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My Cardiologist Looked at My Bloodwork Last March and Asked Me a Question I Couldn't Answer. "Marjorie. How Long Have You Been Holding Your Breath?" I'm 67. I'm a retired ICU nurse. I worked at a hospital in a midsize Midwestern city for thirty-eight years. I retired in 2022 at sixty-four. I'd planned to retire at sixty-six, but the last two years of my career had taken something out of me that I didn't fully understand until I'd been retired for a while. I want to write down what happened to my blood pressure in the year after I retired, and what I did about it, because I think there are women like me — women who spent their working lives taking care of other people and never quite learned how to take care of themselves — who might benefit from reading it. I want to be careful, though. I want to tell you the truth and not a tidy version of it. The truth has more edges. I'll back up. My blood pressure had been a thing on my chart since 2014. That was the year my husband Earl died. He was sixty-two. He'd had a heart attack at a hardware store on a Saturday morning. He was looking at lawn mower belts. He was dead before the ambulance got there. I want to tell you that I am writing about Earl because Earl is part of the story of my blood pressure, but I am not going to dwell on him because dwelling is not what this is for. I will say this: Earl and I were married thirty-four years. We had two kids. He was a good man. I miss him every day. I have learned to carry the missing. I was fifty-six when Earl died. My blood pressure went up about ten points in the year after his death. My doctor at the time — a young woman named Dr. Park — sat me down and told me she wanted to start me on a low dose. I said I'd think about it. I didn't start it. I told myself the bloodwork was high because I was grieving. I told myself that once the grieving was over, the bloodwork would come back down. The grieving was not over for about three years. By the time it was, my blood pressure was higher than it had been, not lower. Dr. Park had retired by then. My new doctor, Dr. Khan, had the same conversation with me. He recommended a low dose. I said I'd think about it. I didn't start it. I told myself I'd work on it through lifestyle. I'd walk more. I'd eat less salt. I'd lose ten pounds. I did some of those things. Not enough. By 2020 — the year COVID hit, the year I was 62 and working twelve-hour shifts in the ICU — my blood pressure was high enough that Dr. Khan was no longer asking. He was telling me. He said: "Eleanor. You're a nurse. You know what these numbers mean. I need you to start the medication. I'm worried about you." I told him I'd think about it. I didn't start it. I want to tell you why I didn't start it, because if I don't tell you why I didn't start it the rest of this isn't going to make sense. I didn't start it because I was a nurse. I had spent thirty-six years at that point watching other people take medications they didn't fully understand. I had watched other people get put on a low dose of one thing, then a low dose of another thing to manage the side effects of the first thing, then a third thing to manage the side effects of the second thing, then end up on six pills they couldn't keep track of. I had told myself, somewhere around year fifteen of nursing, that I was never going to be one of those people. I was going to be the nurse who didn't take pills. Who managed her own body. Who held the line. I want to be honest with you that the holding the line was not really about pills. The holding the line was about being the one in charge. I had spent my whole working life being in charge. Being the person other people came to. Being the steady one. Being the one who knew. Taking a pill, in some quiet part of myself, felt like admitting that I wasn't the steady one anymore. I have a lot to say about that, looking back. I'm not going to say all of it. I will say this: I was wrong. I was wrong for a long time. I retired in March of 2022. The retirement itself was a kind of relief. I'd been at the hospital since 1984. The work had become harder in the last few years — harder physically, harder emotionally — and the COVID years had taken something out of me I wasn't sure I'd ever get back. I retired on a Friday. I packed up my locker. I had cake with the day-shift nurses. I cried a little. I drove home. By the following Wednesday I was bored. By the following month I was — and I want to choose this word carefully — irritated. Irritated at the house. Irritated at my own routine. Irritated at the woman in the mirror who was suddenly a retired person and didn't know what to do with herself. My kids — Jeff and Megan, both in their late thirties — checked on me a lot the first few months. I told them I was fine. I told them I was enjoying not setting an alarm. I was not enjoying not setting an alarm. I want to tell you what my year looked like, because if you've been a working woman for forty years and you're approaching retirement, somebody should tell you this. The first year of retirement, for a woman who has been a working professional her whole adult life, can be a particular kind of hard. It is hard not because there is nothing to do. It is hard because there is no longer a structure that tells you who you are. For thirty-eight years I had been Eleanor the ICU nurse. In April of 2022 I became Eleanor. Eleanor is a woman I had not really met yet. I started doing things that were probably bad for my blood pressure. I was on my couch a lot. I was watching too much news. I was eating more than I needed to and not paying attention to it. I had stopped my regular walks because I'd been telling myself for years that I walked enough at work. Now I wasn't at work, and I was still telling myself I walked enough. I was not walking enough. I was drinking more wine in the evening than I'd ever drunk in my life. Not a lot. But more. Two glasses on weeknights. Three on Sundays. I want to be specific about the wine because the wine is the kind of thing women my age don't talk about, and we should. The wine was a way of marking time. It was a way of making 6 p.m. feel different from 4 p.m. It was a way of having a thing at the end of the day that meant the day was over. When you've been a shift worker for forty years and your day no longer ends, the wine is a way to make a day end. It worked. It also raised my blood pressure. By the spring of 2023 — my first full year of retirement — I had not had a checkup since 2021. I was a retired nurse who had not been to her own doctor in two years. I was avoiding it. I knew the numbers were going to be bad. I didn't want to see them. I didn't want Dr. Khan to look at me over his glasses and ask me, again, why I wasn't taking the medication. So I didn't go. The thing that made me go was Megan. Megan is my daughter. She's 38. She's a physical therapist. She's married, two kids. She lives an hour away from me. She came over one Sunday in February of last year. We were sitting at my kitchen table. She'd brought her two kids — Ben who's seven and Lila who's four — and they were in my living room watching something on the iPad. Megan looked at me across the table. She said: "Mom. When was your last checkup." I said: "I'm fine." She said: "That's not what I asked." I said: "It's been a while." She said: "How long is a while." I said: "I don't remember." She said: "Mom." I said: "I haven't been since before I retired." She put her coffee cup down. She said: "Mom. You're a nurse. You know how this works. You know what happens when women your age stop going." I said: "Megan. I know." She said: "Then why." I said: "Because I'm tired." I want to tell you that I didn't mean physically tired. I meant tired in a way I had not been able to put into words until I said it out loud at my kitchen table to my daughter that Sunday afternoon. I was tired of being responsible. I had been responsible for other people's bodies my entire working life. I had been responsible for my husband's body for thirty-four years. I had been responsible for my children's bodies for thirty-eight years. I had been responsible for my own body the whole time too. I was tired of being responsible. I had wanted, somewhere in me, for someone else to take the responsibility for a while. For someone else to tell me what to do and have me say okay and not have to think about it. That's not how it works. I know that. But that's how I had been feeling for about a year. I told Megan some version of that at the kitchen table. Megan listened. She said: "Mom. I'm going to come with you to your appointment." I said: "You don't have to." She said: "I know I don't have to. I'm going to." She called Dr. Khan's office on Monday morning from her car on the way to work. She put me on speakerphone. She had me make the appointment for two weeks later. She came with me. The appointment was a Wednesday in early March of last year. Dr. Khan came into the room. He greeted me. He looked at Megan. He recognized her as my daughter from years of family photographs I'd shown him. He said: "Eleanor. It's been a while." I said: "It has." He said: "Let's see what's going on." He took my blood pressure. He took it twice — once at the start of the appointment, once at the end. He didn't tell me the numbers. He said: "I want to run a full panel today. I want to do bloodwork. I want to do an EKG. I want you to come back next week and we'll talk." I went home with Megan that afternoon. We had dinner at my house. She stayed for a few hours and then drove back. She called me Thursday morning. She said: "Mom. Did he tell you the numbers." I said: "No." She said: "Did you ask." I said: "No." She said: "Mom." I said: "I'll find out next week." She didn't push. She has learned, my daughter, when to push and when not to. I went back the following Wednesday. Dr. Khan came in. He sat down on the rolling stool. He had my chart pulled up on the screen. He said: "Eleanor. I want to talk to you about your numbers." He told me. I am not going to tell you my specific numbers, because I am the kind of person who reads other women's testimonials and gets confused when the numbers are specific. But I'll tell you they were in a range that, as a retired ICU nurse, I knew was the range where the conversation is not whether to start medication. The conversation is which medication, at what dose, monitored how often. He also referred me to a cardiologist. He hadn't done that before. The referral was the part that scared me most. He said: "Eleanor. I want you to see Dr. Choudhury. She's a colleague of mine, an excellent cardiologist. I want her to look at your EKG, look at your numbers, and have a conversation with you about a plan. I'm going to start you on a low dose today. She's going to look at the bigger picture." He said: "I am not going to ask you anymore whether you're going to start the medication. I am telling you. I want you to start tomorrow morning. The prescription will be at your pharmacy this afternoon." He looked at me. He said: "I'm not angry with you. I'm worried about you. You're a friend, Eleanor. You're not just a patient. I want a lot more years with you in this practice." I cried in his office. I don't usually cry. ICU nurses don't usually cry. We do other things with what would have been crying. I cried that day. He handed me a tissue. He said: "Get the prescription. Take the first pill tomorrow morning. See Dr. Choudhury next Wednesday. Call me if you have any questions." I got the prescription. I took the first pill the next morning. That was the moment my blood pressure stopped being something I was managing in my head and started being something I was actually managing in my body. It was about ten years too late. The cardiologist appointment was the following Wednesday. Dr. Choudhury is, I would guess, in her early fifties. She has short dark hair. She wears scrubs to her office, which I learned later was something she did because she rotated between her office and the cardiac cath lab and didn't see the point in changing clothes between. She came into the exam room with my chart on a tablet. She sat down across from me. She looked at me for a second before she said anything. She said: "Eleanor. How long have you been holding your breath." I want to tell you exactly what happened in my chest when she asked me that. I felt — and I am writing this down ten months later, and I can still feel it — that someone had asked me a question I had been waiting to be asked my entire adult life. I had been holding my breath. I had been holding my breath since 1984. I had been holding it through nursing school and through my first ICU rotation and through Earl's death and through forty years of twelve-hour shifts and through three years of grieving and through two years of COVID and through fifteen months of retirement. I had been holding my breath the whole time. I had not known I was holding it. I sat across from a cardiologist I had met thirty seconds earlier, and I started to cry the way people cry when somebody has named something that has been true for so long that they had stopped being able to name it themselves. She didn't say anything. She let me cry. After a minute she said: "Eleanor. I'm not asking that as a metaphor. I'm asking it because of what I'm looking at on your EKG. Your heart is doing extra work. Has been for a while. The medication is going to help. The lifestyle conversation is going to help more. I want to have both conversations with you today." She handed me a tissue. She said: "Tell me about the last ten years." I told her. I told her about Earl. About retirement. About the wine. About the couch. About the irritation. About the holding the line on the medication that I should not have been holding the line on. She listened. She said: "Okay." She said: "Here's what we're going to do." I'm going to compress what Dr. Choudhury told me because I want to respect your time and because the appointment was almost an hour and a half long. She said three things. The first was that the medication was going to do the heavy work on the numbers. I should not think of the medication as a failure on my part. I should not think of the medication as the moment my body stopped being mine. I should think of the medication as a tool. Like a stent or a pacemaker. A tool that was going to do work my body had stopped being able to do on its own. She said: "Eleanor. You are not less of a nurse because you take a pill in the morning. You are not less of a woman. You are not less of yourself. You are a sixty-seven-year-old woman whose body is asking for support. The support is medical. The support is also lifestyle. The support is also community. The support is what we're going to put together today." I cried again at "community." I had not had a community since I'd left the hospital. I had not known I'd needed one. The second was the basics. She gave me a structure. She said: "I want you to walk forty minutes every morning, before breakfast. Outside, weather permitting. I want you to cut wine to one glass on Saturdays. I want you to eat in a way that supports cardiovascular wellness — less salt, less processed food, more leafy greens, more fish, more legumes, less red meat. I want you to go to bed at the same time every night and get up at the same time every morning. I want you to do these things for ninety days before we re-evaluate." She paused. She said: "Eleanor. I'm going to be honest with you about something. These instructions are obvious. You know them better than I do. The reason I'm giving them to you isn't because you don't know them. It's because the difference between knowing them and doing them is the difference between your numbers six months ago and your numbers six months from now. I want you to do them." She said: "If you have trouble doing them, call my office. I will get on the phone with you. I have time for this." The third was the supplement. I want to tell you about the supplement carefully because the supplement is one component of a stack and the stack matters more than any one component of it. She said: "Eleanor. I want to tell you about one more thing. I usually tell my patients about it at the second appointment, not the first, but I'm telling you about it at the first because I think you'll do something with it." She said: "There is a body of research on beetroot — particularly the cold-pressed kind, which preserves the active compounds — for cardiovascular wellness. The compounds in beetroot, called betalains, support the body's natural antioxidant balance. The antioxidant balance matters more for post-menopausal women than people realize. There's also research on beetroot's relationship to nitric oxide production, which is relevant to cardiovascular wellness in ways that are well-studied." She said: "I am not going to recommend a specific brand. I don't do that. But I will tell you that if you want to look into a beetroot supplement as one component of your stack — alongside the medication, alongside the lifestyle, alongside the follow-ups with me — I am comfortable with that." She said: "If you find a brand you want to try, bring the bottle to your next appointment. I will look at the label. We'll talk about whether it's a good fit alongside the medication." She said: "I want to be clear, though. The supplement is the fourth thing. Or the fifth. Not the first. The medication is the first. The walks are the second. The food is the third. The sleep is the fourth. The supplement supports the others. It does not replace them." She said: "Most importantly: don't add anything to your regimen without telling me. The medication interacts with some things. I want to know what you're taking." I told her I understood. I left her office with three pages of instructions and a follow-up scheduled for ninety days out. I started the medication that night. I started the walks the next morning. I cut the wine to Saturdays. I started eating the way she'd told me to. I went to bed at 10:30 and got up at 6:30 every day, including weekends. For about three weeks I did the basics without the supplement. I want to tell you what those three weeks felt like. The medication started doing what medication does, which is mostly invisible. I didn't feel different. I assumed it was working. That was the contract. The walks were hard at first. I'd been a working ICU nurse for forty years and I'd thought I was in better shape than I was. I was not in better shape than I'd thought. I was sixty-seven years old and I had been sitting on a couch for fifteen months and my body knew it. The first morning I walked twenty minutes and had to sit on a bench in our neighborhood park for ten minutes before I walked home. By the end of the second week I was making it to forty minutes. The food was easier than the walks. I'd been a nurse my whole life. I knew how to cook for cardiovascular wellness. I just hadn't been. The wine was the hardest of the four things, and I want to be honest with you that for the first two weeks I broke the rule once. On a Tuesday in late March I had a glass of wine because it was raining and I was tired and I'd been good for ten days and I decided to give myself a glass. I told Dr. Choudhury about it at my second appointment. She didn't scold me. She said: "Eleanor. Did the glass of wine make you feel better." I said: "Honestly? It made me feel guilty." She said: "That's a useful piece of information. The next time you're considering it, ask yourself whether the wine is going to actually make you feel better, or whether you're using it for a reason that's not about pleasure." She said: "Wine on Saturday is fine. Wine on Tuesday because you're tired and it's raining is the kind of wine you don't actually want. That's the wine we cut." I have not had a wine on Tuesday since. I started looking into the supplement at the end of week three. I want to tell you how I found Rosabella because the how matters. I asked Megan, who is a physical therapist and reads a lot. I asked her whether she had heard of any cold-pressed beetroot supplements that had a good reputation. She said she'd ask her colleagues. A week later she called me. She said: "Mom. A colleague of mine in the practice has had a few patients in their sixties and seventies who've added a beetroot supplement to their regimens. The one most of them are taking is called Rosabella. It's made by a small operation in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania. They cold-press at low temperatures. There's a science page on the website that's worth reading. My colleague says she's seen good things in her patients who use it alongside their cardiac care." She said: "I'm not telling you to take it, Mom. I'm telling you what I found." I looked at the website that night. I read everything on it. I'm a retired ICU nurse. I read product information the way I used to read patient charts. The cold-pressing detail was the part that mattered to me. I knew enough about food chemistry to know that beetroot betalains are heat-sensitive. Most beetroot supplements on the market are heat-processed. Rosabella isn't. The science page was honest. It explained what the compounds appear to do and what they don't claim to do. It didn't overpromise. It didn't underdeliver on what it could honestly say. The third-party testing was on the site. I read the most recent testing reports. The "about" page was a real "about" page. Not a marketing page. A small farming community in Lancaster County. The cold-pressing process. The slow harvesting. The reason they did it the slow way. I called Dr. Choudhury's office the next morning. I talked to Brenda, the nurse who works with her. I told her what I'd found. I told her I wanted to ask Dr. Choudhury whether it was sensible to add to my regimen. Brenda called me back the next day. She said: "Eleanor. Dr. Choudhury says it's a reasonable choice. The brand is one she's familiar with. It's a food-based supplement, the cold-pressing is real, the science holds up. There's no interaction concern with your medication. She says go ahead. Tell her at your next visit." I ordered the bottle that afternoon. It came on a Friday. I started Saturday morning. I want to be honest with you about what happened for the first three weeks. Nothing. I felt nothing different. The medication was already doing its work. The walks were doing their work. The food was doing its work. The sleep was doing its work. The supplement was not adding anything I could feel for the first three weeks. Around week four I started noticing things. The first thing was the morning. I had been getting up at 6:30 every morning for the previous month. I had been getting out of bed by sitting on the edge for about thirty seconds and then standing up. Around week four I noticed I was standing up out of bed without sitting on the edge first. I had not been doing that on purpose. My body had just started doing it. The second thing was the walks. I had been making it forty minutes since the end of week two. Around week five I noticed I was finishing the forty minutes and not feeling like I needed to come back. I added ten minutes. I added another ten the next week. By week eight I was walking sixty minutes most mornings. I was sixty-seven. I had been on the couch for fifteen months. I was walking sixty minutes a day. I want you to sit with that, because the way I want you to sit with it is the way I sat with it, which was: my body had a sixty-minute walk in it. It had not had a sixty-minute walk in it the year before. The third thing was the breathing. I want to tell you about the breathing carefully because the breathing is what closes the loop on Dr. Choudhury's question. She had asked me, the first day I met her, how long I had been holding my breath. I had not understood the question metaphorically. She had not asked it metaphorically. She had asked it because she had seen, on my EKG and in my numbers, that my body was working harder than it should have to do its basic job. Around week six of the program — about ten weeks after that first appointment — I noticed that I was breathing differently. I noticed it on a walk one morning. I was walking up a small hill in our neighborhood. The hill is maybe an eighth of a mile, gentle slope, the kind you wouldn't think twice about if you were forty. At sixty-seven, six months earlier, I would have been short of breath at the top. That morning I got to the top of the hill and I was not short of breath. I stood there for a minute. I took a deep breath in. I took a deep breath out. I thought: oh. I thought: this is what she meant. I thought: I had been breathing shallow for ten years. I had been breathing shallow because my heart had been working harder than it should have been, and my body had been compensating, and I had not noticed because the compensation had been so gradual. I stood at the top of the hill for I don't know how long. When I got home I sat down at my kitchen table and I wrote in my journal — I'd started a journal at the beginning of the program — and I wrote: "Today was the first day I knew I had been holding my breath." That was the date the program stopped being a project and started being a way of living. I went back to Dr. Choudhury at the ninety-day mark. She took my blood pressure. She did an EKG. She pulled up the new bloodwork. She looked at me. She said: "Eleanor. Tell me." I told her. I told her about the walks. About the food. About the sleep. About the supplement. About the wine on Tuesdays that I hadn't had. About the hill. She listened. When I was done she said: "Eleanor. Your numbers are in a better place. Not perfect. Not where I want them yet. But meaningfully better. The medication is doing what we hoped it would do. The lifestyle changes are doing what we hoped they would do. Whatever you're doing — the combination of all of it — is working." She said: "I'm not going to attribute it to any one thing. Including the supplement. I think the combination is what's doing the work. I want you to keep doing the combination." She said: "Come back in three months." I went back in three months. The numbers had settled further. I went back six months after that. They had settled more. I am now ten months in. I am not at the numbers Dr. Choudhury wants me at long-term. I am closer than I was. We are still adjusting the medication. We are still working on the lifestyle. But I have a heart that is doing less extra work than it was. I have a body that breathes deeper than it had been. I have a morning that starts before 6:30 with a walk that I look forward to. I have a daughter who calls me on Tuesday evenings and says: "Mom. How was the walk this morning." She has been asking me that for ten months. I have an answer for her every Tuesday. I want to tell you about a Saturday in October. Megan and her family had come over for dinner. Ben and Lila were running around in the backyard. Megan was helping me in the kitchen. She was washing lettuce at the sink. I was making the dressing. She said, without looking up: "Mom. I want to ask you something." I said: "What." She said: "Are you happy." I stopped stirring. I want to tell you what I felt in that moment because it is the moment I keep coming back to. I felt — and this is the part I would not have been able to feel a year earlier — that someone in my family had finally asked me a question I had wanted to be asked for a long time. Earl used to ask me that question. Earl had been gone for eleven years. Nobody had asked me that question in eleven years. I said: "Megan. I am." She said: "Mom. Tell me about it." I told her. I told her about the walks. About the kitchen table journal. About the woman who had handed me a tissue and asked me how long I had been holding my breath. About the way the medication had stopped being a defeat and become a tool. About the way Saturdays had become the only wine day, and how the Saturday wine tasted different than any wine had tasted in years because it was the only one. I told her — and this is the part I think wives and daughters need to hear — that the year before, I had been carrying something I had not known I was carrying, and that putting it down had been the gift of the year. She didn't say anything. She kept washing lettuce. I kept stirring the dressing. After about a minute she said: "Mom. I'm so glad." I said: "Me too, honey." We finished dinner. We ate at the kitchen table. Ben spilled his milk. Lila told me a long story about a frog she had seen at her preschool. Megan watched me across the table. That night, after they'd left, I sat in my chair in the living room for a while. I thought about Earl. I thought about the version of me who would not have started the medication ten years ago. I thought about the version of me who, by some series of small decisions, had started it last March. I thought about the version of me who had been holding her breath since 1984. I thought: she is putting the breath down, one walk and one Saturday-wine and one capsule of cold-pressed beetroot at a time. I went to bed at 10:30. I slept all the way through the night. I do, most nights now. I want to be careful about what I'm claiming. I added the supplement to a routine that already included a blood pressure medication, daily walks, a careful diet, less wine, and a consistent sleep schedule. I cannot tell you which part is doing what. What I can tell you is that the combination is the version of me you've been reading about. I cannot tell you which capsule, which walk, which Saturday wine I didn't pour, which night of going to bed at 10:30, which hour of journaling tipped me. I know the combination did. I know I am a sixty-seven-year-old retired ICU nurse who finally — finally — let somebody help her. If you are a woman in her sixties or seventies who has been told she should be on a blood pressure medication and has been holding the line for reasons that are about pride or identity or fear or some combination of all three — please don't hold the line the way I held the line. Go to your doctor. Tell her what your numbers have been. Ask her what she'd recommend. Listen. If she recommends the medication, take it. Take it as a tool. Take it as a partner to the lifestyle changes you are going to make alongside it. Take it as a way of letting somebody help you. Then ask her about the basics. The walks. The food. The sleep. The wine. Then — and only then — ask her about supportive supplementation. About beetroot. About the cold-pressed kind. About the small operation in Lancaster County that does it the slow way. If she says yes, you have a fifth thing to add to your stack. If she says no, you have information. Either way, you have asked. The asking is what starts everything else. I'm not a doctor. I'm a 67-year-old retired ICU nurse from a midsize Midwestern city who spent four decades taking care of other people and ten years not taking care of herself, and who finally — last March — sat across from a cardiologist who asked her one question that broke the holding pattern open. "How long have you been holding your breath." If somebody has been asking you that question, in their own words — your daughter, your husband, your doctor, your friend — please answer it. Don't deflect. Don't say you're fine. Don't say you'll think about it. Answer the question. Then take whatever step the answer points you toward. I took mine. You can take yours. ~ Eleanor W. P.S. — Rosabella has a 90-day money-back guarantee. If you're not satisfied for any reason, every penny back, no questions asked. That's a reasonable policy. Give it at least six weeks before you decide. I felt nothing for three weeks. The supplement is slow. The combination is slower. P.P.S. — I went back to the hospital last month for the retirement party of a colleague I worked with for twenty-six years. I walked into the ICU lounge. The day shift nurses were there. Most of them I had worked with. Most of them I had not seen in two and a half years. I want to tell you what three of them said to me, in three different parts of the room, over the course of an hour. The first said: "El. You look like yourself again." The second said: "El. What have you been doing. You look ten years younger." The third said: "El. I want to do whatever you're doing." I told all three of them the same thing. I told them about Dr. Choudhury. I told them about the medication. I told them about the walks. I told them about the supplement, which is the part I want to emphasize, because most of them — like me — were nurses who had been holding the line on their own medications for years. I told them I had been wrong to hold the line. I told them I wished I had not held it. I told them: "If your doctor has been asking you to start something — please start it. The medication is not the defeat. The not-starting is the defeat. I know that now. I wish I'd known it ten years ago." The third nurse — her name is Phyllis, she's 62 — went to her doctor the next week. She called me last Tuesday. She'd started a low dose. She said: "El. I should have done this two years ago." I said: "Phyllis. We all should have done it two years ago. Welcome to the other side." She is on the other side. I am on the other side. The other side is real. It is not a place you can argue your way to. It is a place you can only be invited to by somebody who is already there. I am inviting you. P.P.P.S. — Rosabella is a small operation. The farms harvest on their own schedule. I waited twelve days for my second bottle because they were between bottlings. I keep an extra one in the cupboard now. If you decide to try it, that's worth knowing. They're not Amazon. They make what they make. P.P.P.P.S. — I want to say one more thing about Megan. She called me last week. She said: "Mom. I want to come up next Sunday. I want to walk with you." I said: "Honey. That would be wonderful." She said: "Forty minutes?" I said: "Yes. Forty." She said: "Mom. I want to start doing this for myself." I said: "You're thirty-eight years old." She said: "I know. I'm starting now. I don't want to wait until I'm sixty-seven." I cried at my kitchen table again. I'm becoming a woman who cries at her kitchen table. I had not been one of those women for a long time. I am now. The kitchen table is where the work happens. The kitchen table is where my daughter told me she was starting to walk forty minutes a day at thirty-eight, because her mother was finally walking forty minutes a day at sixty-seven. That's a chain. The chain runs forward. If you start walking today, your daughter starts walking sooner. Your granddaughter starts walking sooner than your daughter did. The chain is what we leave behind. Start the walks. The rest will follow. P.P.P.P.P.S. — One last thing. I want to talk to the nurses reading this. Or the doctors. Or the social workers. Or the teachers. Or any of the women who have spent their working lives being the one in charge. I want to tell you the thing I wish somebody had told me when I was fifty-six and Earl had just died and my blood pressure had just gone up ten points. I wish somebody had told me: it's okay to let somebody else take the responsibility. The responsibility for your own body, when you have spent forty years taking responsibility for other people's bodies, can become a thing you have forgotten how to give to anyone else. You don't have to give it to anyone else. You can give it to your doctor. You can give a piece of it to your daughter. You can give a piece of it to a friend who has been through something similar. You don't have to carry it all by yourself. That is the lesson I would have wanted at fifty-six. I got it at sixty-seven. Eleven years is a long time to hold your breath. Don't hold it as long as I held it. The other side is real. I'm here. I'm telling you. Come over. https://track.tryrosabella.com/feb71eaf-4594-4b50-b39e-f5e5eeea7537 Individual experiences vary. These statements have not been evaluated by the FDA. This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease.