Wellness Insider Facebook ad: “Feel Like Yourself Again”

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I stopped on the landing between the first and second floors of my own apartment building and pretended to look at my phone so my son wouldn't see me trying to catch my breath. He was already inside my apartment. He'd carried up a lamp and a wicker basket and gone back down for the second load. I was between loads, holding a canvas tote bag with two throw pillows and a picture frame in it, and I was standing on that landing looking at the linoleum floor and breathing through my nose because if I breathed through my mouth I would have made the sound a person makes when they can't get enough air, and I did not want him to hear it. His footsteps came back up the stairwell. I turned my phone screen on and pretended to scroll. He looked at me and smiled and said "you okay Ma?" and I said "just checking a text from Denise," and he nodded and kept climbing. Denise had not texted me. Denise was my sister in Woonsocket and she had not texted me anything in six weeks. I climbed the last flight after him and I sat down on my new couch and I did not get up again for 40 minutes. My name is Bev. I am 61 years old and I have lived in Providence, Rhode Island for all of them. I worked as a seamstress at Trinity Repertory Company for 26 years, altering costumes for Shakespeare and Tennessee Williams and every high school field trip's first play, and I retired in June of last year. In August I sold the townhouse in Cranston that my husband Ray and I bought in 1998, three years before he passed, and I moved into a small second floor apartment on Hope Street a mile from my son Jonathan and his wife Priya and my grandson Arjun. I was very proud of that move. I had chosen it. I had walked through it in July with a woman from the property management office and I had said yes to the second floor unit even though there was a ground floor unit available in the same building, because the second floor had a bay window in the living room that looked out at a maple tree and the ground floor unit looked out at a dumpster. I signed the lease in the office that day. The woman said "and you're okay with the stairs?" and I laughed and said "I'm 61, not 91." I want you to hold onto that sentence for a second. I was 61, not 91. Six weeks after I moved in I could not carry a bag of groceries from my Corolla to my apartment door without stopping twice. I did not tell Jonathan. I did not tell Priya. I did not tell Denise in Woonsocket. I did not tell my primary care doctor Sofia, whom I had been seeing since 2011, when I saw her in October for my annual physical, because Sofia would have listened and would have ordered tests and I did not want tests, I wanted to be a woman who could carry her own groceries up her own stairs. So instead I developed a system. I bought a rolling cart at the Ocean State Job Lot on Reservoir Avenue. A little red one with wheels. I would park in the small lot behind my building, roll the cart to the base of the stairs, carry two bags at a time up the first flight, put them on the landing, go back down, get two more, carry them to the landing, and then from the landing I would carry them two at a time up the second flight. Two trips became four. Groceries that used to take 8 minutes to bring in took 25. I told myself that was normal. I want to tell you what shortness of breath is actually like when it creeps up on you over years. It is not gasping. It is not a gasp. It is a quiet ache in your ribs when you take a deep breath at the top of the stairs. It is talking on the phone and having to pause mid sentence to take a small extra breath that the person on the other end would not notice. It is turning down the invitation to go to the beach at Narragansett with Priya's family because you know there is a long staircase from the parking lot down to the water and you are more afraid of coming back up than you are of going down. It is the summer you realized you were not making that trip anymore. Ray died in 2001. He was 39 years old and he had asthma his whole life and one bad August afternoon he had an attack that would not stop and by the time the ambulance got to Rhode Island Hospital he was gone. Jonathan was 11. I raised him from a townhouse in Cranston on a seamstress salary and I did not remarry because I did not want to and because I was too tired. For 22 years I climbed the stairs in that townhouse without thinking about them. I don't know exactly when it started. I remember being 54 and thinking I needed to lose 15 pounds. I remember being 57 and thinking I was out of shape. I remember being 59 and thinking I was getting older, everybody slows down. I remember being 60 and standing at the top of the stairs in the townhouse with a laundry basket saying "whew" out loud in an empty house. Whew. That's the sound of a woman noticing something and deciding not to notice it. By the time I moved into the Hope Street apartment I could not walk up a flight of stairs without stopping at the top for 45 seconds to breathe. I did not know that was what was happening because I never walked up a flight of stairs while anyone was watching. I always did it alone. And a person who is alone at the top of a flight of stairs can breathe for as long as she wants and no one has to know. The apartment was going to be my confession. Because Jonathan and Priya were going to come up those stairs, and Arjun was going to run up those stairs, and I was going to have to walk up them with them, and there was going to be a Tuesday when I could not hide it anymore. Three weeks after I moved in there was a Sunday when Priya came over with a lasagna and Arjun. He is 6. He ran up the stairs ahead of us with the enthusiasm of a person who has never had a body that failed him. Priya walked up with the lasagna. I walked up behind Priya with a bottle of sparkling water and by the second landing I was 15 seconds behind her and by the top she was already unlocking my door with the spare key I'd given her and I was on the second to last step with my hand on the railing and my other hand pressed flat against my chest. She looked back down at me and I saw her see it. She didn't say anything. She said "come on Bev, I'm starving," in a light voice, and she went inside. But she saw me. And I knew she saw me. That was a Sunday in September. The next morning I went out to get the mail. The mail room in my building is the little vestibule inside the front door, before the stairwell starts. There are 8 tenant mailboxes on the wall and a narrow table where the mail carrier leaves oversized packages and where residents leave things they don't want. A dog-eared paperback. A branch of grocery store flowers someone didn't want to carry up. Once a bowl of clementines with a note that said "please take." That morning there was a small orange bottle on the table. Not a prescription bottle. Amber glass. White label. A supplement of some kind. Next to it was a piece of junk mail addressed to Cal Morrison, Apartment 3B, which is the apartment directly above mine. I had met Cal exactly once. He'd introduced himself in the vestibule my third day in the building. He was 66 and he was tall and gray and he wore a Boston Red Sox cap and he'd retired 4 years ago from working the docks at ProvPort, which he told me and which I had to ask him what it meant. Longshoreman, he said. Cargo containers. Cranes. He said "welcome to the building" and he shook my hand and his handshake was the kind that a person who has held a lot of chains has. And then he went up the stairs. Up the stairs. I had watched him from the vestibule. He'd taken the two flights to 3B like it was nothing. He'd taken them the way Jonathan had taken them the day of the move. Like there weren't stairs involved. Like the stairs were just floor at a slight angle. I stood in that vestibule on the Monday morning after Priya saw me on the second to last step, and I looked down at that little amber bottle next to Cal Morrison's junk mail, and I picked it up and I read the label. Auniva. Organic pomegranate extract. It said "concentrated peel extract, standardized to punicalagins." It said "2 capsules daily." It said "made in the USA." I stood there for a full minute holding it. Then I put it back exactly where I'd found it, next to the junk mail addressed to Cal Morrison, apartment 3B, one flight above mine, and I went back up my own flight of stairs stopping once on the landing and pretending to look at my phone. That night at 5:30 I heard Cal's footsteps come down the stairwell. I heard him come into the vestibule. I heard him pick up his mail and go back up. I heard him take the stairs two at a time. I sat on my couch and I listened. Wednesday morning I went down to get the mail again. My box was empty. But the little amber bottle was on the table again, sitting on top of a folded copy of the Providence Journal. Cal came out of the stairwell just as I was standing there. "Morning, Bev." "Cal." He picked up the paper and the bottle. And he saw me looking at the bottle. I did not plan what I said next. I said "can I ask you something." He said "yeah." I said "you took the stairs two at a time last night." He looked at me. I said "I take them one at a time and I have to stop at the landing." He didn't laugh. He didn't dismiss me. He said "how long has that been going on?" I said "years, I think. It got bad a few months ago." He held up the little amber bottle and he said "have coffee with me on Saturday, if you want. I'll tell you about this." That is how I ended up at a place called Modern Diner on East Avenue in Pawtucket on a Saturday morning at 9:15 AM sitting across from Cal Morrison and eating a piece of rye toast and hearing about something his brother in law had told him 2 years earlier. Cal's brother in law is a respiratory therapist at Miriam Hospital, and Cal, before he found this thing, had been climbing his own stairs the way I climb mine. He was 63 at the time. Thirty seven years on the docks in Providence had left him with a set of lungs that he described to me as "leather bags that used to be new." That was his phrase. Leather bags. He said "when you breathe salt air and diesel fumes and container dust for four decades, you don't come out of that with clean lungs." He said he'd gone up the stairs to his apartment one night after a long day at the docks and he'd had to sit down on his own kitchen floor to catch his breath, and his brother in law had been there, and his brother in law had said "Cal, we're going to talk." His brother in law's name was Ellis. He was a respiratory therapist for 30 years. And what he told Cal that night sitting on Cal's kitchen floor was that the lungs are not just about breathing. Ellis said the lungs are about delivery. He said what most people don't understand is that the lungs are where the oxygen gets into the blood, but the whole reason you get short of breath on the stairs is not just that your lungs aren't taking in enough air, it's that the whole delivery system, the lungs and the blood vessels and the tissue that carries the oxygen out to your legs and your heart and your muscles, has been getting worn down for decades by something called oxidative stress. Ellis said your lungs are more exposed to oxidative stress than almost any tissue in your body, because they are the tissue that is in direct contact with the outside air, every single breath, all day, every day, for 60 years. Every diesel fume you ever stood next to. Every second hand cigarette. Every wildfire smoke season. Every dry indoor air with dust particles floating through it. The lung tissue is on the front line, and it takes the hits. And on top of that, Ellis said, the blood vessels that carry oxygen from the lungs out to the rest of your body, they get worn down too. The vessels get stiffer. The signal that tells them to open up so blood can flow through gets weaker. That signal is called nitric oxide, and it gets destroyed by the same oxidative stress that beats up your lungs, and when it gets destroyed the vessels don't open the way they should and the blood doesn't move the way it should and the oxygen you're breathing in doesn't get out to the places that need it. Cal said Ellis drew him a picture on a napkin. Lungs on the left. Muscles on the right. A pipe connecting them. And he wrote "rust" on the pipe. Cal said "when you're breathing on the landing, it's not that your lungs are broken. It's that the whole system, from the lung tissue to the delivery pipe, has been getting rusted up for 40 years, and now you notice." I sat there in the diner and I put my fork down. I said "so what did you do." Cal said Ellis had been reading about pomegranate for years. Not the juice. Not the seeds. He'd been reading specifically about the peel of the pomegranate, which most people throw away, because the peel contains compounds called punicalagins that have been studied for how they support the body's antioxidant defenses, the ones that clear out the oxidative stress that's been beating up the lung tissue and the vascular delivery system. Ellis had told Cal that the punicalagins are also studied for supporting the same signal in the blood vessels that keeps them open and relaxed, the same nitric oxide pathway that had been getting attacked. He said the punicalagins work on both ends. They help the antioxidant defenses that protect the tissue. And they help support the vessels that carry the oxygen out. Ellis had told Cal to be careful about what he bought. He said most of the pomegranate products at the store are pomegranate juice, or extract standardized to something called ellagic acid, which is a different compound found in a lot of fruits. The punicalagins are specifically in the peel of the pomegranate. Most products don't use the peel. And most extracts don't standardize to punicalagins. Ellis had brought Cal a bottle of one specific product a few weeks later. Auniva. Organic pomegranate peel extract. Standardized to punicalagins. 2 capsules a day. Made in the USA. Cal had been taking it for a little over 2 years. He said the first month, nothing. He said the second month, he wasn't sure. He said somewhere in the middle of the fourth week, he'd walked up the two flights to his apartment and he'd noticed at the top that he wasn't holding the railing. He said he stood at his own front door and he looked back down the stairwell and he thought "I didn't hold the railing." He said the change had been slow. Week by week the top of the stairs got a little quieter. Then the middle of the stairs. Then the walk from the parking lot. He said by month 6 he was taking the stairs two at a time on days when he was in a good mood. He said the stairs had never gotten easier. He had gotten more able to take the stairs. That was the way he said it. I asked him if he was sure it was the pomegranate. He said in December of last year he ran out for 5 weeks because his brother in law's supply had been late and he'd forgotten to reorder his own. And by the end of the second week he was breathing on the landing again. He said "I'm sure." Then he told me two things I want to tell you. He said Auniva has a 90 day money back guarantee. If it doesn't work for you, you send the bottle back and you get your money back. He said "that's what made me try it. I don't try things." And he said this: "Bev, you don't feel it. You just wake up on a Wednesday four weeks in and you don't hear yourself breathing at the top of the stairs anymore. That's how you know." I ordered the bottle from the same URL Ellis had given Cal. Cal wrote it down for me on a paper coaster from Modern Diner. auniva.co/pom/5. The bottle came the following Thursday. I want to tell you what happened over the next 8 weeks, and I want to tell you honestly. Week 1, nothing. Week 2, nothing. Week 3, one thing. I noticed on a Wednesday that I'd carried three grocery bags up from the parking lot in a single trip. Not two. Three. And I had stood at my door with the bags at my feet and I had felt normal. Not out of breath. Not tight in the ribs. Just a woman who'd come up two flights of stairs with groceries. I sat on my couch and I thought about that for a long time. I told myself it was probably a mild day. It was 58 degrees out. Maybe the cool air had helped. Week 4, Priya came over on a Sunday and Arjun ran up the stairs and I walked up behind Priya, and at the top of the stairs I unlocked my own door. Priya looked at me. I did not know what she was looking at until she said "Bev, you're not out of breath." Week 5, I went to Denise's house in Woonsocket for the first time in a year and a half. There is a set of concrete steps up to her front porch, 7 of them, and I had put off visiting for months because those steps had become a problem. I walked up them with a pie in my hands and I did not think about the steps until I was inside her kitchen setting the pie down. Then I remembered I hadn't thought about them. Week 6, I heard myself on the phone with Sofia's office. I was scheduling a follow up. And I noticed I was talking in whole sentences without the little pause I hadn't known I'd been doing for years. Week 7, Cal saw me in the vestibule and said "you look different." I said "I feel different." He nodded and went upstairs. Two at a time. Week 8, I want to tell you something exact. It was the Saturday before Thanksgiving. Jonathan and Priya invited me over for a soup and to help them get the guest room ready for Denise, who was coming for the holiday. There is a little steep hill on their street. I had not walked from my car to their front door in a year and a half without pausing. I parked. I walked up the hill. I rang the doorbell. Jonathan opened the door and I was standing there normally, holding a bottle of wine, and he looked at me and he said "did you park closer than usual," and I said "no." He looked at me for a second. And then he said, quietly, "Ma, are you okay?" And I said "I think I might be." Jonathan did not press. That is the kind of son he is. He hugged me and he took the wine and I went inside. But at some point later, after the soup, when Priya and Arjun were putting sheets on the guest bed and Jonathan and I were alone in the kitchen doing dishes, I told him. I told him about the landing. I told him about the phone. I told him about Priya seeing me on the second to last step. I told him about the little amber bottle on the vestibule table and about Cal from apartment 3B and about a respiratory therapist named Ellis and about the peel of a pomegranate. Jonathan listened. And when I was done he said "Ma, why didn't you tell me any of this before?" I said "because I was 61, not 91." He put down the dish towel. He didn't say anything for a minute. Then he hugged me again, and he held on longer than he had at the door. I want to be careful about what I'm saying to you. I'm not telling you my lungs are 25 again. I'm not telling you I'm running up hills. I'm not telling you my doctor did a spirometry test and my numbers moved. Sofia hasn't checked, because I haven't asked her to check. I'm telling you what I feel, what I do, what I'm able to walk up. What I'm telling you is that I moved into a second floor apartment because it had a bay window and a maple tree, and for two months I thought I'd made a terrible mistake, and then a man from apartment 3B who I'd shaken hands with exactly once left a bottle on a vestibule table and told me about his brother in law, and now on Sunday mornings I come up my own two flights carrying a bag of groceries and a bakery box and a cup of coffee, and I unlock my own door, and I do not stand on the landing pretending to look at my phone. If you are reading this on your couch because you took the elevator up one floor at the mall this morning even though the stairs were right there, or because you don't visit your daughter as much as you used to because her house has a hill, or because you have gotten very good at looking at your phone at the top of a flight of stairs, I want you to know something. There is a woman in Providence, Rhode Island who was doing all of those things a year ago. And a longshoreman told her about a respiratory therapist. And the respiratory therapist told him about a fruit. And the fruit was not the juice. It was the peel. The company is Auniva. The product is their organic concentrated pomegranate peel extract, standardized to punicalagins from the peel, not to ellagic acid like most of the products on the shelf. 2 capsules a day. Made in the USA. They give you 90 days. If it isn't working for you, you send the bottle back and they refund you every penny. That is what let me press the order button. You can order it from the same URL Cal wrote on the coaster for me at Modern Diner. 👉 https://auniva.co/pom/5 P.S. I want to say something about the peel one more time, because I almost missed it. I would have gone to Whole Foods and bought a bottle of pomegranate juice and drunk it every morning and probably nothing would have happened. The punicalagins are in the peel. Not the seeds. Not the juice. Most products on the shelf are the juice, or an extract standardized to ellagic acid, which is not the same compound and is found in a lot of fruits. Auniva standardizes to the punicalagins from the peel. That is the whole difference. It is why Cal uses theirs and it is why I use theirs. P.P.S. About the 90 days. It is a real return guarantee. If it isn't working for you at day 89, you ship the bottle back and they refund you. That is what let me press the order button on a Sunday night on my couch with my son's fiancée having just watched me struggle on the second to last step of my own staircase. I did not know if it was going to work. I knew the risk was 90 days of trying it, and I had already spent six weeks in a second floor apartment I was starting to think I'd made a mistake buying. P.P.P.S. If you order it, do not sit on the couch on day 4 waiting to feel something. That is not how this works. Cal said it to me at the diner and I say it to you. You take the 2 capsules in the morning. You live your Tuesday and your Wednesday and your Thursday. And one Sunday afternoon four or five or six weeks in, you carry a bag of groceries up two flights of stairs and you set them down at your door and you notice that you are not breathing hard, and you look back down the stairwell, and you know. 👉 https://auniva.co/pom/5

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Feel Like Yourself Again

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