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I listened to my dead husband's voicemail for the 47th time this morning while I sat in my car in the Kroger parking lot with the engine off. "Hey Janie, it's me, traffic's a mess on 64, I'm gonna be late, don't hold dinner, love you, bye." 11 seconds long. 11 seconds. I have it memorized down to the breath he takes between "love you" and "bye." There's a tiny pause there, like he was about to say something else and didn't. I've spent two years wondering what he was about to say. Frank died on October 11th, 2023. Massive heart attack at his desk at the Charleston Gazette-Mail, where he'd been a sports editor for 31 years. He was 61. He'd left me that voicemail on April 3rd of that same year. Six months and 8 days before. I save it. I move it from one phone to the next. The Verizon guy who set up my new iPhone last December asked me if I needed help transferring anything and I said yes, my voicemails, all of them, and he looked at me funny because nobody saves voicemails anymore, but he did it, and I gave him a $20 tip because he didn't ask why. My name is Janet. Everyone calls me Janie. I'm 58 years old. I live in a brick split-level on the south end of Charleston, West Virginia, the kind of street where the dogwoods come in pink along both curbs in April and where everyone knows whose Subaru is whose. Frank and I bought the house in 1997 when our son Eli was 4. Eli is 33 now, lives in Pittsburgh, calls me every Sunday at 6:30 PM whether I pick up or not. I haven't checked my blood pressure since the funeral. I have one of those little arm cuffs in the linen closet, on the second shelf, behind the towels Frank's mother gave us in 1995. It still has the receipt taped to the side because Frank refused to throw away the receipt on anything that cost more than $40. The cuff was $52 from CVS. He bought it after his cardiologist Dr. Marsh told him he needed to start tracking his numbers at home, and Frank, being Frank, came home with one for each of us, because he said if we were going to do something we were going to do it together. He took his every morning at 6:14 AM, sitting at the kitchen table in his blue plaid robe, before the coffee was even done. He wrote the numbers in a yellow legal pad with the date and a little notation if he'd slept bad or eaten something salty. The legal pad is still in the kitchen drawer. I haven't opened it. I can't. I haven't taken mine since the morning of October 12th, 2023. Which was the morning after Frank died. I sat at the table by myself and put the cuff on and watched the number come up and then I took the whole machine and put it in the linen closet behind the towels and I haven't touched it since. The number was 168 over 102, if you're wondering. I am not stupid. I know what 168 over 102 means. I worked as the office manager at a pediatric practice for 24 years before I retired in 2022. I sat across the desk from Dr. Rinaldi for nearly a quarter century, and I know what a blood pressure reading is supposed to look like, and I know what one looks like when it isn't. But I also know what grief is. And grief, the kind that comes for a woman who lost her husband suddenly at 61 with no warning, is the kind that says: I will deal with my body later. I will get through Thanksgiving first. I will get through Christmas. I will get through his birthday. I will get through our anniversary. I will get through the one year mark. I will get through the two year mark. And the years go by and you don't deal with it. And every morning you wake up and your head feels heavy and your face feels hot when you stand up too fast and you tell yourself it's because you didn't sleep well, or because you're dehydrated, or because the weather changed, or because you had two glasses of wine with Carol on Thursday night. You tell yourself anything except the thing. The thing is, my husband died of his heart at 61. And I am a 58-year-old woman whose blood pressure was 168 over 102 the morning after he died and who has not checked it in two years and three months. Carol Whitfield has been my best friend since 1996. She lives 4 streets over on Ridgeway Drive in a yellow Cape Cod with a flagstone path. She and her husband Dr. Marsh, the same Dr. Marsh who'd been Frank's cardiologist, used to come over for cards every other Friday. Dr. Marsh is 64 now, retired in 2024 from his practice but still consults two days a week at CAMC. He was the one who pronounced Frank at the hospital. He drove me home in his own car. He sat at my kitchen table at 9:47 PM that night and didn't say anything for 23 minutes, just sat there with his hand on my hand, and then he said, "Janie, the man loved you to pieces. He talked about you like a boy." I haven't been able to look him in the eye since. Not because of anything he did. Because of what he knows. He knows Frank's numbers. He has them in a file somewhere. He knows what Frank's blood pressure was running in those last 6 months. He knows what mine was the only time I let him take it, at Carol's 55th birthday party in 2022, when he had one of those wrist cuffs out and was making people guess theirs as a joke. Mine was 154 over 96 with a glass of pinot grigio in my hand. He'd raised an eyebrow at me. Said, "Janie, when are you coming in?" I'd laughed and walked into the kitchen for more cheese. A year and a half later he was driving me home from the hospital where my husband had died. He has tried to talk to me three times in the last two years. At Frank's memorial. At Eli's wedding in May of 2024. Standing in line at the deli counter at Capitol Market last September. Each time I have made my voice bright and said "I am doing fine, doctor, you take care now," and walked away. Last Thursday he showed up at my front door at 4:47 PM with a Pyrex casserole dish covered in tinfoil. Carol was at her sister's in Roanoke. He was alone. He had the casserole in both hands and a folder under his arm. I stared at him through the storm door for a long second. "Carol made too much lasagna," he said. "She said you'd take the leftovers off our hands if I begged." That is a lie. Carol does not over-make lasagna. Carol portions everything in advance because she ran the church food pantry for 11 years. Dr. Marsh knew I knew it was a lie. He held the casserole up a little higher and said, "Can I come in, Janie." I let him in. He set the lasagna on the kitchen counter, on the exact spot where Frank used to set the mail on Tuesdays. Then he sat down at the kitchen table without being asked, in Frank's chair, and put his hands flat on the placemat, and looked at me, and said: "Janie, you haven't been in to see anyone in two years. I know because I have a friend at every cardiology practice in Charleston and I asked. I'm not here as your doctor. I'm here as Frank's friend. And I cannot watch this happen twice." I didn't say anything. He opened the folder. In it was a single piece of paper. A photocopy of Frank's last in-office blood pressure reading from August 14th, 2023. 8 weeks before he died. 158 over 96. With a little note in Dr. Marsh's handwriting in the margin: "FU 3 mo. discuss adjustment." He never made it to the follow-up. Dr. Marsh slid the paper across the table toward me. Then he said, very quietly: "Janie, what's yours running." And I started to cry. Not the polite cry I'd done at the funeral. The other kind. The kind that comes up out of your stomach. I cried in Frank's kitchen for what felt like an hour but was probably 4 minutes. Dr. Marsh didn't move. He didn't reach for me. He just sat there and let me do it. When I stopped, he said: "Go get the cuff." I got the cuff. I took it out of the linen closet behind the towels. The receipt was still taped to the side, faded now. I brought it to the kitchen and I sat down across from him at the table and he wrapped it around my arm himself, gently, the way he must have wrapped it around hundreds of women's arms over 34 years of practice, and he pushed the button. The number came up. 171 over 104. We sat there looking at it. He didn't tell me what to do. He didn't lecture me. He didn't write a prescription. He said, "Janie, I want to tell you something I've been telling a handful of people the last 14 months. I would have told Frank if I'd known then what I know now. Will you let me say it." I nodded. He sat back in Frank's chair. He told me he'd retired in part because he'd gotten tired of telling 60-year-old men what their wives were going to find when they came home from the hospital that night, and he'd started reading. Reading on his own time. About what actually happens inside a blood vessel when the pressure stays high for years. He said the inside of your blood vessels has a thin living wall. Just one cell layer thick. He called it the endothelium but he said I could just think of it as the inside lining. He said that lining is the part that decides whether your blood vessels open up or stay tight. It produces a molecule called nitric oxide, and the nitric oxide is what tells the vessel walls to relax. He said years of inflammation and stress and processed food and grief and not sleeping right wear that lining down. He said when the lining isn't healthy, it can't produce as much nitric oxide. The vessels stay tight. The blood forces its way through. The pressure goes up. And the higher the pressure goes, the more it punishes the lining, which produces even less nitric oxide. A cycle that feeds itself. He said the medications he'd prescribed Frank, and the ones he would have prescribed me if I'd come in, work by forcing the vessels open. He said they do not touch the lining. He said the lining keeps deteriorating underneath, and the dose goes up over time, and that's why people end up on three medications instead of one, and four instead of three. He said that was the conversation he'd been about to have with Frank at the follow-up Frank never made. He said he'd been looking for something that helped support the lining itself. He said his daughter, who is a nutritionist in Asheville, sent him an article about a fruit called amla. He said the article was good. He said he read the original studies. He said the science is real, and the mechanism makes sense, and the studies aren't perfect, but he's been taking it himself for 11 months. He said he'd brought a bottle with him. In the folder, under the photocopy. It was a small bottle with a green label. Said Alevia on it. He didn't push it across the table. He just left it next to the photocopy of Frank's last reading and said: "I'm not selling you anything. I don't get a cent. I'm telling you what I'm taking and why." Then he said the thing that broke me a second time. He said: "Frank would have taken it, Janie. If he'd known. He was that kind of man. He would have read the same articles I read and he would have ordered a bottle for both of you. You both would have been on it for two years by now." I looked at the bottle on the table next to the paper that said 158 over 96. I think you can guess what I did. I want to slow down here and tell you what I learned in the next 4 days, because I think it matters. I am not a woman who buys things from Facebook. I am not a woman who falls for things. I worked the front desk at a pediatric practice for 24 years and I have heard every miracle pitch you can imagine from every essential-oil-pyramid-scheme cousin in the state of West Virginia. I am suspicious by trade. So I read for 4 days before I took the first capsule. Here's what I figured out, as a 58-year-old woman with no medical degree but a quarter century of sitting next to a doctor at lunch. Your blood pressure is not a separate problem from the rest of your body. It is a downstream signal of what is happening on the inside of your blood vessels. The inside lining. The endothelium. When that lining is functioning the way it did when you were 30, it produces nitric oxide. Your vessels relax. Your blood flows easily. Your pressure stays where it should. When the lining is worn down, the lining produces less nitric oxide. Your vessels stay tight. Your heart has to push harder. The number on the cuff goes up. Pills can lower the number. Pills cannot heal the lining. What amla appears to do is different. It contains compounds called emblicanins that help support that inner lining. When the lining is supported, it can start producing more of its own nitric oxide, the way it did when you were younger. Vessels can relax more naturally. Blood flows more freely. The pressure on the walls can ease. And when the pressure eases, the lining isn't under the same constant beating anymore. The cycle can start to break. Pressure can come down. Not because something forced it. Because the body is doing what it already knew how to do. The lining just had to be supported first. That sentence sat in my kitchen with me for a long time the night I read it. The lining just had to be supported first. Frank had been on losartan for 6 years. The dose had been raised twice. Two months before he died, Dr. Marsh had wanted to add a second medication. Frank had pushed back. He'd said he wanted to try diet first. He'd been doing the DASH diet for 11 weeks. He'd lost 9 pounds. His pressure had not budged. Because the diet wasn't reaching the lining. And the pill wasn't reaching the lining. Nothing he had ever taken or eaten in 6 years had reached the lining. I ordered a bottle that Thursday night. From the website Dr. Marsh wrote down on the back of the photocopy. alevia.com/amla/33. He told me to use that link because it had something to do with their guarantee. 90 days. If it doesn't work, you send the bottle back and they refund you. Every penny. I want to say something about that guarantee. Because I'm 58 and I have been around long enough to know that a real money-back guarantee is rare. The losartan Frank took for 6 years did not come with one. The DASH diet book on his nightstand did not come with one. The wrist cuff at Carol's birthday party did not come with one. Nothing about his hypertension treatment, in 6 years of treatment, came with a refund if it failed. It failed. Nobody offered Frank his time back. Nobody offered me my husband back. Alevia offers you 90 days. You take it for 90 days. If your pressure doesn't move, you send the bottle back and they refund you. That is more than fair to a woman who has been burned before. The bottle arrived on Tuesday. I took the first two capsules with my eggs Wednesday morning. November 27th. The morning before Thanksgiving. Eli came home for Thanksgiving. He noticed I'd cried. He didn't ask why. He hugged me longer than usual at the door and said, "Mom, you look tired." I said, "I know." I started taking the cuff out of the linen closet every morning at 6:14 AM. Frank's time. I sat at the kitchen table in his blue plaid robe, which I'd been wearing since the second week after he died. I wrote the numbers in the yellow legal pad. In the same column where Frank had stopped writing. I started a new page so the handwriting wouldn't confuse me. Week one: 168/103. 171/104. 169/102. 166/101. 170/103. 165/100. 167/102. I cried looking at those numbers. Because they were almost identical to the morning after he died. Week two: 162/99. 164/100. 159/97. 161/98. 158/97. 160/98. 156/96. Week three: 152/93. 154/94. 149/91. 151/92. 148/90. 150/92. 147/89. I called Dr. Marsh on the morning of December 18th when the cuff said 144/87 because I thought it might be broken. He laughed for the first time I'd heard him laugh in two years. He said, "Janie, it's not broken." I am sitting in my kitchen right now, on a Tuesday morning in May, writing this. I took my pressure 47 minutes ago. 128/81. I have not seen a number that low since 2019. I want to tell you about the other things, because the numbers don't tell the whole story. I sleep again. I don't mean I sleep more hours. I mean I sleep through the night without waking up at 3:14 AM with my heart in my ears. That had been happening for 17 months. I'd been telling myself it was grief. The headaches I'd been having since the funeral are gone. I thought those were grief too. They weren't grief. They were 168 over 102 for two years. I can walk to the end of my driveway and back without my face getting hot. I'd stopped getting the mail myself in October of 2024. I have a neighbor's grandson who'd been doing it for $5 a week. I called him last Saturday and told him he was fired but I'd still pay him through June. My son called me last Sunday and said, "Mom, you sound like yourself again." He didn't know I'd ever stopped sounding like myself. I haven't listened to the voicemail in 6 weeks. I still have it. I'll always have it. But I don't need to listen to it every morning to remember Frank, because for the first time in two years I'm not punishing myself for surviving him. If you're reading this and you have a number you've been hiding from, a cuff in a linen closet, a yellow legal pad you can't open, a voicemail you've memorized down to the breath, I want you to hear me. Frank ran out of time because nobody told him there was anything to do besides the pill. I do not want you to run out of time. Alevia has a 90 day money-back guarantee. If your numbers don't move, you send the bottle back and they refund you. No phone call. No fight. They refund you. The losartan didn't come with that. Neither did the diet book. Neither did the six years of three-month follow-ups. This does. P.S. You'll know it's working before the cuff confirms it. For me it was the headaches. Mine had become so constant I'd stopped noticing them, the way you stop noticing a fan running in another room until somebody turns it off. Week two the room got quiet. I sat at the kitchen table with my coffee and realized I didn't have a headache, and I started crying because I hadn't remembered what it felt like to not have one. If you've been telling yourself the headache is grief, or the heaviness in your chest is grief, or the way your face gets hot when you stand up is grief, please consider that some of it is grief and some of it might be the lining, and there's something you can do about the lining. P.P.S. About the guarantee. 90 days is unusual. Most companies give you 30. 30 days is barely long enough to know if something's working for a body that has been running on a damaged lining for a decade. Alevia gives you 90. That is three full bottles. That is enough time to see your numbers move on a cuff you've been hiding from. The only reason a company offers a guarantee that long is because they already know what you're going to find out. P.P.P.S. Dr. Marsh told me Alevia is a small company and they sometimes sell out. He'd had to wait 8 days for his second bottle in February. I keep two in the kitchen drawer now, where Frank's legal pad used to live. One open, one sealed. Because I am not going back to 171 over 104. Not for one morning. Not for one week. Not for anyone. P.P.P.P.S. If you're a widow, or a wife whose husband won't go to the doctor, or a daughter watching your mother slide the cuff back into the linen closet, please send her this. I am writing it because no one wrote it for me when I needed it. I am writing it because the casserole Dr. Marsh brought over wasn't a casserole, it was a chance, and I almost didn't open the door. Open the door. Open the linen closet. Open the bottle. Frank would have wanted you to. 👉 alevia.com/amla/33