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

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The auto-pay for the boat came out of my checking account on the 3rd of every month for the last 34 months. Three hundred and forty dollars. For 34 months. That's $11,560 for a boat that's been sitting under a blue tarp in our side yard, next to the propane tank, growing a small colony of wasps under the bow. My husband Bernard doesn't know I've been paying it. He thinks we let it go two years ago. He thinks the finance company took it back. He thinks the tarp is covering a chest freezer. It's not. It's covering a 19-foot Lund Impact XS that we picked out together on his second-to-last day at UPPCO before he retired. I've been paying that boat payment out of the tips I make at the salon. Twenty-dollar tips. Sometimes a folded fifty at Christmas. I put them in an envelope in my glovebox and once a month I deposit the envelope at the credit union drive-through and pray my auto-pay clears. I couldn't tell you why I've been doing this except that the day we bought that boat was the last day I saw my husband happy. And I wasn't ready to let that day be the last one. My name is Colleen. I'm 62 years old. I've been cutting hair in Escanaba, Michigan for 38 years, and I work three chairs down from where I started, at a salon on Ludington Street called Cutting Edge that's had the same green awning since 1994. My husband Bernard is 63. He retired three years ago in August from Upper Peninsula Power Company after 38 years on the poles. He climbed them in blizzards. He climbed them in ice storms. He climbed them in July when the black flies were biting through his coveralls. He came home more than once with frostbite on his cheekbones. For 38 years he did that job. And when I say his knees were shot, I mean shot in a way you can't fix with ice and Tylenol. The retirement plan was the boat. We are Yoopers. In Escanaba, if you don't fish, I don't know what you do. Bernard grew up fishing Little Bay de Noc with his dad and his uncle Wayne. When his dad passed in 2013, Bernard fished with just Wayne. When Wayne passed in 2019, Bernard fished alone. The plan was that once he retired he'd fish every day the weather let him. He'd take the boat out on the bay at 5:30 in the morning. He'd bring home walleye and I'd cook them in butter with sliced almonds the way my mother taught me. We'd have the grandkids up in the summer and Bernard would take them out and teach them what his dad taught him. That was the plan. Here's what actually happened. The week Bernard retired, he tried to climb into the boat at the launch off M-35 and his right knee buckled so hard he had to sit down on the trailer fender for 20 minutes before he could stand up again. He got in eventually. He caught 6 walleye that day. He came home smiling. But it took him an hour and 12 minutes to get out of the boat when he came back to the launch. I know because he told me. He didn't call for help. He didn't want another fisherman to see him. He sat in the boat at his own trailer and waited until the parking lot cleared out, and then he pulled himself up by the console and stepped over the gunwale one leg at a time like he was climbing over a fence in slow motion. He drove home. He unhooked the trailer. He put the boat in the side yard. And he came in and sat down in his chair and didn't say anything for the whole night. He went out 3 more times that first summer. Each one was worse than the last. By September he'd stopped talking about the bay. The doctor said knee replacement. Both knees. Bernard said not yet. I understand why he said not yet. His brother Ronnie got a knee replacement in 2016 and had a blood clot that put him in the hospital in Marquette for 11 days. Bernard watched Ronnie limp for a year afterward and said, "I'll live with what I got." So we lived with it. He tried a glucosamine chondroitin from Meijer. Nothing. He tried turmeric. Nothing. He tried a copper knee sleeve his cousin recommended. Nothing. He tried CBD gummies my daughter mailed him from Traverse City. He said they made him sleepy but the knees still hurt. He got a cortisone shot in October of that first year. It helped for about 5 weeks. He got another one 4 months later and it didn't do much of anything. The orthopedic in Marquette said he couldn't keep doing them forever. So Bernard stopped trying. That's the part I want you to understand. He didn't just have bad knees. He stopped trying. A man who climbed a 40-foot pole in a snowstorm at 3:47 in the morning to get power back to St. Francis Hospital in 1994 stopped trying to walk down to the mailbox. He sat in his chair. He watched hunting shows. He watched fishing shows, which is worse. He'd watch a man on the Fox Sports channel catching walleye on Mille Lacs and he'd get this look on his face like somebody was reading his will out loud. I'd come home from the salon at 6 in the evening and find him in the exact same position I left him in at 8:30 in the morning. Same coffee cup. Same throw blanket. Same view of the same corner of the same room. The tarp in the side yard was slowly caving in from the snow. I couldn't call the finance company. I don't know how to explain it any better than that. I just couldn't do it. Signing the paperwork to let that boat go felt like signing something else, and I couldn't put my name on it. So I started using the tips. The turning point came in June. Bernard's cousin Kirby has a fish camp on Little Bay de Noc, about 40 minutes north on County Road 513. Every year for as long as I've known Bernard, the men in his family have gone up there for a long weekend in June. His dad went. His uncle Wayne went. His brother Ronnie went. Bernard went every single year from age 14 until age 60. Kirby called on a Wednesday night. Bernard put him on speaker. "You coming up this year, Bernie?" Bernard was quiet for a second. Then he said, "I don't think so this year, Kirb." Kirby said, "You said that last year." Bernard said, "I know." Kirby said, "You gonna come next year?" And Bernard didn't answer. He just sat there in his chair, and Kirby waited on the line, and I stood in the kitchen with a wooden spoon in my hand and a pot of chicken and dumplings I'd stopped stirring, and eventually Kirby said, "Alright, Bern. I love ya. Call me if it changes." Bernard hung up the phone and put his hand over his eyes. He didn't cry. Bernard doesn't cry. His father didn't cry when his mother died. His grandfather didn't cry when his brother died in Korea. Bernards don't cry. But he put his hand over his eyes for a long time. And I stood in the kitchen and I knew he was giving up. I knew it the way you know a customer has been drinking before she sits in your chair, or the way you know a marriage is over before either spouse says the word. You know because you've been paying attention. I stirred the dumplings. And I thought about the tarp in the side yard and the $340 leaving my checking account on the 3rd of the next month, and I felt something in me get very quiet. I had two choices. I could stop paying the boat and let it go, and Bernard could sit in that chair until he couldn't get out of it, and one day I'd bury him and drive past Kirby's camp on 513 and cry. Or I could figure something out. I don't know why I thought I could figure something out. I'm a hairdresser. I don't have any credentials. I don't have any special knowledge. I cut and colored hair for 38 years and raised two kids and made pasties every Christmas Eve. But I had a chair every day. And people talk in that chair. Eileen has been my Tuesday-morning 9:15 for 14 years. She's 67. She gets a wash and set every other Tuesday and a permanent wave every 4 months. Her husband Sigurd is a retired welder from the shipyard down in Marinette. Sig is 71 and until 2 years ago he could barely get out of a kitchen chair. I didn't know this until Eileen sat down that particular Tuesday, two weeks after Kirby's phone call, and asked how Bernard was doing. I looked at her in the mirror. And instead of saying "good" the way I usually do, I said, "He's not doing good, Eileen. He hasn't been in that boat in almost two years." Eileen was quiet while I combed her out. Then she said, "Sig couldn't get up off the couch in 2022. You remember that?" I remembered. Sig had missed the Delta County Fair for the first time in his adult life. Eileen had come in for her permanent wave the week after and cried into her cape. "He's back at the shop now," she said. "Three days a week. He rebuilt the transmission on our grandson's Ranger last month." I stopped combing. "How?" Eileen said, "My sister-in-law Maureen sent him something." I want to be careful here about how I tell this part, because I don't want you to think Eileen sold me on anything. She didn't. She was talking about her husband. I was the one asking questions. Eileen said Maureen's daughter is a nurse in a rehabilitation clinic outside of Green Bay. And Maureen's daughter had a patient, an older gentleman, who came in after a hip surgery and was recovering way faster than anybody expected. He told Maureen's daughter he'd been taking something for a couple of months before the surgery. Something with a fruit called amla. Maureen's daughter looked it up. She told Maureen. Maureen told Eileen. Eileen ordered a bottle for Sig. Two months later Sig was up. I finished Eileen's permanent that morning and I did not think about it for the rest of my shift because I had 4 clients back to back and a bride's rehearsal party at 4 in the afternoon. But when I got home that night, I sat in my car in the driveway with my phone and I typed in a-m-l-a and I read for about 40 minutes with the engine off and the windows fogging up. Here is what I understood by the time I went inside. The problem in Bernard's knees wasn't just wear and tear. That's what I'd been told for years. That's what the orthopedic said. That's what every article in the AARP magazine said. Wear and tear. But wear and tear is a description. It's not a cause. The actual cause, or one of them anyway, is that the cells inside our joints need energy to maintain themselves. To keep the cartilage smooth. To keep the fluid where it belongs. To manage the low-level inflammation that happens every day in every joint of every human alive. That energy is made by tiny structures inside every cell called mitochondria. You may have heard of them from a middle-school science class. The powerhouse of the cell. That's what they called them in 1978 when I was in Mrs. Aikens's class. Well. As we age, and as we spend 38 years climbing power poles in the freezing cold, our mitochondria don't work the way they used to. They lose efficiency. They put out less energy. And when the cells in your joints aren't getting the energy they need, they can't do their maintenance work. Cartilage doesn't stay smooth. The joint environment gets inflamed. Everything hurts. I read this and I thought about Bernard's chair. I thought about the glucosamine that didn't work. And the turmeric that didn't work. And the copper sleeves and the CBD and the cortisone. Something Maureen's daughter had explained to Eileen finally landed for me. She'd said it was like sending a construction crew to a job site with all their lumber and nails and tools but no electricity. They can't run the saw. They can't run the drill. They can't do the work. It doesn't matter how much lumber you send. Bernard's joints had been getting lumber for years. Glucosamine. Turmeric. Copper. They just didn't have any power to do anything with it. Amla, from what I read, is different because of what it does to a pathway called AMPK. I'm not a scientist. I'm going to explain this the way I understood it sitting in my Buick. AMPK is like a switch inside your cells. When it's on, the cells make more energy and manage themselves better. When it's off, or working poorly, they don't. Amla is one of the few things that seems to reliably turn that switch on. It supports your mitochondria at the source instead of just throwing more raw material at cells that can't use it. The active compounds in amla are called emblicanins. They're antioxidants but they also do something antioxidants don't usually do. They seem to signal to the cell to work better. That was the piece I hadn't heard before. Every supplement Bernard had tried was trying to add something to his joints. Amla was trying to help the cells in his joints do their own job again. I went inside. Bernard was in his chair. I made grilled cheese and tomato soup and we watched half of a fishing show and he fell asleep before it ended. The next morning before work I went to the website Eileen had told me. Auniva. I ordered two bottles. The website is auniva.co/amla/33 I paid $34 dollars for the first bottle and got the second one at a discount. Shipping was free. The bottles arrived in 5 days. Two capsules a day. 30 servings per bottle. I put the first bottle on the counter next to Bernard's coffee cup on a Wednesday morning and he looked at it and said, "What's this?" I said, "It's amla. Eileen's Sig has been taking it." He said, "Sig can't walk." I said, "Sig fixed a transmission last month." Bernard looked at me for a long time. And then he opened the bottle and took two capsules with his coffee. Nothing happened for about 12 days. I want to be honest about that because I know how these stories can sound. Bernard took his amla every morning with his coffee and for a week and a half nothing changed. He sat in the same chair. He watched the same shows. I paid the boat payment on the 3rd out of an envelope of tips. Around day 15 I noticed him standing in the kitchen at the counter, not sitting at the table. Standing while he ate a bowl of cereal. I didn't say anything. At the end of week 3 I came home and he was outside. In the driveway. Just standing there looking at the tarp on the boat. I didn't say anything about that either. Week 4 he took the tarp off. It took him about 20 minutes because the wasps had built a nest under one corner. I watched from the kitchen window. He got a can of spray from the garage. He sprayed. He waited. He rolled the tarp back the rest of the way. He walked around the boat once. Slowly. He came back inside and had a beer. Week 6 he called his cousin Kirby. I was at the salon when he called. He told me later that night. He told Kirby he wasn't coming up to camp this June but that he might come up in September for the fall run. He said Kirby got quiet on the line the way Kirby does when something matters to him, and then Kirby said, "Alright, Bern. I'll hold a spot." Week 8 he asked me for the keys to the truck. He drove himself down to the launch off M-35. Alone. He didn't take the boat. He just drove down there and sat in the truck at the launch and watched other men back their trailers into the water for about an hour, and then he came home. He didn't tell me he'd gone until I noticed the receipt from the gas station in Gladstone on the counter. Week 11 he hooked up the trailer. I was making eggs when he came in the kitchen and said, "I'm gonna take her out." I said, "Today?" He said, "Yeah." I said, "Do you want me to come?" He said, "No. I want to do it by myself first." I said okay. I gave him a thermos of coffee and a peanut butter sandwich in a Ziploc. He was gone from 6 in the morning until 2 in the afternoon. He came back with 3 walleye and a small pike he threw back and skin that was pink from the sun for the first time in almost 3 years. He backed the trailer into the driveway. He stepped out of the boat by himself, one leg at a time. It wasn't fast. It wasn't graceful. His knees are still his knees. But he did it. And he stood in the side yard with his hand on the gunwale for a minute, and he looked at the boat, and he looked at me on the back porch, and he said, "The auto-pay never went through on this thing, did it." I sat down on the porch step. I said, "It went through, Bern." He said, "For how long?" I said, "Since we stopped talking about it." He came up the steps. He sat down next to me. He didn't say anything for a long time. And then he put his hand over his eyes the same way he did after the phone call with Kirby, and this time he did cry. Just a little. Bernards don't cry a lot. I want to tell you something about Auniva's Amla and the reason I'm sitting here typing this on my laptop at the kitchen table on a Sunday morning while Bernard's out on the bay. I'm not a spokesperson. I cut hair. I'm 62 years old and I have arthritis in my thumbs from 38 years of holding shears and I probably need to think about what I'm going to take for that too. But I'm sharing this because there are wives all over Delta County, and all over the Upper Peninsula, and all over this country, who are watching their husbands sit in chairs and give up on the things they used to love. You've been told it's aging. You've been told there's nothing to do. You've been told the only real option is a surgery your husband won't agree to. And in the meantime you've been paying for a boat, or a bass tracker, or a hunting camp, or a set of golf clubs, or a Harley in the garage, out of your tips or your Social Security or the sale of your mother's earrings, because you're not ready to let the last version of your husband disappear. I understand you. Auniva's Amla comes in a bottle of 60 capsules. 30 servings. Two capsules a day with breakfast or coffee. It's made in the USA. Shipping is free. And there's a 90-day money-back guarantee, which is what let me try it in the first place. If it hadn't worked for Bernard, I could have sent it back and gotten every dollar of my tip money back into that envelope. You can go check it out at: 👉 auniva.co/amla/33 P.S. Bernard is going up to Kirby's camp on Little Bay de Noc in September for the fall run. He's the first one who called Kirby to confirm this year, ahead of Ronnie and ahead of Ronnie's son. Kirby told me on the phone last week that he almost dropped his coffee cup when Bernard's name came up on the caller ID. He said, "Coll, I didn't think he was ever gonna come back up here." Neither did I. That call is worth every $340 that came out of my checking account for 34 months, and I would pay it all over again for the sound of Bernard telling his cousin what tackle he wants to bring. P.P.S. Auniva's 90-day money-back guarantee is the reason I want to say something specific. I've been on the wrong side of a lot of medical bills in this family. Bernard's cortisone shots were $180 each after insurance. The MRI he got in 2022 for his right knee was $1,240 out of pocket, and I never once saw a refund offered when the shots wore off, when the MRI showed nothing new, when the specialist charged us $340 for a visit that ended with "we'll just keep an eye on it." Nobody in medicine offers you your money back when they don't help you. Auniva does. If it doesn't work for your husband, or for you, you send back the bottles and you get every penny. That's a kind of confidence I've never seen from any of the specialists we've paid. P.P.P.S. I need to mention something practical. Eileen told me a couple of months ago that when she went to reorder Sig's bottles, they were out of stock for about 10 days. This is a small company and they don't always keep pace with how many people are finding out about them. I keep 2 bottles at the house at all times now, one open and one sealed on the shelf, because I don't want Bernard to miss a day. I don't know what their inventory looks like this week. If your husband's fishing opener is in the spring, or if you've got a milestone coming up like a wedding or a grandchild's baptism or a family reunion where you'd like him to actually be present, I wouldn't wait. Bernard sat in that chair for two summers. He can't get those two summers back. I don't want that for you. 👉 auniva.co/amla/33

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