Rachel Clarke Facebook ad: “Delete Joint Pain in 30 Days”

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Nobody warned me about the dryness. The hot flushes, yes. The moods, the waking up drenched — your mum warned you about those, the telly never shuts up about those. But nobody warns you what the menopause does to your vagina. Nobody. And that's the one that nearly cost me my marriage. It took my Saturdays and half my friendships while it was at it. But it's the marriage bit that still frightens me — because I never saw it happening till it had nearly happened. I'm 52. If you'd told me two years ago I'd be writing about this on the internet, I'd have died of shame on the spot. But I've learned a thing or two since. And one of them is that keeping quiet about it is exactly how it wins. So I'll start with the hardest part. Paul and me. We've been married 29 years, and that side of things had always been easy. Never something we had to talk about or work at. It was just us. And then it started to hurt. Not "a bit uncomfortable." Hurt. Like I was made of paper down there. The one part of my life that had always been lovely, and now I'd be lying there bracing myself. And you can't relax when you're braced. And when you can't relax it hurts more. Round and round it goes. So I started finding ways to not. Tired. Headache. Up early tomorrow. I invented half the list. And if I'm honest, the wanting had gone quieter too. Whether that was the change itself, or two years of dreading something I used to love — I couldn't tell you. Both, I'd say. And there was another bit. One I'd never said out loud to a living soul. It didn't even look like me anymore, down there. Drier. Thinner. Like it was shrivelling in on itself. I know exactly how that sounds. But you try feeling like a woman when a part of you looks like it's packing up and leaving. Paul never pushed, he's not that sort, bless him. But I'd catch him looking at me sometimes, and I knew what he was wondering. Whether it was him. Whether it was us. And I didn't say anything. Because saying the real reason out loud felt impossible. That's the bit I'm least proud of. 💔 Now here's the thing. If it had only been the bedroom, maybe I'd have carried on pretending forever. But it doesn't stay in the bedroom. Nobody tells you that either. By last winter, it was in my whole day. A sting when I wiped after a wee — that had been the very first sign, months back. I'd thought it was a water infection coming on. Drank my cranberry juice. Waited for it to pass. It didn't pass. It spread. Sore just sitting too long. I'd be shifting about on the settee like I couldn't get comfy — because I couldn't. Car journeys turned into something I'd dread days ahead. We drove down to Paul's mother's in Devon and I spent four hours trying to find a way to sit that didn't hurt, staring out the window so he couldn't see my face. Then my clothes. Certain underwear started to rub, and by the end of a day out I'd be chafed raw. My good jeans went to the back of the wardrobe. Then the rest of my jeans followed them. If you'd seen me last winter, you'd have found a woman in the same soft joggers every single day. Not because I'd let myself go. Because everything else hurt to wear. And who on earth do you tell? 😔 You can moan to the girls about your knees. You can laugh about the flushes over a coffee — we all do. But you can't sit in a garden centre café and announce it stings when you wipe. There's no version of that conversation. So you say nothing. And the longer you say nothing, the more it gets in your head — till it stops being a body thing and starts being a you thing. Something wrong with you. Something to hide. And it seeps into everything. I started turning down days out. The walking group I'd been going to for donkey's years, I let slide. My friend Carol kept inviting me, and I kept saying no, till she half stopped asking. From the outside I suppose it looked like I was slowing down. Getting older, getting boring. Nobody could see it was all one thing. Even I couldn't. I did try things, on the quiet. I bought one of those creams from the pharmacy — stood at the counter praying I'd not bump into anyone from work. It helped for about an hour, then it was like I'd never put it on. Bought a dearer one. Same story. I drank that much water I was up half the night. Went cotton everything, unscented everything, like the internet said. I even did three weeks of pelvic floor exercises off a YouTube video, because some magazine swore it'd get the blood flowing down there. Squeezing away at red lights like a mad woman. Made not a blind bit of difference. Little fixes for the surface. Nothing that touched what was going wrong underneath. I sat in front of the GP once, for something else entirely, with the words all lined up in my mouth. She said "anything else?" and I heard myself say "no, that's everything, thanks." Drove home and had a little cry on my own drive. So I'd more or less decided that was that. This was 52. And the woman who wore nice jeans, went on day trips, and reached for her husband in the night — she'd been retired without anybody asking me. What changed it all was one night in March, at about half one in the morning. I was awake — too hot, covers off, covers on — so I was doing what I often do at that hour. Scrolling one of those menopause forums. I like reading how other women are getting on with it all. Makes the middle of the night less lonely. And that night, I found a thread where a woman had written down my life. 😢 The sting when you wipe. The car journeys. The jeans at the back of the wardrobe. Even the joggers — she'd written "I live in soft trousers now and my daughter thinks I've given up." Word for word, my life. And halfway down, one woman had put it plainer than I'd ever have dared. She just wrote: "I want my old vagina back." I laughed and cried at the same sentence. Because that was it. The whole thing, in six words. And under it all, hundreds of replies. All saying me too. Me too. Me too. I sat there in the dark with my hand over my mouth. Two years thinking I was the only woman in the UK falling apart like this — and it turns out 7 in 10 of us get this after the menopause. Seven in ten. And not one of us saying it above a whisper. I was on that forum till three in the morning. Some of those women properly knew their stuff — been through it, done the reading, come out the other side. I read everything I could get my hands on after that. I've always got my nose in a book anyway, and for once it paid off. And here's what I finally understood. Stay with me, because I'd have given anything for somebody to tell me this two years sooner. It's got a name, for a start. Vaginal atrophy. Atrophy — same word they use when a muscle wastes away. Because that's what's happening. It's not that things get "a bit dry," like everyone assumes. The walls themselves get thinner. There's actually less to the tissue than there used to be. That's why everything rubs and stings and chafes. A name. An actual medical name, and nobody had ever said it to me. It wasn't me being precious. It wasn't in my head. It was a real thing, happening to real tissue. And what that tissue is built from — the scaffolding holding the whole lot up — is collagen. Same stuff as your skin, same stuff as your joints. And when the menopause comes, your body just about stops making it. You lose nearly a third of it in the first five years. I hadn't a clue. Not a clue. But the collagen's only half the story. Here's the half that made me sit up in bed. There's this other thing your body makes, called hyaluronic acid. Sounds like something off a chemistry exam, I know. But its whole job — its one and only job — is holding water inside your tissue. It works like a tiny sponge. Holds many times its own weight in water, right where it's needed. It's the reason young skin stays plump and comfortable without ever having to think about it. And it drains away with age, same as the collagen does. So there I was, two years buying creams to put wetness on the outside — when my body had lost the two things that hold moisture in on the inside. Watering a plant with no roots. No wonder nothing off the pharmacy shelf ever lasted the hour. The woman whose thread it was — Sue, she was called — had been exactly where I was, joggers and all. And what turned it round for her wasn't anything off a shelf. It was rebuilding from the inside. The collagen and the hyaluronic acid, back in her body, every day. But she was dead firm about one thing. The first one she tried did nothing, and she nearly gave up there and then. Because your body has different sorts of collagen doing different jobs, and the cheap tubs only give you one sort. And collagen barely absorbs on its own — it needs vitamin C taken alongside it to switch the whole process on, and most brands can't be bothered putting it in. She'd learned all that the expensive way, bless her. The one she'd ended up on — and half the thread turned out to be on it with her — is called Elavate. It's got more than one sort of collagen in it — and the hyaluronic acid's in there too. That was the bit that made my mind up. The sponge and the scaffolding, in the same scoop. The vitamin C's built in as well, so it actually absorbs. And it's a proper dose — 8 grams, when the tubs I'd been looking at were 2 or 3. ⭐ I read the reviews myself before I spent a penny — over 20,000 women in the UK, 5 stars. And going through them, it was the forum all over again. Women getting their days out back. Women feeling like themselves again. Page after page of us. There was a 90-day money-back guarantee too, which honestly is the only reason a burnt-once woman like me clicked buy. I'll come back to that. So I started. One scoop in my morning coffee, tastes of chocolate, no palaver. I told nobody. Not Paul, certainly not the forum. This one was mine. The first few weeks — nothing, and I'll not dress it up. Week three I was muttering "another twenty quid down the drain" at the kettle. But Sue had said the tissue takes weeks to rebuild itself, give it two months at least. So I gave it two months. Around week five, I noticed the end of the day arriving without me having thought about it once. No raw feeling. No shifting on the settee. It wasn't fireworks. It had just started going away. But when something's hurt every single day for two years, it going away is huge. Week eight, I did a proper test. Good jeans out of the back of the wardrobe, full day out with Carol, garden centre and all. I sat in that café for two hours and the only thing that stung was the price of the scones. 😄 I could've wept on the way home. Over jeans. Imagine. We drove down to Devon again last month. Four hours. I read my book most of the way and never once thought about the seat. And Paul. I'll not give you every detail, because some things are ours. But a few weeks back, one night, I didn't reach for an excuse. I didn't want one. And after, lying there in the dark, he said, "I thought you'd gone off me, you know." Quiet, like he was owning up to something. 😭 Two years he'd been lying on his side of the bed thinking his wife didn't want him anymore — while I was on mine, too ashamed to tell him it simply hurt. All that, over a conversation we never had. Well, we had it that night. The whole lot. And I cried, and he called me a daft old thing, and pulled me in. And we were us again. I'll not tell you everything's perfect. I still get days I'm aware of it, and I keep taking Elavate every morning. But I've gone from a woman whose world was shrinking to a woman with plans in her diary. And somewhere along the way I started feeling confident in myself again. As a woman, I mean. I'd forgotten what that felt like. 😤 What makes me cross now is just this: seven in ten of us. And we're all sat in our separate houses at half one in the morning, thinking we're the only one. Nobody warns us, so we think it's just us, so we say nothing — so nobody warns the next woman either. So this is me, warning you. The warning I never got, the one I'd have given anything for two years ago. If any of this sounded like your life — the stinging, the jeans you've retired, the excuses you're tired of making — it is not just you, you are not broken, and you do not have to just put up with it. It took me two years to work that out. It doesn't have to take you two. ⚠️ And one smaller warning while I'm at it — it does sell out, and after getting caught waiting on a restock once, I keep a spare in the cupboard now. And that guarantee — 90 days. Three whole months to feel it working, and your money back if it doesn't. The creams in my bathroom drawer never offered me that. 👇 The link's below — it's the UK one, the one I take. That's the one you want. There's a way back, ladies. I'm on it. Come and join me. x

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elavate.com

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