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

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The knee gave out on the third verse of My Wish. 180 people were watching. My son Cody was holding my hand in his left and my shoulder in his right and we were doing the slow rocking thing that mothers and sons do at weddings when neither of them knows how to dance and both of them are just trying to get through the song without crying. Then my right leg locked. I don't mean it hurt. I mean it locked. Straight. Frozen. Like somebody had run a piece of rebar down the middle of my thigh and welded it to my ankle. I could not bend it. I could not shift my weight off of it. I could not take the next step in whatever it was we were doing on that parquet floor. Cody felt it before he heard it. His face changed. He said, "Mama?" And I said, real quiet, "Cody I can't move my leg." The DJ was a boy named Trey from the youth group at First Baptist and he had never worked a wedding before and God bless him he saw us stop and he did not know what to do so he just faded the song out and it went dead quiet in that reception hall and every single one of those 180 people looked at me standing there in the middle of the dance floor in my sage green dress with my one good leg and my one leg that had turned into a fence post. Cody put my arm around his neck and he half carried me back to Table 3. He sat me down. He kissed the top of my head. He said, "It's okay, Mama." And then Trey the DJ said into the microphone, "Uh, folks, let's give the mother of the groom another round of applause and we'll pick up right where we left off in just a second." And they clapped. All 180 of them. That polite pity clap that people do when they don't know what else to do with their hands. I sat at Table 3 and I smiled and I nodded at everyone who came over and I ate a piece of the almond cake and I laughed at somebody's story about a bachelor party and I did not go back on that dance floor the rest of the night. Cody's father, my husband Del, drove me home at 10:47 PM. I did not speak for the whole 14 minute drive from the reception venue in Cumby back to our house on the west side of Sulphur Springs. He didn't push me to. When we got home I sat on the edge of our bed in that sage green dress and I took off my one shoe. The other was still in Del's hand because I couldn't reach my foot. He knelt down and slid it off for me. He said, "Lou." I said, "Don't." He said okay. He went and made me tea. I didn't drink it. I laid in bed that night and stared at the ceiling fan and thought about the exact face my son made when my leg wouldn't work. My name is Louetta. My mama named me after her mama who came from Louisiana back in 1912. Most everyone just calls me Lou. I've answered the phone at First Baptist Sulphur Springs since 1985. That's 40 years this fall. I'm 62. Del and I have been married 41 years. We have two boys, Cody and Wade. Wade lives in Fort Worth with his wife and their little girl. Cody stayed here, took over Del's daddy's spot at the feed store, and last spring he married a girl named Kaitlyn from Winnsboro whose mama Roselinda has become one of the best things that ever happened to me, and I'll get to that. My knees started hurting me around 52. Nothing dramatic. Just a stiffness in the morning that took a few minutes to walk off. I remember mentioning it to Dr. Prentiss at my annual and he said, "Louetta, you're getting older, that's all it is. Little bit of wear and tear." Little bit of wear and tear. For 10 years I heard those words in different mouths. Dr. Prentiss. Then the physical therapist I saw for 6 weeks in 2019. Then the orthopedic guy in Tyler who took the X rays and said I had "some" arthritis in both knees and gave me a cortisone shot in each one that lasted about 4 months before it wore off. Then a second round of shots. Then a third. I took glucosamine and chondroitin for 2 solid years. I took turmeric capsules the size of a horse pill. I took meloxicam every morning until my stomach couldn't take it anymore. I bought one of those little compression sleeves off Amazon that made my calves swell up. I stopped kneeling in church. That was maybe 4 years back. The kneeler at First Baptist isn't padded and my right knee wouldn't take it, so I just started sitting through the prayer and hoping nobody thought I'd stopped believing. I stopped taking the stairs at the church office. There's only 6 of them from the parking lot up to the side door but I started going in the front way where it's flat. I stopped mowing. Del took over the mowing and never once complained but I noticed. I stopped going down to help with the little kids' Sunday school because the getting up and down off the little chairs and the sitting on the floor for story time became more than I could pull off without needing to grab onto a countertop on the way back up. I stopped a lot of things. That's how this happens by the way. You don't wake up one day and decide to become a woman who can't dance at her son's wedding. It happens 6 inches at a time. Little accommodations. A handrail here. A stair skipped there. A prayer done sitting instead of kneeling. And one day you look up and you're 62 and your leg won't bend when your only boy is asking you for a dance. The Monday after the wedding I called Cody at the feed store. I told him I was sorry. He said, "Mama, don't. It was a beautiful night." I said, "I ruined the dance." He said, "You did not ruin one thing. You showed up in that dress and you smiled at every person Kaitlyn's mama brought over and you danced with me until your leg said no more. That's not ruining anything." I could not talk after that. I told him I loved him and I hung up and I cried at my desk in the church office for about 20 minutes until Pastor Emmitt walked past and asked was I alright and I lied and told him it was allergies. Two weeks after the wedding, Roselinda called me. Roselinda is Kaitlyn's mother. She's a couple years older than me, maybe 64, ran her own house cleaning business in Winnsboro for 30 years, retired last spring right before the wedding. Big woman. Bigger laugh. She calls me "Miss Lou" even though we're basically the same age because that's how her mama raised her. She said, "Miss Lou, I want to come see you." I said, "Come on." She drove over from Winnsboro that Saturday and I made her some sweet tea and we sat out on my back porch and she told me the reason she'd come. She said, "Miss Lou, my sister Anita is up in Tyler. She runs a little compounding pharmacy out on the loop. Do you know what a compounding pharmacy is?" I said, "Vaguely." She said, "It's where they mix up specific medicines for specific people. Custom stuff. She's been in that business 32 years. And she stocks a lot of supplements too, the ones she actually believes in. She won't put something on the shelf unless she's seen it work on her own customers." I said, "Okay." Roselinda said, "About 8 months ago, Anita started stocking something new. It's not a drug. It's a fruit extract. From India. She started ordering it because two of her regulars, both women our age, both with arthritis in their knees so bad they were being told they needed replacements, both told her their pain was different after they'd been on it a couple months. Then a third one told her. Then a fourth. Anita is not the kind of woman to get excited over supplements. She's the kind that watches things for years before she'll tell you it's real." I said, "What is it." Roselinda pulled a little bottle out of her purse. Dark green label. It said Auniva Amla. She said, "Amla. Also called Indian gooseberry. Ayurvedic medicine has been using it for around 5,000 years but the reason Anita believes in it is not the history, it's what she's seen in her own store. She's been taking it herself for 6 months for her hips. She told me last month at Easter she got up out of the pew after the whole service without holding the back of it, and that was the first time in about 3 years." I looked at the bottle. It looked like nothing. A little dark green cylinder with white lettering. Roselinda said, "I asked Anita to explain to me what it actually does. Because I'm not spending my money on somebody's guess. She sat me down at her kitchen table and drew it on a napkin." She reached in her purse and pulled out a folded up piece of paper. Which was, in fact, an actual napkin, from what looked like a Whataburger. She unfolded it on my porch table. She said, "Anita said this is what she wishes doctors would take 3 minutes to explain instead of just handing out anti inflammatories. She said the cells in our joints, the ones that keep the cartilage healthy and the joint lubricated and the inflammation from going crazy, those cells need cellular energy to do their job. Just like every other cell in the body. That cellular energy is made by these little parts inside the cells called mitochondria." I said, "Okay." She said, "Mitochondria are basically the little power plants inside your cells. Every cell has them. They take what you eat and turn it into energy your cells can actually use. And they run best when you're young. As we age, and as our bodies get worn down by processed food and stress and just decades of daily living, those little power plants start running less efficiently. They make less energy." She tapped the napkin. She said, "So imagine your joint cells are a construction crew. Their job is to keep the cartilage in shape, keep the joint lubricated, and calm down inflammation when it flares up. They know how to do all of it. They've been doing it your whole life. But somewhere around 50 or 55 or whenever it started for you, the power went out at the job site." She said, "The lumber's still there. The tools are still there. The crew is still there. But there's no power. So the work stops." I said, "So the pills." She said, "The pills, the shots, the glucosamine, none of it is turning the power back on. The anti inflammatories are yelling at the crew for not doing the work. The shots are basically knocking the crew unconscious so they stop feeling how tired they are. None of it is addressing the fact that there's no power at the site." I sat there with my hand on the arm of my chair. The porch fan was going. A grackle was screaming in the pecan tree. I said, "And this fruit?" Roselinda said, "Anita said what amla does, and this is where I'm going to butcher the science, but she said it helps activate a pathway in the body called AMPK. And AMPK is basically the switch that tells your mitochondria to start running the way they used to. To make more energy. To do their job better." She said, "When that switch flips on, your mitochondria can start producing cellular energy the way they did when you were younger. That energy can flow back to the cells in your joints. And when those cells are supported, they can go back to doing what they know how to do. Maintaining the cartilage. Managing inflammation. Supporting your mobility." She said, "Anita also said this fruit has one of the highest antioxidant profiles they've ever measured in a food. Which matters because oxidative stress is one of the things that wore your mitochondria down in the first place. So it's not just switching the power back on. It's protecting the power supply from getting worn down again." She folded the napkin back up. She pushed it across the table to me. She said, "You keep that. Anita's diagram." I picked it up. I unfolded it. It was a very basic drawing of what looked like a house with a lightning bolt struck through it and then a second drawing next to it of the same house with the lightning bolt gone and a little sun over the top. That was Anita's chart. I laughed for the first time since April. Roselinda said, "Miss Lou. It's not magic. It's not a cure. Anita said what she's seen is people who give it a real chance, a couple of months, they usually start noticing things around week 3 or 4, and by around week 6 they know if it's doing something for them or not. And the company has a 90 day money back guarantee, so if you try it and nothing happens, you get your money back." She pushed the little dark green bottle across the table. She said, "I want you to have this one. My gift. If it works, you buy your own next bottle. If it doesn't, you tell me I was full of it and we still love each other." I took the bottle. I started taking it that Sunday. Two capsules with breakfast, the way the label said. Two weeks in, I didn't notice anything. I told Del I was probably wasting my time. He told me to just keep taking them because Roselinda had gone to the trouble. Week 3, I got up out of the pew at First Baptist after Pastor Emmitt's closing prayer and I noticed I hadn't grabbed the back of the pew in front of me to pull myself up. I stopped in the aisle. I stood there. Mrs. Wanda Franklin behind me said, "You okay honey?" I said, "I think so, Wanda." Week 4, I was in the church office on a Tuesday morning and Pastor Emmitt asked me could I run down to the fellowship hall to check if the coffee urn was cleaned out from Sunday, and I said sure, and I walked down those 6 steps from the side door and I walked back up them without thinking about it. I didn't take them one at a time. I didn't hold the rail. I just went. I sat back down at my desk and I stared at the little white bottle in the drawer. Week 5 was the mowing. Del was at the feed store helping Cody with inventory on a Saturday and the grass was getting away from us, and I looked out the kitchen window at the mower parked next to the shed and I thought, well, let me just try. I pulled the cord. I mowed the front half of the yard. Then I stopped. Not because my knee gave out. Because it was 91 degrees and I was 62 and only a fool mows in Texas at noon. When Del got home he saw the fresh cut and he looked at me and he did not say anything for a long minute. Then he said, "Lou." I said, "I know." He hugged me in the kitchen and I could feel him crying into my hair and I didn't say anything about it because sometimes a man needs to cry into his wife's hair without her making it a thing. Week 6 I called Cody at the feed store and I said, "Baby, does Kaitlyn still have that CD from y'all's first dance." He said, "Mama, why." I said, "I want a redo." He was quiet a second. Then he said, "Come to the house tonight. We'll have supper." I drove over to Cody and Kaitlyn's little rent house on Jackson Street. We ate spaghetti. Kaitlyn put on the reception playlist on her phone through the little speaker on the coffee table. My Wish came on. Cody stood up and put out his hand. We danced through the whole song. All 4 minutes and 43 seconds. My leg did not lock. My knee did not quit. I did not have to be walked back to a chair. At the end Cody dipped me and Kaitlyn hollered and Del laughed his big laugh from the couch and I stood back up on both feet and I felt like a woman again instead of a fence post in a sage green dress. That was 4 months ago. I still take my two capsules every morning with breakfast. Del takes them too now. He said if I wasn't going to be the tired one anymore he wasn't going to be either. Roselinda calls me every Sunday afternoon. Her hips have kept getting better. She's talking about starting to walk with Anita in the morning when she drives up to Tyler. Cody and Kaitlyn are having a baby in February. A little girl. They're going to name her after me. Louetta Kaitlyn Pennebaker. I found that out over Sunday dinner two weeks ago and I cried into my mashed potatoes. I'm going to get to hold that baby and I'm going to get to walk her around this yard and I'm going to get to kneel on the floor in front of a coffee table with her and stack blocks and I'm going to get to dance with her at her wedding one day, God willing, and none of that felt possible on the drive home from Cumby last April. If you're reading this and you're the one who used to do things and doesn't do them anymore, and everybody around you is telling you it's just age, and your doctor is telling you it's just wear and tear, and every supplement you've tried has ended up in the back of the cabinet, I want you to hear me on this. Your body is not broken. Your joints are not gone. The crew is still on the job site. The power just went out. Auniva's Amla is what turned the power back on for me. It's not a drug. It's a fruit extract that has been used in one of the oldest medical traditions in the world for 5,000 years, standardized into a capsule you take twice a day with breakfast. Made in the USA. Free shipping. And a 90 day money back guarantee, so if you take it for 3 months and it doesn't do a single thing for you, you send back what's left and they refund you. No hoops. No arguing. Three months to find out is not a lot to ask when the alternative is another 3 months of grabbing pew backs to stand up and skipping stairs and turning down your son's hand on his wedding day. 👉 auniva.co/amla/33 P.S. I want to say something to the woman reading this who is thinking about her mother, not herself. Maybe your mama is the one who won't get down on the floor with the grandkids. Maybe she's the one who stopped mowing. Maybe she's the one who takes a full minute to get out of the passenger seat when you pick her up for lunch. She won't order this for herself. She won't. She's the generation that thinks pain is what happens and you just handle it. Order it for her. Send it to her house. Tell her Louetta from Sulphur Springs said to try it for 90 days and if it doesn't do anything the company gives the money back. That's what Roselinda did for me. Somebody has to be the one to hand the bottle across the table. P.P.S. About the 90 day guarantee. I want to say this plainly. In 10 years of cortisone shots and glucosamine and meloxicam and physical therapy and compression sleeves, not one person ever offered me my money back if it didn't work. The shots didn't come with a refund. The horse pill turmeric didn't come with a refund. The orthopedic bill in Tyler sure didn't come with a refund. A company that will give you your money back after 3 months is a company that has watched enough of its customers get their lives back that they're willing to bet the mortgage on it. That tells you something. P.P.P.S. Auniva is not a huge outfit. Anita in Tyler told Roselinda they've had backorders before because they can't always keep up with demand. If you're going to try it, get enough to run a full 3 months so you can give it a real shot. I keep 2 bottles at the house all the time. One for me, one for Del. I'm not going back to being the woman on the parquet floor at Cumby, and neither is he. P.P.P.P.S. Cody and Kaitlyn's little girl is due February 14th. Valentine's Day. Louetta Kaitlyn Pennebaker. I am going to be able to kneel down next to her crib to pick her up. I am going to be able to sit on the floor with her and get back up. I am going to be able to walk her out to the pecan tree in the back yard and lift her up so she can touch the low branches. That is what this is for me. Not a supplement. Not a pill. It's the grandbaby I'm going to get to be a grandma to, all the way, not from a chair. If that's what it is for you too, or you know a woman it could be that for, don't wait until next month. Order today. Start tomorrow. Your grandbaby is coming whether you're ready or not. 👉 auniva.co/amla/33

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Feel Like Yourself Again

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