Ad copy

I had to hide my hands under the dinner table at my own son's birthday last Saturday so my grandkids wouldn't see them shaking when I tried to cut the lasagna. I've been a mechanic for 38 years. I own Bortolami's Auto, on Saginaw Street in Flint, Michigan, between the old Coney Island and the laundromat with the cracked sign. My father opened it in 1971. I took it over in 1994 when his back finally went. My name is on the building. My name is in the phone book. My name is on the side of the tow truck. And last Saturday, at my own kitchen table, with my wife Linda's lasagna sitting in front of me steaming, I couldn't pick up the serving spoon without it rattling against the side of the pan. So I put my hands in my lap. I sat there with my hands in my lap like a 4 year old being scolded, and I let my son Anthony serve me, and I pretended I was just being polite. My grandson Mikey, who's 8, said "Pop pop, why aren't you eating," and I said "I'm letting it cool, buddy," and Linda gave me a look across the table that I've been seeing more and more lately. It's the look of a woman who knows. I want to tell you who I was before this started. I'm Dom. Dominic Bortolami. I'm 63 years old. I've lived in the same house on West Court Street since 1986. Linda and I bought it the year Anthony was born. It's a 2 bedroom brick ranch with a detached garage I built myself in 1992 out of cinder block I hauled from the Lowe's on Miller Road. I could pick up a Chevy small block by myself when I was 35. Not on a hoist. With my arms. I'd grip the intake manifold and walk it from the engine stand to the workbench like a man carrying a trash can. I've changed the front pads on a '73 Charger in 28 minutes. I've pulled a transmission from a Silverado on a creeper in my own driveway with nothing but a floor jack and a 6 pack of Stroh's. My hands have been in engines since I was 11 years old, when my dad sat me on a milk crate in the bay and handed me a 9/16 wrench and told me to find the loose bolt. These hands. These same hands. Last Tuesday I dropped a 10mm socket on the shop floor and I couldn't pick it up. I'm not exaggerating. I knelt down. I tried to pinch it between my thumb and finger. My fingers wouldn't close. I tried 3 times. I had to scoop it into my palm with the side of my hand like a toddler scooping cereal. I looked around to make sure nobody saw. My apprentice, a 24 year old kid named Travis, was in the back fixing a cooling fan. He didn't see. The customer was outside on his phone. He didn't see. But I knew. I went into the bathroom in the back of the shop and I stood at the sink and I looked at my hands under the fluorescent light and I felt something I haven't felt since my father died in 2007. I felt scared. I felt actually, deeply, all the way down into my chest scared. Because if these hands stop working, I don't know who I am. I want to back up. This didn't start last Tuesday. This has been creeping up on me for 4 or 5 years and I've been pretending it wasn't. It started in my knees, around 58. They'd ache after a long day on the concrete. I figured, fine, I'm getting older, I work on concrete, that's the job. I bought one of those rubber mats from Harbor Freight and I started taking ibuprofen with my coffee. Then it moved to my shoulders. Reaching up to pull a transmission jack handle, I'd feel a deep grinding under the joint, like sand in a hinge. I started using my left hand more. Then my left started doing it too. Then my hips, getting in and out of the truck. I started leaving the door open for an extra 5 seconds before I tried to swing my leg out. Then about 18 months ago, my hands. The grip was the first thing. I couldn't crack open a stuck oil filter without a wrench anymore. Used to do it with my bare hand. I started keeping a strap wrench in my back pocket and pretending it was just because it was faster. Then the dexterity. Couldn't thread a small fastener with my fingers anymore. Used to be able to start a 6mm bolt one handed in a tight spot, by feel, eyes closed. Now I drop them. I drop them constantly. I have a coffee can in the bay full of bolts I've dropped and given up on. Then the pain in my knuckles when I wake up. Like somebody snuck in overnight and filled the joints with broken glass. I'd lay there at 5 AM and flex my fingers 50 times before I could get out of bed. Linda noticed. Of course she noticed. Linda notices everything. She'd watch me struggle with the pickle jar at dinner and she'd just quietly take it from me and twist it open and hand it back without saying anything. I love her for that and I hate her for it at the same time. I know that's not fair. But I do. I went to the doctor last spring. Dr. Patel. She's been my doctor for 20 years. She listened to everything. She did some x-rays. She did some blood work. She said it was osteoarthritis and it was just part of getting older. She gave me a pamphlet about hand exercises and a prescription for a stronger anti-inflammatory and she told me to lose 15 pounds. I took the pamphlet. I took the prescription. I lost 8 of the 15 pounds. Nothing changed. I want to tell you what scared me most about Saturday at the dinner table. It wasn't the spoon shaking. It wasn't even hiding my hands. It was the look on my son Anthony's face. Anthony is 37. He's got a good job at the GM plant in Lordstown. He's the kind of son who calls his mother every Sunday and shows up on Father's Day with a cooler of beer he brewed himself in his garage. He's a good kid. He's a better man than I was at his age. When he stood up to serve me the lasagna, he didn't say anything. He just stood up and took the spoon out of the pan and he put a piece on my plate. Like it was nothing. Like it was the most natural thing in the world for a son to serve his 63 year old father at the dinner table. But I saw his face for half a second before he caught it. He looked sad. He looked at me the way I used to look at my father in the last 18 months of his life, when his back was so bad he couldn't lift a coffee cup with both hands. That's the look that broke me. Because I'd been telling myself for 4 years that I wasn't there yet. That I wasn't my dad in the last bad chapter. That I was still Dom Bortolami, the man with the hands, the man with the shop, the man who could pick up a Chevy small block. And in one half second look across a kitchen table from my own son, I saw that I was already past it. That he'd already started putting me in the chapter I was so afraid of. I didn't sleep Saturday night. I lay there next to Linda and I listened to the furnace clicking on and off and I thought about my father in 2007, sitting in a wheelchair in our living room, asking me to scratch a spot on his shoulder he couldn't reach. I got out of bed at 4:15 AM Sunday morning. I went into the kitchen. I made coffee. I sat at the table and I opened my laptop, which I almost never do. I'm not a computer guy. Linda does the bills. I do the bay. But I sat there in the dark in my underwear and a tee shirt and I started typing. I started by searching what Dr. Patel had told me. Osteoarthritis. Part of aging. I wanted to know if there was something else going on. I wanted to know if 38 years of working with my hands had finally come due, like a mortgage payment. What I found, over the next 3 hours, sitting at that kitchen table while Linda slept, changed how I'm thinking about all of this. I'm not going to pretend I understood every word of it. I'm a mechanic. I read repair manuals and the Sunday paper. But you give me a pattern and I can follow a pattern. That's the whole job. That's how you find a vacuum leak. You follow the pattern. And the pattern that started forming as I read was this. The cells in your joints, the ones that maintain the cartilage and produce the fluid that keeps the joint moving smoothly, they need energy to do their work. A lot of energy. That energy gets made in tiny little structures inside every cell called mitochondria. Mitochondria are basically the engine block of the cell. They're where fuel becomes power. Every cell in your body has them. The cells in your hands. The cells in your knees. The cells in your shoulders. And as you get older, those mitochondria stop working as well as they used to. Not because of one thing. Because of a lot of things stacked on top of each other. Years of inflammation, years of stress, years of processed food, years of toxins, years of just being alive. The mitochondria run dirtier. They produce less power. They build up more waste. When that happens, the cells in your joints don't have what they need to do their job. The cartilage doesn't get maintained. The fluid doesn't get replenished properly. Inflammation that should be cleared out hangs around. The whole system starts running on fumes. It's like an engine running with bad spark plugs and dirty oil. It still runs. It just runs worse and worse, and louder, and rougher, until something gives. That's what was happening to me. It wasn't that my hands were "old." My hands were starving. I read until the sun came up. And the question I kept circling back to was the simplest one. If the engine is dirty, what cleans it? If the cells aren't producing enough power, what supports the power supply? That's where I found Amla. I'd never heard the word in my life. I'm a guy from Flint. The most exotic thing in our cabinet is the garlic powder. Amla is a small green fruit that grows on a tree in India. They've been using it in their traditional medicine for over 3,000 years. The old translation of its name means something like "the nurse," because of how broadly it supports the body. But what stopped me was what the research has been finding about it at the cellular level. Amla has been associated with activating something called AMPK. AMPK is one of the master switches in your cells. When AMPK is active, it tells your cells to clean up. To clear out damaged components. To support the mitochondria. To run cleaner. When AMPK is active, the engines in your cells can start producing power more efficiently again. The way they did when you were younger. And when those engines are running better, the cells in your joints can start doing their job again. Maintaining cartilage. Managing inflammation. Producing the fluid that keeps things moving. I sat there at the kitchen table and I thought about my coffee can full of dropped bolts. I thought about the strap wrench in my back pocket. I thought about my grandson asking why I wasn't eating. I thought, oh. Oh. So that's what it was. I'm not telling you Amla is a miracle. I'm not telling you it's going to give you back your 30s. I'm a mechanic. I don't do miracles. I do diagnostics. But for the first time in 4 years, I had a frame for what was happening to me that wasn't "you're getting old, take this pamphlet, lose 15 pounds." The frame was, your engines are dirty, and there's something that supports them. I bought a bottle of Alevia Amla that Sunday morning. Linda came down at 7 in her bathrobe and asked what I was doing on the laptop and I told her, and she said "okay, Dom," in the voice she uses when she's deciding whether to let me try something or whether to fight me on it. She let me try. It came in 4 days. Two capsules a day, with breakfast. I want to tell you what happened over the next few months, but I want to be careful. I don't want to be the guy on Facebook telling you about a miracle. There are no miracles in Flint, Michigan. We don't believe in them here. But here's what I noticed. The first 3 weeks, nothing. I'm being honest. I almost called Linda over to look at the bottle one morning and tell her I was going to send it back. She told me to give it more time. In the second month, I noticed I was getting out of bed without flexing my fingers 50 times first. I'd just get up. I didn't notice it had stopped. It just stopped. Around week 7, I picked up a 10mm socket off the shop floor without thinking about it. I didn't realize what I'd done until I was already standing back up with it in my hand. I stood there in the bay holding that socket and I felt something move in my chest. In the third month, Linda watched me open the pickle jar at dinner. She stopped chewing. She looked at me. I didn't say anything. She didn't say anything. She just kept eating. Last week, I cracked open a stuck oil filter on a '04 F-150 with my bare hand. I sat down on the bumper of that truck and I laughed. Travis, the apprentice, came over and said "you good, Dom?" and I said "yeah, kid, I'm good." And here's the moment I want to leave you with. Yesterday was Sunday. We had dinner at our house again. Anthony and his wife and the grandkids. Linda made a roast. Mikey was sitting next to me at the table. The roast came out. Linda set it in front of me with the carving knife and the fork. I picked up the knife. I picked up the fork. My hands didn't shake. I carved the roast. The whole thing. 8 slices. Even cuts. I served Mikey first. He looked up at me and he said "Pop pop, you cut it good." I said "thanks, buddy." And I kept carving. And I didn't put my hands in my lap. And I didn't pretend I was letting it cool. And I didn't catch any look across the table from Linda or from Anthony. I just carved the roast like a 63 year old man who's been doing it his whole life. I want to say something to you, if you've read this far. If you're a man over 50 who works with your hands, or used to, and you've been told for years that the stiffness and the dropping and the grinding and the pain when you wake up are just part of getting older, I want you to think about what I learned at that kitchen table. "Just getting older" is sometimes a story we tell ourselves about something that has a different name underneath. The cells in your joints need power to do their job. The engines in your cells make that power. Sometimes those engines need support. I'm not your doctor. I'm not telling you what to do with anything you're already taking. Talk to your doctor. Show her this if you want. But the thing I wish I'd known 4 years ago, when my knees first started aching on the concrete, is that there are people researching this stuff. There are answers besides a pamphlet and a stronger anti-inflammatory. Alevia Amla is what worked for me. Two capsules a day, with breakfast. They make it here in the USA from a standardized extract of the Indian gooseberry. They give you 90 days to try it, and if it does nothing for you, you send it back and they refund you. No fight. No questions. I bought my fourth bottle yesterday morning before church. If you've got hands you used to be proud of, and they're not what they were, I want you to at least look at it. Because I cut the roast last night. And I almost missed the chance to do that, because I almost let myself believe what everyone told me was just aging. If you want to look at it, here's where you can. P.S. The 90 day guarantee is what got me to try it. I figured if it did nothing in 3 weeks I'd send it back. I never sent it back. I just kept buying more. P.P.S. Linda hasn't opened a pickle jar for me in 6 weeks. She mentioned it last night. She wasn't sure if I'd want her to bring it up. I told her to bring it up. I want to remember. P.P.P.S. If you're a son or a daughter watching your father struggle with something he used to do without thinking, don't wait until you see the look on his face at a dinner table. Don't wait until he's hiding his hands in his lap. Just have the conversation. He'll listen. He's tired of hiding too. 👉 https://alevia.com/amla/33