Midlife Wellness Report Facebook ad: “Feel Like Yourself Again”

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I put Dana’s pickleball paddle in the trunk of my car on a Tuesday afternoon in June and I didn’t give it back to her for eleven days. Because for eleven days I couldn’t figure out how to hand it to her without one of us crying. We’d only played twenty minutes. She’d walked off the court at the community center on Cheshire Road and sat on the bleacher in the sun for a while, and then she’d said she needed to go home, and I’d said okay, and I’d driven her home, and we hadn’t talked in the car. When I pulled into her driveway I forgot she’d left her paddle in the back seat. I remembered halfway home. I almost turned around. I didn’t turn around. I drove home instead and I put her paddle in the trunk of my Highlander with the reusable Kroger bags and the jumper cables and the folded blanket for Biscuit, and I closed the trunk, and I stood in my garage for a minute in the June heat with my hand still on it. I’m a 57-year-old retired 4th grade teacher and I stood in my garage staring at a trunk in the middle of the afternoon because I could not figure out how to tell my best friend of 30 years that I had watched her get smaller for five straight years and I didn’t know how to keep pretending I hadn’t. I want to be careful how I say the next part. Because Dana is going to read this. She said she wanted me to write it. But if you have a friend you’ve been watching disappear — the kind of disappearing where nobody else has noticed yet, because she’s been dressing around it and rescheduling around it and laughing it off for four years — this is for you. I want to tell you what happened over the next four months. Let me back up. My name is Karen. I’m 57. I live in Delaware, Ohio, in the same brick ranch my husband Ron and I bought in 1998. Ron sells industrial paint and is retiring in November whether he wants to or not. Our daughter is in Columbus and our son is in Charlotte. We have a terrier mix named Biscuit who is eleven years old and snores like a chainsaw and has one and a half teeth left, and I love him more than I probably should. Dana and I met in September 1994 in a hallway at Ohio Wesleyan University in a dorm that no longer exists. She was reading a Dean Koontz book upside down. She said the ending still worked the same way. That was 31 years ago this month. She is godmother to my daughter. I am godmother to hers. Five years ago last spring, two months after her 52nd birthday, she called me and asked if I wanted to try pickleball with her at the community center. That summer we played four days a week. That was the last summer she was Dana. I want to tell you what I mean by that. Not that she got sick. Not that anything dramatic happened. She got quieter. The first summer she was the loudest one on the court. She talked trash. She talked to the ball. She talked to me the whole car ride home about the calls she’d blown and the drop shots she wanted to add. The second summer she stopped drinking water on the court because she said she couldn’t stand losing her spot to go to the bathroom. The third summer she started arriving after we’d already stretched. The fourth summer she cut back to Tuesday only. One game, some weeks. The fifth summer — this past summer — she stopped hosting the Saturday brunches. She’d hosted them at her house since 2020. Egg casserole, fruit salad, cinnamon rolls from Bob Evans, coffee. Nine women, sometimes ten. She’d hosted 43 in a row and then she just stopped. When I asked her why, she said she wasn’t up for it, in a voice that didn’t invite the next question. I told myself it was menopause. I told myself it was the shoulder she’d hurt in 2022. I told myself it was Mike being retired and getting on her nerves. I told myself a lot of things. She started buying her tops one size up. I noticed the tags. I never said anything. Dana notices when people notice, and I didn’t want to be that. By last spring she was radius-mapping the courts. She’d sit in the car in the parking lot and go into the community center bathroom before she walked out to play. She turned down the Sarasota tournament trip last February. She said it was the flights. It wasn’t the flights. Our little pickleball group takes a photo at the end of every summer session. Dana got in the back row for the last three summers. In the last one, she stood behind Gail Petrofsky, who is 5’2”. Nobody said anything. I want to tell you about Gloria Beckman. Gloria was in our club. She stopped coming three summers ago. She kept saying she’d be back in the fall. She never came back in the fall. She’s at the community center sometimes on Tuesdays now, sitting on the bench in the sun near the parking lot, watching. She wears the same navy windbreaker. I did not want Dana to be Gloria. I want you to understand — I did not let myself say that out loud for eight months. But it was there. You have to understand — Dana had been trying. She had been trying to fix her body for four years. She did Whole30 twice. The second time she made it 26 days and cried into a plain chicken breast at her kitchen island because she had stopped noticing food. She drank celery juice for six months. Sixteen ounces every morning. She kept the produce receipts in a manila envelope so she could track whether it made a difference, and then she stopped opening the envelope. She spent $800 on an Instagram gut-healing PDF from a woman with 400,000 followers whose face was on the cover. 47 pages. Dana keeps it in the drawer with her taxes. She spent $1,400 on a functional medicine intake in Cleveland in the fall of 2022. GI-MAP, hair analysis, food sensitivity panel. The doctor sent her home with a supplement list of eleven bottles. She did the probiotic rotation. Align. Culturelle. Florastor. Seed at $58 a month. There was one at $89 a bottle whose name we’ve both forgotten now. She cut dairy. Then gluten. Then eggs. Then FODMAPs. Then nightshades. She ate rice and chicken for three weeks in the spring of 2023 and didn’t feel any different. She wore an Oura ring for a year. She bought a Squatty Potty. I’m not going to say more about that. She tried prayer. She’s Methodist. She’s not joking. Her doctor told her to keep doing what she was doing and that some of it was probably her age. She was 55. I want to tell you about the morning of June 14th. I’d been up since around 4am. I’d tried to go back to sleep and I’d given up and I’d made coffee in the dark and I’d sat at our kitchen table with my hands around the mug and I’d been thinking about the paddle in my trunk for two hours. At some point around 5:37 I said it out loud to Biscuit. Biscuit was asleep on the kitchen mat and did not hear me. I said: what if we’ve been trying to fix the wrong thing for her. For four years. What if it isn’t a diet. What if it isn’t a probiotic. What if it isn’t even a colon problem at all. I’m not a person who says things like that. I taught spelling and long division for 32 years. I don’t do essential oils. I make my grandson a peanut butter and shredded cheddar sandwich when he comes over, because he’s four and he asked for it once and I never got around to telling him it was weird. But I said it out loud in my kitchen at 5:37am on a Tuesday and I couldn’t unsay it. Two weeks later my college roommate Marnie called me from Cincinnati. Marnie and I talk every Sunday. She and I met the same fall I met Dana. She still lives on Erie Avenue in the house she raised her three kids in. I’d been telling her about Dana for months, in the low-grade way you tell your college roommate things over the phone. She’d been listening. She said her daughter Eliza — who’s a PA at a gastroenterology practice in Cincinnati — had mentioned something at Christmas. Something Marnie had halfway forgotten but had thought about again when I’d talked about Dana the week before. Marnie said: Eliza told me at Christmas there’s a whole thing gastros are behind on. It’s not bacteria. She said the word and I couldn’t repeat it. She said it’s underdiagnosed in women our age. Marnie said: Eliza doesn’t sell anything. She works for a two-partner practice and drives a 2017 Corolla. She just mentioned it. I want to be precise about that. Because I have been on the phone with women trying to sell me things my whole adult life, and Eliza was 34 years old and had told her mother in passing at Christmas without ever mentioning it to me once. She’d also told her mother the water thing — that women 45 to 60 should drink their water at room temperature in the morning, not iced. It slows the whole system when it’s cold. She’d said that first. It was a free thing. It cost her nothing to say. I wrote down the word Marnie had tried to pronounce. I sat with it for two days. Then I drove to the CVS on Sandusky Street and I stood in the aisle they call Digestive Health. I counted 22 products on three shelves. I’m not exaggerating. I counted. Twenty-two. All fiber. All probiotics. Two stool softeners. Three Miralax jugs of graduated sizes. Not one bottle on any shelf mentioned what Eliza had mentioned. I stood in the aisle for eleven minutes. I thought about Gloria on the bench. Then I went home. It was 1:34 in the morning when I finally understood it. I want to tell you what I mean by “understood.” I’m a retired 4th grade teacher from Delaware, Ohio. I understand fractions. I understand cursive. I do not understand PubMed. I had 19 tabs open. I’d been reading since about 9pm. I’d read one article three times and I still wasn’t sure I’d read it right. I kept scrolling back up and reading a paragraph again and going wait — what. I rolled my eyes at first. I don’t want to pretend I didn’t. I’ve had women send me links to things for the last ten years. Detox foot pads. Alkaline water. A woman on Instagram who sells you a $79 tea and a lecture. I’ve clicked on maybe two of them in ten years. But this one was different, and I want to tell you why. It was the forums. I read forum posts for over an hour. Women my age. Women older. Women who sounded like Dana. One woman had written that she’d stopped taking pictures with her granddaughter for two years, and when she came back to it, her granddaughter had said “you’re squishier now, Grandma,” and she couldn’t stop thinking about it. I read that one four times. I read about the microbe. Marnie had been trying to pronounce it AR-KEY-uh and it turned out she was right and I was the one who’d been saying it wrong to myself for two weeks. I sounded like an idiot on the phone with her the next day. I kept saying “like fruit going brown” and waving my hand, and she was in Cincinnati, she couldn’t see me waving. I read for another hour. I ended up on a company site and I read reviews for over an hour more. Women my age. Saying the same things Dana had been saying to me on court for five summers. I ordered two bottles at 2:41 in the morning. One for me. One for Dana. The 90-day money-back guarantee is the only reason I ordered them. I want you to understand that. At 57 I am not throwing 60 dollars down a hole again. I checked the return policy three times before I clicked. I typed “return policy” into their search bar. I read it twice. I opened a new tab and read it again on my phone. Then I closed the laptop and went to bed and did not tell Ron until the bottles arrived. Here is what I understood — at my level, which is fourth grade spelling teacher, not microbiologist. Bacteria is one branch of life. Archaea is a different, older branch. They aren’t the same thing. Probiotics are aimed at bacteria. When your problem isn’t bacteria, probiotics can’t touch it. Archaea in the gut produce methane. Methane tells the muscles of the intestine to slow down. Too many methanogens, everything moves at a fraction of its normal speed. Bloating. Backup. The middle that shows up out of nowhere. There’s a plant compound called berberine that addresses part of it. There’s a second called allicin — from aged garlic — that reaches the strains berberine can’t. And a third called piperine — from black pepper — that carries both into the bloodstream at 2,000 times the absorption of either one alone. That’s the technical version. Here’s how I finally understood it, and how I told Dana at her kitchen table on a Sunday afternoon: For five years, Dana had been playing tennis at the pickleball court. Every protocol she’d tried — the Whole30, the celery juice, the $1,400 functional medicine, the $89 probiotics — was aimed at bacteria. Bacteria wasn’t her problem. She had been showing up to the wrong sport with a very expensive racket for four years. And every laxative on the CVS shelf was designed to force her gut to move. Not one of them was addressing what was slowing it down. She’d been trying to bail a boat with a hole in it, and everyone was arguing about the color of the bucket. If you remove what’s slowing the motor, the motor works on its own. That’s what “restore” means. That’s what the reviews meant. That’s what the women on the forum meant. Nobody was talking about laxatives or forcing anything. They were talking about their bodies going back to how they used to work. I didn’t fully believe it at 2:41 in the morning. I just knew Dana had tried everything else, and none of it had been aimed at what a PA in Cincinnati had mentioned to her mother in passing at Christmas. I drove to Dana’s on Sunday June 30th with her paddle in my back seat and two bottles of something called Berbino in a paper bag on the passenger seat. I gave her the paddle first. She held it in her lap. I said: I want you to take a bottle of this with me for 90 days. That’s it. If nothing changes, we never talk about it again. There’s a 90-day money-back guarantee — I checked it three times before I ordered — and I’ll return both bottles myself. Dana looked at me for a while. She said she’d think about it. She started it that Wednesday. I want to say something once and I’m not going to say it again. Dana did not stop anything her doctor had told her to do. She kept doing what she was doing. This is not medical advice. I taught 4th grade for 32 years. Please talk to your own doctor before you change anything you’re doing. Week one, nothing happened. Dana texted me on July 9th and said “I feel like I flushed 60 dollars.” I said, “me too honestly.” I meant it. I was already writing a customer service email in my head. Week two — I want to be careful how I say this — Dana called me on a Wednesday and mentioned during a completely unrelated conversation about our kids that she’d been sleeping through the night. She said it like it wasn’t the point of the call. It wasn’t the point of the call. She’d called to ask if my daughter Emily was pregnant. Emily wasn’t pregnant. My son’s wife was. My daughter was furious. Week three we played on Tuesday morning. Dana got to a ball at the kitchen line she’d been giving up on for a year. She didn’t say anything. I didn’t say anything. I hit the next ball into the net because I was watching her. Week four Dana played all three games. All three. She didn’t sit out the second one. She hadn’t played three games in a row since 2023. Week five was the fitted shirt. I want to tell you about the fitted shirt. It’s a coral-colored short-sleeve she bought at TJ Maxx in 2021 and wore twice and put in the back of her closet. She wore it to pickleball on the last Tuesday in July. I saw it in the parking lot before she got out of her car. I sat in my Highlander for a minute pretending to look at my phone. I did not want her to see my face. Week six Dana hosted Saturday brunch for the first time since Christmas of 2023. Nine of us. She made the egg casserole. She got the cinnamon rolls from Bob Evans. Nobody said anything about it because nobody had known it was gone. Week eight Dana said yes to the Cape May tournament in October. She hadn’t said yes to a tournament since 2022. Week ten was the club photo at the end of the summer session. Dana stood in the front row. Straight-on to the camera. Not behind Gail. Not in the back. I sat in my car in the parking lot afterwards for eleven minutes and I cried the way I don’t cry. Ron was in Michigan for his sister’s birthday. I called him anyway. He said, “you got her back.” I said no. She got herself back. Dana had her annual OB-GYN appointment in September. Her doctor asked her what she’d been doing. Dana told her. Her doctor said: whatever you’re doing, keep doing it. This is consistent with a settled hormonal environment. She did not recommend it. I want to be clear about that. She said “keep doing what you’re doing.” She’d been saying that for four years. But this time she was saying it about something that was actually working. We drove home from the Cape May tournament on a Sunday evening in October. Dana was in the passenger seat of my Highlander. Her paddle was on the back seat next to a Cracker Barrel bag with her sunglasses on top of it. Ron and Mike were driving home from a different weekend. Around the exit for Frederick she was watching the road and she said something I’ve been thinking about since. She said: I was going to sell my paddle in October. She said: I hadn’t told anybody. I was going to say it was my knee. She said it flat, watching the road, like she was reporting the weather. She has said less honest things than that to me at the funerals of both of her parents. Dana doesn’t say things like that out loud. She never has. I didn’t say anything back. I just held her hand across the center console for the next four miles. We hit Emmitsburg and she said, “there’s a Sheetz.” I got off at the exit. I want to talk to you for a minute. If you have been watching a friend disappear — the kind of disappearing where nobody else has clocked it yet because she’s been dressing around it and laughing about it and rescheduling for four years — I see you. If you have a friend who used to say yes to everything and now says maybe, I see you. If you’ve watched her arrange her whole life around where the bathrooms are and pretend she wasn’t doing it, I see you. If you’re the one still driving her home from things, I see you. If you’re the one hiding it, and your best friend hasn’t figured it out yet — I see you too. Both of you. She’s paying more attention than you think she is. I am not a doctor. I taught fourth grade for 32 years. I can’t promise this is going to work for you or for the person you love. I can tell you that Dana had tried everything for four years and everything she’d tried had been aimed at the wrong branch of life, and when she finally tried something aimed at what was actually happening in her gut, her body came back. She’s still taking it. So am I, honestly. I take it too. The link is at the bottom of this post. There’s a 90-day money-back guarantee. It’s the only reason I ordered it in June, and it’s the only reason I’m sending you to it now. You risk 60 dollars for 90 days. If nothing changes, you send the bottles back — even the empty ones. They refund every dollar. I asked. **>> berbino.com** **P.S.** Dana asked me to tell you that when she got in bed the night of the club photo she cried for 20 minutes and Mike thought she’d hurt herself. She told him about the paddle in my trunk. He said he’d wondered. He’d wondered for two years. He hadn’t known how to ask. The small things are the whole thing. A life is made out of Tuesday mornings and coral shirts and front rows. **P.S.** I checked the return policy three times before I ordered. Ninety days. They refund you even if the bottles are empty. I called and asked because Ron said no company actually does that. They do. The woman on the phone was named Renee and had a golden retriever puppy barking in the background. She was very patient with me. **P.S.** They ran out of stock for about two weeks in August and I couldn’t get my second bottle when I needed it. It made me nervous. So I keep one bottle in the medicine cabinet and one in my kitchen drawer next to the batteries. I’d rather be six months ahead than caught short. **P.S.** If you have a Dana in your life, send her this. Just the link. Don’t explain. She’ll know what to do. There’s some other 57-year-old woman out there right now standing in her garage with her hand on a trunk, and she does not know how to hand a paddle back to her best friend. Tell her about Dana. **P.S.** There’s a woman named Gloria who used to play at our club. She stopped coming three summers ago. She kept saying she’d be back. She’s at the community center some Tuesdays, sitting on the bench in the sun, watching. I’ve been trying to figure out how to walk over. I haven’t figured it out yet. If you know how, come find me. — Karen

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Feel Like Yourself Again

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