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I paid a two thousand pound deposit on a care home room for my mum, and she was sat in the passenger seat while I signed the form. Room 14. Ground floor, window over the staff car park. Non refundable, it said so at the top of the page. I signed it on my knee with the little light on in the car, and she sat next to me with her handbag on her lap, holding it with both hands. I'm Sarah, I'm 42, and I live in Bristol. My mum is Christine, she's 68, and she lives ten minutes from me in Fishponds. I'm writing this for anyone who is watching a parent go downhill and being told, over and over, that this is just what getting older looks like. I believed that for nearly two years. I was wrong, and it very nearly cost me my mother. It's long. It took two years, so it's long. It started with her being tired. That's all it was at first. Mum worked in a school kitchen for twenty six years. Up at half five her whole life, feeding four hundred children a day and then coming home and doing her own house. She used to walk from hers to mine in nineteen minutes and get annoyed with herself if it took twenty. Then she started sitting down at two in the afternoon and not getting back up. I'd let myself in and find her asleep sat upright in the armchair with the telly going and her glasses still on her face, and when I woke her she'd say she'd only shut her eyes for a minute. She said something to me that summer that I've never got out of my head. "I sleep all night and I wake up empty." Not tired. Empty. Then the bloating. Flat as anything in the morning. By six in the evening her stomach was hard and swollen and she couldn't do the button up on her own trousers. She bought two pairs of elasticated ones off the market and told me they were comfier. She wore those two pairs for about a year. She stopped coming to Sunday dinner at mine. She said eating a full plate made her swell up so much she couldn't sit at a table and breathe properly at the same time. My mum, who cooked Sunday dinner for this family for thirty years, sat at home with a slice of toast instead. Then the forgetting. She put a chicken in the oven one Saturday and never turned the oven on. Found it in there at nine at night, still cold. She rang me twice in one afternoon to ask the same question about my daughter's parents evening. Same question, same words, two hours apart. She'd lose the thread in the middle of a sentence and just stop, and look at me, and say, "What was I saying?" She missed my niece's birthday. Not forgot to post the card. Forgot the day. She started writing things on the back of her hand in biro. Then on the backs of envelopes. Then she stopped driving anywhere she didn't know, because she said she got muddled in car parks and couldn't find the right level. I rang her one Tuesday and she said she was just off out to the shop. I turned up an hour later and she was sat in her car on the drive with her seatbelt on and the engine off. She said she couldn't remember if she'd already been. She was waking at three in the morning, every night, with her heart going. She told me she'd lie there with her hand flat on her chest counting it, waiting for it to settle down, and by the time it did the birds had started. Her hair was coming out. Every time I cleaned her bath there was a mat of it round the plughole, and she went from a thick head of hair to me being able to see her scalp at the front when she stood under the kitchen light. She lost about a stone and a half in a year and not one of us said well done, because she looked wrong with it off her. Grey, and hollow round the eyes. And she got sharp. My mum, who never raised her voice at anyone in her life, shouted at my son for leaving his trainers in her hallway, and then rang me an hour later crying about it. "I don't know why I did that, Sarah. He didn't do anything." We went to the GP. Of course we did. We went five times in fourteen months. Visit one, a young locum: "She's sixty eight, Sarah. Honestly, this is what sixty eight can look like. Try and get her moving a bit more." Visit two, after bloods, on the phone: "Her bloods are normal. Her B12 is at the lower end but it's within range, so nothing to worry about there." Within range. I've thought about those two words more than anything else anybody said to us. Visit three: "How is she in herself? Sometimes at this age it presents as low mood. We could try her on an antidepressant and see if that lifts things." Visit four, the memory: "I do think we should refer her to the memory clinic. Try not to worry about it in the meantime." Visit five, the stomach: "It's IBS. The gut slows down as we get older. More fibre, less caffeine." She ate the fibre. One evening she was hunched forward on my sofa with her hand pushed up under her ribs and she said, "It feels like there's something in there that doesn't want to move." The memory clinic saw her in the spring. Puzzles, dates, drawing a clock face, remember these three words and I'll ask you again in a bit. She got two of the three. "There is some mild impairment. We'd like to see her again in six months." Six months. I didn't think she had six months of being herself left in her. So we went private, because everybody does. Two hundred and eighty pounds for a consultant who was perfectly kind and said, "I think we're looking at the early stages of cognitive decline. I'd start making plans now, while she can still be involved in them." Start making plans. Another hundred and sixty for the follow up. Three hundred and fifty for a gastroenterologist who said IBS again and told her to keep a food diary, which she couldn't remember to fill in. Four hundred and eighty for a private scan that showed nothing at all. Forty seven pounds a month on probiotics for five months. Then collagen. Then a greens powder. Then digestive enzymes off Amazon because a woman in a Facebook group swore by them. I added it up on the back of an envelope one night. One thousand eight hundred and something, and that's only what I could find receipts for. Call it two thousand. That's before the care home wanted a penny. And my mum, who used to walk to mine in nineteen minutes, was sat in her chair with the curtains half shut at two in the afternoon. My brother lives in Reading. We had the phone call. She can't be on her own much longer. The oven. The car park. What if she goes out one day and can't work out how to get home. We looked at three homes and picked the one that smelled the least like a hospital, and I drove her over on a Thursday to see room 14. She was very polite about it. She said the garden was lovely. She held her handbag the whole way round, in front of her, with both hands. In the car afterwards, while I was signing, she said, "Don't put me somewhere I don't know anybody, Sarah." And then she said, quite calmly, looking out of the windscreen, that some mornings she thought it would be easier for everybody if she just didn't wake up. I said something useless. I drove her home. Then I sat on my own drive with the engine off for about forty minutes. I didn't cry. I just sat there and thought, that's my mum gone, that's it, and she's sixty eight. The one who wouldn't have it was her younger sister, my Auntie Bernie. Bernie is 64 and has no filter whatsoever. She came round to mine, got an envelope and a biro out of her bag, sat me at the kitchen table and made me say every single symptom out loud while she wrote them down. Not one at a time, the way the doctors took them. All of them, together, on one bit of paper. Tiredness that sleep doesn't touch. Bloating that builds through the day. Waking at three with her heart going. Hair thinning. Weight falling off. Fog. Losing words. Snapping at people and then crying about it. B12 at the bottom of the range. Iron low. Every test normal. Then she typed the whole list into Google in one go, and we sat at that table scrolling for about three hours. About the fourth thing down was a long piece by a functional medicine doctor about intestinal parasites in adults, and how in older people it gets mistaken for ageing and early dementia, over and over again. I nearly shut the laptop. Parasites. My mother has bleached her kitchen floor twice a week since 1983. But I kept reading, and every paragraph in it was her. The World Health Organisation estimates one in three adults in the developed world is carrying an intestinal parasite. You don't get them from a jungle. You get them from undercooked meat, unwashed salad, a pet, a public toilet, a swimming pool. My mum fed a school full of children for twenty six years and had a dog asleep on her lap for fifteen. They attach to the gut wall and they take the iron and the B12 before your body ever gets to absorb it. That is why her levels sat at the bottom of the range while she was eating three proper meals a day. She kept saying, "I do eat, Sarah, I do eat." She was eating. She just wasn't the one being fed. That's the exhaustion that sleep doesn't fix. It isn't old age. It's being drained from the inside. They release toxins, and those toxins reach the brain. That's the fog. That's stopping halfway through a sentence. That's a woman who ran a school kitchen for twenty six years getting muddled on the second level of a car park. And that's the three in the morning waking with your heart hammering, which every one of us puts down to worry. They inflame the gut lining, and that's the bloating that comes on through the day. That's what gets you sent home with the word IBS and a leaflet about fibre. And they hide behind a biofilm. A sort of slime shield. Standard stool tests miss up to ninety percent of them because of it. That is why every test my mum had came back clear, and why every single doctor shrugged and blamed her age. I couldn't sleep that night for being angry. Not at Mum. At the fact that the tests were never going to find it. We spent two years and two thousand pounds looking in places it was never going to be, and we were told to plan for her decline, and nobody once looked properly. Carvacrol, which is the active compound in wild oregano oil, ruptures them and dissolves that biofilm. Thymoquinone, from black seed oil, stops them reproducing and helps flush them out. Both used for thousands of years round the Mediterranean and the Middle East. Not a drug. Not new. So I went into a health shop on the high street and bought a bottle of oregano oil for twenty one pounds ninety nine and felt very clever about myself. Two and a half weeks. Nothing. Not one thing changed. Then I actually read the label properly. Eighteen percent carvacrol. You need at least eighty percent to get through the biofilm. Under that it can't reach what's hiding behind it. You haven't bought a treatment, you've bought expensive olive oil with a herb in it. Most of what's on the shelf is fifteen to fifty percent, and that's why so many people try oregano oil, feel absolutely nothing, and decide the whole idea is rubbish. Bernie found the one with the chemistry right. Herbies Oregano+. Eighty percent carvacrol from wild Mediterranean oregano. Cold pressed black seed oil in the same softgel for the thymoquinone. Third party lab tested. Nitrogen sealed so it doesn't oxidise. No fillers. No oily burps, which mattered, because Mum gags on fish oil and always has. Two softgels every morning. That's the whole thing. I ordered it that same night. I didn't tell my brother, because he'd have said I was clutching at straws, and I was. Day six is the day I'm not going to describe in an advert. She rang me at twenty past eight in the morning and I couldn't understand a word at first because she was crying too hard. I drove round with my coat on over my pyjamas. She hadn't flushed. She wanted somebody else to see it. I stood in my mother's bathroom and looked, and I want to be clear about why we both ended up sat crying on the edge of her bath. It wasn't disgust. It was relief. Two years of her age, her nerves, her memory, her IBS, her low mood. And there it was. It was never in her head. Her mind was never going. It was in her, and it was coming out. The first two days after that weren't pleasant and nobody warned us, so I'm warning you. It's poo, bad bacteria and worms. Literally everything. Then it settles, and after those two days she said she felt amazing. Week one. Her stomach wasn't thick and bloated by the evening anymore. She sat at my table at half nine at night with the button of her trousers done up, and she kept putting her hand flat on her own stomach like she didn't quite trust it. Week two. She slept from eleven until half six and didn't wake once. She rang me to tell me before I'd even had a cup of tea. "I've had a whole night, Sarah." Week three. The fog started lifting, and that's the one that made me sit down on the stairs. She did the crossword in the paper. She remembered the name of my daughter's netball coach, which I'd forgotten. She rang me and talked for fifty minutes and went through four different subjects and kept them all straight, and I sat on those stairs with the phone against my ear listening to my mother come back. She said, "I don't think I've felt properly awake since I was in my fifties." Week four. The energy. And the energy is the best part, it honestly is. She walked to mine. Nineteen minutes. She stood in my hallway slightly out of breath and very pleased with herself and said, "Well, I timed it." The snapping stopped completely. She said it had been like having a horrible mood sat on her chest for two years and it had just lifted off her. Her skin went clearer and less oily as well, which none of us expected and which she is unbearably smug about. And the only problem now is that she's had to buy new trousers, because the elasticated ones fall down on her. She tells everybody this like it's a complaint. About nine weeks in, on a Sunday, she turned up at mine without saying she was coming, went through my kitchen cupboards, threw out four things that were out of date, and told me off at length about the state of my airing cupboard. I stood in my own kitchen being criticised by my mother and I've honestly never been happier. We lost the two thousand pounds. Non refundable, exactly like the form said. Somebody else has got room 14. It's the best money I've ever wasted. She takes it once or twice a year now, that's all. It's all natural and she says she can feel when she's due. I understand now why so many people order it again. And here's the bit I didn't expect. It isn't only for people who got as far as we did, with a form signed and a consultant telling us to make plans. Most of the reviews are the everyday version. Bloating no diet shifts. Tiredness no amount of coffee touches. The fog. The three in the morning waking. People take it and within a few weeks the misery they'd quietly decided to live with just starts lifting off them. You don't have to be sat in a car park signing a deposit before it's worth looking. Nobody is paying me to write this. I don't work for them and I get nothing if you buy it. I'm a 42 year old woman in Bristol who spent two years being told her mother was simply old, and who was three weeks away from moving her into a home. Herbies Oregano+ is eighty percent carvacrol from wild Mediterranean oregano, with cold pressed black seed oil for the thymoquinone in the same softgel. Third party lab tested, nitrogen sealed, no fillers, no oily burps. Two softgels every morning. Don't do what I did first. Check the carvacrol number on anything you buy. Fifteen to fifty percent cannot get through the biofilm, and you'll feel nothing and give up, like I nearly did. There's a 30 day money back guarantee, so you lose nothing by finding out. If nothing changes you email them and you get your money back. They're a small company and they sell out regularly, so I'm sorry if it's gone when you click. That does happen and that's genuinely why. But if it's showing below, it's in stock right now, and if you've got a mum like mine I wouldn't leave it. Sarah P.S. I've still got Bernie's envelope. It's in the drawer with the takeaway menus. All of Mum's symptoms in biro on the back of a gas bill, in the handwriting of a woman who refused to accept that her sister was just old. Every doctor we saw looked at one line of that list at a time. Bernie looked at all of it at once. If you haven't got a Bernie, be one, for your mum, tonight.