Arthritis Support Community Facebook ad: “Feel Like Yourself Again”

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I sat down 90 seconds into my daughter's first dance song. In front of 140 people. In the middle of the floor. My knees just gave out and I dropped onto the chair that the DJ had put out for the grandmothers, and I sat there with my hand over my mouth pretending I was crying happy tears while my daughter Brooke kept dancing with her father like nothing had happened, because my husband Tom had seen me go down and he just kept her spinning so she wouldn't notice. That was the moment I knew something had to change. Not someday. Now. My name is Patricia, but everyone calls me Patty. I'm 54 years old and I drive a school bus in Beaver Dam, Wisconsin. Have for 21 years. Route 4, the one that goes out past the Walmart and curves around toward the lake before it doubles back to the elementary school. I know every pothole on that road. Every kid's name. Every house where I have to honk twice because the mom is always running late. I'm telling you all this because I want you to understand the kind of body I had before that wedding. It wasn't an athlete's body. I'm not going to lie about that. I've never been a runner. Never been one of those women in the spin classes at the Y. But it was a working body. A capable body. A body that climbed in and out of that bus 18 times a day. That helped third graders with car seats. That stood in the cold at 6:15 AM scraping ice off the windshield while my coffee got cold in the cupholder. A body that worked. Until it didn't. I want to tell you when it started but I can't, really. That's the thing about it. There's no day on the calendar I can circle. It just kind of... crept in. A twinge in my right knee getting out of the driver's seat. That was probably 2 years ago. I thought I'd slept on it wrong. Then both knees, when I went up the bus stairs in the morning. I started doing that thing where you grip the rail and basically pull yourself up. Just to take the load off. Then it was the grocery store parking lot. Walking from my car to the entrance at the Pick 'n Save and my left hip would catch. Like there was a little hook in it and somebody was tugging on the line. I'd stop. Pretend to look at my phone. Wait for it to settle. Then the stairs at home. We have a split-level. Six stairs up from the front door to the kitchen, then six more from the kitchen to the bedrooms. When we bought it in 1997 I used to run up those stairs two at a time carrying a laundry basket. By the end of last year I was taking them one at a time, holding the rail, leading with my good leg. The way you watch your grandma do it. I'm 54. Not 84. I went to the doctor. Of course I went to the doctor. I'm not one of those women who refuses. I went to Dr. Hennessey, who I've been going to for 15 years, and I sat on the crinkly paper and I told him exactly what was happening. He did the thing where he moves your knee around. Bent it. Straightened it. Pressed on the sides. Asked me if it hurt. It hurt. He sat back on his little wheely stool and he did the half-smile thing doctors do when they're about to tell you something you don't want to hear. "Patty," he said. "You're 54. You drive a school bus. You're carrying a little extra weight. This is what 54 looks like." I sat there. "It's wear and tear. We can talk about anti-inflammatories. We can talk about physical therapy. But honestly, the best thing for you is to lose 20 pounds and accept that you're not 30 anymore." I left the office that day and I sat in my car in the parking lot and I cried. Not because he said I needed to lose weight. I know I need to lose weight. I've known that for 10 years. I cried because he made it sound like a sentence. Like this was just my life now. Like the only road forward was a slower, smaller, more careful version of who I used to be. And I thought about my mother. My mother, Eileen, who is 81 years old and lives in a one-story rambler now because she can't do stairs anymore. Who hasn't planted her tomatoes in 4 years because she can't get up and down off her knees. Who used to make me laugh so hard at the kitchen sink that I'd have to put down the dish I was drying. I love my mother. But I do not want her body. And what scared me, sitting in that parking lot, was that I was already on her road. I was 27 years younger and I was already on her road. I tried things. I tried the glucosamine that my sister-in-law swore by. Took it for 4 months. Nothing. I tried turmeric capsules from the GNC at the mall. Took those for 3 months. Maybe a little less stiffness in the mornings, maybe not, hard to tell. I tried collagen powder in my coffee. The girl at the supplement store told me it was for "joint support." It tasted like cardboard mixed with sand. I stuck with it for 6 weeks. I tried CBD cream on my knees at night. I tried a heating pad. I tried ice packs. I tried Tylenol Arthritis. I tried that Voltaren gel from the commercials. Some of it took the edge off. None of it changed anything underneath. I was managing pain. I wasn't fixing anything. And then Brooke set the wedding date. My only daughter. Getting married in May at the country club in Fond du Lac to a sweet kid named Eric who works for John Deere. They'd been engaged for 14 months and the date had been on my fridge calendar for so long I'd stopped really seeing it. But now suddenly it was 3 months out. And the mother of the bride dances with her father, and the mother of the bride does the receiving line, and the mother of the bride stands and walks and turns and smiles for 6 hours straight in heels. I cannot tell you what that thought did to me. I started practicing. I'm not joking. I started wearing my dress shoes around the house to break them in. I'd stand at the kitchen counter chopping vegetables for an hour just to see how long my hips could take it. I'd do the stairs over and over telling myself, you can do this, you can do this, it's one day, one day. The week before the wedding I went to Dr. Hennessey and I asked him for something. Anything. Could he give me a cortisone shot? Could he give me real pain pills, just for the day? He gave me a cortisone shot in my right knee. Told me it would take the edge off. He looked at me, kind of sad, and said "Patty, just sit when you need to sit. Nobody expects you to be on your feet the whole time." I told him I wasn't going to sit at my own daughter's wedding. I lied. The wedding day was beautiful. May 10th. Brooke was a vision. Eric cried during his vows, the kind of crying where his shoulders shook, and I loved him more in that moment than I'd loved him in 14 months of engagement. I held it together through the ceremony. I held it together through the receiving line, even though by the end my left hip was doing that thing where it felt like the joint was full of broken glass. I held it together through dinner. And then they called Brooke and Tom up for the father-daughter dance, and the DJ played "My Girl" because that was the song Tom used to sing to her when she was little, and Brooke held out her arm to me to come up first for the photo, and I stood up from my chair and I walked across that dance floor and I stood next to my daughter in front of 140 people while a photographer snapped pictures. And 90 seconds into the song, my knees gave out. Just gave out. No warning. No pain spike. Just, gone. Like someone had cut the cables. I went down sideways and the only reason I didn't hit the floor is because Tom caught my elbow and the DJ, bless him, saw it happen and slid that grandmother chair under me in one motion. I sat there in the middle of the dance floor at my only daughter's wedding while my husband finished the dance without me. I want you to feel that with me for a minute. Because that's where I want to live in your head for the rest of this. It was 12 minutes later, in the coatroom, that Brooke's college roommate Mallory found me. Mallory is 28 years old. Brooke met her at UW Madison. She's a pharmacy technician now, works at a Walgreens in Milwaukee. She'd been a bridesmaid that day and her dress was lavender and she came into the coatroom looking for her clutch and she found me sitting on a folding chair with my heels off and mascara on my hands. She didn't say anything at first. Just sat down next to me. Then she said "Pat, how long has it been this bad?" And I started crying for real. I told her everything. The doctor. The supplements. The stairs at home. My mother. The cortisone shot. All of it just came pouring out because I was tired and I'd held it in for 3 years and a 28 year old in a lavender dress had looked at me with kind eyes and asked a real question. Mallory listened. When I was done she said something I'll never forget. She said "Pat, none of those things you tried were going to work. You were treating the joint. The problem isn't really the joint." I looked at her. "It's underneath." I asked her what she meant. And she told me about something I'd never heard of before. She told me about your mitochondria. Now, I'm going to do my best to repeat what Mallory told me, because she had a way of explaining things that made sense to a school bus driver. I went home that night and looked it up to make sure I had it right, and the more I read the more it made sense. The cells in your joints, she said, they need cellular energy to do their job. To maintain the cartilage. To stay lubricated. To manage inflammation. All of that takes energy, and that energy is made by these tiny power plants inside every one of your cells called mitochondria. That's where your body makes the fuel that runs everything. And when you get older, and you eat the processed foods we all eat, and you breathe in the things we all breathe in, and you live the stressed-out lives we all live, those little power plants start to wear down. They don't make as much energy as they used to. The cells in your joints don't get the energy they need. And they can't do their job. So your cartilage thins. Your inflammation goes unmanaged. Your lubrication dries up. And your knees give out on a dance floor at 54. Mallory said, "Pat, it's like you're trying to deliver lumber to a job site that has no power. Doesn't matter how much lumber shows up. Nothing's getting built." I sat there in that coatroom and I thought about every supplement I'd ever taken. Every cream I'd ever rubbed on. Every Tylenol. Lumber. To a job site with no power. I asked her what you do about it. She said her aunt up in Eau Claire had been dealing with the same thing for years. And about 8 months ago her aunt had started taking something her sister had told her about. Standardized amla extract. Indian gooseberry. And her aunt was a different person now. I'd never heard of it. But I sat in that coatroom and I asked Mallory how to spell it, and I typed it into the notes app on my phone, and the next morning, while Tom was making coffee, I sat at our kitchen table in my bathrobe and I started reading. Here's what I learned, sitting at that table in my bathrobe on the Sunday after my daughter's wedding. Amla is the fruit of the Indian gooseberry tree. In traditional medicine, they call it "the nurse," because it's been used for thousands of years for general healing. But the modern research on it is what made me sit up. The active compounds in amla, the ones they call emblicanins, have been shown to help activate something called AMPK. AMPK is the pathway your body uses to support mitochondrial function. It's like the master switch for your cellular power plants. When AMPK gets activated, your mitochondria can start producing cellular energy more efficiently. The way they did when you were younger. And that energy can flow back to the cells that need it most. Including the cells in your joints. And when those cells get the energy they need, they can start doing what they're supposed to do. Maintain cartilage. Manage inflammation. Stay lubricated. That's not the joint working harder. That's the body finally getting the support it's been missing. The other thing about amla, and this is the part that floored me, is that it has one of the highest antioxidant profiles ever measured in a food. Which matters because the same oxidative stress that wore down your mitochondria in the first place is still doing it every day. Amla helps protect those little power plants from getting worn down further. I read for 4 hours that Sunday. Tom made me lunch and I ate it at the table and kept reading. By the end of the day I'd ordered a bottle of Auniva Amla. I want to tell you what happened next, and I want to be honest with you, because I know how this kind of story goes and I don't want to be one of those people who tells you everything fixed itself overnight. It didn't. The first week, I didn't feel anything. I was honestly a little disappointed. I'd built this thing up in my head. I took 2 capsules every morning with my coffee, like the bottle said, and I went about my life and I felt the same. Week 2 was when something shifted. It wasn't dramatic. I just noticed that on Wednesday morning, when I climbed into the bus, I didn't grip the handrail. I just stepped up. I'd done it three times before I realized I'd done it. I sat in the driver's seat for a minute with my hand on the wheel. Just sat there. Week 3, I was at the Pick 'n Save and I walked from the car to the entrance and my hip didn't catch. It just didn't catch. I waited for it. The whole walk across the parking lot I was waiting for it. And it didn't come. I bought a bag of apples I didn't need just to give myself an excuse to walk back to the car and then back inside again. Week 4, I took the stairs at home two at a time. Just once. Just to see. I stood at the top of the stairs in the kitchen and I looked down at the landing and I cried like a baby. Tom heard me and came around the corner and asked what happened and I just shook my head and said "Nothing. Nothing happened." Which was true. Nothing happened. I just walked up the stairs the way I used to walk up the stairs. Week 6, I was at work in the morning and one of the kids on my route, a little boy named Brody, missed a step getting on the bus and fell forward. I caught him under the arms and lifted him up onto the first step and sat him in the seat behind me. I didn't think about it. I picked him up. I'm 54 and I picked a kindergartner up off the ground without thinking about it. In the rearview mirror I watched the next kid get on, and I realized I was smiling. Week 8 was Brooke's housewarming. She and Eric had closed on a little house in Fond du Lac and they were having both families over. There are 4 steps up to their front porch. I walked up them carrying a casserole dish in one hand and a bouquet of flowers in the other and I didn't even register the steps were there. I rang the doorbell and Brooke opened the door and she looked at me kind of funny and said "Mom, you look different." I said "Different how?" She said "I don't know. Lighter. Like something's lifted off you." I went into her kitchen and I set the casserole down and Tom came up behind me and put his hand on my back and didn't say anything. He didn't have to. That night, after dinner, Brooke and I were in her kitchen washing dishes and she said "Mom, what happened?" And I told her. I told her about Mallory in the coatroom. About the mitochondria. About the lumber to a job site with no power. About the bottle on my counter. She was quiet for a minute. Then she said "Mom. I'm so sorry about the wedding." I told her not to be sorry. Because if it hadn't happened at the wedding, I'd still be limping up those stairs at home telling myself this was just what 54 looked like. The wedding wasn't the worst day. It was the day everything started to change. Now, here's what I want to say to you, if you're reading this and you're somewhere on the road I was on. Maybe you're not at the wedding moment yet. Maybe you're still in the parking lot. Maybe you're at the stage where you grip the rail going up the bus stairs. Or where your hip catches in the grocery store. Or where the stairs at home have started to feel longer than they used to. I want to tell you something that nobody told me. This isn't just what aging looks like. It might be what aging looks like for a lot of people, but it doesn't have to be what aging looks like for you. Your joints aren't broken. They're just being run on empty. The cells that maintain them have been starving for years and nobody told you, because nobody asked the right question. The question isn't "what's wrong with my joints?" The question is "what's wrong underneath my joints?" And for me, the answer was the energy. The power plants. The mitochondria. I take Auniva Amla every morning with my coffee. Two capsules. That's it. I don't do anything else differently. I haven't lost the 20 pounds yet. I'm still a school bus driver in Beaver Dam, Wisconsin, with a husband who snores and a daughter who's married and a mother in a rambler who refuses to use a walker. But I climbed the stairs at her house last weekend two at a time, carrying her laundry basket, and she looked at me from her chair and said "Patty, when did you get so spry?" I just laughed. If you want to try what I tried, you can find it at auniva.co/amla/33. It's a 30-day bottle, made in the USA, and it comes with free shipping. The thing that mattered most to me, because I'd been burned so many times before, is that they have a 90-day money-back guarantee. If it doesn't do anything for you, you send back what's left and they refund you. No questions. No hoops. I don't think you'll need to send it back. But that guarantee is what let me click the order button at 6 PM on a Sunday in my bathrobe. P.S. I want to come back to the wedding for a second. There's a picture from that day that Brooke had framed and put in her hallway. It's me and her on the dance floor. The chair is in the picture. I'm sitting in it. She's leaning down with her arms around my neck and she's laughing. When I first saw it I told her to take it down. She didn't. Last week I was at her house and I stopped in the hallway and I looked at that picture and I thought, that woman in the chair didn't know yet. She didn't know that 90 seconds was the bottom and the only direction left was up. If you're sitting in a chair right now thinking you're at your bottom, I hope you'll let that be the day everything starts to change. P.P.S. They keep selling out. I don't know what the supply situation is right now but the last time I went to reorder there was a wait list, so if you go to the site and they have it in stock, that's the moment to grab it. I learned the hard way that "I'll do it next week" was how I lost 3 years of my life to a problem I could have been solving. P.P.P.S. The 90-day guarantee is the part I keep coming back to in my head. They give you 3 full months to decide. That's longer than I gave any other supplement I tried. By 3 months, you'll know. Either it did something or it didn't. And if it didn't, you didn't lose a dollar. I lost 3 years. I'm not getting those back. But I'm getting everything after. 👉 https://auniva.co/amla/33

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Feel Like Yourself Again

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