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The cuff still came out of the drawer every Sunday morning. I still put it on. I still pressed the button. I just stopped writing the numbers down because By Tuesday my doctor wanted to add a fourth pill. I sat in her exam room with the paper crinkling under me and I looked at her and I said give me 60 more days. She tilted her head a little. She didn't say anything for what felt like a long time. Then she said okay. 60 days. I went out to my car. I sat in the parking lot of her office with the engine running. I wasn't crying. I was just sitting. I been on blood pressure medication since I was 46. I'm 54 now. That's eight years of pills that keep getting stronger while my body keeps getting worse. And the thing is, I been trying. Apple cider vinegar in a shot glass every morning. I made it eight weeks before I started gagging at the smell. Cinnamon capsules for three months. My A1C actually went up that quarter. I'm not exaggerating. It went up. Berberine. Two months of stomach knots. Labs didn't move. Whole30 once with my sister. I finished it. Two clean weeks after. Then I drifted because nobody can eat like that forever. Intermittent fasting for four months. I lost six pounds. Then I started binge eating Skinny Pop at 11 PM and gained eight back. A box of Yogi Detox tea. Then five more boxes. Nothing. A $189 juice cleanse from the place by the mall. Three days. I gained the weight back in a week and I was meaner during it than I been since my divorce. A jar of Dr. Sebi sea moss gel that is still sitting in the back of my refrigerator. I can't bring myself to throw it out. A 10 day water fast I quit on day 4. Eighty hours of Barbara O'Neill on YouTube. Maybe more. I'm not going to count. I had stopped telling my sister what I was trying. She thought I was stubborn. I had stopped telling my doctor what I was trying. She thought I was being non compliant. I hadn't told my daughter in two years. I had also stopped writing my pressure readings down. I knew the number. I just didn't want to see it in my own handwriting. That afternoon I sat at my kitchen table and I googled why do my blood pressure meds stop working. Lord. I don't know what I was expecting. I scrolled past four WebMD pages telling me to lose weight, take my medication as prescribed, and reduce stress. As if any of that was new information to me. Then a YouTube thumbnail showed up. An older gentleman in a white shirt standing in a kitchen full of dried plants. The title said something about why your body raises your pressure on purpose. I clicked it because I was at the end of my rope. He said something in the first 40 seconds I haven't been able to forget. He said your body is not broken. Your body is defending itself. He said when your blood gets too thick from years of buildup, your vessels narrow on purpose to protect themselves. Your body raises the pressure to push thicker blood through narrower pipes. That's not a failure. That's a defense. The pills lower the number on the cuff. They don't clean the blood that made the number go up. So your body keeps defending. And your doctor keeps adding pills. That's why you been adding pills for years and the number is still climbing. It isn't because you aren't trying hard enough, he said. It's because nobody ever explained to you what your body was actually doing. I sat at my kitchen table and I cried a little bit. Not a lot. Just enough. For the first time in a long time somebody said something that made sense. It wasn't my fault that the apple cider vinegar didn't work. It wasn't my fault that Whole30 didn't work. None of it was built to clean the blood. None of it was built to address the defense. The pills weren't built to do that either. They were built to manage the number while everything underneath kept getting worse. I'd been trying to lower the number for years. I never one time was trying to clean what was causing it. The same gentleman said one more thing I have to tell you because it changed everything. He said every red blood cell in your body completes its lifespan inside about 90 days. By the time three months pass, the entire river of blood you're carrying right now is gone. Replaced. Built new. The question, he said, is not how do I lower the number. The question is what am I going to build the new blood out of. His name is Chef Tijani. He's from Jamaica. He makes a blood detox tea from herbs his grandmother used to boil. Cerasee, burdock, guaco, moringa. Real plants. The whole leaf. You boil it for ten minutes and the water goes dark. I ordered a bag that night. I was scared and skeptical and tired and I ordered it anyway. I want to tell you the truth about what happened next because the first week nothing happened. I drank the tea three times a day. I felt nothing. I almost gave up. Week 2 I noticed my ankles weren't as swollen when I put my socks on. It was a Thursday. I sat on the edge of my bed for a second because I'd been wearing socks over swollen ankles for so long I'd forgotten what regular ankles felt like. Week 4 I checked the cuff and it read 128 over 82. I checked it three times. I almost didn't believe it. I wrote it down. First time in six months I wrote a number down. Week 8 I had my labs done. My doctor looked at them. Then she looked at me. Then she said what are you doing differently. I told her. She didn't argue with me. She said keep going. She cut my metformin in half that visit. Week 12 I came off one of my blood pressure pills entirely. The fourth pill never happened. I didn't even bring it up. She didn't either. My grandbaby was at my house last Saturday. She's four. We were in the kitchen. She was eating a banana. I was making her sandwich. She looked up at me and she said Nana you smiling. I hadn't noticed. I sat down at the kitchen table and I looked at her and I said Nana is going to be at your graduation. I don't know why I said it that way. But I said it. And I meant it for the first time in a long time. I'm not telling anybody to stop their medication. I'm not a doctor and I'm not going to pretend to be one. I'm telling you what happened to me, because I sat in that parking lot eight months ago thinking I was past saving, and I wasn't. If any of this sounds like you, this is what I been drinking. I'll leave the link below. Take it or leave it.