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Should I do my knee surgery? That was the question in my head every night for three months. This morning I got back from a 4-day trek to Dayara Bugyal in Uttarakhand. 11,950 feet above sea level. Rocky terrain almost the entire way up. Scorching heat on day one. Drizzle on day two. Pouring rain and hail on day three. Extreme cold on day four. I went with a group of women I met at my morning walks in Pipliyapala Park. The youngest in the group was 46. I was 68. I had a tube of Volini in my daypack the whole four days. It is the same tube my husband packed for me the night before I left. I did not open it once. If you are sitting with the same question in your head right now — should I do my knee surgery — please read what I am about to tell you. I would have given anything for someone to share this with me three months ago, when I had the CHL ortho's consent form open on my phone every night for forty-two nights in a row. I am back home in Indore now, sitting on the sofa-bed in our drawing room. I had been thinking about whether to share this all week. I decided I should. If your knees are giving way going down your own stairs — or if you are watching your wife's knees give way going down hers — read this whole thing. Inside your knee is a soft, smooth pad. Doctors call it cartilage. You can call it your knee cushion. It is the thing that keeps your bones from grinding on each other every time you walk, sit on the floor for pooja, or climb a stair. That cushion is built from one thing. Collagen. Collagen is the glue. The building material. The fibre your body uses to make skin, hair, nails — and the cushion inside both your knees. When you were 30, your body made fresh collagen every day. Without thinking. Without effort. Then something quiet happened. As you grew older, your body's estrogen production began to drop. And estrogen was the signal that told your body to keep making collagen. When the signal went quiet, the factory closed. Your body did not stop using collagen. It just stopped making fresh collagen. So every day after your last period, the cushion in your knee got a little thinner. A little drier. A little weaker. For 10 years you do not feel it. Then one morning you wake up and the walk from your bedroom to your bathroom hurts. That is when your ortho says, "Madam, age ke saath hota hai." It is not age. It is empty. Let me tell you about Aanchal. Aanchal is forty-six. She runs a tiffin service in Ahmedabad. She was the youngest woman in our trek group of eleven. She had not slept the night before we left because she was afraid the trek was going to be too hard for her. On day two she walked three metres behind me, not asking questions, just keeping pace. By the second hour of the climb she was still behind me. By the lunch stop she was still behind me. At the campsite that night she finally asked. "Auntyji, how?" I told her, "Tomorrow. Wait till tomorrow. There is a long story." Day three we took shelter behind a stone wall at 11,400 feet that the shepherds had built for their flocks. Aanchal's hands had gone white. She was crying because her fingers were too cold to feel her own face when she touched it. I put her hands inside both of mine and rubbed them until the pink came back. Then I told her the story. I told her about the three orthopaedics in Indore who had each said the same thing: "Madam, age ke saath hota hai. Surgery hi solution hai." I told her about the one Friday I flew to Mumbai because someone in my husband's family had insisted his orthopaedic was the best in India. Forty-two thousand rupees in flights, hotel, and a fifty-second consultation in which he glanced at my X-ray and wrote the same sentence on a different letterhead. I told her about the three years on Cartigen morning and night, the fourteen months on Ibuprofen every night, the eighteen months on a Volini tube my husband bought two at a time so we never ran out. The four months of physiotherapy at a clinic on AB Road that left a faint pink mark on my right knee from the TENS machine. The four tins of Oziva collagen powder I stirred into water every morning for four months that did nothing. I told her that on the fourth of February this year, the orthopaedic at CHL wrote "knee replacement, both knees" across the top of my file. April 7th was the booked date. Four lakhs, four. Six months of recovery. My husband bought a folding stool for the bathroom and hid it in the storeroom so I would not have to see it every morning when I brushed my teeth. I told her that on the same evening of February 4th, the woman who lived in the flat directly opposite ours — Kavitha, who had only moved in nine months earlier and who I had barely said more than five sentences to until that night — rang our doorbell with no reason. She sat down next to me on the sofa-bed and listened to me cry for forty minutes. Then she said: "Akanshi, your knee cushion has not worn out. Your body stopped telling the collagen factory to send material the year your periods stopped. Your body is not aging. Your body has been ignored." I told Aanchal that Kavitha had been on the right form of collagen — the intact kind, type 2, at the exact 40 mg dose — for the last ten months. Her morning stiffness was gone by her week 5. She walked 3 kilometres a day in Pipliyapala Park now. She had not opened a Volini tube since November. Kavitha came back the next morning with an unopened bottle from her own cupboard and a note that said, "Start before another year of cushion is gone." I started on the 8th of February, four days after the CHL consultation. Behind the stone wall at 11,400 feet, with the hail coming down past the lip of stone above our heads and Aanchal's fingers slowly getting their colour back inside my hands, I told her what happened in those fourteen weeks. By week 3 I had stopped calling my husband from the bedroom to help me sit up before getting out of bed. I just swung my legs over and stood up. By week 5 I had called CHL and cancelled the surgery. Nineteen days before the booked date. By week 7 I was doing the morning aarti standing up for forty minutes. By week 9 I had picked up my granddaughter Anaya — eleven kilos, four years old — without first looking at my husband to ask if it was okay. By week 11 I was walking thirty minutes a day in Pipliyapala. That is where Lakshmi found me and asked if I wanted to come with the group to Dayara Bugyal in May. By week 12 I had said yes. Behind the stone wall, Aanchal listened to all of it without interrupting once. When I finished, the hail had stopped. The clouds were starting to lift off the ridge above us. She said, "Auntyji, will you send me the link when we get back?" I said yes. We walked the last three kilometres of day three with her hand inside my elbow. She did not need it for support. I did not need it either. Day four was the meadow. Dayara Bugyal at 11,950 feet in clear early-morning light. The grass was the colour of bottle-green my mother used to dye my school uniform with. The peaks to the north were white. Three of the women had brought thermos flasks of chai. We sat on a flat rock and drank it without talking. I took the tube of Volini out of my daypack and laid it on the rock next to the chai cup. The seal was still intact. The packaging said BEST BEFORE OCT 2027. I had carried it for ninety-six hours through scorching heat and pouring rain and hail and extreme cold, and I had not needed it. Lakshmi saw me looking at it. She picked up her phone and asked if she could take a photo of me alone on the trail just above the meadow. That is the photo at the top of this post. In the photo I am holding a trekking pole I did not lean on. I am wearing the red cap my granddaughter Anaya gave me last Diwali. I am smiling because Lakshmi had just told me I was walking faster than her on the uphill, and I had laughed and told her it was because I had spent ten years not walking at all and I was catching up. We came down the mountain in two days. On the bus back to Dehradun, Aanchal sat next to me and watched me text her the link from my phone. She started crying again. She said her mother was sixty-five and had been told to schedule knee replacement for September. She wanted to send the link to her mother that evening. I told her to wait until her mother had her morning coffee on Saturday, and to call her instead of text. Mothers need to hear their daughters say the words on the link out loud, not read them. Aanchal nodded and put her phone back in her pocket. That is the reason I am writing this. If you have been asking yourself whether to do your knee surgery — like I asked myself, nineteen times into my phone after midnight, between November and February — or if your wife has been asking herself the same question and you have heard her get up to walk to the bathroom at 3 a.m. and stop halfway — If you have been told "Madam, age ke saath hota hai" — or if your wife has — If you have tried the Cartigen, the Volini, the Combiflam, and you still wake up at 5:30 in the morning with knees that take 45 minutes to remember how to walk — or if your wife has — If you are 5, 10, 15 years past menopause and no one has ever told you that the cushion inside your knee has been emptying every day since your last period — or if your wife is in those years and you have stopped asking her how she slept — This is different. Before either of you signs the surgery consent — read what I sent Aanchal on the bus back to Dehradun. 👉 https://www.jointura.in/pages/advertorial-v5-1 P.S. — Facebook will hide this post within 48 hours. Health posts that say "surgery is not the only option" get flagged. Screenshot it. Save it. Send it to your sister. To your bhabhi. To your daughter. To your niece who messages you about her mother's stairs. To the woman down the corridor who sits on a folding chair at her own pooja. If you are her husband reading this — send it to her first. Then to her sister, her bhabhi, her niece. Then to the husband down the corridor who has stopped asking his wife how she slept. Lakshmi has already booked the next trek. October. Five days. Bedni Bugyal. The same group, plus the two new women Aanchal recruited from her sister's wedding last weekend. I will be 68 going on 69 by then. So can you. P.P.S. — I know this post is long. It took me two weeks to write it after I got back from the trek. The first week I sat with the Dayara Bugyal photos on my phone and could not decide whether to share them. Who was I to write to anybody about anything. I am a retired math teacher. I am not a doctor. I had only done one trek. The second week I typed it. On my phone. On the sofa-bed in our drawing room. Between cups of chai. I would write a paragraph, put the phone down, then pick it up again half an hour later and write another. My husband walked past me on Sunday afternoon and asked what I was writing. I told him, "A long letter for the women in our complex park, and for Aanchal's mother." He smiled and said the ones who needed to read it would. I also want to be honest about one more thing before I close. The brand Kavitha brought me on the morning of February 5th from her own cupboard is called Jointura Undenatured Collagen Type II. Made in India. The intact form of type 2 collagen, at the exact 40 mg dose, third-party lab-tested. One capsule. Once a day. With warm water. Thirty minutes before any other tablet I take in the morning. I waited ten months to know my neighbour was taking it. I waited fourteen weeks to know it was working in my own body. I am not going to ask you to wait that long. If you find another Indian brand at the proper 40 mg of the same intact form, with proper third-party lab testing — take that one. We do not care which brand you pick. We care that you start before another year of cushion is gone. If you want the shortest path — the one Kavitha brought me — they give you 30 days to try it. Empty bottle, full refund, no questions. That was the only reason I tried it myself. If Kavitha had not rung my doorbell on the evening of February 4th, I would not have spent four days at 11,950 feet in the Garhwal Himalaya carrying a tube of Volini I never had to open. I would have been six weeks into a six-month recovery in operating room 4 at CHL instead, with steel in both knees, looking at the folding stool from the storeroom on my own bathroom floor. I am not asking you to buy what I am taking. I am asking you to start something. Today. Before the question you have been asking yourself becomes a date on a hospital consent form like mine almost did. The cushion does not wait. 👉 https://www.jointura.in/pages/advertorial-v5-1 — Akanshi Singh, Indore 68 years old oldest woman in a group of eleven who walked four days to Dayara Bugyal carried a tube of Volini up 11,950 feet and never opened it