Mark Holtman Facebook ad: “My wife had already paid the solicitor”

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My wife paid a solicitor three hundred pounds to start our divorce before anybody found out what was actually wrong with her. She told me afterwards that she was not leaving me. She was leaving what she thought she had turned into. I'm Mark, I'm 47, and I live in Leeds with my wife Claire and our two, Ellie who is fourteen and Sam who is eleven. I am writing this for any bloke who has quietly started thinking his wife has changed, or gone off him, or stopped bothering. And for any woman who has already worked out on her own that her family would be better off without her, because something is wrong with her body and every single person she has asked has told her she is fine. It took us nearly two years to get an answer, and the answer came off the back of an envelope at our kitchen table, not from any of the six people we paid. Claire is 45. She swam county level at school, she did the Leeds 10k twice, she was the one still talking in the kitchen at one in the morning when everyone else had gone home. When we met she took the mickey out of me for going to bed before midnight. It came on so slowly that neither of us ever pointed at a day and said it started there. The tiredness was first. Not knackered after a long week. Empty. She would sleep nine hours on a Saturday, come down at half ten still in her dressing gown, sit on the arm of the sofa and say she felt like she had been drugged. By the autumn she was going up to bed at eight o'clock, before Sam. Then the bloating, and this is the bit I feel worst about, because I opened my mouth about it. She got dressed in the morning and she was flat. By six in the evening her stomach was hard and swollen and she could not fasten her work trousers, so she sat at the tea table with them undone under a jumper. I made a joke. One stupid joke, about eight months in, about how much she must have enjoyed her lunch. She did not speak to me for the rest of the night and at the time I honestly thought she was being oversensitive. Then the fog. She does payroll for a school trust, numbers all day, and she started getting things wrong. She would read the same email four times and still ask me what it said. One afternoon she rang me from the work car park because she could not remember whether she had driven in or got the bus. She was crying and doing that thing where she talks normally over the top of it so you cannot tell. The three am waking went on for months. Every morning, near enough. Wide awake, heart going like she had run up the stairs, nothing to be frightened of. She would come down and sit in the dark kitchen with her phone until five, then go to work. Her hair was coming out. There was a nest of it in the plughole every time and she started shutting the bathroom door so I would not see her clearing it. She lost about a stone without trying, and then it went the other way and her face went puffy, and nobody could tell us why either of those things had happened. And she started snapping. That is the part that nearly did for us. Claire is the calmest person in our house by a mile, and she was shouting at Sam over a dropped cup and then going and sitting in the car on the drive. She snapped at me constantly, about nothing, about the way I loaded the dishwasher. Then at midnight she would apologise in a voice I did not recognise and say, "I don't know who this is. I don't know why I'm like this." We did what you are supposed to do. We went to the GP. Over and over. First visit: "You've got two children and a full time job, Claire. You're run down. Try getting to bed earlier." Second visit, after bloods: "Everything's normal. Completely normal. Your iron's fine." Third visit: "At your age this is very likely perimenopause. Let's give it six months and see where we are." Fourth visit, different GP, and this is the one I still get angry about: "Have you thought about antidepressants? Sometimes when we feel low physically, the mind is the place to look." She took them for four months. They did nothing for the swelling, nothing for the three am waking, and the fog got worse on them, not better. Fifth visit: "It sounds like IBS. Try more fibre and cut out the onions." The extra fibre made her so swollen she could not bend down to load the washing machine. She sat on the kitchen floor to do it for about a fortnight. So we stopped waiting for the NHS and started paying, which is what you do when you have run out of ideas. A private GP in town, one hundred and eighty pounds, who used the word stress so many times I started counting and got to nine in twenty minutes. A gynaecologist, two hundred and fifty pounds, who said her hormones were within range and to come back in a year. A gastroenterologist, three hundred and forty pounds, who ordered a stool test. It came back clear. He told her, and I am quoting it exactly because Claire typed it into her phone in the lift on the way down, "Some people just have sensitive guts." Probiotics at sixty pounds a month for eight months. That is four hundred and eighty pounds of little bottles in the fridge door. A food intolerance test off the internet, one hundred and forty nine pounds, which said she was intolerant to yeast, egg white and cabbage. She cut all three out for three months and nothing changed except she was miserable at Christmas. I added it all up later on the back of the same envelope I will tell you about in a minute. Just under fourteen hundred pounds to be told my wife was fine, while she got worse in front of me. And somewhere in the middle of all that, without me having the first clue, Claire decided that the problem was her. She pulled away. She stopped touching me. She moved into the spare room in the October and said it was the three am waking, which was half true and I let it be all true because it was easier. She stopped going to Ellie's netball. She stopped ringing her mum on a Sunday. Her friend Bev knocked twice and she stood behind the door and did not answer it. One night in January she was sat on the edge of the bath at about half eleven, still in her work clothes, and she said there was something seriously wrong with her that nobody was ever going to find, and she was not going to make me and the kids watch it happen for the next ten years. I said she was being dramatic. I said those words to my wife. I said, "You heard them, love. Your bloods are fine." She did not argue with me. She got up, went across the landing, and shut the spare room door. A week later I picked her phone up off the worktop to turn the alarm off and her notes were open. There was a list. What Sam needs for swimming on a Tuesday. Ellie's inhaler is in the front pocket. The password for the boiler app. My mum's number if you can't get me. It was written for somebody who was not going to be there to do it herself. I put the phone down and stood in the kitchen and I genuinely thought my wife was dying of something and hiding it. I did not ask her about it. I have gone over that a hundred times since. I did not ask her, because I did not want to hear the answer. Three weeks after that I came in from work and there was an envelope on the worktop from a solicitor in Horsforth. Client care pack, a fee note for three hundred pounds, and a form she had filled in about the house and the pension and the arrangements for the children. She had been in on her lunch break. She had sat in a stranger's office and answered questions about who Sam lives with. I stood there in my coat and read it twice. I did not sit down. When she came home she did not deny any of it. She put her bag down and said it very calmly, in a flat voice, like she had practised it in the car. "I'm not leaving you. I'm leaving this. I'm a horrible tired woman who shouts at her kids and I'm not doing it to you for another twenty years." That was the night it went through me properly: I had spent nearly two years quietly annoyed with a woman who was ill. Her sister Donna is the reason we are still married. Donna came over that Saturday, sat at our table with a cup of tea going cold, and did the one thing no GP and none of the six people we paid had done. She did not look up one symptom. She wrote all of them down, on the back of an envelope, in a list. Bloating, flat in the morning, swollen by night. Exhaustion that sleep does not touch. Brain fog. Waking at three with a racing heart. Hair loss. Weight up and down. Snapping at everyone. Bloods normal. Stool test clear. Then she searched the whole lot at once, together, instead of one at a time, and she sat there reading for the best part of forty minutes without saying anything. Then she turned the laptop round and said, "Claire. I think you've got parasites." I nearly laughed at her. I nearly reached over and shut the lid. We live in Leeds. Claire washes salad twice. The furthest we have been is Fuerteventura and she would not even eat the ice cubes. But I read it. And then I read it again at two in the morning when the house was asleep, and I stopped finding it funny. The World Health Organisation estimates around one in three adults in the developed world is carrying an intestinal parasite. One in three. You pick them up from undercooked meat, from unwashed salad, from the dog, from public toilets, from swimming pools. Nothing exotic. Ordinary life in a normal house. They attach to the gut wall and they take the iron and the B12 out before your body ever gets near it. So you eat properly and you are still running on empty. There was a line Claire read out that made her cry at the table: I was eating, but I was not the one being fed. That was her tiredness, word for word. That is why nine hours in bed did nothing. They release waste that gets into the blood and reaches the brain. That is the fog, the low mood, the shouting at an eleven year old over a cup, the waking at three in the morning with your heart going for no reason at all. Every single thing my wife had been apologising to me for at midnight for two years. They inflame the gut lining. That is the swelling that gets a label of IBS slapped on it and a leaflet about fibre. And then the bit that made me properly angry. They hide behind a biofilm, a slime shield they build around themselves, and standard stool tests miss up to ninety percent of them. Her clear test did not mean she was clear. It meant the test was never going to find it. Three hundred and forty pounds to be looked for with the wrong tool, and then told her gut was sensitive. Two years. Fourteen hundred pounds. My marriage in an envelope on the worktop. And the tests were never going to find it. The two things that kept coming up in what Donna found were not drugs. Carvacrol, the active compound in wild oregano oil, which ruptures the parasites and dissolves the biofilm they are hiding behind. And thymoquinone, from cold pressed 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 anyone had a stool test to fail. So on the Monday I went to the health shop on my dinner and bought a bottle of oregano oil for twenty two pounds. Claire took it religiously for a fortnight. Absolutely nothing happened, except it repeated on her all day. Then I picked the bottle up and actually read the small print on the back. Seventeen percent carvacrol. You need at least eighty percent to get through the biofilm. Under that you are not touching them. They sit behind the shield perfectly safe while you take your two capsules a day. What you have bought is expensive olive oil with a herb in it. Most of what is on the shelf in this country is somewhere between fifteen and fifty percent, and that is exactly why so many people try oregano oil, feel nothing at all, and decide the whole idea is rubbish. We nearly did. Donna was the one who found the one with the chemistry right. Herbies Oregano+. Eighty percent carvacrol from wild Mediterranean oregano. Cold pressed black seed oil in the same softgel for the thymoquinone. Third party lab tested. Nitrogen sealed so it does not oxidise on the shelf. No fillers. No oily burps, which mattered a lot to Claire after the shop stuff. Two softgels every morning. That is the whole of it. I will be honest with you, I ordered it the way you order the last thing on the list. The solicitor's letter was still in the drawer under the takeaway menus. The first two days were rough and nobody warned us. She was in and out of the bathroom both days. On the second day she came out looking grey and said, "Mark, that was not normal." Day six is the day I am not going to describe in a Facebook post. She called me upstairs. She was on the bathroom floor with her back against the bath, crying, and I thought something awful had happened. Then she pointed at the toilet. We both looked at it and neither of us said anything for about a minute. She was not crying because it was disgusting, and it was. She was crying with relief. Two years of stress, your age, your hormones, your head. Two years of thinking she was a bad wife and a worse mum. And there it was, in the bowl, in our bathroom in Leeds, the thing that had been doing it. I sat down on the floor next to her and said sorry about a hundred times and she kept saying, "It was real. It was real." Then it started going. End of the first week the bloating dropped. She stood in front of the mirror on the landing at ten o'clock at night with her hand flat on her stomach and said, "Mark. It's ten at night." Her stomach was not thick and swollen by the evening anymore. That had not happened since before Ellie started high school. Day eleven she slept the whole night through. First full night in about two years. She came down the next morning and looked ten years younger and did not know what to do with herself, so she cleaned the oven at half seven. Week three the fog went. I noticed before she did, because she was talking properly again, three subjects in one go, interrupting me, taking the mickey out of my parking. I had not heard my wife talk like that in so long that I had to go and stand in the garage for a minute and get myself together. She put it better than I can. "I don't think I've felt properly awake since my thirties." Week four was the energy, and this is the part she goes on about to anybody who will listen. Not coffee energy. She says she felt light, and happy, and full of power, and that was the best part of the whole thing. She started walking again. She was up at half six on a Sunday looking for someone to go with her. Her skin went clearer and less oily as well, which neither of us was expecting and which she was ridiculously pleased about. And the snapping stopped. Just stopped. Sam said it to me in the car about a month in, completely casually, not even looking up: "Mum's funny again." The one that finished me off was a Sunday in the spring. She had been up the Chevin with Donna, came back with mud all up her leggings, and stood in our kitchen telling me off for a solid ten minutes because I had not touched the borders since March and the garden was a disgrace and what exactly was I planning to do about the compost. I stood there grinning at her like an idiot while she shouted at me about compost. That was my wife. She had been gone the best part of two years and there she was, hands on hips, having a go at me about a flower bed. The only real problem now is she has had to buy new clothes twice, because the old ones are too big and she has not dieted once. She keeps holding the waistband of her old work trousers out and making me look at the gap. She does it once or twice a year now, that is all it takes. It is all natural, two softgels in the morning, and then you get on with your life. She reordered in the autumn without even telling me, and honestly, now I understand why so many people order it again. The solicitor's letter went in the recycling in April. She rang them and cancelled and apologised, and the woman on the phone could not have been nicer about it. And I want to say this bit, because I think it might be the most important part. It is not only for people who got as far as we did. Most of the reviews are not marriages nearly ending. They are the everyday version. The bloating no diet shifts. The tiredness coffee does not touch. The head that will not clear by Wednesday. People take it and within a few weeks the misery they had quietly got used to just starts lifting. You do not have to get all the way to rock bottom before it is worth looking. 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 the best part of two years thinking his wife had gone off him, and who was wrong about her in a way I will be making up for for a long time. Herbies Oregano+ is eighty percent carvacrol from wild Mediterranean oregano, with cold pressed black seed oil for the thymoquinone in the same softgel. Third party lab tested, nitrogen sealed, no fillers, no oily burps. Two softgels every morning. Do not do what I did and buy the cheap stuff first. Fifteen to fifty percent carvacrol will not get through the biofilm, and you will decide, like I nearly did, that none of this works. There is a 30 day money back guarantee. If nothing changes you email them and you get your money back, so the worst that happens is you have wasted a fortnight. They are a small company and they sell out regularly. I am sorry if it is gone when you click, that does happen a lot and that is genuinely why. If it is showing below, it is in stock right now. Mark P.S. Donna is the reason I still have a wife, and all she did was look at everything at once instead of one symptom at a time. If your wife has gone quiet, if she has stopped coming out, if she keeps apologising at midnight for who she has turned into, please do not take it personally like I did. Get a bit of paper. Write every symptom down, all of them, on the one page. Then sit down and look at them together.

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herbies.co

My wife had already paid the solicitor

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...