Becca Jane St Clair

Mounjaro Pens. Pic via Shutterstock

Back in September, I had surgery on my leg to drain a very large abscess. When I went into hospital and they took my bloods, it came back that my blood sugar was extremely high for a diabetic on Metformin and they had to put me on a sliding scale for insulin before they could even attempt the surgery. This triggered alarm bells, but not very big ones as having an infection can obviously spike your blood sugars and I hadn’t taken my Metformin the night before or morning of surgery.

The wound healed, but it caused a Hidradenitis Supperativa flare in my groin from where the dressing had been sticking. I’m still seeing the wound care nurse, and she put in a request to my GP to have it looked at to determine if I needed a second surgery (I hope not!) or further meds to clear it up. I received a week of antibiotics and a message to “please make an appointment”.

Now, we all know how hard it can be to schedule GP appointments at the best of times, so I scheduled an appointment for three weeks from then, figuring if they needed to see me sooner they would contact me. I assumed it was regarding the HS, but I was wrong.

My appointment was with the new diabetic nurse who had been reviewing all of her new patient files and she discovered that my blood sugars had been on the rise for FIVE YEARS, pushing me from barely diabetic (I originally got diagnosed by accident when I was getting diagnosed with PCOS) to fully diabetic. No one told me.

To further complicate the matter, some Metformin was easier to swallow than others and sometimes I would get sick within an hour of taking the Metformin and we couldn’t be sure if the pill was coming back up as well. But it was obvious my body did not tolerate Metformin as well as it used to….so the nurse suggested Mounjaro.

I was familiar with Mounjaro as far as knowing it was a diabetic drug that people were buying OTC from online pharmacies to assist in weight loss as the NHS would only prescribe it for the treatment of diabetes or extreme/morbid obesity. I also of course had seen all the online articles about Mounjaro, Wegovy, etc. and the horrific side effects being discovered. So Fiona (my diabetic nurse) put in for the prescription for me and we scheduled another appointment for a week’s time and she told me to write down any questions that popped into my head to get things sorted and then I would decided if I wanted to do it and she would supervise my first jab. She also assured me that the side effects for weight loos and for diabetic use were different (and the information booklet she gave me indicated this as well)

The Questions and Answers I had:

Do I need to eat low carb? No, I can continue eating as normal
Are there specific foods to avoid? overly fatty food and fried food. I can eat it, but it might make me sick or give me diarrhea.
Can I still take my multivitamin for Perimenopause> Yes
What is the end goal? Will I be on this for life? The goal is to get my blood sugars under control and get them possibly down to below Diabetic numbers. I can choose to stop the medication at that point to see what happens or I can continue to take it.
Does it need to be injected at the same time each week? Only the day is important. I can take it at any time once/wk on the same day
Do I need to monitor my blood daily? No, I will have checks every three months while we figure out the dosage required, then just an annual blood test like usual.

We spent a good half an hour discussing all of the questions above and how I felt about going on a jab. Then Fiona weighed me to get my starting weight. I’m not going to share it here, but it’s been recorded. I initially didn’t want to know what I weighed because of my prior issues when I was on Slimming World, but I decided I needed to know and I wrote it down in my journal. I also took measurements of my belly, hips, and chest to compare with next month.

Then, I learned how to do the jab. I’m a watcher, not a read instruction kind of person, so Fiona mocked putting the pen together and showing me what to do before handing it to me and having me stick myself. Giving the jab wasn’t painful or stressful at all and I barely felt it. Fiona then left the room and returned with a Massive sharps bin and about a dozen bags of needles for me to store. I’m not sure she intended on me storing them in an ice cream bin, but it’s the perfect size and I love the irony:

We had our dinner before my appointment, and I was glad for it as I wasn’t feeling the best after it, so home I went and I went straight to bed.

I’ll make another post with my week one notes.

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Top image from Shutterstock.

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Around Mid-August, I noticed my hair was getting dry and brittle. At first, I chalked it up to summer because my hair also had started going blonde since we had so many bright sunny days and when we were on holiday in Austria the temperature never got below 25 during the day. But even using my aloe bar shampoo and conditioner from Foamie with my 2-3 times per week Garnier Papaya Hair Mask and Aussie leave-in conditioner it was still really dry. I went off to Boots with the intention of perusing the hair care aisle to find a product that would help my dried out hair.

Charles Worthington is a brand that I have used in the past – mostly when travelling as their travel sized containers are more like foil packets that can squish as they get empty – so when I saw they had developed a line of products designed for peri- and menopausal hair, I decided to check out the shampoo, conditioner, and hair mask (no link for the mask! Sorry!).

They claim that their products reduce 90% of breakage that occurs during peri- and menopause as the products contain Hyaluronic Acid that will “deeply hydrate and condition hair with a lightweight, non-greasy formula to deliver stronger hair that looks and feels healthy.” So I gave it a go.

On the days that I only used the shampoo and conditioner, my hair definitely felt a little softer and less brittle. I noticed less hair coming out on the hair brush, which I thought was amazing since I have such thin hair to begin with! The mask…not so much. The mask left my hair feeling dryer than just using the conditioner and I also felt that I couldn’t go multiple days between washing my hair like I usually did.

The two bottles plus hair mask lasted 6 weeks, and cost £21 at Boots during a 3 for 2 sale.

Will I buy it again? I’m wavering between probably not and maybe. I think the shampoo and conditioner could be great products to use when my hair is feeling dryer than normal or if perimenopause makes my hair situation even worse. But I won’t buy the mask again, as I think I get better moisture out of the Garnier mask (and it certainly is better value).

I’m writing this in September and saving it for Blogvember content, so I’ll update this post with how my hair feels going back to my bar products!

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