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My grandson Eli sat down next to me on the back porch steps at my own Fourth of July barbecue and said, "Grandma, how come you don't play with us anymore?" He's 7. He was holding a sparkler that had already gone out. He had ketchup on his chin from his third hot dog. He sat down the way 7 year olds sit down, like gravity is optional and the world is made of rubber. And he asked me why I don't play with them anymore. I didn't have an answer. I mean, I had answers. I had a dozen answers. I was tired. My stomach hurt. I'd been up since 3 in the morning again. I'd spent 45 minutes in the bathroom before anyone arrived. I was wearing the loosest dress I owned and it was still pressing against my abdomen like a blood pressure cuff. But you don't say those things to a 7 year old who's holding a dead sparkler and looking at you like you used to be the center of the world. So I just said, "Grandma's a little tired today, baby." He looked at me for a second. Then he said, "You're always tired, Grandma." He got up and went back inside. I sat on that porch step for the rest of the night. My name is Donna. I'm 57 years old. I live in a small town called Signal Mountain, just outside Chattanooga, Tennessee, in a house my husband Bill and I built in 1999 on a half acre lot with a creek running through the back that my grandkids used to catch crawdads in every summer. I worked as an office manager for a pediatric dental practice for 19 years before I retired last June. My husband sells commercial HVAC systems and has for 31 years. We have two sons. Our oldest, Michael, lives in Nashville with his wife and Eli. Our youngest, Tyler, lives 20 minutes away with his girlfriend. I want to tell you who I was before this started, because the woman sitting on that porch step on the Fourth of July was not the woman my family knew. I was the woman who hosted. That was my whole identity. Thanksgiving at Donna's. Christmas Eve at Donna's. Easter brunch at Donna's. Fourth of July at Donna's. Every birthday, every homecoming, every time somebody needed to be fed or celebrated or comforted, it happened in my kitchen with my hands and my recipes and my dining room table with the extra leaf we kept behind the hutch. I made pulled pork from scratch. I made cornbread from my mother's recipe. I made banana pudding in a dish so big my husband had to carry it to the car with both hands. I was the woman who got to the kitchen at 5 AM and didn't sit down until 9 PM and loved every minute of it. That woman started disappearing about 3 years ago. It started the way these things always start. Small. So small you can pretend it's nothing. I was 54. I'd just come back from a weekend with my sister in Gatlinburg. My stomach felt off. Bloated. Not painful exactly, just heavy. Like I'd eaten a Thanksgiving meal and it was sitting there, not going anywhere. I figured I'd overdone it. I'd had fudge from that shop on the main strip. I'd had pancakes every morning. I figured it was the weekend catching up with me. It didn't go away. Within a couple of weeks, the bloating was there every day. Not just after eating. First thing in the morning, before I'd even had coffee, I'd stand in front of the bathroom mirror and my stomach would be distended like I was 4 months pregnant. By noon it would be worse. By dinner it would be so tight I'd unbutton my pants under the table and pray nobody noticed. I started waking up at 3 in the morning. Not because of noise. Not because of Bill's snoring, which is legendary. I'd just be awake. Wide awake. Staring at the ceiling with my heart beating faster than it should be at 3 AM and my mind racing through a list of things I needed to do even though I was too tired during the day to do any of them. The sugar cravings came next. I have never been a sweets person. I drank my coffee black. I preferred salt. But starting that fall, I wanted sugar constantly. Cookies. Cereal. Bread. White rice. Anything starchy, anything sweet, anything that turned to sugar. I'd eat dinner and 45 minutes later I'd be standing in the pantry looking for something else. Not hungry. Just driven. The fatigue was the worst part. I'd been a high energy woman my entire life. Ask anyone. Ask Bill. Ask the girls at the dental office. I was the one who got there first and left last and still had enough gas to make dinner from scratch that night. By the time I was 55, I was coming home from work and sitting on the couch and not moving until bedtime. Bill would ask if I wanted to go for a walk after dinner and I'd say maybe tomorrow, and tomorrow never came. I told myself it was menopause. I told myself it was stress. I told myself I was just getting older and this is what getting older looks like and I needed to stop expecting to be 35. Everybody around me said the same things. Bill said I was working too hard. Michael said I needed a vacation. Tyler said I should try yoga. My sister said her hormones had done the same thing and it passed. It didn't pass. I went to Dr. Carlisle in January of 2023. She's been my doctor for 12 years. Good woman. Thorough. She listened to everything I told her. She pressed on my abdomen. She ordered blood work. She ordered a stool test. She said the words "irritable bowel syndrome" the way doctors say words they've said ten thousand times. The blood work came back normal. The stool test came back normal. She said it was probably IBS triggered by hormonal shifts and dietary changes and stress. She told me to try a low-FODMAP diet. She gave me a printout from a website. She told me to come back in 6 weeks. I tried the low-FODMAP diet. I eliminated onions, garlic, wheat, dairy, apples, and half the vegetables I'd been eating my whole life. I ate rice and chicken and green beans and felt like a prisoner in my own kitchen. The bloating got slightly better for about 10 days. Then it came back. Worse. I went back to Dr. Carlisle. She referred me to a GI specialist in Chattanooga. He was a nice man. He scheduled a colonoscopy. The colonoscopy was clean. He said my colon looked "beautiful." He said the word beautiful while I was lying there in a hospital gown and I almost laughed. He said it was almost certainly IBS. He prescribed a low dose antispasmodic. He said to keep up with the FODMAP plan. He said sometimes these things take time. I filled the prescription. I took the pills for 3 months. The bloating didn't change. The fatigue didn't change. The 3 AM wake ups didn't change. The sugar cravings got worse. I tried probiotics. Four different brands. The expensive kind from the health food store on Broad Street. The bloating actually got worse on two of them. I tried digestive enzymes. I tried peppermint capsules. I tried apple cider vinegar. I tried psyllium husk. I tried magnesium. I tried a 14 day gut reset cleanse I found on Instagram that cost $89 and tasted like wet cardboard. None of it worked. Or it worked for a week and then stopped. Or it made one thing better and another thing worse. By the time Eli asked me why I don't play anymore, I had been managing this for 3 years. Managing. That's the word. Managing it the way you manage a leaky roof. You put a bucket under it. You check the bucket. You empty the bucket. You never fix the roof. I want to tell you what happened on that porch after the kids went home. The fireworks were over. Michael and his wife had loaded Eli into the car seat. Tyler and his girlfriend had left. The neighbors had gone inside. Bill was in the kitchen wrapping up the leftover pulled pork I hadn't made this year because I didn't have the energy. We'd bought it from a barbecue place on the highway instead. That was the first year in 22 years I hadn't made the pulled pork myself. I was still on the porch step. The citronella candle was burning down. The creek was making that sound it makes in July when the water is low and the rocks are warm. That's when Bill's older sister Ruthie came back out. Ruthie is 64. She lives on the other side of Signal Mountain, about 10 minutes from us. She'd worked at a Walgreens in Chattanooga for 28 years before she retired. She's the kind of woman who doesn't say anything she hasn't thought about first. She's never once given me unsolicited advice in 33 years of being my sister in law. She sat down on the step next to me. She didn't say anything for a while. She just sat there looking at the yard. Then she said, "Donna, I've been watching you for about two years now and I've been waiting for the right time to say something. I think tonight is the time." I looked at her. She said, "I went through what you're going through. Starting in 2019. The bloating. The exhaustion. The waking up in the middle of the night. The craving things I'd never craved. The feeling like my body had been taken over by something that wasn't me." I felt my eyes get hot. She said, "I did the same circuit you've been doing. Dr. Patterson told me IBS. The GI guy told me IBS. The colonoscopy was clean. The stool test was clean. I tried every diet and every supplement and every cleanse on the shelf at my own pharmacy and nothing worked for longer than a week." She paused. "Then my friend Miriam told me something that changed everything. And I want to tell you what she told me, because I've been watching you fade and I can't watch it anymore." I didn't say anything. I just nodded. Ruthie told me about Miriam, a woman she'd worked with at Walgreens for 15 years. Miriam was originally from the Philippines and had gone back to visit family in Manila in 2018. When she came home, she mentioned to Ruthie that her cousins had been shocked that Americans don't deworm. That in the Philippines, and in most of Asia, and in most of South America, and in most of Africa, routine deworming is standard. It's done in schools. It's done in families. It's done twice a year, the way Americans get their teeth cleaned. Ruthie said she'd laughed. She said she'd told Miriam that Americans don't have parasites. Miriam had looked at her with the expression of someone who has just been told the sky is green. Miriam told her: Americans absolutely have parasites. The difference is that Americans stopped looking for them. The US stopped routine deworming in the 1950s. Not because the parasites went away. Because sanitation improved enough that the government decided the programs weren't cost effective anymore. The parasites didn't get the memo. Ruthie said she'd filed that conversation away and forgotten about it. Then she got sick. The same bloating. The same fatigue. The same 3 AM wake ups. The same cravings. The same circuit of doctors and diets and supplements that worked for a week and stopped. And one night, sitting at her kitchen table at midnight unable to sleep, she remembered what Miriam had told her. And she started reading. She read for 3 nights in a row. I want to tell you what Ruthie told me she learned, because it's what I went home and confirmed with my own reading that night. The standard stool test your doctor orders, the one that came back "normal" for both of us, misses parasites a significant amount of the time according to the research on how the test is designed. The test is looking for eggs in a single sample, at a single point in time, in a single section of the stool. Parasites don't shed eggs continuously. They shed in cycles. They also don't live in the open lumen of the gut where a sample can reach them. Many of them live behind something called a biofilm. A biofilm is a protective wall. A barrier made of sugars and proteins that parasites and bacteria build on the lining of your intestinal wall. It's like a fortress. They live behind it. They feed behind it. They reproduce behind it. And most importantly, they hide behind it. A stool test can't see behind it. A colonoscopy can't see behind it. A doctor who received minimal training in parasites across 4 years of medical school is not going to find something that has built itself a house inside your gut and pulled the curtains closed. And here's the part that stopped me cold when Ruthie said it. Everything I'd been experiencing for 3 years had an explanation that wasn't IBS and wasn't menopause and wasn't stress. The bloating. Parasites feed on the food you eat, especially sugars and starches. They produce gas as waste. That gas distends your abdomen. The bloating isn't your gut reacting to FODMAP foods. It's something alive in your gut producing waste. The 3 AM wake ups. Your body's immune system is most active during the overnight hours. That's when it mounts its strongest response against invaders. If you have something living inside you, your body knows, even when your doctor doesn't, and it wakes you up when it's fighting hardest. The sugar cravings. Parasites feed on sugar. They need it. When they need more, they send chemical signals that make YOU crave it. The woman who never wanted sweets suddenly can't walk past a cookie without reaching for it. That's not willpower. That's not hormones. That's something inside her requesting fuel. The fatigue. If something is living inside you and eating what you eat before your body can absorb it, you are being starved at the cellular level even if you're eating 2,000 calories a day. The exhaustion isn't laziness. It's malnutrition in the presence of plenty. I sat on that porch step and I felt something crack open in my chest. Not pain. Recognition. The feeling of hearing the truth after 3 years of hearing everything but. Ruthie said, "I know what you're thinking. You're thinking why didn't the doctor find it. Why didn't the stool test catch it. Why didn't the GI guy see it." I nodded. She said, "Because they weren't looking. Because they were trained to rule out the things they were trained to look for, and parasites in American adults is not on that list. It hasn't been on that list since the 1950s." I asked her what she did about it. She said she'd tried oral supplements first. Herbal parasite cleanses. Wormwood. Black walnut hull. Clove. She ordered three different ones over 4 months. None of them worked. And Miriam had told her they probably wouldn't. Because oral supplements face three problems. First, stomach acid breaks them down before they reach the lower gut where the parasites actually live. Second, even what survives the stomach gets diluted across the 25 feet of intestine between your throat and your colon. By the time it reaches the site, there's almost nothing left. Third, and this is the part that matters most, nothing you swallow can penetrate the biofilm. The wall is there specifically to keep threats out. Swallowing something and hoping it gets through the wall is like throwing a tennis ball at a brick house and expecting it to go through. Ruthie said Miriam had told her about something else. Something that doesn't go through the stomach at all. A castor oil pack. Worn on the abdomen. Overnight. Here is what Ruthie explained to me, and what I went home and read about until 2 in the morning while Bill slept and the creek ran outside and the leftover fireworks smell drifted through the kitchen window. Castor oil contains a compound called ricinoleic acid. When applied to the skin of the abdomen, ricinoleic acid absorbs transdermally. Through the skin. It doesn't go through the stomach. It doesn't get diluted across 25 feet of intestine. It doesn't have to survive acid. It arrives at the tissue underneath the skin, directly, at concentration. Ricinoleic acid has been shown to break down biofilm. The protective wall that parasites build. The wall that hides them from stool tests and colonoscopies and every oral supplement you've ever swallowed. The ricinoleic acid breaks the wall down. The compression of the pack against the abdomen activates the lymphatic system underneath. The lymphatic system is your body's drainage network. It removes waste and dead material. When the biofilm starts to break down, the lymphatic system carries out what gets dislodged. And because you wear it overnight, for 6 to 8 hours, the delivery is sustained. It works during the overnight window when your body's immune response is already at its peak. The same window that's been waking you up for years. I sat at my kitchen table and I read study after study about ricinoleic acid and transdermal absorption and lymphatic drainage and biofilm disruption and I felt, for the first time in 3 years, like someone had finally explained to me what was happening inside my own body. Ruthie had told me the name of the one she used. The one Miriam had recommended. A pack called Tavio. Organic cotton and bamboo. Designed for overnight wear. Washable. Reusable. You buy it once. I ordered it that night. It came in 4 days. I want to tell you what happened, and I want to be careful. I don't want to be the woman on the internet making promises. I'm an office manager, not a scientist. But here is what I noticed. The first 5 days, almost nothing. I wore the pack every night. I woke up, took it off, washed it. The bloating was the same. The fatigue was the same. I almost called Ruthie and told her it wasn't working. I didn't, because Ruthie had told me to give it 2 weeks minimum and she doesn't say things she doesn't mean. Day 7 was when I woke up and something was different. I stood in front of the bathroom mirror the way I did every morning and my stomach was flat. Not slightly-less-bloated. Flat. The way it used to be before all of this started. I pressed on it with my hand. No tension. No tightness. No pressure. I stood there for about a minute not trusting it. By noon the bloating had come back slightly, but it was maybe 40 percent of what it had been. Not the swollen, distended, can't-breathe feeling. Just a mild fullness. Day 10 was when the 3 AM wake ups stopped. I slept from 10:45 PM to 6:10 AM without waking up once. I lay in bed when I woke up and stared at the ceiling and realized it was morning and I hadn't seen 3 AM. I hadn't seen 3 AM in over two years. Day 14 was when Bill noticed. We were eating dinner. Chicken and rice and roasted broccoli. I'd cooked it. I'd gotten home from running errands and I'd gone into the kitchen and I'd cooked dinner without thinking about it. Without sitting on the couch first. Without telling myself I'd order something instead. Bill looked up from his plate and said, "You cooked." I said, "I cooked." He said, "You haven't cooked on a Tuesday in a long time." I hadn't. I knew that. He knew that. We both knew that. Week 3 was when the sugar cravings disappeared. Not gradually. They just weren't there anymore. I walked through the grocery store on Saturday morning and I went past the cookie aisle and I didn't turn down it. I didn't even think about turning down it. It was like someone had unplugged something in my brain that had been running on a loop for 3 years. I want to be honest about something here. My timeline is my timeline. Some women respond faster than I did. Some slower. Your body is going to do what your body is going to do. I can only tell you what mine did. Week 4 was when Michael brought Eli down from Nashville for a weekend visit. I want to tell you about that weekend because it's why I'm writing this. Eli came running through the front door at 10 AM on a Saturday. He had a backpack full of action figures and a Ziploc bag of goldfish crackers and the same energy he always has, the kind that makes the air vibrate around him. He looked at me and he said, "Grandma, can we go to the creek?" The creek. The one in the back yard. The one where we used to catch crawdads. The one I hadn't walked down to in over a year because the path is uneven and sloped and my energy couldn't carry me down it, let alone back up. I said, "Get your boots." We went to the creek. I carried a bucket. He carried a net. We spent an hour and a half in the water catching crawdads and turning over rocks and getting mud on our knees. He caught 7 crawdads and named every single one of them. I stood in that creek with the cold water running over my feet and the sun coming through the tulip poplars and I felt like the woman I used to be. When we got back to the porch, I sat down on the same step where he'd asked me why I don't play anymore. He climbed into my lap. He's getting big. He's heavy in the way 7 year olds are heavy, all elbows and knees and sudden weight. He said, "Grandma, that was the best day." I held him and I looked out at the yard and I cried without making any sound because I didn't want him to know. I want to say something to you if you're still reading. If you're a woman over 40 and you've been bloated every day for months or years and you've been told it's IBS. If you wake up at 3 AM and nobody can tell you why. If you crave sugar like your body is possessed by something that isn't you. If you're so tired you've stopped cooking and stopped hosting and stopped being the woman your family knows. I want you to think about what nobody told you. Your doctor ran a stool test. The stool test misses parasites a significant amount of the time. Your colonoscopy was clean. The colonoscopy can't see behind a biofilm wall. You've tried every oral supplement on the shelf. Nothing you swallow can penetrate the wall. The thing that worked for me goes through the skin, not the stomach. It breaks down the wall from the outside. It activates the drainage system your body already has. It works overnight during the window your immune system is already fighting. And you wear it once, wash it, and wear it again. It's not a bottle you have to keep buying. The pack is called Tavio. It's the only one I found that's designed for overnight wear with sustained compression. It's washable. It's reusable. You buy it one time. If you don't feel a meaningful difference, every penny back. 30 days. No fight. No questions. I'm 8 months in. I wear it 4 or 5 nights a week now instead of every night. The bloating is gone. The 3 AM wake ups are gone. The sugar cravings are gone. I cooked Thanksgiving dinner last year for the first time in 3 years. Bill carried the banana pudding to the table with both hands the way he always used to and he didn't say anything. He just smiled. Eli stayed the whole weekend. We went to the creek both days. He told me on Sunday when they were leaving that he wants to come back every month. I told him, "Grandma will be here." And for the first time in 3 years, that was true. Almost forgot the link. Here it is: https://buytavio.com/pages/parasite-infestation-discovery P.S. Ruthie has been on the pack for almost 4 years now. She wears it 3 nights a week. She says the bloating never came back. Not once. She's 64 years old and she walks 3 miles every morning before sunrise and she hasn't seen a gastroenterologist since 2021. The 30 day guarantee is what made me click the button that night. I figured if I wore it for 3 weeks and nothing happened I'd send it back and go back to managing. I never sent it back. P.P.S. I threw out every supplement in my cabinet last month. The probiotics. The digestive enzymes. The peppermint capsules. The psyllium husk. The magnesium. The $89 gut reset cleanse powder that had been sitting behind the coffee maker since 2022. None of them could reach what was actually there. They were all trying to get through a wall that only breaks from the outside. P.P.P.S. Michael called me last week and asked if I'd host Easter brunch. He said Eli had been asking. I said yes before he finished the sentence. I'm already planning the menu. Deviled eggs. Ham. My mother's cornbread. Banana pudding in the big dish. The woman who hosts is back. She was in there the whole time. She just needed the wall broken down so she could come home. P.P.P.P.S. If you have a sister or a mother or a friend who's been fading the way I was fading, and she's been told it's IBS and she's been told it's menopause and she's tried everything on the shelf and nothing works for longer than a week, tell her. Really tell her. Ruthie waited 2 years to tell me because she didn't want to overstep. I wish she'd told me the first week she noticed. Be the Ruthie. Don't wait for the Fourth of July.