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My husband crawled out of a customer's house on his hands and knees last March. He thought I didn't know. He pulled into the driveway, sat in his truck for 11 minutes, then came inside and told me he was tired and going to lay down. He didn't eat dinner. He didn't take his boots off. He just walked past me in the kitchen and went straight to the bedroom. The customer called me the next morning. A woman named Diane on the east side of Toledo. She found my number on the business card he'd left on her kitchen counter. She didn't want to make trouble. She just wanted to make sure he was okay. She said he'd gone under her sink to fix a leaking trap and when he tried to stand back up he couldn't. His legs gave out. His face went white. He sat on her kitchen floor for 20 minutes before he could get himself up, and then he braced against the counter and walked out to his truck like a man who'd been shot. She watched him from the front window. He sat in his truck for a long time before he drove away. She said she'd never been so worried about a stranger in her life. I thanked her for calling. I hung up the phone. I stood in our kitchen and stared at the coffee maker for I don't know how long. Then I walked down the hall and I sat on the edge of our bed and I looked at my husband sleeping with his work clothes still on, and I started planning what I was going to do. I'm 57 years old. My name is Cheryl. I live in Toledo, Ohio with my husband, Rick, who is 61. We've been married 34 years this October. We met at a Bob Evans on Reynolds Road in 1989 when I was waiting tables and he came in with two of his buddies after a job. He had grease under his fingernails and he asked for extra ketchup and he tipped me 4 dollars on a 7 dollar check, which in 1989 was a fortune. Rick has been a plumber since he was 19. His dad was a plumber. His granddad was a plumber. He started his own company in 1998 and named it after our daughter, Hailey, who is 32 now and lives in Cincinnati with her two boys. The truck still says Hailey's Plumbing on the side, even though the logo is faded and the H is starting to peel. He works alone. He's always worked alone. He had a guy work with him for a couple of years back in 2011 but it didn't take, and after that he said he'd rather just do it himself. He likes the quiet. He likes being his own boss. He likes that when a customer asks him a question, he's the one who knows the answer. He is the most stubborn man God ever made. And his blood pressure had been climbing for 4 years. The first time the doctor mentioned it was 2021. Rick had gone in for a physical because I made him. His pressure was 148 over 94. The doctor said it was elevated and he wanted to see it again in 3 months. Rick didn't go back in 3 months. He went back the next year. It was 152 over 96. The doctor put him on a low dose lisinopril. Rick took it for about 6 weeks and then quit because he said it made him cough. I begged him to call the doctor and get a different one. He said he'd think about it. He didn't think about it. The next year his pressure was 159 over 98. The doctor sat him down and told him in plain language that if he didn't get this under control he was going to have a stroke. Rick is a man who only respects plain language. He took the prescription. This time it was a different medication. He took it for 2 months. Then he forgot one day. Then he forgot two days. Then he forgot a week. Then the bottle sat in our medicine cabinet and I'd see it every time I brushed my teeth. He won't talk about it. I have tried. I have tried in the kitchen. I have tried in the car. I have tried in bed at night with the lights off. I have tried writing it in a card on his birthday. I have tried bringing it up casually while we're watching the Tigers play. He always says the same thing. "I'm fine, Cheryl. I'll go in when I need to." Last winter I started noticing things. He'd sit at the kitchen table after work and put his head in his hands for a long minute before he got up to take his boots off. He'd come out of the bathroom in the morning and grip the doorframe before he started walking. He'd be carrying a tool box to the truck and he'd set it down on the porch step and just stand there. I started watching him without him knowing I was watching him. His face was a color I didn't have a word for. Not red. Not flushed. Something deeper. Like the blood was sitting under his skin in a place it wasn't supposed to be. In February I went into his truck while he was in the shower one morning. I was looking for a Costco card I thought he'd left in the console. I opened the glove box and I found a blood pressure cuff. The kind you get at CVS. It was still in its box, but the box was open and the cuff had been used. I took the cuff out. I looked at the digital screen. The last reading still on it was from 4 days earlier. 171 over 103. I sat in that truck in our driveway in my bathrobe and I cried. Big silent crying. Don't want to wake the neighbors crying. 171 over 103 is the number where doctors stop being patient with you. 171 over 103 is the number where you sit in a hospital waiting room. 171 over 103 is the number where your wife gets a phone call she can't unhear. He was checking it. He knew. He knew the whole time. He just wasn't telling me. I put the cuff back in the glove box. I closed the door quietly. I walked back inside and I made him eggs. That was 4 weeks before Diane called me about the kitchen floor. When I got off that call with Diane I knew I couldn't keep doing what I'd been doing. I'd been begging. I'd been hinting. I'd been leaving articles printed off the internet on his side of the bed. He'd been laughing at me and saying I worried too much. I needed something different. I called my sister Patty. Patty is 3 years younger than me. She lives in Sylvania. She's a retired school nurse from Sylvania Northview. She's the kind of person who knows things. Not because she's a doctor, but because she has spent 30 years dealing with parents who didn't know what to do with their kids' problems and she figured out, somewhere along the way, that most of the answers are not where most people are looking. I told her everything. Diane. The truck. The cuff. The number. The bottles in the medicine cabinet that he wasn't taking. She was quiet for a long time. Then she said, "Cheryl. I want to tell you about something I've been doing. I wasn't going to bring it up because I didn't know if it was for you. But I think you need to hear about it now." She told me about a thing called amla. I'd never heard the word. I asked her to spell it. A. M. L. A. She said it's a kind of berry. From India. The Indian gooseberry. People have been using it over there for thousands of years. She started taking it about a year and a half ago because her own pressure was creeping up after her hysterectomy. Her doctor wanted to put her on medication. She wanted to see if she could try something else first. She did her research. She talked to her son in law's mother, who is from Mumbai. She landed on amla. She'd been taking it for 18 months. Her pressure had come down on its own. Her last reading was 124 over 78. Her doctor was confused. She didn't care. I said, "Patty. Rick is not going to take a berry from India because his sister in law told him to." She laughed. She said, "I know. I am not asking you to ask him. I am asking you to learn about it. Learn about it. Then decide what to do." I spent the next 2 weeks on my laptop at the kitchen table after Rick fell asleep at night. I read until 1 in the morning some nights. I had a notebook. I had pages and pages of notes. I made Patty answer the phone twice a day because I had more questions every time. What I started to understand was that blood pressure isn't just about the number. The number is the smoke. The fire is somewhere else. The fire is in the blood vessels themselves. The lining of them. There's this thin layer on the inside of every artery in your body called the endothelium. When that lining is healthy, it's smooth and flexible and it tells your blood vessels when to relax and when to contract. When it's damaged, the whole system gets stiff. The vessels don't open the way they should. The heart has to push harder to move the same amount of blood. The pressure goes up. What damages the endothelium? Oxidative stress. Inflammation. The slow erosion that happens to all of us over the years, but happens faster in some people than in others. Specifically the kind of people who are stubborn 61 year old plumbers who eat at gas stations 4 days a week and crawl under sinks all day and don't slow down when their bodies tell them to. The medication Rick had been refusing to take works by forcing the system. It's like a man pushing on the gas pedal of a car with a stuck brake. It works, but it doesn't fix the brake. Amla, what I learned, works at the source. It's one of the most antioxidant rich foods in the world. It contains compounds that have been associated with supporting healthy nitric oxide production, which is what tells your blood vessels to relax. It's been linked to helping maintain healthy endothelial function and supporting the body's natural ability to manage oxidative stress. In plain language, the kind of language Rick would respect, it gives the body the materials it needs to do its own job. It doesn't override the system. It supports the system. Like sending a guy a better wrench instead of yelling at him for being slow. I read about a specific brand called Alevia. Their product is just called Alevia Amla. Small dark glass bottle. Two capsules a day. They source their amla from a specific traditional growing region in India and they don't cut it with fillers or fake stuff like a lot of supplement brands do. They have a 90 day money back guarantee, which mattered to me because I knew if I bought it and it didn't work for him I'd have to eat the cost without telling him. I ordered a bottle. I had it shipped to Patty's house because Rick checks the mail. When it came in I drove to Sylvania and picked it up and I drove home and I sat with it on the kitchen table for an hour trying to figure out how I was going to do this. I decided I wasn't going to ask. I wasn't going to explain. I was going to put it next to his coffee mug in the morning with a glass of water, and I was going to tell him my sister Patty had given it to me and she'd asked me to try it for my own circulation, and I'd been taking it and feeling better, and I'd put one out for him just in case. I laid it like a trap. A loving trap. He came downstairs at 6:15 in the morning. Sat at the table. Picked up the capsules. Turned them over. Looked at me. He said, "What is this?" I said, "Patty's been on it. She says it's good for circulation. I started taking it last week. I put one out for you in case you wanted to try it." He said, "Cheryl." I said, "Rick." He looked at me for a long minute. Then he picked them up and he swallowed them with his coffee. He didn't say anything else about it. He just took them. He took them the next morning too. And the morning after that. Within 2 weeks I noticed something. He was getting out of bed in the morning and not gripping the doorframe. I didn't say anything. I just noticed. Week 3, he came home from work and instead of putting his head in his hands at the kitchen table he sat down and asked me how my day was. Week 4, he brought up the cuff. Out of nowhere. We were eating dinner. He said, "I checked my pressure this morning." I tried to keep my face still. I said, "Oh yeah?" He said, "It was 142 over 89." I said, "Rick. That's lower than the doctor's number from last year." He said, "I know." He didn't say anything else for a few minutes. Then he said, "I'm going to keep checking it." That was the first time he'd ever told me his number on his own. In 4 years of refusing to talk about it, he had just volunteered the information. Week 6, he came home from work with a brown paper bag. He set it on the kitchen counter. He pulled out a head of cauliflower and some bell peppers and some chicken breasts. I said, "What's this?" He said, "Diane told me to start eating better." I said, "Diane?" He said, "The lady on the east side. With the leaking trap. I went back today to fix the second valve. She made me sit down and have a glass of water before I started. She said her husband died of a stroke when he was 64 and she didn't want to read about another plumber in the obituaries." I started crying at the counter and he pretended not to notice while he put the chicken in the fridge. Week 8, he was sleeping better. He hadn't snored that loud, gasping kind of snore in over a month. He was waking up before the alarm. He was making me coffee instead of the other way around. Week 10, he went to his doctor. I drove him because I wanted to be there. I sat in the waiting room. He came out with a piece of paper. 136 over 84. His doctor said it was the best reading he'd had in 5 years and he didn't know what Rick was doing different but he should keep doing it. Rick told the doctor he was eating cauliflower. He didn't mention the amla. I almost laughed in the waiting room. We sat in the truck in the parking lot after. He looked at the paper for a long time. He said, "Cheryl. I almost died on that kitchen floor in March." I said, "I know." He said, "How did you know?" I said, "Diane called me." He didn't say anything for a long time. Then he said, "I owe that woman a lot more than a fixed valve." We drove home in silence. He held my hand across the truck console. He hadn't done that since we were dating. It's been 11 months now. His pressure is steady in the low 130s over high 70s. He still works full time. He still crawls under sinks. But he stands up slowly. He drinks more water than he used to. He brings me a glass of water without me asking. He takes the amla every morning. He doesn't make a big deal out of it. He just takes it. About 3 months ago he told one of his buddies about it. The guy is another plumber named Gary who's about Rick's age and has been on blood pressure medication for 9 years. Rick told him about the amla. Just casually. Like he was recommending a tool. Gary ordered some. Now Gary's wife calls me once a week to tell me Gary is doing better than he has in years. I'm telling you this story because I know what it's like to watch a man you love refuse to take care of himself. I know what it's like to find a blood pressure cuff hidden in a truck. I know what it's like to get a phone call from a stranger telling you your husband couldn't stand up. I know how alone you feel when you're the only one in the house who's worried. If you're reading this and any part of it sounds familiar, I want you to look into Alevia Amla. Not as a replacement for what your doctor is telling you to do. Just as something that supports the body the way the body was supposed to be supported all along. The 90 day money back guarantee is what got me to try it. I bought it knowing if it didn't work I could send it back and I wouldn't have lost anything but the gas money to Patty's house. They mean the guarantee. I've never had to use it but a friend of Patty's did and she got her money back without an argument. The bottle is small. Two capsules a day. It comes in the mail and you take it with your coffee. That's the whole thing. I almost lost the man I met at Bob Evans in 1989. I came so close I can still feel it in my chest. If your husband, or your father, or your brother, or you, is being stubborn about this, please. Please. Do what I did. Stop begging. Start learning. And then figure out the loving trap that gets the people you love to do the thing they won't do for themselves. Diane is coming over for dinner next month. Rick invited her himself. He said he wanted me to meet the woman who saved his life. I told him she didn't save his life. I did. He laughed and said we'd just have to agree to disagree. I think we're both right. P.S. The bottle really is small. Don't let that throw you. When mine first came in the mail Rick lifted it and said, "This is the whole thing?" That's amla. It's potent. You don't need a tub of powder. You need two capsules. P.P.S. The 90 day guarantee is the only reason I had the nerve to try this. I was 4 years deep into worrying about my husband and I couldn't afford another disappointment. Knowing I could send it back if it didn't work was the only thing that let me click order. They keep their word. If you try it and it doesn't help, you send it back. That's the deal. P.P.P.S. If you're the one with the high pressure and you're reading this thinking your wife or your husband is overreacting, I want you to know what you look like from the outside. You look like a person they love who they're watching disappear in slow motion. They are not nagging you. They are scared. Let them love you. Take the capsule. It's two capsules. It's not a betrayal of your stubbornness. It's a gift to the person who has to watch you. 👉 alevia.com/amla/33