6 Jun
Right, this is a bit of a ramble and only loosely related to the usual things we talk about, so bear with me. I had a DEXA scan a few months ago, which I'd been asking my GP about for a while if I'm honest. I wasn't in crisis or anything, I just had this nagging feeling that I'd been coasting on assumptions about my own health for years and I wanted some actual numbers to look at. My mum had a hip fracture in her late sixties and it changed everything for her, so it's always been somewhere in the back of my mind. Anyway, the results came back and they weren't terrible but they weren't brilliant either, and suddenly I found myself reading absolutely everything I could find about bone density and what happens post-menopause and calcium and vitamin D and weight-bearing exercise and honestly it's a lot. Like, a LOT. I went from mildly curious to completely obsessed in about four days. I've started making notes, which is new for me. I'm not naturally a notes person but I've got a little document going now with questions for my next GP appointment. Things like what the numbers actually mean for someone my age, whether I should be thinking about this differently given I've been on HRT for a while, what the follow-up timeline usually looks like. I don't want to go in there and just nod along, I want to actually understand what I'm looking at. On the more practical side I've been thinking a lot about what I'm eating, not in a restrictive way but more like, am I actually getting enough of the things that matter? I've started being more deliberate about dairy and green veg and I've been reading about how vitamin D absorption works in winter which, living in England, is obviously a joy. I've been taking a supplement for ages but I realised I had no idea whether the timing or the dose I'd picked off a shelf years ago was even sensible, so that's another thing on the list to actually ask someone qualified rather than just assuming. The strength training thing is where I feel most out of my depth. I started going to a class at my local leisure centre about six weeks ago and I am by some distance the least coordinated person there. There's a woman who must be at least 70 doing things with a barbell that make me feel personally embarrassed. But I keep going because I genuinely believe it matters and because my knees hurt less on the days after I go, which I wasn't expecting. I've got a granddaughter who's just turned two and she wants to be picked up approximately nine hundred times a day when I see her, and I want to still be able to do that when she's five. That's basically my entire motivation summed up. Anyone else gone through the bone health spiral? Would love to know what questions you found useful to ask x