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I sat in my work truck in the Lowe's parking lot at 6:22 in the morning last Thursday and I could not make myself open the door. Third morning in a row. I had a 7 AM at a house in Mountain Brook. New homeowner. Their downstairs unit was throwing a code I'd already diagnosed over the phone. 45 minute job. Easy money. I'd been doing 4 of these a day for 28 years. I just couldn't open the door. I sat there with both hands on the steering wheel and watched a man in a fluorescent vest collect carts from the parking lot. He had a system. Long row first. Then the loose ones near the trees. Then the singletons by the propane tank. He must have been 65, 70 years old. Moving steady. Whistling at something I couldn't hear. I watched him for 14 minutes. Then I started the truck and drove home. I'm 56 years old. My name is Wendell. I've lived in Birmingham, Alabama for 51 of those 56 years. The other 5 were in Tuscaloosa when I went to a trade school that doesn't exist anymore. I've been an HVAC guy since 1996. I own a small company called Beasley Heating and Air. It's just me and my son Tucker and a kid named Reese we hired out of UAB last fall. Three trucks. White Fords with our name on the side in red vinyl. The vinyl on mine is starting to peel at the corners. I keep saying I'll get it redone. I haven't. My wife is named Lurleen. We've been married 31 years. She does the books for the company out of the spare bedroom in our house in Vestavia Hills. She wears reading glasses on a chain around her neck and she knows everybody's birthday including the customers'. We have three kids. Tucker, who's 28 and works with me. Cassidy, who teaches second grade in Hoover. And Briggs, our youngest, who's 22 and at Auburn studying something I can't pronounce. We have one grandson. Tucker and his wife Hadley had him in September. His name is Crockett. He's 7 months old. I'm telling you all this because I need you to understand who I was before this started. I'm the guy who has 4 calls before 9 AM. I'm the guy who eats two breakfast burritos from the gas station on the way to the first appointment and another one between the second and third. I'm the guy who shows up at the lake house in Logan Martin every Saturday morning and works on the dock that's been falling apart since 2019. I am not a guy who sits in a parking lot for 14 minutes watching another man collect carts. But that's who I'd become. It started in July. I was tired. Just tired. The kind of tired where you sit down on the edge of the bed to put your socks on and you forget what you were doing for a second. I figured it was the heat. We had a bad stretch in July where it didn't drop below 88 for 11 straight days and I was crawling around attics in Mountain Brook and Homewood that were 140 degrees inside. I figured I was just cooked. Then it got to be August. Lurleen would have dinner ready at 6:30. I'd come in and shower and sit down at the table and by 7 I was nodding off in my plate. She'd touch my arm and I'd jump like I'd been shocked. She made me an appointment with Dr. Sutherland. He's been my doctor for 19 years. His office is in a little brick medical building behind the Publix on Highway 280. I went in late August. He listened to my heart, my lungs. He looked in my ears. He ran blood work. Three days later his nurse called and said everything came back normal. Normal. Cholesterol normal. Blood pressure 134 over 86, a little high but normal for a man my age and my build. Glucose 102. Liver fine. Kidneys fine. Thyroid fine. B12 fine. I asked her about the tiredness. She said "Dr. Sutherland said it sounds like you might just need to slow down a little. Maybe consider how much caffeine you're drinking." I drink 5 cups of coffee a day. I'd been drinking 5 cups a day since I was 22 years old. The caffeine wasn't the problem. I hung up the phone and I sat in the truck in their parking lot and I said it out loud to the dashboard. "This is not normal." Because here's what was happening that the blood work didn't show. I was waking up at 6:18 every morning, 12 minutes before my alarm, with my heart pounding like I'd been running. I'd lie there in the dark next to Lurleen and feel it banging in my chest for 4 or 5 minutes before it would calm down. My hands had started shaking. Not all the time. But when I'd reach into the truck box for a manifold gauge, the metal of the gauge would tremble in my hand before I had a grip on it. I started using two hands for everything. I started taking longer at every job. Tucker noticed. He didn't say anything. He just started taking more of the calls. I was losing words. I'd be on the phone with a customer trying to explain why their thermostat was throwing an E5 and I'd reach for the word "differential" and it wouldn't be there. I'd just stop. Mid sentence. The customer would say "you there?" and I'd say "yeah hold on" and look around the truck like the word was sitting on the dashboard waiting for me. I was 56 years old. I'd diagnosed an evaporator coil leak in pitch dark in a crawl space the previous spring using nothing but my flashlight and my fingertips. I was the best HVAC tech in north Jefferson County and people knew it. They asked for me by name. The Watsons in Mountain Brook had been calling me personally since 2003. I could not remember the word differential. And Dr. Sutherland told me to drink less coffee. September got worse. I started canceling calls. Not many. One or two a week. Tucker would take them and pretend it wasn't a problem. Lurleen would come into the office and find me sitting at my desk staring at the wall and she'd say "you okay honey" and I'd say "yeah just thinking" and I wasn't thinking. I was just sitting. Tucker and Hadley had Crockett on September 14th. I went to the hospital. I held him. I stood there in the recovery room with my grandson against my chest and my son crying and my daughter in law sleeping and I felt nothing. That's what scared me. I felt nothing. I'd waited my whole life for that moment and I'd run out of whatever it took to feel it. I went home that night and I sat on the back porch in the dark and I told Lurleen something was wrong with me that the blood work wasn't seeing. She said "I know honey. I've been watching you." She said "Wendell. You're not depressed. I know what depressed looks like. My sister was depressed for 11 years. This isn't that. Something is wrong with your body. We have to figure out what." She made me an appointment with a different doctor. A woman in Homewood named Dr. Pham. She'd been recommended by Lurleen's bridge friend Estelle who'd had her own husband figured out by her after 4 other doctors had told him he was fine. Dr. Pham ran more tests. The expensive kind. The kind insurance won't pay for unless you fight them. She found that my fasting insulin was on the high end. She found that my A1C, while still in the "normal" range at 5.8, had climbed from 5.4 in 2021. She said "you're not diabetic. But you are headed there. And your body is already responding like it is." She said the medical term for it. Pre diabetes. Insulin resistance. She said "in the prediabetic phase, your body is fighting harder and harder to control your blood sugar. Your pancreas is overproducing insulin. You're getting blood sugar spikes after meals that you don't feel as spikes, you feel as fatigue, brain fog, shakiness, the heart pounding in the morning, all of it. You're crashing. You're spiking and crashing all day and you don't know you're doing it." She said "your blood work in August was technically normal. But you've been hiding in the normal range for a while. You're at the edge of it." I asked her what to do. She said "diet. Exercise. Cut the breakfast burritos. Cut the sweet tea. Walk after meals. Eventually we'll talk about metformin if it doesn't turn around." I said "okay." I did everything she said. I cut the burritos. I cut the sweet tea. I started walking around the cul de sac after dinner. Lurleen walked with me. We'd loop the cul de sac 4 times. About a mile. I lost 7 pounds in 5 weeks. But the fatigue didn't lift. The shaking didn't go away. The heart pounding at 6:18 in the morning kept happening. And then it was the second week of October and I was sitting in the Lowe's parking lot at 6:22 watching a man collect shopping carts. That's the morning I drove home and I went back to bed in my work clothes and I slept until 11:30. Lurleen didn't wake me up. She let me sleep. She rescheduled my appointments. She called Tucker and told him to take the rest of my calls. She handled it. Lurleen is a woman who handles things. When I woke up at 11:30 she was sitting on the edge of the bed with a glass of water and a piece of toast on a little plate. Like I was sick. Like a child sick. She said "I called Mr. Pugh." Mr. Pugh is a customer of ours. 7211 Bonita Drive in Mountain Brook. We've maintained his system since 2008. He's a retired pharmacist. He retired from CVS corporate after 38 years. Lurleen said "his unit's making a noise. He said he can wait but I told him you'd come this afternoon. I think you need to go." I said "Lurleen I can't." She said "you can. It's Mr. Pugh. He's easy. You drive over there and look at the unit and you come home. That's it. Just one. Just to remember who you are." She handed me the toast. I ate it. I showered. I drove to Mountain Brook at 1:30 in the afternoon. Mr. Pugh's house sits at the end of a long driveway with magnolia trees down both sides. Big white house with green shutters. Brick chimney. He answers the door himself even though he could afford someone to answer it for him. He's 71 years old. Pharmacist. Tall guy. Bald on top with a white fringe around the sides. Always wears a button down tucked in even on Saturdays. He opened the door and he looked at me for a second longer than he usually does. He said "Wendell. Come in. Coffee?" I said "yes sir, thank you." He led me into his kitchen. His wife passed two years ago and he lives alone now with a cat named Bess. The kitchen looks the same as it did when I first met him in 2008. Wallpaper with little blue flowers. A long wooden table. A coffee maker on the counter that's older than my son. He poured me a cup of coffee in a porcelain mug with a fox on it. He said "the unit's fine, Wendell. I made that up so your wife would call you." I just looked at him. He said "Lurleen called me yesterday. She told me what's been going on. She said she didn't know what else to do." I set the coffee down. I felt something break in my chest. Not bad break. Just give. Like a piece of ice giving way on a pond. I said "Mr. Pugh I'm 56 years old and I can't open my truck door in the morning." And then I started crying in this 71 year old pharmacist's kitchen on a Thursday afternoon in October. Mr. Pugh didn't say anything for a while. He let me cry. He drank his coffee. He looked at the bird feeder out his kitchen window and watched a cardinal land on the metal pole. When I was done he stood up and walked over to a cabinet next to his refrigerator. He opened it. He pulled out a small dark glass bottle. He set it on the table between us. He said "I want to tell you about something." He sat back down. He said "I worked at CVS for 38 years. I sat behind that counter and watched every diabetes medication that came out of the 90s and 2000s and 2010s. I sat there as a clinical pharmacist and counseled people through the prescriptions their doctors wrote them. I know what those medications do and I know what they don't do." He said "I retired in 2018. My wife was diagnosed with type 2 in 2019. Caroline. You met her once. She was the woman who used to bring us iced tea when you came out to the unit in the summer." I remembered. Tall woman with white hair pinned up. Linen blouses. Always barefoot in the house. He said "Caroline went on metformin. Her numbers didn't move. Her doctor added another medication. Numbers still didn't move. They added a third. By the end she was on 4 prescriptions and she felt worse than the day she was diagnosed." He said "she passed in 2022. Not from diabetes directly. From everything diabetes does to a body when it goes unaddressed at the level it actually exists at." He tapped the table. He said "I spent 18 months after she passed reading. Real reading. The kind I should have done while she was alive. I read everything I could find on what's actually happening in a body that's drifting toward this. Not the disease management literature. The mechanism literature. The biochemistry. What's actually going wrong upstream of the numbers." He said "Wendell. The pancreas isn't broken. The cells aren't broken. The pathway underneath, the system that's supposed to control how fast carbohydrates turn into sugar in your bloodstream, that pathway gets worn down. Slowly. Over decades. By stress. By processed food. By oxidative stress that builds up in the body like rust building up in a pipe. By the time your A1C creeps to 5.8, that pathway has been wearing down for 10, 15, 20 years." He said "the medications work on the number. They don't work on the pathway. The pathway keeps wearing down underneath while the number gets suppressed. That's why people get prescribed more and more medication over time. The underneath keeps getting worse. The number keeps needing more help to stay quiet." I was listening to him like a man listening to somebody explain his own life. He pointed at the dark glass bottle on the table. He said "this is pomegranate. Specifically a standardized extract called Alevia. The reason I take it, the reason I started buying it after I lost Caroline, is because of what it does at the level of that worn down pathway." He said "pomegranate contains a class of compounds called punicalagins. They are some of the most studied antioxidant compounds in nature. There are over 30 randomized controlled trials looking at what they do in human blood sugar regulation. The mechanism isn't suppression. It's support. The punicalagins can help neutralize the oxidative stress that wore that pathway down in the first place. When the assault on the system eases, the pathway can start functioning more like it used to. The way it worked when you were 28 years old and could eat a whole pizza and not feel a thing." He said "same meals. Same food. The body can start responding the way it used to respond. The spikes can ease. The crashes can soften. The fatigue and the brain fog and the morning heart pounding, those can start to settle, because they were the spikes and the crashes the whole time. You just didn't know what you were feeling." He picked up the bottle. He held it in his hand. He said "I started taking this 14 months ago. My fasting glucose was at 98 before I started. It's at 84 now. My A1C was 5.7 the morning Caroline got her diagnosis. I checked it. We were the same. It's at 5.2 now. Not because something forced my numbers down. Because the system underneath was given the support to function again." He set the bottle in front of me. He said "I keep extras in this cabinet. I give them to people who need them. I should have given one to Caroline when she got her diagnosis. I didn't know yet. I know now." I picked up the bottle. It was the same kind of small dark glass bottle as a tincture. The label said Alevia. Pomegranate. There were words on the back about the punicalagin standardization. The dose. A 90 day money back guarantee. I said "Mr. Pugh, why didn't my doctor tell me about this?" He said "Wendell. I love most of the doctors I worked with for 38 years. They are good people. But they were trained to treat disease that's already arrived. Pre diabetes isn't a disease they have a billable code for. So they tell you to lose weight and come back in 6 months. They don't tell you about the punicalagins because nobody trained them to tell you about the punicalagins. The training they got was the medication training. That's the tool they have. That's the tool they use." He said "you can take this. Worst case, it doesn't do anything for you and you ship the bottle back inside 90 days and you get your money back. Best case, it gives the system underneath a chance to come back online. I'd say try it." I drove home with that bottle on the passenger seat. Lurleen was at the kitchen table when I walked in. She looked up. She didn't ask. She saw the bottle in my hand and she said "did Mr. Pugh give you that?" I said "yes." She said "I asked him to." I started taking it the next morning. Friday. October 18th. With my coffee at 5:45. I didn't feel anything that first day. Or the second. Or the third. About 8 days in I noticed something I hadn't expected. I woke up at 6:30 instead of 6:18. My alarm went off and I opened my eyes and looked at the clock and the heart pounding wasn't there. I lay there in the dark for a second waiting for it. It never came. I sat up. I put my socks on without forgetting what I was doing. I made coffee. I sat at the kitchen table and I read the sports section of the AL.com on my phone for 11 minutes before I got up. I hadn't read the sports section in 4 months. 2 weeks in, the shaking in my hands eased. Not all at once. Just less. I was reaching into the truck box for the manifold gauge one morning at a job in Trussville and I noticed the metal wasn't trembling against my fingers. I held my hand up to the light. It was steady. 3 weeks in, I made it through dinner without nodding off in my plate. Lurleen didn't say anything but I caught her looking at me across the table the way she used to look at me when we were 30. 5 weeks in, I was at a job in Inverness, in the attic, working on a coil leak in 92 degree heat, and I came down out of that attic at 1:15 PM covered in sweat and dust and I sat in my truck and I ate the turkey sandwich Lurleen had packed for me. And I didn't fall asleep in the truck after. I drove to the next call. By December I was running 5 calls a day again. Same as I'd done at 38, 42, 51 years old. Tucker stopped quietly taking my appointments. He didn't say anything either. He just stopped doing it. Crockett, my grandson, started smiling at me when I'd come into the room. Sat on my chest while I watched Auburn lose to Alabama. Pulled my beard. Laughed. I felt it that time. I felt all of it. I went back to Dr. Pham in February for a follow up. My A1C had dropped from 5.8 to 5.3. My fasting insulin was back inside the normal range. She looked at the numbers and she said "Wendell. What did you do." I told her about the walking. I told her about cutting the burritos. And then I told her about the pomegranate. She wrote it down on her chart. She said she'd had a few other patients mention it. She said she was paying more attention to it than she used to. She said "whatever you're doing, keep doing it." I'm still doing it. I'm going to keep doing it. I drove out to Mr. Pugh's house last month with a bottle of his favorite bourbon. I sat at his kitchen table for 2 hours while he told me stories about Caroline and about his 38 years behind the pharmacy counter. The cat Bess curled up on my lap. When I was leaving he walked me to the door. He shook my hand. He said "Wendell. Tell people." So I am. I'm telling you because there's a man reading this somewhere who's sitting in a parking lot at 6:22 in the morning watching another man collect carts. There's a woman reading this who's married to that man. There's a son reading this who's quietly taking his father's calls without saying anything. You don't need a diagnosis. You don't need to wait until your A1C crosses the line. The pathway underneath has been wearing down for a long time and the things you're feeling, the fatigue, the brain fog, the morning heart pounding, the words you can't find, those aren't aging. Those are signals. The system is asking for support. Alevia Pomegranate is the brand Mr. Pugh gave me. Standardized to the punicalagins, the part of the fruit that actually does the work in the body. Most other brands skip that part because it's expensive to standardize for. Mr. Pugh checked. Mr. Pugh checks everything. That's why I trust the brand he handed me. You can order it at alevia.com/pom/5. They have a 90 day guarantee. You take it for up to 90 days. If your body responds the way mine did, if you start sleeping through the night again, if your hands steady out, if the brain fog lifts, you keep it. If you take it for 90 days and you feel nothing, you ship the bottle back and they refund every penny. That's the deal. That's the only kind of deal worth taking on something like this. I'm 56. I run 5 calls a day. I held my grandson on Sunday for 41 minutes and didn't put him down once. P.S. Lurleen has been on it since November. She didn't have anything wrong with her. She just watched what it did for me and she said "I want what he's having." Her bridge friends ask her why she looks so good lately and she tells them. About half of them have started ordering it. P.P.S. The 90 day guarantee is real. I called and asked before I ordered my second bottle because I'm the kind of man who calls and asks. You order it, you take it, and if it's not for you, you ship it back and they refund every penny. No fight. That's the only reason I tried it. Mr. Pugh said "what do you have to lose, you ship it back." He was right. P.P.P.S. Mr. Pugh told me Caroline used to make him a pomegranate salad every fall with arugula and walnuts and goat cheese. She loved the season. He said he hadn't been able to eat one since she passed. I drove out to his house last Saturday with the ingredients in a grocery bag and we made one together at his kitchen table. He cried. So did I. The cat Bess sat on the table between us like she knew. That's what this stuff is. It's not a number on a chart. It's the things you get back. The dinners. The salads. The grandsons. The mornings you can open the truck door again. 👉 alevia.com/pom/5