Cheryl Wittman Facebook ad: “The Natural Way to Support Your Blood Pressure”

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I had a few good weeks last spring where I felt almost like myself, and I almost forgot what was wrong with me. That's the part nobody warns you about. Not the bad days. The good ones. Because the good ones lie to you. They tell you maybe it's gone. Maybe you imagined it. Maybe you're fine. And then a labradoodle pulls you down a sidewalk outside Asheville and you sit on a stranger's porch step for 19 minutes trying not to die, and you remember. My name is Sandra. I'm 61. I live alone in a little yellow house on Persimmon Street, about twenty minutes east of Asheville, with a carport that leaks and a fig tree out back I've been trying to kill for seven years that refuses to die. My husband Ray passed in 2020. A stroke. Sudden. He was standing at the kitchen sink rinsing out a coffee cup and he just went down sideways and took the dish rack with him. By the time the ambulance came he couldn't say my name. He was gone four days later in a hospital bed in Asheville and he never said another word I could understand. I keep his coffee cup in the cabinet now because I can't use it and I can't throw it out. I work part time at the thrift store the Methodist church runs on Main. I sort the donations. I price the books. I knit. I garden when my back lets me. I have one sister, Lynn, who lives over in Weaverville with her husband, and I have her dog Charlie about four times a year when they drive down to Florida to see his people. Charlie is a labradoodle. Cream colored, 62 pounds, four years old, the absolute sweetest animal you've ever met and dumb as a box of rocks. This story is about Charlie. And it's about a porch step I sat on for 19 minutes in front of a house I'd never been to before. And it's about what a stranger told me in those 19 minutes that I think is the reason I'm still here. But I'm getting ahead of myself. Let me back up. I started feeling weird about three years ago. Nothing dramatic. Just little things. I'd stand up from the couch and the room would slide a half inch to the left. I'd carry a box of donated books from the car to the back room and have to set it on the counter and hold the edge for a second. I'd lie down at night and hear my own heartbeat thumping in my ear against the pillow, this slow heavy knock, like somebody at a door two rooms away. I went to my doctor. Dr. Mercer. Busy man. The kind of office where the girl walks you back from the scale and sits you on that high table with your legs hanging and straps the cuff on over your sleeve before you've caught your breath from the hallway. He took my pressure that first visit. 148 over 92. He said, "Well, that's a little up. Could be the visit. White coat thing. Let's keep an eye on it." I said okay. Three months later it was 150 over 90. He said, "Stage 1. A lot of women your age." He started me on lisinopril. Three months after that, still 150-something. He added a second one. Amlodipine. He said, "Are you watching your salt? Walking?" I said yes to both. He said, "Stress?" I said, "I'm a 60 year old widow who prices used paperbacks. My biggest stressor this week was a man who tried to return a toaster he bought at a different store." He laughed. He wrote something down. He said let's keep an eye on it. Keeping an eye on it. That's what they do. They keep an eye on it. While the number sits there in the 150s and the pills pile up and you start to feel like a pot that's been left on the back burner too long. I want to tell you what was happening to my body during those years of "keeping an eye on it," because nobody at that office ever asked me. They asked about the number. They never asked what it felt like to be the person attached to the number. It felt like I was carrying something heavy that nobody else could see. The lisinopril gave me a cough. A dry, scratchy, all-day cough that never once let up in fourteen months. I coughed through the whole sermon every Sunday. People started bringing me cough drops at the thrift store like I was sick. I wasn't sick. That was the medicine. The amlodipine swelled my ankles. By four in the afternoon my feet didn't fit my shoes. I started wearing the same stretched-out slip-ons every day and keeping my good shoes in the closet. I'd sit on the couch at night with my legs up on two pillows, looking at these puffy shiny ankles that weren't mine, thinking: this is the treatment. This is the help. And the readings sat in the 150s anyway. I started taking the elevator at the doctor's office instead of the one flight of stairs. I told myself it was my knee. It wasn't. I stopped going to the Saturday farmers' market with Lynn because the lot is up a little rise and walking it made my temples pound. On the days I did try to go, I'd stop at the mailbox halfway up the rise and pretend to be checking something in it so Lynn wouldn't see me catching my breath. I let the front beds go. Just let them. Weeds came in. The fig tree took the corner. I told myself I'd get to it next spring. And here's the part I've never told a living soul. I got to where I'd take my own pressure four, five times in a row, hoping the next one would come out lower. I learned to drape a dish towel over the little screen while it pumped so I wouldn't watch the number climb, because watching it climb made it climb. I'd sit at my own kitchen table rubbing the side of my neck the way I read about online, trying to trick my body into a lower number before I let myself look. I started to think maybe I was losing my mind. Maybe this is what 60 is. Maybe everybody at church felt this way and nobody said. Maybe Lynn felt this way. Maybe the woman ahead of me at the Ingles felt this way. Maybe we were all just walking around like pots on the back burner, smiling at the potluck, pretending we didn't hear ourselves ticking. I want to tell you about the day with Charlie now. Because it's important. Lynn called me on a Sunday in late April last year. She and her husband were driving to Florida that Friday and they'd be gone nine days. Could I take Charlie? I said yes. Of course. I always say yes. I picked him up Friday morning with his bed and his food bag and his ridiculous little rain jacket, and I brought him home. The first three days went fine. I walked him in the morning, did a short loop, came home, sat on the back step with my coffee. He was happy. I was happy. Day four was a Tuesday. April 22nd. I remember the date because it was supposed to be the day I went back for my three month check. I'd put it off on account of the dog. It was hot for April. Maybe 80 degrees. Sticky. The kind of day where the air has weight in it. I clipped Charlie's leash around 10:30 and we headed up Persimmon like always. He did his sniffing routine for the first little bit. Then he saw the cat. Orange tom, sitting on a fence post about 60 feet up the road on the left. Charlie went from a walk to a dead sprint in half a second. He's 62 pounds. I'm 137. The leash was looped around my left wrist twice because I'd been switching hands. I went with him. I didn't fall, exactly. But my body did something I can only call launching. My arm yanked forward, my chest jolted, my feet stumbled, and I half ran half stumbled about 30 feet up the sidewalk before I got my heels planted and hauled him back. I got him stopped. He was still barking. The cat hadn't moved a muscle. And then I felt it. It started in my temples. A pressure. Like somebody had wrapped a wet towel around my head and was twisting it slow. Then my ears. That pillow-thump, except now it was loud and fast and on both sides, like my pulse had climbed up into my head. Then my vision went funny. Not black. Spotty. Little gray dots drifting across whatever I looked at, and the edges of everything going soft. And then my legs. My legs went to rubber. I didn't fall. I made it about ten more feet to a porch step in front of a brick ranch with a glider on the porch and a flag by the door, and I sat down on the bottom step. Hard. Charlie sat down on the walk next to me and looked at me like he couldn't figure out why we'd stopped. I sat on that step for 19 minutes. I know it was 19 minutes because I kept checking my phone, hoping every time I looked that more time had passed. The first few minutes I was scared in a way I haven't been since the hospital. I thought, this is it, this is the stroke, this is Ray. My head was pounding and my ears were roaring and I tried to remember that thing from the poster, the face, the arm, the speech, and I couldn't make my mind hold the order of it. The next few minutes I started crying. Not sobbing. Just leaking. The kind of crying where you don't make any noise and you don't realize it until something drips onto your collar. The last little while I just sat there with Charlie's chin on my knee, looking at a fig tree in the yard across the street, of all things, thinking about Ray. About how Ray just went down at the sink. About how his pressure was 138 over 88 three weeks before, and the doctor said keep an eye on it. About how I'd been keeping an eye on mine for three years while it sat in the 150s and the pills made me cough and swelled my feet and nothing got better. A woman came out of the brick ranch at some point. I don't know exactly when. I remember her at the screen door first, watching. Then she came down the steps with a jelly glass of water. She handed it to me without saying anything and sat down on the step next to me. Charlie put his head in her lap. She was maybe 66. White hair in a clip. Glasses. A cardigan even in that heat. We sat there a minute. Then she said, "How long have you been having those?" I said, "Having what?" She said, "Whatever that just was. I watched you come up the road. I saw your color go before you sat down. I worked thirty years on a hospital floor. I know that look." I started crying again. I told her everything. I don't know why. I'd never laid eyes on her. Her name was Ruth. She'd lived in that house since the eighties. Her husband Walt had passed six years before, his heart, at 64. She was retired from the hospital. I told her about Ray. About Dr. Mercer. About the cough and the ankles and the 150s. About the dish towel over the little screen. About feeling like a pot on the back burner. She listened to all of it. She didn't say anything for a long while after I finished. Then she said, "Can I tell you something? And you don't have to take it as advice. You can take it as a story." I said okay. She said, "After Walt died, I went into a tailspin. My pressure was bad. I knew it was bad. The doctor put me on a beta-blocker, metoprolol. And that pill turned me into a zombie. I couldn't get off the couch. No spark, nothing. I'd sleep and wake up tired. So I stopped taking it, which I should never have done, and I want to be clear about that, because going off a heart medicine on your own is exactly how people end up where Walt ended up. But I did. And then for about a year I just sat in this house feeling my heart bang around in my chest, waiting for it to be my turn." She looked at the dog. "Then my niece, up in Ohio, mailed me a box. She'd had a scare of her own. She didn't even really tell me what it was. She just said, 'Aunt Ruthie, wear one of these every night for two months. If you hate it, throw the rest out.'" I said, "Wear what?" She pulled up her sleeve. There was a little patch on the inside of her arm, tan, about the size of a silver dollar. She said, "Magnesium. And a little B12. You put it on before bed and it works through the skin while you sleep." I'd heard of magnesium the way you've heard of it. The thing your cousin takes for leg cramps. I didn't know it had a single thing to do with blood pressure. I asked her how she felt. She thought about it. Then she said, "Like I quit waiting for the other shoe to drop." That sentence went into me like a hook. Because that's exactly what I'd been doing for three years. Waiting for the other shoe to drop. Waiting to be the next Ray. Waiting to go down at my own sink with a coffee cup in my hand. I went home that afternoon. I put Charlie in his crate. I sat down at the kitchen table with my laptop, and I went looking. I'm going to tell you what I found, because nobody at that office ever told me any of it. The thing they don't tell you about blood pressure is that the number is a symptom. It's not the disease. It's the smoke. The fire is somewhere else. For me, the fire turned out to be in the muscle. I didn't even know my arteries had muscle on them. I thought they were just pipes. They're not. There's a layer of muscle wrapped around them, and it's supposed to relax — to let go — so the blood has room and the pressure settles. Mine had forgotten how. That's the only way I know to say it. It had been clenched up so long it didn't remember how to let go. And then I found the thing I had to get up and walk around the kitchen about. The thing that tells that muscle to let go is magnesium. Magnesium. The thing I thought was for leg cramps. I read it three or four times to be sure I had it right. There's calcium, which makes the muscle squeeze, and there's magnesium, which lets it let go, and they push against each other like a gas pedal and a brake. And if you're low on the magnesium, the brake's just gone. The muscle keeps squeezing. All day. All night. For years. Then I read the part that made me say it out loud to the dog. About half of us are low on it. Half. And — this is the part — you can't fix it by eating better. I'd spent three years cooking bland and cutting salt and walking, and the one thing I actually needed was the one thing you can't really get back from a salad. The dirt it used to come from is worn out, stress burns through it, and every cup of coffee washes a little more of it down the drain. Three years of doing everything right, and I'd been chasing the wrong thing the whole time. And then I sat there and laughed, except it came out more like a cough. Because that second pill. The amlodipine. The one swelling my ankles up so my own shoes didn't fit. I looked it up. It's a calcium channel blocker. Which, near as I can tell, is a fancy way of saying it's a man-made version of the exact thing magnesium does on its own. They had me swallowing a chemical to do the job a mineral is supposed to do for free — except the chemical does it by force, from the outside, and shoves the fluid down into your feet doing it. That's where my balloon ankles came from. The mineral does the same job from the inside, the quiet way, and your ankles stay your ankles. I had to put the laptop down for a second after that one. Because that's the whole thing, isn't it. They had a pill that papers over the number. Nobody had the one thing that was actually missing. I won't pretend I understood all of it. Some of what I read went clean over my head and I skipped it. But the simple part I understood fine: give the muscle back the magnesium, and maybe it can do its own job again. And the same mineral is tied to the kind of deep sleep I hadn't had since before Ray — which, when you've been waking up at four in the morning for two years straight, lands on you like a promise. There was one last thing, and it's the reason I didn't just buy another bottle of pills. Magnesium in a pill barely gets into you. Most of it goes straight through, and the cheap kind tears your stomach up, which is the last thing you need when you're already choking down a fistful of pills every morning. But on a patch, through the skin, overnight, it goes in slow and steady while you're asleep. Which is exactly when your body's trying to unclench anyway. I read until it got dark. Charlie slept on my feet the whole time. I'm not a doctor. I price used books for the Methodist church. But none of this was hidden. None of it was a secret. Half the people I know are probably walking around low on this mineral, and not one person whose job it was to help me ever once said the word magnesium. Not Dr. Mercer. Not the cardiologist he sent me to that one time. Not the pharmacist who counted out all those pills. Nobody. Three days after I met Ruth, I ordered a box of the Avalaine patches. The NerVana ones, magnesium and B12. I picked Avalaine because the magnesium in theirs is the clean kind, drawn from an old sea deep underground, paired with the activated form of B12, third-party tested, and because they put a 60 day money-back guarantee on the box. I figured if it did nothing, I'd send the rest back and be out nothing but the postage. I want to be very clear about one thing, because Ruth was clear with me and it probably saved my life. I did not stop my pills. I kept taking the lisinopril and the amlodipine exactly like I was told, and I told my doctor what I was adding. I am not telling you to stop yours either. I'm telling you what I added. And I want to be honest that it wasn't one thing working in a straight line. The patch helped the sleep. The sleep helped the walking. The walking helped the number. It's hard to pull any of it apart. One patch. Every night. Before bed, on the inside of my arm. That was it. The first week, nothing. I'll be honest. Maybe a little less foggy in the afternoons. I checked my pressure that Friday hoping for a miracle and it read 151 over 95, same as ever, and I just about talked myself out of the whole thing. Told myself I'd thrown my money at another bottle of nothing, like the magnesium pills from the drugstore that did diddly two years back. The second week, something turned. It was a Wednesday. I took my pressure at the kitchen table, towel over the screen, the whole routine. When I pulled the towel off it read 144 over 90. Six points. It was the first reading in I don't know how long that didn't drop my stomach. The third week is the one I'll never forget. I slept through the night. All the way through. For two years I'd woken at four in the morning sharp, every single day, heart going, mind running, lying there counting my own pulse in the dark waiting for the sky to get light. That Wednesday I opened my eyes and it was full daylight. I checked my pressure before I'd even had coffee: 138 over 86. I sat on the edge of the bed and cried and I didn't even rightly know why. The fifth week I read 132 over 84, and I walked up the rise to the Saturday market with Lynn and I didn't stop at the mailbox halfway to pretend I was checking it. I just walked up it. I came home and pulled the dead branches out of the front beds for the first time in two years, and my back held. The seventh week I read 127 over 82, and Lynn and I walked from her driveway all the way down to the creek and back, the better part of a mile, uphill the whole way home, and I made it both ways without stopping. Lynn noticed before I said a word. The third time we walked up that rise together she stopped on the sidewalk, looked at me, and said, "What are you doing different?" I told her. About the patch. About Ruth. About the porch step. She said, "Send me the link." She's been wearing them four months now. Her pressure ran 142 over 88 back in the winter. She had it checked at the pharmacy a couple weeks ago. 126 over 80. She called me from the parking lot and we both cried like fools on the phone. I went back to Dr. Mercer in the fall. The girl strapped the cuff on. He looked at the screen, frowned at it, and took it again on the other arm like the machine was broken. 124 over 80. He said, "What did you change?" I told him. He didn't say anything for a minute. Then he said, "Well. Whatever you're doing. Keep doing it." I'm doing it. I want to tell you the thing about Ray I haven't told you. Three weeks before he went down at the sink, he'd been in for a check. His pressure was 138 over 88. The doctor said, "A touch high. Let's keep an eye on it." We were keeping an eye on it. Keeping an eye on it is what they call it when nobody does anything. I think about Ray every single day. I think about him at that sink with the coffee cup. I think about whether the muscle in his arteries had been clenched up tight for years, starving for something simple, and nobody ever said the word. I think about whether something as plain as a mineral could have given him another ten years. I'll never know. But I know this. I sat on a stranger's porch step with a labradoodle's chin on my knee and I was sure I was going to die the way Ray died. And a woman I'd never met came out of her house with a jelly glass of water and told me about a patch her niece mailed her from Ohio. And five weeks later I read 132 over 84 and walked up the rise to the market without stopping, and I slept all the way to morning. If you've been watching your number sit there for years, if your doctor keeps adding pills and telling you to keep an eye on it, if the pills are giving you a cough you can't shake or ankles that don't fit your shoes, and you're worn out from feeling like a pot on the back burner, I want you to know there's another way to think about all of it. Your blood pressure is not the disease. It's the smoke. The fire is in the muscle of your arteries, and it's been starving for something simple while everybody kept handing you something complicated. The Avalaine NerVana+ patch puts that simple thing — magnesium, the mineral that tells the muscle to let go — in through your skin, overnight, while your body is already trying to rest. It supports your body's own ability to relax those vessels and keep your pressure where it's meant to be. It works with what the body already knows how to do. One patch. Every night. A 60 day money-back guarantee. If your body doesn't tell you something is different, you send the rest back and you don't pay. That's the deal. I'm not a doctor. I'm a 61 year old widow who got hauled up the road by a labradoodle and ended up next to a retired hospital aide named Ruth on a brick porch step. I'm telling you the same thing she told me. You don't have to keep waiting for the other shoe to drop. 👉 https://uk.avalaine.com/products/nervana-%C2%AE-magnesium-patches P.S. — Ruth still lives in that brick ranch. I walk Charlie past it every time Lynn goes to Florida, and we sit on her porch glider and drink sweet tea. Last time I was there she told me her readings had been steady at 116 over 74 for over a year. She's 67. She's taking a bus tour up through the Blue Ridge in October with her church group, leaf season. She told me it's the first thing she's planned for herself since Walt. She didn't think she'd be around to take it. She's taking it. P.P.S. — The 60 days is the part I want you to sit with. When they put Ray on his blood pressure medicine, nobody offered him a refund. When Dr. Mercer told me to keep an eye on it for three years while my ankles swelled and my number sat in the 150s, nobody offered to give me back the years. Avalaine puts 60 days on the box because that's their way of saying they'll stand behind it. Wear it for two months. If your body doesn't tell you something is different, send the rest back. You're risking the postage. I spent three years taking my pressure five times in a row while the number sat right where it was. Don't do what I did. P.P.P.S. — If your husband is in the recliner more than he used to be. If your sister keeps begging off the things she used to drive an hour for. If your mother takes the elevator now where she used to take the stairs and waves it off like it's nothing. If you yourself have been quietly stepping around the hills and the slopes and the stairs and the long way to the car, and telling yourself this is just what sixty feels like — this is not what sixty feels like. This is what a clenched-up artery feels like. This is what a body run dry of the one mineral that tells the muscle to let go feels like. This is what a pot on the back burner feels like. There is another way. One patch. Sixty nights. A jelly glass of water on a porch step. A stranger named Ruth. A mineral your arteries have been begging for the whole time. 👉 https://uk.avalaine.com/products/nervana-%C2%AE-magnesium-patches

Where the ad sends people

avalaine.com

The Natural Way to Support Your Blood Pressure

"I’ve struggled with my blood pressure for years and didn’t want to rely on more pills. I decided to try NerVana+ patches and now I feel more balanced, less tense, and my readings have been more consistent. It’s so easy to use, and I love that I can just put it on and go about my day."