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I found a photograph of my husband in a junk drawer last March and I sat down on the kitchen floor and cried for 40 minutes. Not because he was dead. He was upstairs. I could hear the recliner squeaking through the ceiling. I cried because the man in the photograph wasn't the man upstairs anymore. And I hadn't realized when I'd lost him. He was 41 in the picture. Lean. Tan. Standing in front of a 22 foot sailboat at a marina I couldn't remember the name of. White t shirt. Khaki shorts. Grinning at whoever was holding the camera, which must have been me, although I couldn't remember being there. The man upstairs was 54. He weighed 247 pounds. He'd been asleep in his recliner since 6:18 PM. It was 8:34. His glucose meter was on the side table next to a glass of flat Diet Coke. His blood pressure cuff was in a drawer in the kitchen because he didn't like looking at it anymore. His knees had been so bad for the last year that he'd installed a railing on the basement steps so he could get to the laundry room. He was 54. He looked 67. I'm 54 too. My name is Charlotte. Everybody calls me Lottie. I've lived in Lancaster, Pennsylvania for 31 years. Born and raised in a little town outside Hershey called Palmyra. Moved here when I married Wendell. He's the man upstairs. We've been married 29 years. Wendell is, or was, a sailor. That's the only way I know how to say it. He grew up on the Chesapeake. His father had a 19 foot day sailer. By the time Wendell was 11 he could rig a boat alone. By 16 he was crewing for races in Annapolis. When we met in 1994 he was 24 and was working for a sail loft in Baltimore. We moved to Lancaster in 1995 for my job. I'm an RN. I work at Lancaster General Hospital. Cardiac stepdown unit. Have been there for 27 years. Wendell stopped working at sail lofts when we moved inland and started selling commercial insurance. He's been at the same agency for 26 years. He's a steady man. He shows up. He pays the bills. He's a good husband and was a good father to our two daughters. Olive is 26 and lives in Philadelphia and is in her last year of an engineering PhD at Drexel. Marigold is 23 and just started teaching kindergarten in Reading. They both call me on Sunday afternoons. We don't have grandchildren yet but I think Marigold and her boyfriend Connor are getting close to telling us something. We had a sailboat for the first 12 years we lived in Lancaster. A 22 foot Catalina we kept on Lake Aldred. We'd drive down on Saturday mornings with a cooler and our daughters would have their swimsuits on under their clothes and Wendell would teach them how to read the wind off the trees on the bluff. The boat was named the Marlowe. After a character in a book Wendell loved as a kid. We sold the Marlowe in 2007. Wendell's back had started to bother him. Olive was 8 and didn't want to sail anymore, she wanted to be at sleepovers. Marigold was 5 and was scared of the boat. The marina fees were getting to us. Wendell said one Sunday in October "let's sell her" and by Christmas she was gone. He never sailed again. He started gaining weight in 2008. Not a lot. 12 pounds in 18 months. He blamed his back, the desk job, his 40s. He started taking blood pressure medication in 2011. He got bumped to a second medication in 2014. He was diagnosed with type 2 diabetes in 2016. Metformin. Then a second medication. Then a third when the others stopped working. His cholesterol climbed despite a statin. His knees gave out in 2019. The orthopedist said both meniscuses were torn and the cartilage was wearing through and he'd need replacements eventually but not yet, and in the meantime to lose 40 pounds. He didn't lose 40 pounds. He gained 30 more. By 2023, by the time I was sitting on the kitchen floor with the photograph in my hand, this is what I was married to. A 54 year old man who took 7 prescription medications every morning before work. Whose fasting glucose hit 168 most mornings even on insulin. Whose blood pressure ran 152 over 96 on a good day. Whose A1C had crept up to 8.1 in February. Whose knees clicked when he stood up. Whose energy was so depleted that he came home from work at 5:30 and was asleep by 6:30 and stayed in the recliner until I shook him awake at 11 to go to bed. A man who hadn't put a hand on me in 14 months. A man who hadn't laughed at anything I said in months. A man who'd missed both his daughters' college graduations because he didn't want to walk that far in the heat. I'm an RN. I work in cardiac stepdown. I see this exact picture every single shift. I see men come into my unit at 58, 61, 64, with chest pain, with stents, with the early hard signs of where this story ends. I knew what I was watching. I had no idea what to do about it. I'd done everything an RN wife is supposed to do. I'd asked his doctor about every medication he was on. I'd reviewed his labs. I'd cooked Mediterranean for 4 straight years and watched him stop at the Sheetz on the way home from work for an MTO. I'd bought him a Peloton in 2021 that he sat on twice. I'd nagged. I'd cried. I'd left an article about heart disease on his nightstand and he'd put it on the recycling pile without reading it. I'd stopped, gradually, expecting anything to change. I'd started thinking about the rest of my life with a man who was going to die early and leave me to take care of his body for the years before that happened. That's what I was thinking on the kitchen floor. The photograph was on top of the dishwasher cookbook holder. I'd been cleaning out a drawer because Marigold was coming for dinner Saturday and I wanted the kitchen to look like a kitchen. I'd dumped half the drawer in a Target bag for goodwill and the photograph had fluttered out from between an instruction manual for a blender we didn't own anymore. Wendell at 41. Hair still mostly brown. Maybe 178 pounds. Skin from the sun. The big easy grin he used to do where his eyes wrinkled at the corners. I sat on the kitchen floor and I held that picture and I cried because the man upstairs hadn't grinned like that in a decade. I couldn't remember the last time he'd grinned like that. I cried because I'd lost him a piece at a time and I'd been so busy living with him that I hadn't noticed when he stopped being the man in the picture. I cried because I was 54 too. And I had maybe 30 years left if I got lucky. And I was looking at the next decade being a slow loss instead of a life. When I stopped crying I put the photograph on the refrigerator under a magnet from Hershey Park and I went upstairs. Wendell was snoring with his mouth open. The TV was on but muted. SportsCenter highlights of a baseball game from 3 hours earlier. I sat on the ottoman in front of his recliner and I watched him sleep. I didn't know what to do. I didn't have a plan. I had a photograph on the fridge and a feeling in my chest like something was running out. A week after that, on a Thursday, Marigold called me from her car. She was driving home from school. She talked to me on speaker on her commute most days. She said "mom how's dad." I didn't lie. I usually lied. I'd usually say "you know your father, he's plugging along." That day I said "your father is not well, Marigold." There was a long pause on the phone. She said "I know." She said "I've known. I didn't know how to say it." She said "Connor's mom went through this with his dad. She did something." I said "what." She said "I don't remember the details. But Connor's dad is different now. I'll ask Connor to talk to her. She'd want to talk to you." Connor's mother is named Rosalind. She's 56. She and her husband Briggs live in Quakertown. Briggs is a roofer. Self employed. Three trucks, six crew. He was, by Marigold's account back to me 3 days later, almost identical to Wendell in 2022. Diabetic. High blood pressure. Knees gone. Slept in his recliner. Missing from his own life. He was, by all accounts, a different man now. Rosalind called me on a Sunday afternoon. I was sitting on the back patio with a magazine I wasn't reading. She said "Lottie. Marigold tells me your husband is where my Briggs was." I said "yes." She said "I have time today. Do you want to hear about it?" I said "please." She said "I'm going to tell you the whole thing. Not the short version. Because the short version doesn't make sense. Take notes if you want." I got up and got a yellow legal pad from the kitchen. What she told me over the next 45 minutes is the thing I'm going to tell you now. Not because she told me to. Because I sat on my back patio that Sunday in March and listened to a woman explain my husband's body to me in a way no doctor ever had, and I haven't been able to stop telling people since. Rosalind said "Briggs's body had been running for 54 years on a system that was wearing down. Not one system. The same system across everything." She said "your husband has high blood pressure. He has high blood sugar. His knees hurt. He's tired. His cholesterol is creeping. His circulation isn't great. He doesn't want sex. He doesn't want to do the things he used to do." She said "you're a nurse. You know they treat all of those as separate. The cardiologist gets the blood pressure. The endocrinologist gets the diabetes. The orthopedist gets the knees. The urologist if it ever gets to him gets the rest. They each prescribe their own thing. Each thing manages a symptom. Nothing addresses what's happening underneath." She said "what's happening underneath is the same thing across every single one of those problems." She said "your body, when you're young, has systems that work. The pathway that controls how fast food becomes sugar. The molecule called nitric oxide that tells your blood vessels to relax. The filtering systems in your kidneys. The signaling that keeps your joints lubricated and your tissues calm. The circulation that gets blood where it needs to go. Those systems are running quietly in the background of every cell in your body the entire time you're alive." She said "and what wears those systems down, more than anything else, is oxidative stress. The doctors will tell you it's aging. It's not exactly aging. It's the accumulated damage of decades of stress and processed food and environmental load and depleted soil. It builds up in the body like rust forming inside a pipe. Year after year. And as the rust accumulates, it eats at every one of those systems." She said "the nitric oxide gets destroyed before it can reach your blood vessels. So your vessels stay tight. Blood pressure climbs. Circulation suffers." She said "the pathway that controls how fast food turns into sugar gets worn down. So sugar enters the blood faster than the body can handle. Spikes. Crashes. Glucose climbs. A1C climbs. Same meals, same food, different response." She said "the kidneys take a hit. The joints take a hit. The energy systems in your cells take a hit. Everything you're watching in your husband. Everything. It's all downstream of the same root." She said "and the medications, every one of them, they work on the symptom. They suppress the number. They do not touch the root. The root keeps wearing down underneath. That's why your husband is on 7 prescriptions and still getting worse. Because nothing he's on addresses the rust." I sat on my back patio with my yellow legal pad in my lap and I felt the way I felt at nursing school the first time someone explained the cardiac cycle to me. The feeling that something I'd been looking at for years was suddenly visible. Rosalind said "Briggs's brother Jude is a retired NIH scientist. Lives in Bethesda. He's the one who got Briggs onto this." She said "Jude got interested in the pomegranate research about 6 years ago. Said it was the single most studied antioxidant in clinical literature outside of vitamin C and resveratrol. Said the mechanism was elegant. Pomegranate has compounds called punicalagins. Some of the most studied antioxidant compounds in nature. The way they work, in the body, is they can help neutralize the oxidative stress that's been wearing down all of those systems in the first place." She said "when the rust eases off, the systems can start functioning more like they used to. Not because something forced them. Because the body is doing what it always knew how to do, once it had the support to do it." She said "the blood pressure pathway can come back. The blood sugar pathway can come back. The circulation can come back. The energy can come back. Not in 3 days. Not in 3 weeks. Slowly. Over months. The way the rust took years to build up, the body takes months to come back online once you start supporting it instead of just suppressing it." She said "Jude sent Briggs a bottle about 2 years ago. Specific brand. Standardized to the punicalagins, which is the part of the fruit that actually does the work. He said most brands skip that part because it's expensive to standardize for. The brand he sent was called Alevia. Briggs has been on it since." She said "in 18 months Briggs has dropped 38 pounds. His fasting glucose is in the high 90s. His A1C is 5.7. His cardiologist took him off two of his three blood pressure medications. His knees are better. He goes to the YMCA pool three mornings a week. He came home last month with a sailing magazine. I haven't seen him pick up a sailing magazine in 11 years." She paused. She said "I'm telling you this because Marigold told me what's happening at your house. And because Briggs and I almost ran out of time. I want you to have time." I sat there. I said "Rosalind, will you text me the name." She said "I'll do better than that. I'll send you the link. Alevia.com slash pom slash 5. They have a 90 day money back guarantee. You take it for 90 days. If you feel nothing, you ship the bottle back and they refund every penny. There's no risk to try." She said "the harder part isn't trying it. The harder part is getting your husband to take it." I knew what she meant. Wendell wouldn't have read an article about it. Wendell wouldn't have wanted to talk about it. Wendell would have said "I'm fine Lottie, I'm taking what the doctor gave me." I thought about it for 3 days. Then I ordered two bottles. I started taking mine on a Tuesday in late March. Wendell's bottle sat in my underwear drawer for a week. On the second Saturday in April, I made his breakfast. I made it the way I used to make it when we were first married. Eggs the way he liked them. Bacon. Toast. Coffee. I cut up a grapefruit even though grapefruit is bad for some of his medications, just because he used to love grapefruit on Saturdays. I set the plate in front of him at the kitchen table. I sat down across from him with my coffee. I said "Wendell I need to tell you something." He looked up from the eggs. He hadn't expected this. He hadn't expected breakfast. He hadn't expected me to be sitting across from him. I said "I went into the junk drawer 3 weeks ago and I found a picture of you. From the boat. From 1994." His face changed. I said "I sat on the floor and I cried for a long time because the man in that picture isn't sitting at this table. And I love the man at this table. But Wendell I miss the man in that picture and I am scared we are running out of time to get him back." I took the bottle out of my robe pocket and I set it on the table between us. I said "this is something Marigold's boyfriend's mother told me about. Her husband took it for 18 months. He has lost 38 pounds. He has come off two medications. He's at the YMCA pool three mornings a week. Their family thought they were going to lose him." I said "Wendell I am not asking you to believe in it. I am asking you to take it. For 90 days. If you take it for 90 days and you feel nothing, we will ship it back and they will refund our money and I will never bring it up again." I said "but Wendell. I cannot keep watching." He picked up the bottle. He turned it over. He read the label for a long time. The way an insurance man reads things. Slowly. Word by word. He looked at me. He said "Lottie." He said "I haven't known how to talk to you about it either." He started to cry. Wendell doesn't cry. Wendell didn't cry at his father's funeral. He cried at the kitchen table that Saturday morning over a plate of eggs. He said "I have been ashamed." He said "I have been so ashamed I couldn't look at you." He said "I'll take it. I'll take it for 90 days. If it doesn't work I'll take whatever you tell me to take next." That was 14 months ago. I'm going to tell you the next part fast because I don't want to make it into a TV commercial. He didn't feel anything for the first 11 days. He took it every morning with his coffee and his pile of pills. We didn't talk about it. I didn't ask. Day 12 he came home from work and he wasn't asleep by 7. He was awake at 8:30. We watched a movie together. He stayed awake through the whole thing. Week 3 his fasting glucose, which he checks every morning at the kitchen counter, came in under 140 for the first time in 2 years. Week 5 he asked me to drive him to the YMCA. Not to swim. Just to walk on a treadmill. He walked for 14 minutes. He came home and slept like a man who'd worked. Week 8 his pants were loose enough that he tightened his belt by 2 holes. He'd lost 9 pounds. Week 10 he didn't take a nap on a Saturday. He worked in the back yard. He weeded the side bed that had been a disaster for 4 years. He came inside with dirt on his hands and a streak of mud on his cheek and he looked at me from the doorway and he said "Lottie I haven't felt like this since 2007." By the time we hit the 90 day mark, in late June, he'd lost 17 pounds. His A1C had dropped from 8.1 to 6.9. His blood pressure had come down from 152 over 96 to 134 over 84. His endocrinologist had taken him off one of the diabetes medications. His cardiologist had taken him off one of the two blood pressure medications. We ordered another 3 months. That was a year ago. This is where we are now. Wendell is down 41 pounds. He's off two blood pressure medications, one diabetes medication, and his statin. His A1C as of last month is 5.8. His blood pressure is 122 over 78. His knees are not back to 1994. They never will be. But he's at the YMCA pool 4 mornings a week and the orthopedist who said he'd need replacements eventually has pushed that conversation out indefinitely. He grins again. That's the part I'm telling this whole story for. Last weekend he came down the stairs on a Saturday morning in his old sailing shorts. They fit again. He hadn't worn them in 16 years. He looked at me from the bottom of the stairs and he gave me the grin from the photograph on the fridge. The one with the eye wrinkles. He said "Lottie. Let's drive down to Annapolis next weekend. Just to look at boats. I want to look at boats." We drove down last Saturday. We walked the slips at Eastport for 3 hours. I held his hand the whole way. He pointed at the boats he remembered. He named the rigging. He didn't get tired. He didn't ask to sit down. At the end of the day we sat on a bench by the water and he said "I'm not going to buy a boat. I just want you to know I'm thinking about it." I said "I know." He said "the man in the picture in the kitchen. Is he back?" I said "he's back." He said "okay." He held my hand on the drive home for 2 hours. I'm telling you this story because there's a woman reading this who's been watching her husband slip away in pieces, and she doesn't know what to do, and the doctors don't know what to tell her past one more prescription. There's a man reading this who's ashamed, who hasn't known how to talk about it, who's been told for years that this is just what 50 looks like for a man like him. It's not what 50 looks like. It's what 50 looks like when the system underneath has been wearing down for decades and nobody, not one doctor, not one cardiologist, not one endocrinologist, has addressed the rust that's been eating everything at the same time. Alevia Pomegranate is what worked for my husband. Standardized to the punicalagins, the part of the fruit that actually does the work. Rosalind told me, her brother in law Jude told her, that most other brands skip that part because it's expensive to standardize for. I checked. They were right. You can order it at alevia.com/pom/5. 90 day money back guarantee. You take it for up to 90 days. If your body responds the way Wendell's did, you keep going. If you take it for 90 days and you feel nothing, you ship the bottle back in the box and they refund every penny. That's the deal. That's the only kind of deal worth taking on something like this. I'm 54. I'm an RN. My husband sailed me around the Eastport marina last Saturday on his own two feet and he grinned at me in front of a 32 foot Beneteau and I took a picture of him on my phone and I put it on the fridge next to the one from 1994. P.S. I started taking it the same week he did. I didn't tell him. I just wanted to know what it felt like in my own body before I tracked what it was doing in his. My morning energy is better. My night sweats from perimenopause are less intense than they were. The thing I didn't expect was my skin. Three of my coworkers at the hospital have asked me what I changed in the last 6 months. I tell them. Most of them have ordered it. P.P.S. The 90 day guarantee is real. I called and asked, because I'm a nurse and I check things. You take it for up to 90 days. If it's not for you, you put the bottle back in the box and ship it back and they refund every penny. No fight. That's the only reason I asked Wendell to try it. There was nothing to lose. P.P.P.S. Olive came home from Philly two weekends ago. She walked in the back door and she stopped and she looked at her father, who was standing at the grill, and she said "dad." She said it twice. Just dad. She didn't have any other words. She hugged him for a long time. She started crying. Wendell started crying. I started crying in the kitchen window. The whole family cried for a man who'd come back from somewhere we hadn't known he'd gone. That's what this stuff is. It's not a number on a chart. It's the things you get back. The hand on the gearshift. The boat magazine. The husband on the stairs in his old shorts. The daughter at the back door saying dad twice because the man at the grill is her father again. That's what we got back. That's what's possible. 👉 alevia.com/pom/5