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Well. I have taken a heartburn pill every single morning for three years now. Omeprazole first, then pantoprazole, then Nexium. And before anybody says it, no. It is not as simple as the pill not agreeing with me. I already thought of that one myself, thank you very much. I switched brands THREE times and it did not change one single thing. Ten months ago I was walking the loop around the reservoir three mornings a week. Last Tuesday my husband Ron carried our mattress down to the front room, because I have gotten frightened of our own stairs at night. Four doctors, ladies. FOUR. And every one of them came around to the same word eventually, and that word was my age. Well they were all wrong. And when I finally found out what was actually going on, it had nothing to do with how old I am, or what I eat, or my nerves, or one single thing any of them ever wrote down in my file. It was sitting in my own kitchen cabinet the whole entire time. In a bottle so ordinary that four doctors looked right past it, and honestly, so did I. For a little background, let me back up and tell this properly… I'm 68 years old. Three years ago my doctor put me on omeprazole for reflux. She said take it a few weeks and we'll see how you do. Well, nobody ever told me to stop, and the pharmacy just kept on refilling it, and I have taken one every morning since. Half the women at my church are on that or something just like it. It is a heartburn pill. You don't think about it. I thought about it about as much as I think about a Tylenol, honestly. Nobody ever sat me down and explained what it actually does once it is inside you, and I never once thought to ask, because why on earth would you. Then last fall my body started coming apart on me, and I want to tell you the order it happened in, because I really do think the order matters. First the cramps. Always the calf, and always somewhere between one and three in the morning. If you have ever had one you know there is no dignity in it whatsoever. You are up out of the bed hopping around, hanging onto the doorframe, trying not to wake your husband. Three, four nights a week. Then the weakness, and this one crept up on me so slow that I did not even notice it happening. Jar lids I have been opening my whole entire life. The coffee pot got heavy. And I started taking our stairs one at a time with a hand on the rail, just like my own mother used to. Then my left eyelid started twitching and it would not quit. Weeks of it! And not just the eye either. I would be sitting perfectly still and feel a muscle in my calf or my thumb jumping around under the skin all on its own. Then the tiredness, and I don't mean regular tired. I mean standing at the kitchen counter at eleven in the morning with absolutely nothing left in the tank. Some days I did not get dressed until after lunch and I am really not that kind of woman. Then my heart started skipping. Just now and then at first, mostly at night, this little lurch and then a pause that made me put my hand flat on my chest and just wait. And then the one I never told anybody about. I started forgetting things. And I don't mean my keys, everybody loses their keys. I mean I would walk into the pantry and just stand there with the door open not knowing what on earth I came in for. I would hang up the phone and not be able to tell Ron what the call had even been about. I started keeping a notepad by the phone like a girl at a switchboard, writing down every single thing anybody told me, because I did not trust myself to hold onto it anymore. And I stopped offering to have my granddaughter Hannah stay over. I never told one single person why. I just quit offering. You can probably guess what I thought was happening to me. I am 68 years old and I thought I was watching it start 😢 Now I do have to say, I did try to work this out. I am not somebody who just sits there. The first thing I did was blame the pill, which makes me sound a whole lot smarter than I was, because I wasn't blaming the pill. I was blaming the BRAND. I decided the omeprazole must not agree with me, so I got switched over to pantoprazole. Two decent weeks and then every bit of it came right back. So then it was Nexium. Same story. Three different pills in ten months, and I was so pleased with myself for investigating. I kept records and everything! It never once crossed my mind that all three of them were the same kind of drug doing the same exact job. They are called PPIs. I did not learn that word until this year, and I had been swallowing one every morning for three. Meanwhile everybody had an answer ready for me. Eat a banana. Drink more water, Mom, that was my daughter, bless her heart. Tonic water, my sister in law Judy absolutely swore up and down by tonic water. And a bar of soap under the bottom sheet, which I want you all to know I actually went and did, because when you have been up at two in the morning four times in one week you will try anything a woman at church tells you 🤦‍♀️ My bloodwork came back normal every single time. Real good, actually, for a woman my age. The twitching and the weakness got me sent to a neurologist. The skipping got me a cardiologist and a monitor strapped to me for two days. All clear, both of them. Nobody ever put the whole of me on one page. The heart man looked at my heart, the nerve man looked at my nerves, and not one of them ever asked me what was in my medicine cabinet. The last one told me it was most likely restless legs, very common at my age, and that I should stop reading things on the internet. I want you to sit with that one a minute, ladies. Because reading things on the internet is the only reason I am well today. But there it is. That is just how it goes once you are past 65. Nobody gets stumped anymore. Every ache and every mystery gets filed under the same explanation, and the explanation is the year you were born. Now here is the part I am least proud of, and I very nearly left it out. Two years ago, before any of this got bad, I had a run of cramps and I did wonder about magnesium. I went and bought a bottle at the drugstore, I took it faithfully for months, and I even asked to be tested for it. The test came back normal. So I decided well, that isn't it then, and I gave up on the whole idea. That bottle is still in my cabinet by the way. Sitting right there between the fish oil and the calcium. Where it has sat, being taken every single day, doing absolutely nothing, for two years. Hold onto that one too, it's coming back. By July I had quit looking for an answer. I had even quit telling Ron when the cramps woke me up. There was a night in there, sometime after one in the morning, when I sat at my own kitchen table and looked up my own symptoms one last time, and every single thing that came back said the same thing. Normal aging. That was the night I gave up. Not in any dramatic way. I just quietly decided that this was the shape the rest of it was going to be and I had better get used to it. And then Marilyn fell. I should tell you about Marilyn. She is 74, she has been at our church a whole lot longer than I have, and over the last few years every one of us had watched her get smaller. First she quit taking the front steps. Then she quit driving at night. Then she quit coming to the Thursday morning group at all. And every single one of us said the same thing about her, in the kindest possible voice. Well. She's 74. She went down in her own hallway and broke her wrist and they kept her in. I went up on the Sunday, and I was standing outside her room waiting on the nurse to finish up when I heard a doctor talking to Beth, that's Marilyn's daughter, the one who came up from Florida. He was going through her medications. And then he asked how long her mother had been on the omeprazole. Fourteen years, Beth told him. He said her magnesium was very low and that they would be giving it to her through an IV. And I stood out in that hallway with my purse over my arm and my own omeprazole sitting in the little tin inside of it, and I got cold from my feet on up. Beth came and found me down in the tea room afterward. She had been reading for three weeks by then and she had the whole thing printed out. The first thing she told me was what they had said upstairs. That when a magnesium level gets down that low they start worrying about the heart rhythm, and about seizures, and that is why they were not waiting on pills to bring it up. Seizures. Over a mineral. I had to put my cup down. Then she asked me if I knew what my pill actually does. I said well, it stops the acid. That is the whole point of it. She said that's right. And then she asked me something nobody had asked me in three years. She said, do you know what your body uses that acid for? I did not. Magnesium does not just soak into you. It does not seep through like water through a coffee filter, which is honestly what I had always pictured in my head. Your gut has different ways of moving magnesium from what you eat into your body. One of them involves little gates in the lining of your intestine that help pull magnesium through, a bit at a time. And those gates work best under the right conditions. The acidity inside your digestive system is part of that. So the pill does exactly what it is supposed to do. It reduces the acid. But when you keep on reducing that acid day after day, year after year, magnesium can become harder for some people to absorb properly. Not impossible. Harder. And if less is getting through every day than your body is using, well, eventually there can be a gap. That is the part that knocked the wind right out of me, ladies. It was never as simple as whether I was eating enough spinach or bananas. I could have been putting magnesium into my mouth every single day and still not necessarily getting enough of it where it needed to go, because the conditions for absorbing it had changed. And apparently that is why this can creep up on a person so slowly. Which made an awful lot of sense when I sat and thought about it. I was fine the first year. Not quite myself the second. And by the third my legs felt weak enough that I had started getting nervous on our own stairs, especially at night. So of course I said the obvious thing. I said Beth, if that were true my doctor would have told me. And she reached into that stack of papers she had printed out and showed me that low magnesium with long term PPI use has been known about for years. It is even mentioned in the information that comes with the medicine. I have thrown three years of those papers in the trash without reading a single one. Then I said the other obvious thing. I said but Beth, I was TESTED. My magnesium came back normal. And this is the part I really need you to hear, because it is the reason I stopped asking questions for two whole years. Magnesium is not always included on the standard bloodwork. You may have to ask for it specifically. And even when serum magnesium is checked, blood is only one part of the picture. Most of the magnesium in your body is stored outside the bloodstream, including in your bones and your tissues. Now that does not mean a blood test is useless. It absolutely is not. It just means one normal result does not automatically explain away every symptom or tell you everything about your magnesium status. Mine came back normal that one time. And I took that as the end of the conversation. Then Beth said one more thing, and this is the bit I really want you to actually go and do while you are reading this. She said go home and get your magnesium out of the cabinet and turn the bottle around. So I did. Mine said oxide. Hers, the one she had started buying for her mother, said bisglycinate. Two years of taking something faithfully every single day. Two whole years. And suddenly I understood why that mattered too. If the problem is that magnesium has already become harder for your body to absorb, then the form you are taking matters a whole lot more than I ever realized. Magnesium oxide is one of the most common forms you see sitting on drugstore shelves, but it is not known for being particularly well absorbed. Magnesium bisglycinate is magnesium bound to an amino acid, and it is generally considered a more absorbable form. It was not some magic trick where the PPI suddenly stopped mattering. That was what finally made sense to me. My digestion had already made magnesium harder to get in. And for two years I had been trying to fix an absorption problem with a form my body was not making very good use of in the first place. Marilyn was sitting up in the bed when I went back in, and she is really the one who got me over the line, so she should get the credit for it. She said Ruth, before you go looking at the price of the thing, I want you to know there is a 30 day money back guarantee on it, because I would not have chanced it otherwise. I'm on the pension. Thirty dollars is real money to me. And then she said something I have thought about a hundred times since. She said she hands over two hundred dollars a month at that pharmacy without blinking an eye, for a pill that might have been making magnesium harder for her to absorb the whole time. Two gummies at night. That is it. That is the whole thing. Now I did not order it that afternoon and I want to be honest with you about that too. I am 68 and I have watched miracle products come and go since before the internet was a twinkle in anybody's eye. My own mother had a whole drawer full of them. So I sat with my tea for two days and I read about it myself. And I'll tell you what I found, because it was not all one direction. There are plenty of people who take these pills for years and years and are perfectly fine. There are people who will tell you not to go supplementing anything without getting properly checked first, and they are right, and I would say the very same thing to you. But there were also an awful lot of women my age describing my exact ten months. Right down to the notepad by the phone. The one Beth had is made by SPNutrition and it comes as a gummy. It is magnesium bisglycinate, which was the form I kept coming across when I read about magnesium that is easier for the body to absorb than oxide. Two gummies is 400mg. There is no sugar in them either, which at my age with everything else I am watching, I did appreciate. And the gummy part made sense to me too. You chew it instead of swallowing one more hard tablet whole. But the thing I actually cared about was what was written after the word magnesium. Bisglycinate. Because after two years of taking oxide, I finally understood that "magnesium" on the front of a bottle does not tell you the whole story. Thirty dollars against ten months of my life was not a hard sum in the end. Day one, nothing at all. I will be honest about that too. End of that first week I was falling asleep faster. That long stretch of laying there staring up at the ceiling shrunk down to about ten minutes. Week two I had my first night with no cramp at all. Then a second one. I started marking the clear nights on the kitchen calendar with a little check, and Ron thought that was just hilarious until there were eleven of them in a row LOL. By the fourth week the eyelid had stopped and the twitching under my skin had quit right along with it. The coffee pot stopped being heavy. And I had Ron carry our mattress back upstairs to our own bed. I did not tell a soul that was a big deal but it really was. The skipping settled down too, and I want to be careful how I say that, because my heart is my doctor's business and not mine. All I can tell you is I have not put my hand flat on my chest and waited in a good while. And in week six I had Hannah stay over. I had not offered in almost a year. I made the bed up in the back room and we did her puzzle on the floor and she stayed all the way through Sunday lunch, and after her mother picked her up I stood in my kitchen and had myself a good cry about it. My heart was so full ❤️❤️ The notepad is still there by the phone. I just don't need it the way I did. Now I want to be very careful here, because at my age people love to credit anything except you. Nothing else changed. I am still on the same pill, same dose, every single morning. My reflux is between me and my doctor and that is staying that way. My diet did not change one bit. And I certainly did not get any younger! I was not going senile. And I was not just old. I was not eating wrong either. The thing I had never understood was that the pill I was taking every morning could make magnesium harder for my body to absorb over time. And once I understood that, the bottle of oxide sitting uselessly in my cabinet for two years made a whole lot more sense too. So. If you are on omeprazole or pantoprazole or Nexium or any of the PPIs, and you have been on it a whole lot longer than the few weeks they first handed it to you for... if you are up at two in the morning with your calf in a knot hanging onto the doorframe... if jar lids and stairs and the coffee pot have all quietly gotten harder... if something twitches under your skin when you are sitting perfectly still... if you are tired in a way that sleeping does not fix... if your heart does that little skip and then a pause, and the monitor said you were just fine... if your bloodwork keeps coming back perfect while you keep on feeling like something is wrong... or if you have been quietly scared about your memory and you have not said it out loud to anybody... Now I am not saying that is what you have. I am not a doctor and I don't play one on Facebook! Everybody is different and I can only tell you my own situation. Do your own reading, and obviously go and talk to your doctor. Ask whether your magnesium should be checked, especially if you have been taking one of these medicines long term. And please, please do not stop a prescription medicine on your own because of something you read in a Facebook post. But I spent ten months believing I was losing my mind. I was losing a mineral. Anyway. I took Marilyn a bag of her own when she got home. She is back at the Thursday group. Not the front steps yet, but she is driving in the daytime again, and last week she stayed for the whole thing 🙏 Sorry for the long post, I know it got away from me. I am putting an article below that explains why you could be magnesium deficient like I was a whole lot better than I can. 👇 https://spnutrition-us.com/pages/magnesium-deficiency