Iain Jones - It's The Little Things

Iain Jones is a 68-year-old retired hotel manager now living in Hull. Iain spent most of his career running around hotels and putting quite the strain on his body. So when joint pain and arthritis hit, he needed to know where to turn.

This is Iain’s story….

For over 30 years I worked in Hospitality primarily within 3 to 5 star rated hotels, offering up to 500 bedrooms and with large scale Conference facilities. I began as a Trainee Manager and moved my way through all departments often at Head of Department level and allied managerial levels, but ultimately achieved General Manager status. I retired a couple of years ago and despite some lucrative offers to return to the profession, I’ve declined and haven’t looked back. The crucial aspect is working in that industry, it has the ability to take over your life if you let it.

In retirement I volunteer at the local branch of the British Heart Foundation’s Furniture and Electrical shop, allowing me to utilise my extensive Sales, Customer Service and Public Handling expertise towards generating valuable product sales for the benefit of the charity.

I’m not the sort of person who wants to be sitting down and doing nothing. At school age I was a keen cross country runner and athlete. Yet, my career finally interrupted access to and participating in events but I’ve maintained an interest since.

In 2008 I was diagnosed with the early stages of osteoarthritis in both knees. It gradually got worse but in 2017 I found myself on a drug trial for osteoarthritis pain relief which involved a monthly injection similar to a flu jab. And for a year I was completely pain free in my knees.

Unfortunately during that time my osteoarthritis actually got worse and I developed it in my hands without knowing it. Because the drug I was on was masking the pain that was gradually occurring in my hands. As a result the osteoarthritis in my hands went from stage 1 to stage 4 in just 16 months. But it wasn’t really until 2020 that the pain really caught up with me. I had planned on retiring around that time anyway but I could feel myself slowing down as a result of all the joint pain. I felt like I was becoming a liability in the job, I could no longer do the job as quickly and efficiently as I wanted to.

At first my doctors put me on a high dosage of very strong painkillers, but they made me incredibly drowsy which was no fun at all. I was finding every morning my hands would be hurting like hell. It didn’t matter if I was wearing compression gloves, more often than not I’d wake in immense pain from the arthritis in my hands. I’d sometimes wake up with my hand in an almost claw formation and then straightening out the fingers was agony! Basic tasks like putting on a dressing gown became both difficult and painful. I’d have to get downstairs and plunge my hands into the hottest water I could bear to flex my hands. It could often take up to half an hour to get the hands moving properly.

I was speaking to a former colleague who I still have close contact with, and she told me she had mild osteoarthritis and how well FlexiSEQ was working for her. So I gave it a go. To begin with it didn’t work for me, I assumed it was like a lot of other topically applied gels I’d tried and it simply wasn’t going to help me. So I stopped.

And then I discovered FlexiSEQ Max Strength for Osteoarthritis. I realised then that I’d been using FlexiSEQ for Joint Wear & Tear which was not going to be as strong for someone with severe osteoarthritis like me. And, Wow! The change in my hands! Even in the morning when they are cold, the results are astounding. I wake up and I can move my hands immediately; they’re much more supple which means I can start doing things much sooner in the morning than I could before FlexiSEQ. And that sets me up in a better mood for the rest of the day.

I’ve recommended it to a colleague whose mother has osteoarthritis as well as the person who originally recommended FlexiSEQ for Joint Wear & Tear to me for her to try the for Osteoarthritis version, so she’s going to see how she gets on with that as well. I’m so happy I discovered FlexiSEQ; it’s often the little things that can have such a huge impact.