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I haven't played pickleball in 4 months and the worst part is nobody asked me to come back. I figured it out on a Tuesday morning in February. I was scrolling Facebook with my second cup of coffee and there was a photo of Bev and Maryann and Kathy at the Bobby Jones courts, the three of them with their paddles, sunburned, laughing, with a fourth woman I didn't recognize between them. The caption was "Tuesday morning regulars, never miss a week." I had been the fourth woman for 6 years. I sat on my couch in my robe and I looked at that photo for a long time. Long enough that the coffee in my mug went lukewarm. Long enough that the dog, my late husband's beagle, came over and put his chin on my knee like he could tell something was happening. The thing nobody tells you about being a 54 year old widow is that people will be very kind to you for about 18 months and then they will quietly stop including you, and they will tell themselves they're being respectful, and you will not be able to argue with them because they're not wrong, exactly. You did pull away. You did say no a few too many times. You did show up to one game and stand at the net looking pale and then sit down on the bench for the rest of the afternoon. But you didn't think it meant they'd stop calling. My name is Lorraine. I'm 54. I live in Sarasota, Florida in a small ranch house on a cul de sac off Bee Ridge Road. I moved here with my husband Frank in 2017, when he retired from running an HVAC business in Cleveland. He was 5 years older than me, big Polish guy, big laugh, hands like catcher's mitts. We had 2 grown sons in Ohio. We had a plan. We were going to do all the Florida things people make fun of. Pickleball, early dinners, condo association arguments, the works. Frank died on a Sunday afternoon in October 2022. He sat down in his recliner after we got home from church and he never got back up. The medical examiner told me it was a massive heart event, that he was probably gone before he hit the cushion. I don't know if he was. I don't know if I'll ever know. I'm not writing this to talk about Frank. I'm writing this to talk about what happened to me after Frank, because it almost killed me too, and I don't want it to almost kill the woman who's reading this on her phone in her own quiet kitchen. I want to tell you about the pickleball ladies first. Bev is 61, retired from a credit union in Indianapolis, married to a man named Hal who builds birdhouses in his garage. Maryann is 58, a snowbird from Toronto with a hip replacement and a mouth on her like a longshoreman. Kathy is 55, my age, the one I was closest to. Her son was Frank's godson, and she sat next to me at the funeral and held my hand through the whole eulogy and didn't say a single word, which was exactly what I needed. The 4 of us played every Tuesday morning at 9:30 at the Bobby Jones courts. We were not good. We were tragic. Maryann couldn't run for the ball, Bev had a backhand like a screen door, Kathy had a habit of yelling "MINE" and then completely whiffing it, and I had a serve that went into the net more often than it went over. But we played. For 6 years. Every Tuesday at 9:30, even in August when the heat was a hammer, even in February when the snowbirds tripled and the courts were a circus. The last time I played was October 8th of last year. It was 92 degrees. We were finishing the second game and I went up to the net for a soft shot, a dink, the easiest shot in the world for a person who has played for 6 years, and the world tilted. I didn't fall. I want to be clear about that. I didn't faint. I just went grey, and the court went sideways for about 4 seconds, and I held onto the net post with my right hand until I could see straight again. Kathy was on me in a second. She had me sitting on the bench under the umbrella before I could say a word. She made me drink the entire contents of her water bottle. She asked me three times if I needed to call 911. I told her three times I was fine, just the heat, just dehydrated, just hadn't slept well, just probably overdid it. I made a joke about being old. We all laughed too loud. I didn't go back the next Tuesday. I told Kathy I had a doctor's appointment. The Tuesday after that I told her I was having the carpets cleaned. The Tuesday after that I told her my son was visiting. The Tuesday after that, she stopped asking. By December I'd convinced myself it was for the best. By January I'd convinced myself they hadn't really been my friends to begin with. By February I was looking at a photo of them on a court with another woman and my chest hurt in a way that had nothing to do with my blood pressure. I want to tell you about the doctor visit too, because that's where the second piece of this story starts. I went to my GP, a woman named Dr. Patel who took over the practice when my old doctor retired. I told her about the dizzy spell. I told her I'd been more tired than usual. I told her my face had been flushing for no reason. I told her sometimes when I bent over to feed the dog, the room went a little fuzzy when I stood up. She took my blood pressure. Then she took it again. Then she made me lie down for 10 minutes and she took it a third time. 162 over 98. She looked at her tablet. She said, "Lorraine, the last time we saw you, almost 2 years ago, you were 138 over 84. Before that, in 2021, you were 128 over 80. Your numbers have been climbing. I think it's time we talk about a third medication." A third medication. Because I was already on 2. Lisinopril for the pressure, started in 2020 when I was 142 over 88 and Dr. Patel's predecessor decided the conversation was over. Hydrochlorothiazide, the water pill, added in 2022, about 4 months before Frank died, when the lisinopril alone stopped doing the job. And now Dr. Patel was holding her tablet and looking at me with that particular kind of doctor face and saying it was time to add a third. I sat in that exam room and I felt something I hadn't felt in a long time. I felt angry. I felt angry because I had done the things. I had cut back on the salt. I had bought the heart-healthy cookbook from Costco. I had lost 11 pounds the year before Frank died. I had walked every morning. I had played pickleball every Tuesday for 6 years. And the numbers kept climbing anyway, year after year, and the doctor kept adding pills, and nobody, not a single doctor, in 4 years, had explained to me why my body was doing this. The script just got bigger. I sat in my car in the parking lot of Dr. Patel's office and I didn't drive home for 25 minutes. I called my sister in law Patricia, Frank's younger sister, in Akron. I told her about the third pill. I told her about the pickleball ladies. I told her about the dog sleeping on Frank's slippers in the closet. Patricia is 51. She's been a critical care nurse at the Cleveland Clinic for 28 years. Before that she was an ER nurse. Before that she was a Marine. She is the only person in my life who will tell me the truth at full volume without softening it. She listened to me for about 11 minutes. Then she said, "Lorraine, I want you to drive home. I want you to make a sandwich. I want you to eat the sandwich. And then I want you to call me back at 7 o'clock tonight and we are going to have a different kind of conversation." I called her back at 7:02. She said, "I'm going to tell you something I've been wanting to tell you for a year and I haven't because I didn't want to overstep. But I'm overstepping now because Frank would have wanted me to." Then she said, "Before you start that third pill, hear me out." What Patricia explained to me on that phone call, sitting in her living room in Akron while I sat at my kitchen counter in Sarasota with the dog at my feet, was something no doctor had ever taken the time to explain to me. And I'm going to do my best to tell you the way she told me, because it's the part of this that changed everything. She said high blood pressure isn't really a "high blood pressure" problem. That's the symptom. That's the number on the cuff. The number on the cuff is just the body telling you something deeper is going on. And the deeper thing, she said, is happening in the lining of your blood vessels. She told me about the endothelium. That's the smooth, slick, single-cell-thick lining on the inside of every blood vessel in your body. When you're young, that lining is flexible and slippery and your vessels can expand and contract on demand. They can open up when you exercise. They can dilate when you eat. They handle pressure changes like a healthy organ should. But the endothelium takes a beating over decades. From sugar. From stress. From inflammation. From the slow grinding wear of life. And as it gets worn down, it stops producing enough of the signals it needs to keep your vessels relaxed and flexible. One of those signals, she said, is called nitric oxide, and it's the chemical your body uses to tell your vessels "okay, open up, let the blood through." When the lining wears down, the nitric oxide goes down. When the nitric oxide goes down, the vessels can't relax the way they used to. When the vessels can't relax, the heart has to push harder to get the same amount of blood through them. And the number on the cuff goes up. She said, "Lorraine, your blood pressure isn't going up because you're doing something wrong. It's going up because the inside of your blood vessels is asking for help and nobody has been listening." She said the pills work. She was very clear about this. The lisinopril helps relax the vessels chemically, the water pill takes some of the volume off the system. But neither of them addresses what's actually happening in the lining. Neither of them helps the endothelium repair itself or produce more of the signals it needs to keep your vessels healthy. She said, "The pills manage the number. They don't manage the cause. And that's why the dose keeps going up." I sat at my kitchen counter with the phone on speaker and I felt like somebody had finally pulled a curtain back. Then she said, "There's something I've been giving my husband for about 14 months. He's 57, he was on 2 pills, his numbers were climbing, his doctor was talking about a third. He's down to 1 pill now and his numbers are the best they've been since 2019." She told me about Alevia Amla. She told me that amla, also called Indian gooseberry, is a fruit that has been used in India for about 2,000 years. She told me she'd come across it in a continuing education course on nutrition for nurses, of all places, and that the research she'd read had stuck with her. She told me the fruit is loaded with a specific family of compounds called polyphenols, particularly something they call hydrolyzable tannins and a marker compound that researchers have been getting more interested in over the last decade. What those compounds appear to do, she said, is support the endothelium. The lining. The thing that's been worn down. They're associated with healthier markers of inflammation in the blood vessels. They've been linked, in studies, to better function of the lining itself. They've been connected to better nitric oxide availability, which is the chemical your vessels use to relax. In other words, she said, amla appears to help your body do what it's been trying to do for itself the whole time. It doesn't force the pressure down. It supports the system that's been struggling to keep the pressure down on its own. She said, "It's not a replacement for the medication. I want to be very clear about that. You don't stop the lisinopril. You don't stop anything without your doctor. But you add this. You add support for the actual lining. And in 60 days you go back to Dr. Patel and you let her take a new reading." She paused. "And Lorraine. The brand. There are a lot of garbage brands of amla on the internet. My husband uses one called Alevia. It's a clean formulation, it's made in the USA, and they have a 90 day money back guarantee. If you take it for 90 days and you feel nothing, you send the bottle back and they refund you. You're out the cost of nothing." I ordered it that night. I sat at my kitchen counter in the same robe I'd been wearing all day. I used the laptop. It took me about 4 minutes. The bottle arrived 6 days later. I want to tell you the rest of this honestly, because if I oversell it you won't believe me, and if I undersell it I won't be telling you the truth. The first 10 days I felt nothing. Around day 14 I noticed that I'd stopped having the late afternoon crash. I'd been falling asleep on the couch around 3 PM every afternoon for about 14 months. I just hadn't been doing it. I didn't connect it to the amla yet. I thought I was sleeping better at night. Around day 21 I noticed I wasn't getting the flush in my cheeks anymore. The thing where my face would go bright red for 20 minutes after I'd done something as small as carry the groceries in. The flush had been with me so long I'd stopped seeing it. Around day 30, I bent down to feed the dog and I stood up and the room didn't go fuzzy. I stood there in the kitchen with the dog bowl in my hand and I felt my own pulse in the side of my neck and it was steady and even and I had to sit down at the counter because I almost cried. Around day 42, I checked my blood pressure with the cuff I keep on the bathroom shelf. 144 over 87. The lowest reading I'd had in over a year. Around day 51, I checked it again on a Sunday morning. 138 over 84. The same numbers I'd had in 2020, before any of this started. I went to see Dr. Patel on day 64. I hadn't started the third pill. I hadn't told her I hadn't started it. I just walked in. She put the cuff on me. She did the lying-down protocol. She did it twice. 132 over 81. She looked at her tablet. She looked at me. She said, "Lorraine. What have you been doing." I told her about Patricia. I told her about Alevia Amla. I told her about the endothelium and the nitric oxide and the lining of the vessels. I told her I'd been on the amla for 64 days. I told her I had not started the third pill. She listened all the way through. She didn't interrupt me. When I finished, she nodded slowly. She said, "Keep doing what you're doing. We're not adding the third pill. In 6 months I'd like to talk about whether we can taper the hydrochlorothiazide. We're going to keep watching it." I sat in my car in her parking lot again. I didn't drive home for 35 minutes. But this time I wasn't angry. This time I was something else. I think the word for it is awake. I called Kathy that night. I told her I owed her an apology and I owed her an explanation. I told her about Frank, in a way I hadn't been able to tell anybody before. I told her about how the dizzy spell at the courts had scared me so badly I'd hidden from her for 4 months because I was afraid if I went back I would scare her too. I told her about Patricia and the amla and the new numbers. I cried. She cried. We were on the phone for an hour and 18 minutes. I went back to the Bobby Jones courts on a Tuesday morning in late March. 9:30 AM. The temperature was 71. The 4th woman, the new one, whose name turned out to be Diane, was very nice about it. She said she'd been a stand in and she was happy to step back. She said she'd been hoping to meet me. Bev hugged me for a long time. Maryann pretended she wasn't crying but she was. Kathy didn't say anything at all. She just handed me my old paddle, which she'd been keeping in her trunk for me for 4 months. I lost every game we played that morning. My serve still goes into the net. Maryann still can't run for the ball. Bev still has a backhand like a screen door. Kathy still yells "MINE" and whiffs it. We've played every Tuesday since. I'm telling you this because I know somebody is reading it on her phone right now and she has gotten a phone call from a doctor about a third pill, or she has a number on a cuff that keeps climbing, or she has been waving off her own dizzy spells the way I waved off mine, or she has watched her husband go grey and now she's afraid she's next. I know that woman is reading this because I was that woman in February. The number on your cuff is not the problem. The number is the alarm. The problem is happening underneath the surface, in the lining of the vessels that nobody has been talking to you about, in a system that has been quietly asking for help for years. Alevia Amla supports that lining. It supports the body's own ability to keep those vessels healthy and flexible. It is associated with better markers of the inflammation that wears the lining down. It is one bottle a month, 2 capsules a day with breakfast, made in the USA, with a 90 day money back guarantee that means if you take it for 90 days and you feel nothing, you send the bottle back and you get every dollar refunded. I am not telling you to stop your medication. I did not stop mine. I am telling you to add support for the part of your body that has been carrying the weight of the problem for years without anybody noticing. You can find it here: 👉 alevia.com/amla/33 P.S. Kathy is on it now. She started in late April. Her numbers were creeping the way mine had been. She told me last Tuesday morning at the courts that she's been sleeping through the night for the first time in 3 years and that her husband Roy has stopped making jokes about her face being red after they walk the dog. She didn't tell Roy what she'd started. She wanted to see if he'd notice. He noticed. P.P.S. Diane plays with us sometimes when one of us can't make it. She brought her sister Pat last week. Pat is 56 and on 2 BP pills and her doctor just brought up a third. I gave her Patricia's phone number on a napkin in the parking lot. P.P.P.S. If you are a widow, or you are getting close to becoming one, or you have watched somebody you love go too soon from a heart event, I am asking you to take this seriously. The pills manage the number. But the lining is what fails. And the lining is what the research keeps pointing back to. You have 90 days to send it back and lose nothing. You have a lot longer than that to keep losing pieces of your life if you don't. I sat on a bench under an umbrella for 4 months because I was afraid. I'm not afraid anymore. 👉 alevia.com/amla/33