Ad copy

I found my mother's medication list folded inside a Bible in her nightstand the day after we buried her. It was on a piece of yellow legal pad paper, the kind she used for grocery lists, in her tight little handwriting. 14 medications. Doses next to each one. Times of day in the margins. The names of three different cardiologists at the top. She'd been carrying that list in her purse for the last 8 years of her life and I never knew. I sat down on her side of the bed and read it twice. And then I read it a third time. And then I went to her kitchen drawer, the one to the left of the sink where she kept her reading glasses, and I started counting. 14 pairs of cheap reading glasses. The kind from the spinning rack at Walgreens. Black ones, tortoise shell ones, a pair with rhinestones on the temples that I'd never seen her wear. Three pill organizers. One for the week. One for the month. A small one for travel. A blood pressure cuff with the velcro worn soft. A bottle of children's aspirin she'd been chewing one of every morning for as long as I could remember. And my mother, Janelle Adeyemi Carter, had died at 67 of a stroke in the breakfast nook of her own kitchen on a Tuesday morning in February. My name is Tamika. I'm 56 years old. I live in a small ranch house off Old Shell Road in Mobile, Alabama, about 12 minutes from the house my mother lived in for 38 years. I'm a probate paralegal. I have been one for 28 years. I know how to clean out a dead person's house. I've helped clients do it dozens of times. I knew exactly what boxes to bring. I knew which days the Salvation Army would pick up furniture. I knew to bring a Sharpie and label everything for my sisters. What I didn't know was that I would find her medication list in a Bible and have to sit down on the edge of her bed and cry like a child. My mother was not a sick woman. That's the part that I want you to understand before I tell you the rest of this. She walked 2 miles a day around the loop at Langan Park. She made her own collard greens and she didn't put a hambone in them anymore because her doctor told her to cut back on sodium. She went to Sunday service at Stewart Memorial AME. She volunteered Tuesdays at the community library shelving children's books. She drank her coffee black. She didn't smoke. She had two glasses of red wine on Saturday nights and that was it. She was on 14 medications anyway. Three for blood pressure. Two for cholesterol. One for her thyroid. A blood thinner. A water pill. Something for her kidneys because of the water pill. Something for her stomach because of all the other pills. A statin. A second statin when the first one stopped working. And three I had to Google because I'd never even heard of them. This is the part nobody warns you about. Your mother starts taking one pill in her 50s for blood pressure that was "just a little high." By her 60s she's on five. By her late 60s she's on 14 and her cardiologist is talking about adding a 15th. And the whole time she's walking 2 miles a day and skipping the hambone and saying, baby, this is just what people my age have to do. I rode in the front seat of her Buick to her appointments for the last 3 years of her life. I sat in those waiting rooms with the Keurig machine and the year old issues of Coastal Living and I watched my mother nod at every new prescription like she was being handed homework. She'd come out, look at me, and shrug. She'd say, Tamika, what am I supposed to do. He's the doctor. In January, exactly one month before she died, her cardiologist told her her LDL was up again. He said they needed to "explore other options." He used those words. Explore other options. As if a 67 year old woman who was already on two cholesterol medications was supposed to have a hearty appetite for exploration. She had a stroke on February 11. In her breakfast nook. Holding a coffee cup. My father heard the cup hit the floor from the bathroom. She was gone before the ambulance got to Springhill Memorial. 3 weeks after the funeral I went to my own primary care doctor for my annual. I'd been putting it off for 14 months. I knew it. She knew it. My husband Derrick knew it. I'm 56. I work at a desk all day. I do not walk 2 miles around Langan Park. I eat too much takeout from the Vietnamese place on Airport Boulevard because Derrick works late at his shop and I don't feel like cooking for one. I sat in the chair across from Dr. Henley and she pulled up my numbers and her face did the thing. The thing where she's about to tell you something but she's pretending she isn't. She said, Tamika, your LDL is 187. She said, your blood pressure is 142 over 91. She said, your A1C is creeping into a place we need to watch. I started laughing. I actually laughed in her face. Not because it was funny. Because I had buried my mother 3 weeks earlier with 14 pills in her purse and now I was sitting in a doctor's office about to be handed my first prescription. I said, Dr. Henley, my mother just died. She said, I know. I said, my mother was on 14 medications and walked 2 miles a day and died at 67. She said, I know. I said, I am not doing that. I am not doing what she did. Dr. Henley is a good woman. She's about my age. She has a daughter at Auburn. She put her pen down and she looked at me and she said, Tamika, I hear you. But these numbers are real. Let's start with a low dose statin and we'll talk about the rest. She wrote me a prescription. I took it. I never filled it. I drove home from that appointment and I sat in my car in my driveway for an hour and 20 minutes. The car was off. The sun was going down. Derrick's truck wasn't home yet. And I made a promise out loud to my mama that I was not going to walk her road. I started reading that night. I'm a paralegal. Reading is what I do. I read contracts and probate filings and case law for a living, and I am very good at telling the difference between a source that knows what it's talking about and a source that's selling me something. I read for 3 weeks. I read at night after Derrick went to bed. I read on my lunch break in the car. I read studies and forum threads and the boring medical literature that most people don't bother with. I learned a few things I want to share with you because I wish someone had told my mother. What I learned was that the way your body manages cholesterol and the way your body manages blood pressure are not 14 separate problems with 14 separate solutions. They're one problem with one root. The arteries in your body have a thin inner lining. Smooth, slippery, alive. When that lining is healthy, blood flows clean. Cholesterol moves through without sticking. Pressure stays steady because the vessels stay flexible. But there's a process happening inside every adult body where that lining gets irritated. Slowly. Decade by decade. By the time you're in your 50s and 60s, the irritation has been building for 30, 40 years. The lining stiffens. The body responds the only way it knows how, by sending repair cells to patch things up. Those patches are what eventually become the plaque your doctor measures with a number. The cholesterol number itself isn't the disease. It's the smoke. The fire is the irritation in the lining. Statins work on the smoke. They lower the number. They don't do much about the fire. That's why my mother could be on two cholesterol medications and still have her LDL "creeping up" 8 years into treatment. The medicines were chasing the number. The fire was still burning. I read about a lot of things in those 3 weeks. Omega 3s. Fiber. Beet root. Hawthorn. Magnesium. CoQ10. All things I'd heard of. All things that have something behind them but nothing that landed like a real answer. And then on a Saturday morning in late March, sitting at my kitchen table with my second cup of coffee, I came across a research summary about a small green fruit I'd never heard of. Amla. The Indian gooseberry. Grown on trees on family farms across India and Nepal. It has been used in Ayurvedic medicine for something like 3,000 years. It is one of the most concentrated natural sources of a particular kind of vitamin C in the world. But more than that, it carries a family of plant compounds called polyphenols that have been studied for their role in supporting healthy vascular function. The lining of the arteries. The very thing I'd been reading about. The way the research framed it stopped me cold. Amla works on the fire, not the smoke. It supports the arterial lining. It supports the body's own regulation of cholesterol synthesis in the liver. It supports the smooth muscle in the vessel walls that keeps blood pressure flexible instead of stiff. It's not a drug. It's not pretending to be one. It doesn't override the body. It supports what the body is already trying to do. I sat in my kitchen and I cried for the second time in a month. Because what if my mother had known. What if somebody had told her in 1998 when she got that first prescription that there was a 3,000 year old fruit on the other side of the world that worked on the cause and not the symptom. She would have eaten it for breakfast every day for the rest of her life. I went down the rabbit hole all the way that weekend. I found a company in Texas called Alevia. They make a pure amla extract in a capsule. No fillers. No fluff. They source the fruit from family farms in India, they test it independently in the United States, and they put it in a clean capsule with nothing else added. They had a 90 day money back guarantee. I'll tell you the truth because lying to you wouldn't help either of us. I have been burned before. I bought my mother a turmeric supplement from a TV ad in 2019 that did nothing. I bought her fish oil pills the size of my pinky that she gagged on every morning for 2 months. I bought myself an ashwagandha capsule from the vitamin store at Bel Air Mall that gave me a rash on my chest. But this was different. The mechanism made sense. The science was thirty years old, not thirty days. And the guarantee meant if it didn't do anything I wasn't out anything but a few weeks of patience. I ordered a bottle on a Sunday night. It came on Wednesday. I started taking one every morning with my coffee, sitting at the same table where I'd read about it. The first 2 weeks I felt nothing. I almost stopped at day 11. I called my sister Renee in Atlanta and told her about it and she said, baby, give it the full time. Mama always said you don't pull up a plant after 2 weeks to see if the roots are growing. I kept taking it. Week 3, I noticed I was sleeping through the night. I hadn't slept through the night in maybe 6 years. I'd been waking up at 3:14 in the morning like clockwork to use the bathroom and then lying there for an hour. I just stopped doing that. Week 4, my rings fit different. I'd been taking my wedding band off at night for 3 years because my fingers swelled. I forgot to take it off one Tuesday and woke up and it was fine. Week 6, I walked the dog around the block and I didn't have to stop at the corner to catch my breath. I'd been stopping at the corner for so long it had become a habit. I just walked past it. Week 9, I went back to Dr. Henley. I told her I hadn't filled the statin. She started to fuss. Then she pulled up my labs. My LDL had dropped 31 points. My blood pressure was 124 over 79. My A1C was back in the normal range. She sat there with her glasses on the end of her nose and she said, Tamika, what did you do. I told her. I told her exactly what I'd been doing. I told her about Alevia Amla. I told her about the reading. I told her about my mother's medication list in the Bible. She didn't argue with me. She didn't push the statin. She closed my chart and she said, keep doing what you're doing. We'll check again in 3 months. That was 7 months ago. I'm not going to lie to you and tell you I'm a different woman. I'm still 56. I still work at a desk. I still eat too much pho on Tuesday nights when Derrick is at the shop. But I'm not on a single prescription. I take one capsule of Alevia Amla every morning with my coffee. I take a fish oil at night. That's it. That's my whole list. I went to my mother's grave on what would have been her 68th birthday. I sat there on the grass with a coffee from the McDonald's drive thru and I told her everything I'd learned. I told her about the fire and the smoke. I told her I was sorry I didn't know in time. I told her I was going to make sure my sisters knew. I told her I was going to make sure my daughter Jasmine, who is 31 and already has higher blood pressure than I want her to have, knew too. I sat there for an hour and I talked to my mama like she was on the other side of the kitchen table. I'm telling you all of this because if you're a Black woman in your 50s or 60s, if you watched your mother or your grandmother or your auntie disappear into a medication list, if you've been told that the road you're on is just what happens to women like us, please hear me. That is not the only road. There is another one. I am walking it. If you want to look at it for yourself, the company is Alevia. The product is Alevia Amla. They sell it from their own website and they have that 90 day money back guarantee, which is the only reason I had the courage to start. If it hadn't done anything for me I would have sent it back and gone back to square one. I called their customer line one time with a shipping question and the woman who answered was a real person in Texas who didn't rush me off the phone. I take it every morning. My sister Renee takes it now. My cousin Doreen in Birmingham takes it. My daughter Jasmine started taking it last month. Four generations of women in my family have been buried with their pill bottles. I am breaking the chain. If you're sitting in a doctor's office and they're handing you your first prescription and something in your chest is telling you "wait," please listen to that voice. Listen to it before it gets quieter. 90 days. If it doesn't do anything, they send your money back. That's the whole deal. 👉 alevia.com/amla/33 P.S. I want to say this clearly. I'm not telling you to stop your medications. If you're on something, talk to your doctor. I never started mine in the first place, so I had nothing to come off of. But the women I know who have made changes did it with their doctor's involvement, slowly, over months, with their labs checked. Be smart. Be patient. Don't be reckless on my account. P.P.S. My mother's medication list is folded in the front of my own Bible now. I keep it there to remind me what I'm walking away from. Every morning when I take my one capsule with my coffee I think about her. I think about the 14 pairs of reading glasses. I think about the way the cardiologist used the word "explore" like he was inviting her on a vacation. She deserved better. So do you. P.P.P.S. If you have a daughter, please give her a bottle too. Don't wait until she's where I was. Whatever is happening in our blood, in our vessels, in our arteries, it didn't start at 56. It started at 26. The earlier she supports it the easier it stays supported. I wish my mother had known to give one to me when I was Jasmine's age. She didn't know. Now you do. 👉 alevia.com/amla/33