u/professorpumpkins

I’m going grey at 45. Well, it started before 45. My Dad and grandmother were Snow White by 50 and had gorgeous hair. I have Hashimoto’s and I do not have that luxurious hair. I have my hair cut and coloured every 6 weeks and it’s about $160-170 in my HCOL in MA. Work full time and have a 4yo, so there’s also a convenience factor here, too.

Has anyone just said sod it and invested in wigs and skipped the salon altogether? I was just looking at Cami Hair and one wig is half the cost of a year getting my hair cut and coloured every six weeks. Thinking it might be worth experimenting with when the new school year begins (my brain is wired that way and I work in higher ed). Any thoughts or suggestions or experiences, I’d love to hear them!

I work in higher ed which is already full of misanthropes with zero social skills, but I'm currently under the management of a new director who is a former life coach prior to entering higher ed. Fine, great, everything is a mess in higher ed right now. We're on our second re-org.

My first meeting with the new director, two months ago, she asked me if I was "actively looking" for a new job because I have a doctorate. What? That's how our relationship started. I have a PhD and my brain is rotting in this job they re-orged me into from an administrative position in a department that was at least tangentially-related to my PhD. My old department is having a fight with the administration over it during this second re-org, it's a whole thing and I'm over it. Anyway... now there's this going on where she doesn't use my nickname that everyone else uses. At all. It's been two months. I introduced myself with my nickname.

Everyone here uses my nickname, which is really simple, it's just a diminutive of my full, multi-syllabic, Slavic name. She doesn't. In every bit of correspondence where someone uses my nickname, where I sign my nickname, she uses my full name. I can't decide if it's passive aggressive, AI prompting her in GMail, or if it's something else. For me, I make people use my full name if I don't know them well or if I get vibes, it's kind of a security blanket for me, so I'm inclined to just let her keep doing it. I normally wouldn't care, because I love my name, it's beautiful, but compounded with the remarks about my future here, it's off-putting and I feel like I'm being telegrammed to find somewhere else to be.

I’ve been on 7.2 for two weeks now and my weight is still stable (I gained 10lbs since last summer). Some sulfur burps and nausea, bloating, but otherwise no real shift from 2.4. I have a thyroid panel due in July, so I’m expecting to see a meds change there.

How is everyone else fairing? Can anyone who has been on 7.2 longer weigh in (so to speak)?

Sharing this just in case it's helpful to anyone else. I thought I had damaged my back by going to a chiropractor during spring 2024 to help with my posture. I may have done so temporarily, but it was manageable. Then I thought it may have been because I'd lost 80lbs postpartum and my core was a mess. Still probably true and need to work on my core, but not the root of the problem.

I finally went to see my GP last August 2025 and she looked at my back where I had bruised it from sticking my fist into the muscle so hard. I was roaming around from heating pad to heating pad. I couldn't sit on the floor and play with my then 3yo or take walks or handle the grocery store well. They did an x-ray and there were some observations, but the #1 observation flagged by the radiologist was a kidney stone. Having had kidney stones before, I thought, "Okay, I should add, "Call urologist," to my to do list so I don't wake-up with them again." Eventually got around to that in November and had an appointment in February. Meanwhile, I was signed-up for PT and did four months of PT with no improvement except that my core probably got stronger. I just assumed PT would be like when I had sciatica after my LO was born and it would resolve itself in a few weeks. It did not.

I finally ended-up at the urologist and had a CT Scan which showed a 23mm kidney stone just lounging in my right kidney. Perfect. At that point, I started to put it together that it wasn't entirely muscular. I went for a walk with work colleagues one day this spring and dry heaved on the campus driveway I was in so much pain. The muscles were probably reacting to the massive kidney stone and my kidney being swollen. It was really that moment where I realized that it wasn't my back, it was something else. My doctor scheduled me for a PCNL to remove the kidney stone which was an odyssey I never want to repeat. Absolutely worth it, but a very sore two weeks. Other than when the nephrostomy tube was placed, I haven't had any back pain. It's completely gone.

Just something to consider if they see a stone in there when they're taking images. An x-ray won't really show you how big the stone is, but it's worth following-up with a urologist if the pain is in that region of your back.