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My husband's face was gray in the Christmas card. Not the photo paper. Not the lighting. His face. Gray. I was standing in our kitchen on a Tuesday afternoon, holding the proof sheet from the photographer, and I'd looked at maybe 6 of the 12 shots before I noticed it. And once I noticed it I couldn't unsee it. In every single picture. My husband Frank's face was the color of old newspaper. I'd been looking at him every single day for 36 years. And I had not seen it. A camera had to show me. My name is Susan. I'm 61 years old and I live in Saginaw, Michigan. I retired from the post office 2 years ago after 33 years on the same walking route, which is to say I know every porch and every dog and every loose mailbox between Court Street and the river. My husband Frank is 63. He worked at General Motors for 38 years, first on the line and then in supervision, and he retired the same year I did because we'd promised each other we'd do it together. That was the plan. Retire together. Take a trip. See the grandkids. Walk slow. That was the plan. Now I have to tell you about Lorraine, because none of this makes sense without her. Lorraine is a woman about my age who runs a little photography studio out of the bottom floor of her house on the south side of town. She does senior portraits and wedding stuff in the summer, but every November she sets up a Christmas backdrop in her front room and she shoots family Christmas cards. $185 for a 30 minute session and the digital files. I'd been going to her for 11 years. Long enough that she knew my grandkids by name and remembered which one was the shy one. We did our session on a Saturday in early November. Me and Frank, our daughter Becky and her husband, our son Mark and his wife, and the four grandkids. It was the first time in 3 years we'd done a full family picture because Mark's family had moved back from Texas in August. Frank wore the navy sweater I'd bought him for his birthday. I remember everyone laughing at something my granddaughter Hailey said. I remember it feeling like a good day. Lorraine sent the proofs over on Tuesday. She always emails them and then she texts me to let me know they're in the inbox. I was making a cup of tea when my phone buzzed. I sat down at the kitchen table with my tea and my reading glasses and I opened the proofs on my iPad. The first one was a wide shot of everybody. I looked at it. Smiled. The kids looked great. Becky's husband had blinked in this one but you couldn't really tell. I scrolled to the next one. It was a close up of just me and Frank. That was the one where I saw it. I held the iPad closer to my face. I took my glasses off and cleaned them on my shirt and put them back on. I looked again. Frank's skin was gray. Not pale. Not tired looking. Gray. Like someone had drained him from the inside. I scrolled through every single picture. The full family shot. The grandkids alone. Me and Frank alone. Me and our kids. The candid one where he's lifting Hailey up. In every single picture where you could see his face, his face was the wrong color. I stood up and I walked into the living room and Frank was sitting in his chair watching the History Channel and I looked at him. I really looked. And I saw that his face was gray in real life too. When did that happen? When did my husband's face turn the color of the sky in February? I'd been looking at him over coffee every morning for 36 years and I had let it happen by degrees so slow I didn't see it. Every day his face looked like his face had looked the day before, so my brain told me nothing was wrong, and that went on for I don't know how long. The camera had to show me what my eyes wouldn't. I sat back down on the couch across from him and I watched him. He didn't notice. He kept watching the TV. And I saw that he was breathing a little funny. Just a little. Not gasping, nothing like that. But his breath was just slightly heavier than the breath of a man sitting in a chair watching TV ought to be. How long has he been breathing like that? How long has his face looked like that? I went back into the kitchen and I sat down and I tried to drink my tea and I couldn't. It had gone cold while I was looking at the iPad. I called Lorraine that night. I don't know exactly why I called her. I didn't know her that well outside of the once a year sessions. But she was a woman my age and she had taken the pictures and she had seen what I had seen and I didn't know who else to call. She picked up on the third ring. I told her I'd seen the proofs. She said "Susan, can I ask you something?" I said yes. She said "Is Frank okay?" I started crying right there at the kitchen table. She drove over an hour later. Her studio was 12 minutes from my house. She came to the back door because she knows we never use the front, and she let herself into the mudroom and she sat down at my kitchen table and she let me cry for about 5 minutes without saying anything. Then she made us both tea. In my kitchen. Like she lived there. She told me she'd noticed during the shoot. She said his color had been off when he walked in. She said she'd thought maybe it was the November light coming through her front window but when she pulled the files up that night on her monitor she'd known it wasn't the light. It was him. She said she hadn't wanted to be the one to say it. Then she'd seen me scroll through the proofs because she could tell by how long I'd had them open and not responded. She said "Susan. My husband Dale had that same color for 4 years before his heart attack." That sentence sat on my kitchen table between us like a brick. Dale had died 6 years before. I'd been to the funeral. I'd brought a hot dish. Dale had been 64 years old. I asked her what she meant. She said when Dale was about Frank's age his color had started changing. Just a little at first. Then more. She'd asked him about it and he'd said he felt fine. He'd said he was just tired. He'd been working long hours and he was carrying some extra weight and he'd said it was nothing. She said his doctor had told him his blood pressure was on the high side but to watch his salt and try to walk more. She said Dale had walked more. He had cut back on salt. He had tried. But she said his color had kept going. And his energy had kept dropping. And one Saturday afternoon Dale had sat down on the steps of their back deck to catch his breath and he hadn't gotten back up. She told me the cardiologist who'd worked on him at Covenant had told her later that Dale's blood vessels had been deteriorating for years. Just slowly tightening. Slowly losing their elasticity. The blood having to push harder and harder to get through. She said "Susan. The gray was the giveaway. I just didn't know it was a giveaway until it was too late." I sat there and I held my tea and I thought about my husband in the next room. She said "Don't wait until Frank sits down on a deck step." I called Frank's doctor the next morning. They got him in on Thursday. His blood pressure was high. Not catastrophically high. But high enough that the doctor wanted to start him on something and have him come back in 6 weeks. He said something to Frank about how this had probably been building for years and we should have caught it sooner. Frank looked at me when the doctor said that. Just for a second. He didn't say anything in the room. In the car on the way home he said "Did you know?" I said "I didn't know." He said "I didn't know either, Sue. I really didn't." We drove the rest of the way in silence. That night I sat at my kitchen table again with my iPad and I started reading. Now I'm going to do my best to explain what I learned over the next 4 days of reading, because by the end of the week I understood something I'd never understood before and I think you need to understand it too. There's a wall on the inside of your blood vessels. A living wall. A very thin layer of cells that line every artery and vein in your body. That wall is what controls whether your vessels stay relaxed and open, or whether they stay tight. That wall does that by producing something called nitric oxide. Which is a molecule your body makes to relax your vessels. When the wall is healthy, it makes plenty of nitric oxide. Your vessels relax. Blood flows easily. When the wall is worn down, it doesn't make as much. Your vessels stay tight. The blood has to force its way through. That's the pressure. And here's the part that really got me. The more the blood has to force its way through, the more pressure goes onto the wall. Which wears it down further. Which means less nitric oxide. Which means tighter vessels. Which means more pressure on the wall. A cycle that feeds itself. A cycle that gets worse every year. I sat there at my kitchen table on a Wednesday night reading this and I understood for the first time why nothing had worked for Frank's mother and his uncle and everybody else in his family who'd had this same problem. They'd all taken pills. The pills had forced the vessels open. But the wall had kept getting worse underneath. Nothing had ever supported the wall. It's like Frank's friend Bill always says about car maintenance. You can keep refilling the radiator forever. But if there's a leak in the radiator, you're not fixing the car. You're just delaying. The pills delayed. They didn't support the wall. I kept reading. I read every night that week after Frank went to bed. I read about garlic. About beetroot. About magnesium. About fish oil. Beetroot was the one I almost bought. It adds nitric oxide from the outside. People swear by it. But then I read something that stopped me cold. The issue wasn't that Frank's body had run out of nitric oxide. The issue was that the wall was too worn down to make its own properly. Beetroot would have added some from the outside. It wouldn't have done anything for the wall. That's when I came across a fruit I'd never heard of before. Indian gooseberry. They call it amla. The thing that made me sit up was a compound in it called emblicanins. The research on it was talking about how it helps support that inner wall. Not force the vessels open. Not add something from the outside. Support the wall itself. When the wall is functioning better, it can start producing more of its own nitric oxide. The way it did when it was younger. Vessels can relax more naturally. Blood can flow more freely. The pressure on the walls can ease. And when the pressure eases, the wall isn't under the same constant stress anymore. The cycle can start to break. Not because something forced it down. Because the body is doing what it already knows how to do. You just have to support the wall first. I read about that fruit for 3 nights. I read the research. I read everything I could find. By Sunday I had ordered a bottle of Alevia Amla. I want to tell you what happened over the next 9 weeks, and I want to be careful because I'm not a doctor and I'm not going to make claims I can't back up. The bottle came on Wednesday. I told Frank I'd ordered it. I told him about the wall. About the emblicanins. About the cycle. About Dale on the deck step. He listened. He didn't say much. But he held out his hand for the bottle and he read the label. He started taking 2 capsules with his coffee the next morning. Week 1, I watched him constantly. He didn't notice. But I was watching. His color didn't change. He still looked gray to me. I told myself I was being impatient. Week 2, I noticed he hadn't put his hand on the kitchen counter on the way to the back door. He'd always done that. Just rested his hand on the counter for a second when he was walking across the kitchen. I thought it was a habit. It turns out it was a balance thing. He hadn't done it on Tuesday morning. Week 3, his breathing in the recliner sounded different. Not light. But different. Less work to it. Week 4, my sister came over for lunch. Hadn't seen Frank in about 6 weeks. She walked into the kitchen, said hello to him, looked at me kind of sideways, and said quietly when he left the room "Sue, did Frank lose weight?" He hadn't. His face had just stopped being gray. I went back into the kitchen and I leaned on the counter for a minute. Week 6, Frank's follow up appointment with the doctor. The doctor took his blood pressure twice because he didn't believe the first reading. It had come down. Not all the way. But down. The doctor asked him what he'd been doing differently. Frank told him about the amla. The doctor wrote it down in his notes and said "Whatever you're doing, keep doing it." In the car on the way home Frank looked at me from the driver's seat and he said "Sue." I said "Yeah?" He said "I feel like myself." That was the whole sentence. I had to look out my window for a minute because I didn't want him to see my face. Week 7, Frank went out and shoveled the driveway after the first real snow. Whole driveway. Took him 40 minutes. He came back in and his cheeks were red. Pink red. Not gray. Red the way a man's cheeks ought to be red when he's been out in the cold doing work. I made him hot chocolate and we sat at the kitchen table and he told me a story about his first winter at GM and I sat there and I watched his face and I thought, you came back. You came back to me. Week 9 was our 36th wedding anniversary. Frank took me to the Bavarian Inn down in Frankenmuth. Drove us both ways. Held my hand across the table. Ordered the chicken. Told me he was tired by the time we got home but it was a good tired, the kind of tired you get from doing things, not the kind of tired you get from being sick. In our bedroom that night he was getting ready to brush his teeth and he stopped in front of the bathroom mirror and just looked at himself for a minute. I was sitting on the edge of the bed taking my earrings off and I watched him in the mirror. He turned around and he said "Sue. Make sure we do the Christmas card again this year." I said "We do it every year." He said "I want to see what I look like now." I called Lorraine that week. I told her everything. The doctor. The blood pressure. The shoveled driveway. The Bavarian Inn. She was quiet for a long time. Then she said "Susan. I'm so glad." She said "I wish I'd known about this when Dale was here." I didn't know what to say to that. So I just told her I'd see her in November for the Christmas cards. I want to tell you something now, because I think it's the most important thing I have to say. If you're reading this and there's somebody in your life whose color has been off for a while, or whose breathing has gotten a little heavier in the chair, or who you've been telling yourself is just tired because of his job or his age or whatever you've been telling yourself, I want you to look at him. Really look at him. Look at him like a camera would look at him. And if you see what I saw in those proofs, I want you to know what I know now. It's not just aging. It's the wall. The wall on the inside of his blood vessels. The wall that's been deteriorating quietly for years while the pressure has been building. The wall that nothing he's tried has actually supported. You can support the wall. If you want to try what we tried, you can find it at alevia.com/amla/33. It's a 30 day bottle. 2 capsules a day with food or coffee. Made in the United States. Free shipping. The thing that mattered most to me, because I am a woman who does her research before she buys anything, is the 90 day money back guarantee. You can take it for a full 3 months. If you don't notice anything in 3 months, you send back what's left and they refund every penny. No phone calls. No arguing. That guarantee is what let me order it at 11 PM on a Sunday night without asking Frank's permission first. I don't regret a single dollar. P.S. We did the Christmas card last week. Same backdrop. Same sweater. Same Lorraine. When I saw the proofs Tuesday afternoon I cried at my kitchen table again. But it was a different kind of crying this time. Frank's face was pink. His eyes were bright. He looked like the man I married. He looked like the man who walked our daughter down the aisle. He looked like himself. I put the proof up on the fridge that night. He came into the kitchen at midnight to get a glass of water and he saw it and he stood there for a long time looking at it. He didn't say anything. He just touched the picture with his finger. P.P.S. Lorraine called me yesterday. She told me she'd put a bottle on her own kitchen counter last month. She said she was 61 years old and her own color hadn't been great in the mirror lately. She said she figured she'd see what happens. I told her to tell me what she thinks at 9 weeks. Sometimes the photographer needs to be seen too. P.P.P.S. I want to say one more thing about the guarantee, because I know how I think and I think a lot of women reading this think the same way. You're going to look at the price and the bottle and you're going to wonder if it's worth the risk. The 90 day money back is the answer to that. They give you 3 full months. By 3 months, you'll know. We knew by week 4 when my sister asked if Frank had lost weight. But they give you 3 months. And if it doesn't do what you hoped, you don't lose a thing. What I almost lost was my husband. I didn't. 👉 https://alevia.com/amla/33