on. Made in the USA. FDA-registered facility. cGMP-certified. NSF-audited. ISO 17025 third-party tested. I'm not saying it's a miracle. I'm saying it was the first thing in three years that actually addressed the thing that was wrong with my body. 💝 Made for menopausal women 🌿 Turmeric Extract + BioPerine, Moringa 7:1, L. Gasseri SBT2055 📍 Made in USA, FDA-registered facility (cGMP, NSF-audited, ISO 17025) 🧬 Supports a healthy inflammatory response ⭐ Over 2 million women have used Provitalize, 3,000+ reviews, rated 4.4+ on TrustPilot 🔒 90-Day Money-Back Guarantee "Provitalize helped me sleep on my side again." Tina S., RN "I didn't think this would be a game changer, but it is! I was on the second bottle and realized that my hip pain is gone! This is the only change I have made, so I can safely conclude it is the reason! I will continue to take this everyday!" Shelly D., USA "Was very skeptical but in enough hip pain to give it a try. Had tried multiple chiropractor treatments and some individual supplements and exercises. Anyway, I have been taking this for 10 days and already feel significantly better. Not perfect but getting better daily. Would give it five stars if it keeps getting better. Definitely worth a try if you're in pain." VC, USA "I didn't believe the claim that it helps hip pain, but I needed a probiotic so I tried it. 3 weeks later marked improvement in hip pain. I could barely go up the steps, barely sleep due to hip pain. Now I can go up steps normally and sleep without constantly turning over in pain. So surprised.!" Verified Amazon Customer, USA Here's the link Dr. Foster's page led me to. The 3-bottle bundle is what she told me to start with. Because the first 90 days is the window the company gives you to either feel the change or get your money back, no questions: https://thebbco.com/pages/provitalize-j-gt-rpl-v4 ... P.S. The thing nobody tells you about getting your hip back is that it's not the big moments. It's not the curb. It's not the Pilates class. It's the small thing. The smaller one. The smallest one. Last Sunday I walked out of the kitchen holding a roasting pan. The same kind of pan I was holding the Tuesday I went down. I walked across the tile to the cabinet under the stove and I put it away. I didn't think about my hip. I didn't think about the floor. I didn't think about how I'd get up if I fell. I just put the pan away. Then I walked back into the kitchen to grab the lid. And honestly... I think THAT is what I had wanted back all along. Not to be "fearless." Just to be able to walk across my own kitchen with both hands full without having to plan it first.