It was after Jumu'ah.
I had prayed at the back — which is where I pray now, where the wall is, where nobody is close enough to notice how long it takes me to stand.
I was putting on my shoes and trying to do it quickly because my hips were already burning from an hour of sitting and I just wanted to get to my car and rush home so I could lay down — I wasn't paying attention to anything except getting to the door.
And then I heard a woman say, behind me:
"Your knees."
Not a question.
I turned around.
She was maybe 60. Small. The kind of face that has been through something real and isn't bothered about hiding it. She was looking at me the way people look at you when they recognise something they used to see in their mirror.
"I'm sorry?" I said.
"The way you stood up just now." She tilted her head slightly while smiling. "I used to stand up the same way."
I didn't say anything.
"How long," she said.
I looked at her for a moment.
"Almost 3 years," I said.
She nodded slowly. Unsurprised.
"I had it for 6," she said. "I stopped going to Taraweeh for 3 Ramadans. I prayed every Eid in a chair and told my grandchildren my back was acting up." She paused. "I know what you've been telling your family."
My throat tightened.
Because she did know.
We sat back down in the empty masjid — the cleaners moving around us, neither of us caring — and she talked and I listened and by the time we were done I had missed picking up my youngest daughter from school. But I wasn’t too worried about that. I just messaged my husband to get her instead.
Her name was Maryam.
She wasn't a doctor. She wasn't a specialist. She was a 64 year-old woman who had spent 6 years in the same darkness I was in and had eventually found her way out of it.
"The mistake I made," she said, "was thinking it was about my joints."
I frowned. "What do you mean?"
"I spent years treating my knees. Physio. Voltaren. Injections. All of it aimed at the knees.” She shook her head, “The knees weren't the problem. The knees were just where I felt the problem."
"Then what was the problem?" I asked.
"My hormones," she said. "My estrogen. Something my doctor never once mentioned in 6 years of appointments."
She pulled out her phone.
She had saved a voice note — a 40-minute consultation with a specialist she'd found. A consultant in women's musculoskeletal health. She'd paid privately to get on a call with him after her fifth year of getting nowhere, she said, because she was desperate and her husband was desperate and they had run out of other options.
"Listen to this part," she said.
She pressed play.
His voice was calm. Unhurried. The voice of someone who has explained something complicated many times and has learned to do it without making you feel stupid for not already knowing.
"The connection between estrogen and joint health is one of the most under-discussed topics in women's medicine. After 40, when estrogen begins to decline, it disrupts the body's ability to produce structural collagen — the protein that lives inside cartilage, inside tendons, inside every piece of connective tissue that holds your joints together and cushions them against impact. Most people associate collagen with skin. But it is the structure of every joint in your body. And estrogen is what tells your body to keep producing it."
She paused the recording.
"Did your doctor ever tell you that?" she asked.
"No. But I've tried taking collagen powder before– for months." I said.
"Mine neither. And I’ve tried it too. Keep listening..
She pressed play again: "Collagen powder gives the body raw material but it is not effective without specific co-factors. Your body needs specific vitamins and minerals to complete collagen synthesis."
"When that natural collagen production drops, the protective layer inside the joint thins rapidly. The cartilage that once absorbed the impact of your movement begins to wear. And the pain follows a very specific pattern — worst after rest, building with activity, severe with full bending. Worst, in many women, during prayer."
I looked up.
"Salah involves full knee flexion — a complete bend — performed multiple times across 5 prayers a day.
In a single year that is up to 15,000 full knee movements..
On a healthy joint with full cartilage support, this is no problem. On a joint that has lost its collagen structure, this is the most demanding movement you can ask of it. The joint has no recovery time between prayers. The inflammation accumulates. The cartilage continues to wear. The pain arrives earlier and worse each time and takes longer to leave. I call this the Salah Stress Cycle — and it is the reason so many Muslim women over 40 find that their joint pain is organised specifically around their prayer times, even when it isn't as bad the rest of the day."
The masjid was almost empty now.
The afternoon light coming through the high windows.
I sat very still.
“The Salah Stress Cycle.”
There was a name for it.
Four years of appointments — four years of pills, dozens of expensive physio sessions and being told wear and tear are normal for your age — and no one had given it a name.
No one had even asked about prayer.
Maryam let me listen to another 20 minutes of the recording.
He talked about why the standard treatments missed it. Why physio helped the muscle and left the joint. Why most supplements on the market were built at doses too low to produce any real effect- and only targeting surface level symptoms instead of the real cause. Why simply taking collagen powder wasn’t effective and passed through the body largely unused.
And then he talked about what actually worked.
I want to be honest about my reaction.
I was very skeptical.
I had been skeptical about everything for years. Skepticism had become a kind of armor — the only rational response to a long series of disappointments. Every new thing I tried, I tried with one part of my brain already preparing the speech I'd have to give myself when it didn't work.
"What was your reaction when he first told you about it?" I asked Maryam.
She laughed.
"I told my husband it was probably nonsense," she said. "He said we paid the consultant a lot of money for that call, I say try it anyway. I said fine. I took the recommendation and ordered one bottle."
"And?"
She looked at me while chuckling.
"I'm here, aren't I," she said. "Talking to you. With both knees working. Using a mat to pray again."
She opened her purse and showed me the bottle before we left.
A white and blue bottle called FlexWell "It's a complete joint support system" She said, pointing to the label.
She poured 2 tablets out into the bottle cap. It was smaller than I expected. Not like the usual giant ones I was used to.
I took a picture of it.
