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My husband kept a freezer bag of my hair in the shed for four months, because he wanted a doctor to see how much of me was coming out. He never told me. He cleaned the shower plughole every night after I had gone up to bed, and instead of putting it in the bin he put it in a bag, and he hid the bag behind the paint tins in the shed because he knew I never go in there. Four months of my hair. When he finally put it down on the GP's desk, she stopped typing. I'm Karen, I'm 44, and I live in Nottingham with my husband Mark and our two, Ellie who is thirteen and Reuben who is nine. I am writing this for the woman who has been told her bloods are normal so many times that she has started to think the problem is her personality. That was me for nearly two years. Please read all of it, even the parts that are hard to read, because the answer was not anywhere that anybody looked. It came on slowly enough that I had a reason for every bit of it. The tiredness was first. Not the tiredness where you have had a bad night with the kids. The tiredness where you sleep eight hours and wake up and it is like somebody has taken the plug out of you in the night. I used to sit on the edge of the bed at half six with my dressing gown on, working out the order I would do things in so I only had to go down the stairs once. I do payroll for a care agency, three long days a week. I started setting an alarm in the middle of my lunch break so I could sleep in the car in the car park and still be back at my desk for two. I told the girls in the office I had been up with the dog. I said that so many times they started asking after him. I stopped walking him. Mark took it over and never once made a thing of it, and I know now that he had already worked out that I could not do it. Then the bloating. Flat when I got up. By four in the afternoon I looked like I was carrying, properly, and it hurt. Not uncomfortable, hurt. I could press it with two fingers and feel it. I sat through a whole parents evening with my coat folded on my lap, because I had undone my trousers in the car park and could not get them done back up. Mark did the talking to Ellie's form tutor. I sat there with my hands on my coat nodding. Then the fog, and this is the one that frightened me. I have done payroll for eleven years. I know it in my sleep. And I started making mistakes. I underpaid four carers in one run. I did not spot it. A woman called Denise rang the office the following Monday almost in tears because her rent had gone out and there was nothing behind it. I sorted it, and then I went and sat in the staff toilets with the lid down and shook. After that I asked my manager to check my runs behind me, which in eleven years I had never once had to ask for. At home I lost the thread halfway through my own sentences. Ellie would be telling me something about a girl at school and I would come back into the room and realise I had not heard a word of it and had been nodding at her for a solid minute. She noticed. She started saying "are you even listening" in that flat voice, and I did not blame her. Then the waking. Ten past three, near enough every night. Heart going like I had run up the road. Wide awake, sweating through my top, brain doing sums on things that did not need any sums doing on them. One night I gave in at four and went down and put a wash on, and Mark found me sat on the kitchen floor against the washing machine. Then the hair. I noticed it in the shower first, the amount of it in my hand, and I told myself everybody sheds. Then it was on my pillow every morning. Then it was on the back of the sofa, and on my navy work jumpers, and in the hoover so much that I was emptying it twice a week. It was in Reuben's lunch box once, wrapped round the lid of his yoghurt. I have not forgotten that. I stopped wearing it up. Under the lights in Asda you could see my scalp through the front of it. I moved my parting over to the other side and told myself it looked better that way. I lost a stone and a half without changing one single thing I ate. People kept telling me I looked well. Mark's mum said at Christmas that I had got my figure back. I stood in her kitchen holding a tea towel and I wanted to scream at her. And I snapped. That is the part that still makes me feel sick. I shouted at Reuben about football socks. Actually shouted, in his face, in the hall, over a pair of socks. He went up and shut his door quietly, which is worse than slamming it, and I sat on the bottom step with my hand over my mouth thinking, this is not me, who is this. So I did what you are supposed to do. I went to the doctor. Visit one: "Your bloods are normal. You're a working mum, Karen, you're just run down. Try getting to bed a bit earlier." Visit two, six weeks later: "Everything's come back fine. It could be the start of the perimenopause. Have you thought about antidepressants?" Visit three, a different GP, and I took a written list in with me: "It's probably IBS. Try upping your fibre and cutting right back on the caffeine." I upped my fibre. By eight in the evening I could not stand up straight. After that we went private, because we were frightened and because the waiting list was months. Two hundred and eighty pounds for a consultant who was with me nineteen minutes and said, "There's nothing sinister here. Some people are just more sensitive." A hundred and ninety for a dermatologist about my hair, who said it was stress related shedding and it would settle down on its own. A hundred and twenty for a trichologist who sold me a scalp serum in a brown bottle. Sixty pounds a month on probiotics, twice, two different brands. Gluten free for eleven weeks. Dairy free for six. Magnesium, iron tablets, and a collagen powder that tasted of nothing and did nothing. I added it up afterwards on the back of an envelope. Just over thirteen hundred pounds to be told I was fine. And all the way through that, every night, Mark was cleaning the plughole. I found out at appointment five. He said he was coming with me, which he never does. In the room he took a folded freezer bag out of the inside pocket of his coat, put it on the desk in front of the GP and said, "This is her hair. That's four months. I've kept it because nobody believes us." I did not know where to put myself. I have never felt that embarrassed and that looked after at the same time. The GP stopped typing. She took her glasses off and looked at the bag for a good few seconds and said, "Right." Then she took more blood, and she said she would refer me, and she was kind about it, and I want to be fair to her because she was. The bloods came back normal. Again. That was the night Mark told me the rest of it. He had been sitting up after I went to bed reading about women my age dying of things that got missed. He had already looked up what the compassionate leave policy was at his work, and how much of it was paid. When he took Reuben to football on a Sunday he had started telling the other dads that I was poorly, because he did not know what else to call it. He said, "Karen, I have been watching you disappear for two years and I keep getting told I am imagining it." I told him I thought I was dying as well. Neither of us had said that out loud before, not in two years. I did not tell him that in the back of my work notebook I had written down my passwords, the bank, the mortgage number, and which drawer the life insurance paperwork was in, in case somebody needed it. I only told him that months later. We sat in the kitchen with the big light off and did not go up until gone two. My sister Jo is the reason this does not end there. She came over on a Sunday with her laptop and sat at my kitchen table and did the one thing nobody had done in two years. She did not search one symptom. She wrote all of them down first, in a list, the tiredness, the bloating that came up by four, the fog, the ten past three waking, the hair, the stone and a half, the temper, the way my skin had gone greasy and spotty along my jaw at forty four, and then she searched the whole lot together. And she kept landing on the same thing. Intestinal parasites. I nearly shut the laptop on her. I said, don't be ridiculous, we live in Nottingham, I am not drinking out of a river. It felt like an insult, if I am honest. Like somebody telling you your house is dirty. Then she read me how it actually works, and it lined up so exactly with the last two years that I went cold in my own kitchen. The World Health Organisation estimates one in three adults in the developed world is carrying an intestinal parasite. You do not get them from anything exotic. Undercooked meat, a bag of salad that has not been washed properly, the dog, public toilets, swimming pools, soft play. Ordinary Tuesday things. Once they are in, they attach onto the gut wall and they take the iron and the B12 before your body ever gets to absorb any of it. That is the exhaustion that sleep does not touch, and that is why my iron tablets did nothing for eight months. I was eating. I just was not the one being fed. And hair is one of the first things a body gives up on when it is short of iron and protein, which is why there was a bag of it behind the paint tins. They give off waste, and that goes into your blood and reaches your brain. That is the fog, and the low mood, and the ten past three waking up with your heart going. That is why I underpaid four carers. It was not stress and it was not me getting careless in my forties. They inflame the lining of the gut, and that is the bloating that gets a label stuck on it that says IBS, try more fibre. And here is the bit that made me want to put my hand through the wall. They hide behind a biofilm, a sort of slime shield, and standard stool tests miss up to ninety percent of them. So the tests come back clear, and the doctor shrugs, and you go home and start believing you are just a weak person who cannot cope with a job and two kids. Those tests were never going to find it. Not once, not in a hundred appointments, not if I had spent another thirteen hundred pounds. Then I nearly ruined the whole thing by being tight with money. I went to the health shop on the Monday morning and bought a bottle of oregano oil for twenty two pounds. I took it for a fortnight. Nothing happened at all, except it repeated on me all afternoon. So I read the back of it properly, and it was eighteen percent carvacrol. Carvacrol is the compound that actually does the work. What I read says you want eighty percent minimum to get through that biofilm. Below that, they are sat there perfectly safe behind the shield and you have bought a small expensive bottle of flavoured olive oil. Most of what is on the shelves is fifteen to fifty percent. I bought a second one at thirty percent to be sure, sixteen pounds, and again nothing. Jo found Herbies Oregano+. Eighty percent carvacrol from wild Mediterranean oregano. Cold pressed black seed oil in the same softgel, for the thymoquinone, which is the one that stops them reproducing and helps flush them out. Both of them used for thousands of years round the Mediterranean and the Middle East. Third party lab tested. Nitrogen sealed so it is not sat going off on a shelf. No fillers, and no oily burps, which mattered to me after the cheap stuff. Two softgels every morning. That is the whole instruction. I will be honest about the first two days, because that is where people give up. It is not pleasant. There is a lot of going to the toilet, and a lot comes out of you, and it is not only what you would expect. Poo, bad bacteria, and worms. Literally everything. Then after those two days I felt better than I had felt in a year, and that is not me being dramatic, that is just what happened. Day six is the day I am not going to describe in an advert. I shouted Mark up the stairs on a Saturday morning. He stood in the bathroom doorway and looked, and neither of us said anything for a bit. Then I sat down on the side of the bath and cried, and it was not disgust. It was relief. Two years of stress, my age, my hormones, my personality. And there it was, in the bowl, in our house. Mark said, "I knew it. I bloody knew it." Then he went out and sat in the shed for twenty minutes on his own. Week one, the bloating started going. By day nine I got in at half five, did tea, sat down and watched telly, and I had not undone anything. At ten at night my stomach was still flat. I kept putting my hand on it like an idiot. Week two, I slept through. Right through, no ten past three, and I woke at half six and lay there for a minute trying to work out what was different about the room. Week three, the fog lifted. I cannot really explain what it is like to get your own head back. I did the payroll run, checked it twice, and it was clean both times, and I sat back in my chair and thought, I have not felt properly awake since my thirties. Week four, the energy, and this was the best part. Not coffee energy. I felt light, and happy, and full of power, like somebody had taken a rucksack full of bricks off my back. I took Reuben to the park after work on a Tuesday because I wanted to, not because I had said I would. My skin cleared up as well, which I was not expecting. Clearer and less oily, and the spots along my jaw went. Ellie spotted that before I did. The snapping stopped. That is the one that matters in this house. Nobody here is watching my face to see what mood I am in anymore. In June, Mark came in from the shed with the bag in his hand, put it in the kitchen bin, and went out to do the lawn without saying anything about it. I watched him through the back door and did not trust myself to speak. In August we had a family wedding and Ellie wanted her hair plaited like mine. She sat behind me on the bed doing it with the brush and she said, "Mum, your hair's gone thick again." Then she told me off for having no decent hairspray in the house. That was it, that was the whole moment, and I have thought about it a lot since. The only real problem now is that I have had to buy new clothes, because everything I bought when I was bloated hangs off me. Two pairs of jeans and a work dress I had not budgeted for. And I understand now why so many people order it again. You do not take it forever. Once, maybe twice a year is what most people do. It is all natural, and after the first go you sort of know when your body is asking for another one. Here is what I want you to hear if you have got this far and you are thinking, well, mine is nowhere near as bad as that. It is not only for people at the end like I was. Most of the reviews are the everyday version of it. Bloating that no diet shifts. Tiredness that coffee does not fix. Constipation. A head that will not clear. Ordinary women who had quietly got used to feeling heavy, who took it and found the whole lot lifting within a few weeks. You do not have to get to the point where your husband is hiding evidence in a shed before it is worth looking. Nobody is paying me to write this. I do not work for them and I get nothing if you buy it. I am a 44 year old payroll administrator from Nottingham who spent thirteen hundred pounds being told she was fine, and I said I would tell people. Herbies Oregano+ is eighty percent carvacrol from wild Mediterranean oregano, with cold pressed black seed oil for the thymoquinone in the same softgel. Third party lab tested, nitrogen sealed, no fillers, no oily burps. Two softgels every morning. Do not do what I did first. Most oregano oil on the shelf is fifteen to fifty percent and it cannot get near what is sat behind that biofilm. Eighty percent is the number that matters. There is a 30 day money back guarantee, so you lose nothing by finding out. If you do not feel different, more energy, flatter stomach, clearer head, you email them and you get your money back. One honest warning. They are a small company and they sell out regularly. I am sorry if it has gone by the time you click. If it is showing below, it is in stock right now. Karen P.S. I asked Mark later why he never told me about the bag. He said if I had seen how much was in it, I would have stopped getting out of bed. He kept it so that one day somebody with letters after their name would look at it and take me seriously. Nobody with letters after their name ever did. My sister with a laptop did, on a Sunday afternoon, in about forty minutes. If there is nobody doing that for you, do it yourself, and write every symptom down and look at all of them together instead of one at a time.