Mark Holtman Facebook ad: “The nurse could feel it through her skin”

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A nurse pressed two fingers into my wife's stomach, held them there, and said, "There is something moving under my hand and it is not her pulse." Then she walked out of the room to get somebody else. That was appointment nine. Nine appointments in fourteen months, and it was the first time anyone had actually put a hand on her. I'm Mark, I'm 47, and I live in Leeds. My wife Claire is 44. We have Ellie, who is thirteen, and Sam, who is nine. I am writing this for the bloke who is lying next to a woman who keeps telling him that something is wrong inside her, while every letter from the hospital says she is fine. I did not believe her properly for about a year. I have to live with that. It came on so slowly that we both had an excuse ready for every bit of it. The bloating was first. Claire would come down in the morning in her pyjamas with a flat stomach, and by six in the evening she looked six months gone. She started sitting down to her tea with her jeans unbuttoned under the table and her jumper pulled down over the top. She thought I had not noticed. I had noticed for months and said nothing because I did not know what to say. Then the tiredness, and it was not tiredness like mine at the end of a long week. She would sleep nine hours and come down grey. She told me once it was not being tired, it was being emptied out. She would sit on the settee at four o'clock on a Saturday and that was her finished for the day. Ellie learned to bring her a blanket without being asked, and that is the detail I think about now. Then the fog. Claire does payroll, she has done it for eighteen years, she is the one who does our tax return and can add up a shop in her head. She started losing the thread halfway through her own sentences. She rang me from the Morrisons car park one Thursday because she could not remember what she had gone in for, and she had the receipt in her hand while she was asking me. Then the three in the morning thing. Near enough on the hour, every night, wide awake with her heart going like she had run up the stairs. I would wake up and she would be lying there in the dark with her hand flat on her stomach, not moving, just waiting for it to stop. Her hair started coming out. She has always had thick dark hair, it was the first thing I noticed about her. I was clearing the shower drain twice a week with my fingers and putting it in the bin so she would not see how much there was. She stopped wearing it up. Then the weight. Half a stone in about two months, and she was eating. That is the part that should have made somebody sit up straight. She was eating properly and she was disappearing. And she started snapping, which is not her. Claire is the calm one in this house, I am the one who slams cupboards. She shouted at Sam over a knocked over beaker of squash, and then she sat on the bottom stair and cried for twenty minutes because of the way he had looked at her when she did it. The thing she said to me over and over, the thing I stopped properly listening to, was this. "Mark, it feels like something turns over in there. Like something shifts." I said it was wind. I said it was probably IBS. I said what everybody else was saying, because it was easier than the alternative. Here is the ladder. GP one: "Your bloods are normal. You are a working mum, you are run down." GP two, three months later: "It is almost certainly IBS. Try more fibre and cut out the onions." GP three, a locum, ten minutes: "Have you thought about antidepressants? A lot of this presents as low mood." Private GP, one hundred and eighty pounds: "Possibly perimenopause. Come back in six months and we will see where you are." Gastroenterologist, three hundred and twenty pounds, twelve minutes in the room with him: "There is nothing structurally wrong. This is functional. It is how your gut talks to your brain." Dietitian, seventy five pounds a session, three sessions. Low FODMAP for eleven weeks. My wife ate chicken, rice and courgette until she cried at the sight of it, and she got worse, not better. Probiotics. I did the sums in the end because I am the one who does our banking. Two hundred and forty pounds in a year on tubs and sachets and one liquid one that had to live in the fridge door and cost eleven pounds a bottle. Nine hundred and sixty five pounds of our money. One stool sample that came back clear, which we were so relieved about that we went for a pizza afterwards. And a woman in my house who was fading in front of me while I told her it was probably stress. Then there was a stretch last spring, about six weeks, that I have not talked about with anyone except her sister. Claire became certain she was dying. Not frightened. Certain, which is worse to sit next to. She asked me one night with the telly still on, in the same voice she uses to ask if I have put the bins out, whether I would be able to do Ellie's hair for school if it came to it. She said Ellie would want the plait and I would have to get her to show me. Another night at about four in the morning she shook me awake and said, "Take me to A and E, something has burst." We sat in that waiting room until half seven. They took bloods, told us the bloods were normal, and sent us home in the rain with a paper cup of water still in her hand. She started leaving the landing light on. She started saying goodbye to the kids at the school gate for longer than she used to, both hands on their shoulders. And I heard her on the phone to her sister in the kitchen, with the tap running so I would not hear, saying, "Nobody is going to find it until it is too late." Appointment nine was a nurse practitioner at our own surgery on a Tuesday afternoon. We only saw her because there was nothing else for a fortnight and Claire could not stand up straight at the sink. She did the one thing nobody else had done in fourteen months. She got Claire up on the couch, put the paper down properly, and felt her stomach. Slowly. Working her way across it, pressing in with two fingers and holding it there and asking her to breathe out. She stopped on the left side and she went quiet. It went on long enough that I stopped looking at my phone. Then she said it. There is something moving under my hand and it is not her pulse. She went out. She came back with the senior nurse, a woman in her fifties who did not introduce herself, washed her hands, pressed the same spot for a long time and said, "You are right. That is not gas and that is not her pulse." Claire told me in the car that she had started crying on that couch and it was not fear. It was that somebody with a job title had finally said out loud the thing she had been saying for over a year. Her exact words were, "Mark, she could feel it through my skin. I have not been making it up." They sent us up to the hospital the same evening. Two days on a ward. Ultrasound. Bloods again. A cannula in the back of her hand that she kept catching on the blanket. I sat in the chair next to her with my coat over my knees and I was, God help me, relieved, because I thought somebody was finally going to find it. On the second afternoon a registrar came round with a folder and said the scan had not shown anything significant, likely gas and inflammation, and that Claire should follow up with the gastro team. They discharged her with a leaflet about bowel habits and a car park charge of nine pounds forty. So I went home, put the kids to bed, and did the thing I should have done a year earlier. I did not search bloating. I did not search tiredness. I turned an envelope over on the kitchen table and wrote every single thing down, all of it, in order, and then I searched the whole lot together. Flat in the morning and swollen by teatime. Sleep that does not touch it. The fog. Waking at three with her heart going. The hair in the drain. Half a stone off while eating properly. The temper. And the sentence she had said to me a hundred times, that something turns over in there. What came back, on medical sites and in published papers, was intestinal parasites. I nearly shut the laptop. We live in Leeds. Claire washes salad twice, she is the cleanest person in this house, we are not a family that gets worms. I was embarrassed sitting there reading it on my own at midnight. Then it started explaining my wife, line by line, and I could not stop reading. The World Health Organisation estimates that one in three adults in the developed world is carrying an intestinal parasite. You pick them up from undercooked meat, from unwashed salad, from a dog, from a public toilet, from a swimming pool. Nothing exotic and nothing shameful about any of it. They attach to the gut wall and they take iron and B12 out of the food before the body ever gets to absorb it. That is why Claire could put away a full roast and still be grey an hour later. She was eating, but she was not the one being fed. It is also why the weight came off while she was eating properly, which was the bit nobody could explain to us. They release waste that gets into the blood and reaches the brain. That is the fog, and the low mood, and being wide awake at three in the morning with your heart hammering for no reason at all. Her personality was not changing. She was being quietly poisoned in her own house. They inflame the lining of the gut, and that is the bloating that gets a label of IBS put on it and then gets left with that label for years while everyone stops looking. And here is the part that made me sit at that table with my hands over my face. They hide behind a biofilm, a slime shield they build round themselves. Standard stool tests miss up to ninety percent of them, because the sample has to happen to catch eggs being shed on the exact day you hand the pot in at reception. That one clear stool test we went for a pizza over was never going to find anything. Fourteen months of my wife being told she was fine, off the back of a coin toss. I was angry enough that I did not sleep that night. Then in the morning I got practical. Everything I read came back to the same two compounds. Carvacrol, from wild oregano, which ruptures them and dissolves the biofilm so they have nowhere left to sit. And thymoquinone, from black seed oil, which stops them reproducing and helps the body flush them out. Both used for thousands of years round the Mediterranean and the Middle East, long before anybody had a word for any of it. So on the Saturday I drove to the health shop and bought a bottle of oregano oil for twenty two pounds because it was the only one they had. Claire took it for a fortnight. Nothing happened. Not one thing changed except that she tasted oregano until lunchtime every day. Then I read the label properly, at the back, in the small print. Twenty percent carvacrol. The research is clear that you need eighty percent minimum to get through biofilm. Most of what is sitting on the shelf in this country is fifteen to fifty percent, which means the parasites stay behind their shield and are not touched at all. You have bought expensive olive oil that smells like a pizza, and worse than that, you have talked yourself out of the one thing that would have worked. I went back to the papers, worked out what I actually needed to be looking for, and that is how I ended up ordering Herbies Oregano+. Eighty percent carvacrol from wild Mediterranean oregano. Cold pressed black seed oil for the thymoquinone, in the same softgel. Third party lab tested. Nitrogen sealed so it is not oxidising on a warehouse shelf for six months. No fillers. No oily burps, which mattered to Claire after the cheap stuff. Two softgels every morning. That is the whole of it. Day one, nothing. Day two she was in and out of the bathroom most of the day and said it felt like her insides were being wrung out like a cloth. Day six I am not going to describe in an advert. I will say that Claire shouted my name up the stairs, and I stood in the doorway of our bathroom, and my wife was sat on the floor with her back against the bath sobbing. Not disgust. Relief. She kept saying, "That nurse was right. That nurse was right." Fourteen months of being told it was stress and how her gut talks to her brain, and there it was, in a toilet in Leeds, on a Thursday. After those two days she said she felt amazing, and I got to watch it from the outside, which is its own strange thing. Week one, the bloating started coming down. She sat at the kitchen table at ten at night with her jeans done up, put her hand flat on her stomach and said, "It is flat. Mark, it is actually flat at ten o'clock." Week two, she slept the whole night through. No three in the morning. She came down the next day and said the odd part was waking up and not immediately taking stock of how bad she felt, because she had been doing that first thing every morning for years without telling anyone. Week three, the fog went. She was doing the online shop and talking to me about Ellie's parents evening at the same time and finishing every sentence she started. She said, "I do not think I have felt properly awake since my thirties." Week four was the energy, and that was the best part of the lot. Light, happy, full of power is how she put it. She hoovered the stairs and then went out for a walk afterwards, which she has not done since Sam was born. She said the tiredness had not just gone, something had come back in its place. Her skin cleared up as well, less oily round her nose, which neither of us was expecting and which she is very pleased about. And the snapping stopped. In a house with a thirteen year old and a nine year old that is the one that changes everything. There is no atmosphere in here at six in the evening any more. I did not know how much I had been braced for it until it was gone. The moment that finished me off was a Sunday about seven weeks in. She took the pair of them swimming and she got in the water with them instead of sitting on the plastic chairs at the side with the bags and the towels like she has done for two years. Ellie sent me a video of her mum being launched off the shallow end steps by a nine year old. The only complaint in this house now is that she has had to buy new clothes, because the old ones hang off her. She has said out loud that she understands why so many people order it again. You only need to do it once or twice a year, and it is all natural, so it is not something she has to remember for ever. And this is what I would say to anybody reading this who is thinking their version is not as bad as ours. It is not only for people who end up on a ward like Claire did. Most of the reviews are the everyday version of it. Bloated by teatime. Tired in a way that coffee does not touch. Fog. A gut that has been labelled IBS since 2019 and left there. Those people took it and within a few weeks the thing they had learned to live with just started lifting. You do not have to get to the point where a nurse can feel it through your skin before it is worth looking at. Nobody is paying me to write this. I do not work for them and I get nothing if you buy it. I am a 47 year old bloke from Leeds who spent a year telling his wife it was probably wind. Herbies Oregano+ is eighty percent carvacrol from wild Mediterranean oregano, with cold pressed black seed oil for thymoquinone in the same softgel. Third party lab tested, nitrogen sealed, no fillers, no oily burps. Two softgels every morning. Do not make my mistake with the cheap stuff. Fifteen to fifty percent carvacrol will not get through the biofilm, and you will decide none of this works when the truth is you never gave it a chance. There is a 30 day money back guarantee, so you lose nothing. If nothing changes for you, you email them and you get your money back. They are a small company and they sell out regularly. I am sorry if it is gone when you click, that does happen and people end up waiting weeks. If it is showing below, it is in stock right now. Mark P.S. Claire went back to that surgery a few months later and asked at reception if she could leave a note for the nurse practitioner who saw her on the Tuesday. She wrote that she had seen nine people in fourteen months and that this nurse was the only one who put her hands on her and told her the truth. She did not mention the softgels in it. She just wrote, you were right, there was something in there, and I got it out. I have never been prouder of her than I was standing in that car park while she posted it through the letterbox in the door.

Where the ad sends people

herbies.co

The nurse could feel it through her skin

Feeling bloated, heavy, or drained after meals? Oregano+ combines the natural power of oregano oil and black seed oil in one easy-to-swallow softgel capsule. Together, they support your gut balance from the inside out, no side effects, no oregano burps. 2 capsules a day. 30 doses per satchet. Simple...