Ad copy

My husband caught his fifth cold from the grandkids in November and I knew if I didn't do something different, I was going to lose him. I don't mean lose him to a cold. I mean lose the man I married. The man who used to throw Mason up over his head and catch him laughing. The man who used to take Cole out in the backyard and chase him with the garden hose all summer. The man who used to crawl on the floor and let Emma put plastic curlers in what was left of his hair. That man was disappearing. And I was the one who kept opening the front door to let the germs in. My name is Linda. I'm 61. I live in a brick ranch off Tates Creek Road here in Lexington, Kentucky, with my husband Roy and a 14 year old beagle named Daisy who hasn't gotten off the couch since 2019. I worked 28 years as an administrative assistant for the Fayette County School District before I retired in 2022. Roy still works part time at the John Deere dealership over in Nicholasville because he doesn't know what to do with himself if he isn't fixing something. We have 3 kids. Two girls and a boy. All grown, all married, all gone. Our daughter Megan lives 11 minutes away in Beaumont and has 3 children of her own. Mason, who's 7 and convinced he's going to play shortstop for the Reds someday. Cole, who's 5 and has the kind of laugh that makes strangers in Kroger turn around and smile at him. And Emma, who's 3 and calls her grandfather Papa Roy because the first time she said it he turned into a puddle, and she's been trying to make him cry on command ever since. We started having them every other Friday about 4 years ago, when Megan and her husband Trevor needed a date night. It became a tradition. They'd drop the kids off after work. We'd order Marco's Pizza. Watch a movie. Roy would build a fort out of couch cushions in the living room and Mason would be in charge of supervising the construction. The kids would sleep on the pull out in the den. Megan and Trevor would pick them up Saturday morning around 9 with two coffees in hand and apologies for being 15 minutes late. It was the highlight of our week. Until it started to cost us. The first time I noticed the pattern was the winter of 2022. Roy got a cold the Tuesday after a sleepover and it turned into bronchitis. He had to go on antibiotics. The doctor at Baptist Health was the one who said it out loud first. "This is the second time this season, Roy. Anything you can do to limit exposure?" I sat in the exam room chair and felt my stomach drop a little, because I knew exactly what the exposure was. Three weeks later, after the next sleepover, he got another cold. Not bronchitis that time but a cough that lingered until Easter. By summer he was fine. Summer was always fine. Nobody gets sick in the summer. But the next winter started the same way. Mason came over with a runny nose he swore was just from the cold air on the drive over. Three days later, Roy was on the couch with a temp of 101. I told Megan we should probably skip a few weekends until the kids were healthier. She felt awful. She offered to keep them home. But Roy wouldn't let me cancel. "It's a cold, Linda," he said. "I'm not gonna miss my grandkids over a cold." He was a Marine. He spent 4 years at Camp Lejeune in the 80s. He doesn't think colds count as real. But it wasn't just colds anymore. In January of 2023 he caught what the urgent care doctor on Richmond Road called "a particularly nasty flu." He missed Cole's 4th birthday party. He missed church for 3 weeks in a row. He lost 9 pounds because he couldn't keep anything down except ginger ale and saltines. I sat in our bedroom for 5 days straight bringing him broth and watching him sleep. I'd never been scared of a flu before. But Roy is 63. And something about watching him under that quilt, with his face turned to the wall and his breathing rattling like an old radiator, made me think things I hadn't thought before. He bounced back. He always bounced back. By March he was out in the yard putting the boat trailer back together and complaining about the price of marine paint. But the pattern didn't stop. Last winter, urgent care twice. Once for what they called walking pneumonia. Once for an ear infection that came out of nowhere, in a 63 year old man, which apparently happens to adults but my whole life I'd never heard of it. He was tired even when he was healthy. He'd come home from the dealership at 3 and fall asleep in his recliner until I called him for dinner. He stopped going to Lowe's on Saturdays. He stopped going to the gun range with his brother Wade. He started saying "I think I'll sit this one out" about things he used to drive 90 miles for. I was watching my husband become an old man at 63. And every other Friday, like clockwork, I was opening the front door and welcoming in 3 small germ factories who I loved more than anything in the world. The moment that broke me happened the Sunday after Thanksgiving last year. Mason was sitting at our kitchen table coloring while I cleaned up the dishes. Roy had gone to lie down because the kids had been over the night before, and he was already feeling that scratch at the back of his throat that meant he was 36 hours away from being flat on his back. Mason looked up from his dinosaur coloring book and said, very seriously, "Mimi, why does Papa always get sick after we come over?" I froze with a dish towel in my hand. He's 7. He notices everything. I tried to laugh it off. "Papa just has a sensitive nose, sweetie. He's fine." Mason thought about that for a second. Then he said, "Maybe we shouldn't come over so much. So he doesn't get sick." A 7 year old. Trying to figure out how to love his grandfather less, so his grandfather wouldn't suffer. I excused myself to the bathroom and cried for 20 minutes. I cried because my grandson had noticed. I cried because he was right. I cried because I had no idea what to do about it. That night I sat on the edge of the bed and watched Roy sleep. His mouth was open. His breathing was that shallow, congested kind that you can hear from across the room. He's a big man, 6 foot 2, but he looked smaller under the comforter than I remembered him being. And I made a deal with myself. I was going to figure this out. I was going to find something. Anything. Whatever it took. Because I was not going to spend the next 20 years explaining to my grandkids why Papa couldn't come to the soccer game, or the birthday party, or the recital. And I was not going to be the woman who stood at her husband's funeral and said, "He was just always catching things, you know how it is." I started where everyone starts. I went down the internet rabbit hole. I bought him elderberry syrup at the Good Foods Co op. He took it for 3 weeks and got sick on day 22. I bought him vitamin C gummies at Costco. They tasted like candy. They did about as much as candy. I had him gargling salt water every night for a month. He looked at me like I'd lost it but he did it. I bought a humidifier for the bedroom. I bought zinc lozenges. I bought a UV wand from Amazon that's supposed to sanitize doorknobs and light switches. I made our daughter Megan wash the kids' hands the second they came in the front door, which she did, with the same patient eye roll she's given me since she was 14. Nothing moved the needle. Roy got sick after Christmas. Roy got sick again in February. Roy got something in March that wasn't quite a cold but wasn't quite not a cold and just sort of lingered for 16 days. I was running out of ideas. And then in April, I went next door to bring a casserole over to Carol. Carol Henderson is 64 and lives in the brick house with the white shutters, two doors down from us. She and her husband Bill have been on this street longer than we have. She retired in 2020 from St. Joseph East, where she'd worked in cardiac care for 38 years. Bill had just had hip replacement surgery on the right side and was holed up in their living room recliner watching the Golf Channel on a loop. Carol asked me to come keep her company because she was, in her exact words, "about to murder him with my bare hands if he asks me to bring him one more cup of coffee." I brought a chicken and broccoli casserole over and we sat at her kitchen table while Bill grumbled at the TV in the other room. I don't remember how we got onto the subject. I think she asked how Roy was. And I made some comment about him being run down again, and Carol said something I'll never forget. "Bill used to catch every single thing the grandkids brought home. We had 4 grandkids in 6 years and he was sick for most of them. I almost lost my mind." I looked at her. "What changed?" She took a sip of her coffee and said, "A nurse I worked with on the cardiac floor told me about something. Garlic extract. The real kind. Not the stuff at the grocery store." I almost laughed. Garlic? I cook with garlic. I put it in everything. I make a chicken with 40 cloves at least twice a winter. If garlic was going to fix Roy, he'd have been fixed by 1994. I told her that. She just smiled. "That's what I said. And then she explained it to me." Here's what Carol told me. Your immune system has 2 layers. The deep layer is the one everybody knows about. The white blood cells that show up after you're already sick. The antibodies your body makes after it figures out what's attacking you. The army that fights the war. But there's another layer in front of that one. A smaller group of immune cells that sit at the gates of your body. Your nose. Your throat. Your lungs. Your gut. The places bugs come in. These cells are called the front line defenders. When they're doing their job, they catch bugs the second they get inside you and shut them down before they take hold. You never even know you were exposed. You don't feel a thing. When they're sluggish, bugs slip past. They get in deep. By the time the rest of your immune system shows up, the bug has set up shop. And you're stuck in bed for 10 days. Some people have those front line defenders firing on all cylinders. Some people don't. The difference, Carol told me, is what those cells are being fed. They run on specific signals. Pungent, sulfur rich signals that human beings have been getting from food for thousands of years. Onions. Leeks. Cabbage. And especially garlic. For most of history, people in places like Central Asia ate garlic every single day. Raw. Fresh. Just pulled out of the ground. And the people in those places had something modern people don't. A baseline level of immune resilience that kept bugs from ever taking hold. Modern garlic, the kind you buy at Kroger that's been sitting in a bin for 6 weeks under fluorescent lights after being shipped from California or China, doesn't have what fresh garlic used to have. The active compound it relies on, called allicin, is fragile. Heat destroys it. Stomach acid breaks it down before your body can use it. So even if you put 40 cloves in your chicken, almost none of it actually makes it into your bloodstream where it can do anything. Carol said the nurse showed her the research. There's a real study out of the University of Florida where they gave 120 people aged garlic extract during cold and flu season. The people who took it showed measurable changes in those front line immune cells. Their cells were more active. More ready. And those people reported fewer sick days and milder symptoms when something did get through. I sat there at her table holding my coffee. I thought about all the garlic I'd cooked Roy over 38 years. I thought about all the supplements I'd thrown at him. I asked her what she gave Bill. She told me a brand called Alevia. They make a garlic extract that's odorless. No garlic breath. No garlic body smell. Two small capsules a day with breakfast. I asked her if it actually worked. She said Bill hadn't had a cold in 14 months. The grandkids had been over a dozen times. He'd watched Maddie, their oldest, through 3 stomach bugs and 2 ear infections, and he'd held her on his lap, and he'd kissed her forehead, and he hadn't caught anything. "He used to be sick more than he was well," Carol said. "Now he goes to the YMCA Tuesday and Thursday, and he hasn't missed a week since June." I drove home and I sat in the driveway for 10 minutes thinking about it. Roy was inside taking a nap because the kids had been over the night before. I pulled out my phone and ordered a bottle. It came on a Tuesday. Three days later. Free shipping. It was a small white bottle with a green label. Inside were 60 capsules, about the size of a vitamin D pill. No smell when I opened it. No garlic odor at all. Just a small clean looking capsule that didn't even rattle when I shook the bottle because they were packed in tight. I put it in our medicine cabinet next to Roy's blood pressure pills and his fish oil. He asked me what it was. I told him. He looked at me the way he looks at me when I'm reorganizing the garage without his permission. Tolerant. Skeptical. Vaguely amused. "Linda. We cook with garlic 4 nights a week." "Just try it for me, Roy." He grunted. He took 2 capsules with his coffee the next morning. He took 2 more the next morning. And the next. I didn't expect anything dramatic in the first week. I wasn't even really watching for it. But by the end of week 2, the grandkids came over for our regular Friday sleepover. Mason had a runny nose he'd been carrying for 2 days. Cole had been coughing all afternoon at preschool, according to Megan. Emma had a low grade fever that had broken Wednesday but she still had that pale, post sick look 3 year olds get where their cheeks look almost translucent. They came in. They climbed on Roy. They breathed on him. Emma fell asleep on his chest watching Bluey. Saturday morning Megan picked them up at 9. Roy spent Saturday afternoon out in the garage rebuilding the carburetor on a push mower he was supposed to have fixed last August. Sunday he was fine. Monday he was fine. Tuesday he was fine. Wednesday I was waiting for it. That little throat clear in the morning. That second cup of coffee because he was dragging. That nap at 4 in the afternoon. It didn't come. Friday came around again. We did it all over again. Different kids' colds this time, but the same deal. They climbed on him. They breathed on him. They wiped their noses on his shirt. Roy stayed fine. I didn't say anything to him about it for 3 weeks because I didn't want to jinx it. But by the start of week 4, I started watching him differently. Not for signs of getting sick. For signs of being well. He was getting up earlier. Going to the dealership 4 days a week instead of 3. He called his brother Wade and made plans to go to the gun range that Saturday. By week 5 he was sleeping through the night again. He'd been waking up around 3 to use the bathroom and not falling back asleep, and that had stopped without either of us noticing it stop. By week 6 he started taking the bottle himself. Two capsules every morning with his coffee, without me reminding him. He keeps the bottle by the toaster now. By week 8 he asked me to order another bottle. He also asked if I was taking it. I wasn't. He told me I should be. I started taking it that week. It's been 9 months. Roy hasn't had a single cold. Not bronchitis. Not the flu. Not whatever weird thing he used to catch that wasn't quite a cold. Not one. He hasn't been to urgent care since last spring. I want to be careful here, because I know how the internet works and I know how this sounds. I'm not telling you that a capsule turned my husband into a different person. He still has a bad knee. He still snores. He still leaves his coffee mug on the windowsill instead of putting it in the sink. But I am telling you he stopped getting sick. And when you've watched someone catch everything for 4 years straight, stopping is the thing. A few weeks ago Mason and I were in the kitchen. He was at the same table where he'd asked me last year why Papa always got sick. He was coloring again. The same dinosaur book, I think. He's been working on the same dinosaur book for a year and a half. Roy walked in from the garage. He'd just spent an hour out there putting a new chain on the chainsaw because the trees in the back needed limbing before the next ice storm. He smelled like 2 stroke oil and he had a smear of grease on his cheek. Mason looked up at him. "Papa, can we go to the park later?" Roy said, "Yeah, buddy. After lunch." Mason said okay and went back to coloring. He didn't ask if Papa felt up to it. He didn't ask if Papa was tired. He didn't ask why Papa always got sick. Because Papa wasn't sick anymore. Papa was just Papa. I stood at the kitchen sink with the water running and I cried for the second time in a year for a reason nobody in the house knew about. If you're reading this and you have a husband who's always catching what the grandkids bring home, or a father, or a brother, or a friend. If you're the one canceling on the people you love because your own immune system can't seem to keep up with everyone else's. If you're tired of being the one who goes down. I'm not going to tell you Alevia is a miracle. I don't think there are miracles. I think there are things that work and things that don't, and most of what gets sold to people like us doesn't work. But Alevia is what worked for Roy. And it's what worked for Bill before him. It's a real garlic extract. Made in the USA. The kind that gives your front line immune defenders the kind of support modern grocery store food just can't deliver anymore. And the part that mattered most to Roy. It's completely odorless. No garlic breath. No garlic body smell. Two small capsules a day with breakfast. That's it. They back it with a 90 day money back guarantee. You try it for up to 90 days, and if it isn't doing anything for you, you ship the bottle back and they refund every penny. No questions. No fine print. 90 days is enough time to host the grandkids 6 times. 90 days is enough time to find out if your husband can sit on a couch with a 3 year old who has a runny nose and not end up in urgent care a week later. 90 days is more than enough time to know. You can get a bottle here: 👉 alevia.com/garlic/7 P.S. The thing nobody told me about losing your husband to a string of small illnesses is that it isn't dramatic. It isn't like in the movies. It's a slow thing. He starts saying no to things. He starts spending more time in his chair. He stops calling people back. You don't notice it's been happening until your grandson asks you a question in your kitchen that he shouldn't be old enough to ask. I noticed. And I did something. And Roy is in our garage right now, sharpening a blade for the riding mower, because spring is coming and he wants the lawn to look nice when the grandkids come over for Easter. P.P.S. If you order, get him on it before the next sleepover. Carol told me when I asked her about timing, "The sooner he's got it in him, the sooner those defenders get the signal." It made sense to me. And it gave us week 2 instead of week 6. P.P.P.S. If 90 days goes by and it didn't do a thing for him, ship the bottle back and they'll refund every penny. You don't have anything to lose except maybe a winter of urgent care copays. Roy's were $75 a visit. We were averaging 3 a year. You do the math. 👉 alevia.com/garlic/7