Capsaicin Research Institute Facebook ad: “I almost called the coroner before I called 911.”

About this ad

Meta Ad Library ID

985978260515108

Platforms

Facebook, Instagram, Audience Network, Messenger and Threads

Relaunches

0

How we count

Ad text

I found a man slumped over the steering wheel of an idling Ford pickup at the end of my driveway last Tuesday morning, and I almost called the coroner before I called 911. I want to tell you that whole story. Because what I learned from it ended up being the most important thing anyone's said to me about my own husband in 14 years of marriage, and I'd be a coward if I kept it to myself. My name is Loretta. I'm 58 years old, I live on a dead end street in Erie, Pennsylvania, and I drove a city bus for 31 years before my back finally told me it was done. I retired in March. My husband Dale retired the year before. We thought we were going to have these long slow mornings together with coffee and the crossword and maybe a dog finally. Instead I spent that first summer watching him sit in his recliner with the blinds half closed, and I started to understand that retirement wasn't the gift everybody told us it would be. Dale is 61. He worked at the GE plant in Erie for 38 years, the locomotive division, the one they kept saying was going to close any minute and then somehow never did. He came home every night smelling like metal and diesel and that particular kind of factory sweat that doesn't wash out of a t shirt no matter what you do. He was strong his whole life. The kind of strong where he could carry both grandkids on his shoulders at the same time and not break stride. But somewhere around 56, something started to slip. It wasn't dramatic. It was the kind of slow that you don't notice until you're already on the other side of it. He stopped wanting to go fishing on Saturdays. He stopped going down to the basement to work on his model trains, and he had hundreds of dollars worth of unpainted boxcars sitting on that workbench gathering dust. His doctor told him his blood pressure was creeping up. Then it wasn't creeping anymore, it was just up. They put him on one pill. Then a second pill. Then they added a third one for water retention, and his ankles still puffed up by 4 PM every day like little loaves of bread. His hands were always cold now too. Even in summer. He'd grab the coffee mug with both hands like he was warming them on a campfire. I'd watch him do that and pretend I wasn't watching. I'd watch him sit on the edge of the bed in the morning trying to find the energy to put his socks on, and I'd pretend I wasn't watching that either. That's the part that nobody tells you about long marriages. You learn to look away from the things that scare you, because looking at them too directly makes them real. Anyway. Last Tuesday morning I was making coffee and I looked out the kitchen window and I saw a truck at the end of our driveway. Just sitting there. Engine running. Exhaust coming out the back in those little gray puffs because the morning was cold. It was an old red Ford F-150, faded down to almost pink on the hood from sitting in the sun for 30 years, and I knew it belonged to Walter from two doors down. Walter is 67. He's a retired electrician. His wife Diane passed two years ago from pancreatic, and ever since then he's been one of those men who waves but doesn't really stop walking. I figured he'd pulled in to drop off a card or a casserole dish or something. So I waited. I made my coffee. I sliced a banana for Dale. Five minutes went by. Walter didn't come up. I went out on the porch in my robe and slippers, and I called his name, and he didn't move. I walked down the driveway and I saw him through the windshield, slumped sideways against the door, his face this awful gray color I had only ever seen on one other person in my entire life and that was my mother in her hospital bed the morning she died. I started screaming his name and pounding on the window. He didn't open his eyes. But his hand twitched. I ran back to the house, I called 911, I told the dispatcher I had a neighbor having a stroke or a heart attack in his truck and I couldn't get the door open because he had locked it from the inside. Dale came out in his socks. We both stood there banging on that window while the dispatcher talked in my ear. The ambulance got there in 11 minutes. The fire department got there first and they used some kind of tool to pop the lock, and they pulled Walter out and laid him on the asphalt of my driveway and worked on him for what felt like an hour but was probably 4 minutes. They got him stable. They loaded him in the ambulance. One of the paramedics, a young guy with a red beard, told me his pressure had been so high they were honestly surprised he was still talking. He said, ma'am, this happens way more than you'd think with men this age. They feel it coming on, they get in the truck to drive themselves to the hospital because they don't want to make a fuss, and they don't make it. He said it real plain, like he'd said it a hundred times before. Like it was just a fact about the world. Walter is okay. He's home now. They kept him for 4 days and they sent him home with two new prescriptions and a sheet of paper about salt. But I haven't slept right since that morning. Because I know my husband. And I know that if Dale felt his heart pounding through his chest at 6 in the morning, he wouldn't wake me up. He wouldn't call 911. He would put his pants on and get in his truck and try to drive himself to the hospital because he wouldn't want to be a burden. And if I'd been in the shower that morning, or out walking, or asleep, I might have lost Walter. I might lose Dale the same way. That's the thought that's been sitting in my chest for the last 9 days like a stone I can't swallow. So I started reading. I'm not a researcher. I drove a bus. But I know how to use a library card and I know how to ask my niece, who is a nurse practitioner in Pittsburgh, the questions I should be asking. I called her that Wednesday morning. I told her about Walter. I told her about Dale's three pills and his puffy ankles and his cold hands and the way he sits on the edge of the bed in the morning like he's bracing for something. She was quiet for a long time on the phone. Then she said something that knocked the wind out of me. She said, Aunt Loretta, those pills don't fix anything. They just push the numbers down. The thing that's actually broken is the switch inside his blood vessels, and nobody is doing anything about that switch. I said what switch. She said the lining of every blood vessel in his body has tiny receptors on it. Tiny switches. One of them is called TRPV1. When that switch is firing the way it's supposed to, it tells the lining to release a molecule called nitric oxide. Nitric oxide is the signal that tells the blood vessels to relax, the way a tense shoulder finally drops when you take a hot shower. When the switch is firing, the vessels stay loose. The blood flows easy. The pressure stays where it should. She said when you're in your 30s and 40s, the switch is mostly fine. It fires the way it was designed to. But years of stress and processed food and the kind of slow inflammation everybody has and nobody talks about, all of that wears the switch down. Year by year. Layer by layer. The signal gets quieter. The vessels stop relaxing on their own. And once the switch goes quiet, the vessels stay tight. The blood has to push harder to get through. The heart has to work harder. And every beat puts more pressure on a system that's already overworked, which wears it down faster. She said that's the cycle. That's why blood pressure tends to get worse and worse no matter how many pills they pile on. And it's why his hands are always cold. Cold extremities are a symptom of a switch that isn't firing. The blood isn't reaching the edges anymore. I asked her, well what do you do for the switch. And she said, that's the thing nobody talks about, Aunt Loretta. The pills don't go anywhere near the switch. They open the vessels through a different door entirely. Beetroot helps a little because it adds some nitric oxide from the outside, but the body already knows how to make its own. The issue isn't supply. It's that the switch isn't firing. Then she said, there is something I've been telling some of my older patients about. It's not a drug. It's a compound from a pepper. The most studied natural activator of that switch in the human body. There's real research on it now. She said the name. Capsaicin. I wrote it down on the back of an envelope. C A P S A I C I N. I asked her to spell it again. She told me capsaicin is the heat compound in cayenne pepper. The thing that makes a pepper burn on your tongue. But what the research is starting to show is that the same compound, in the right dose, activates that switch on the inside of the blood vessel wall. It wakes it up. And when the switch starts firing again, the vessels start making their own nitric oxide. The way they did when you were younger. She said it's not a magic bullet. It's not a replacement for his medication. But it's the only thing she's seen that works on the switch itself instead of just pushing the numbers down from the outside. And she said something that I've been thinking about every day since. She said, Aunt Loretta, the pills are like putting a clamp on a leaky pipe. Capsaicin is more like fixing the valve. I sat there at my kitchen table holding that envelope and I started crying. Because for 9 years I've watched Dale shrink. I've watched him stop fishing and stop painting his train cars and stop going to his nephew's birthday parties because the drive felt like too much. I've watched the doctor add pill after pill and never once tell us about any switch. I felt like somebody had finally given me a map. I told her I had heard of cayenne. I told her my mother in law used to swear by cayenne capsules from the drugstore for circulation, and she'd given Dale a bottle once, and he'd thrown them out after three days because the heartburn was so bad he couldn't keep them down. She said yes, she had heard the same thing from a dozen patients. She said the standard cayenne capsules have two problems. The first is the burn, which most people can't get past. The second is absorption. Most cayenne products on the shelf are poorly absorbed by the body. The capsaicin barely gets into the bloodstream where it needs to go to reach the switch. So the switch never actually gets activated, no matter how many capsules you take. She told me about a brand called Aurivita. She said it's the one she trusts because it's a softgel rather than a capsule, which protects the stomach lining from the burn. She said it's standardized to 3mg of capsaicin per serving, which is the dosage range used in the actual research, not whatever random amount most products use. And she said it includes a black pepper extract called bioperine that increases absorption substantially. She said the difference between a regular cayenne capsule and Aurivita is the difference between a switch that almost gets touched and a switch that actually fires. I ordered a bag of Aurivita Capsaicin Power that same afternoon. It came in 4 days. A small bag, nothing flashy. Three softgels in the morning with breakfast. I didn't tell Dale at first. I just put it on the counter next to the coffee maker and I said babe, my niece told me to start taking these, my pressure has been creeping up too, want to take them with me. He said sure. He's a sweet man. He said sure. The first two weeks, nothing happened that I could put a finger on. But on day 16 or 17, something did. He grabbed the coffee mug in the morning and he didn't wrap both hands around it. He held it in one hand, the way a person holds a coffee mug when their hand isn't cold. I didn't say anything. I didn't want to jinx it. The third week, he started waking up before me. That hadn't happened in maybe 4 years. I'd come downstairs and the coffee would already be made and he'd be standing at the kitchen window looking at the bird feeder. I still didn't say anything. On day 32, he went down to the basement on a Saturday. He was down there for 3 hours. I crept halfway down the stairs and I saw him sitting at his workbench with a tiny paintbrush, painting a black stripe on a little orange boxcar. He looked up at me and he kind of smiled, and he said, I forgot how much I liked this. I had to go back upstairs because I was about to lose it. By the end of the second month, the puffiness in his ankles had eased up. Not gone, but eased. His hands stayed warm most of the time. His doctor saw him for a regular check and said his numbers had moved in the right direction and asked what he was doing different. Dale said, my wife's making me take some kind of pepper. The doctor laughed. Then he wrote it down. I'm not going to tell you Aurivita Capsaicin Power is a miracle and I'm not going to tell you it cured anything, because it isn't and it didn't. What I'm going to tell you is what I see with my own eyes. I see my husband putting his socks on without sitting down halfway through. I see him walking out to the mailbox without that little hitch in his stride. I see him answering the phone when his brother calls instead of letting it go to voicemail. I see him holding a coffee mug in one hand. I see a man who is starting to come back from somewhere far away. And every time I look out the kitchen window at the end of my driveway, I think about Walter slumped against that door, and I thank God it wasn't Dale, and I thank my niece for telling me about the switch. I want to say a few things directly, in case you're still reading. If your husband is on three blood pressure pills and his ankles still swell, the pills aren't fixing the switch. If you've been told this is just aging, ask yourself why some 70 year olds run marathons and some 55 year olds can't carry the groceries. If you've tried beetroot and garlic and magnesium and fish oil and you're still where you started, it's because none of those things activate the switch directly. They're working on the wrong layer. If you tried cayenne capsules from the drugstore years ago and they tore your stomach up, that wasn't the compound failing you. That was the wrong delivery and the wrong dose. Aurivita works on the layer everything else misses. Aurivita is the company my niece pointed me to. They make a softgel with 3mg of capsaicin standardized to the research dose, with bioperine to actually get it into the bloodstream. One bag is 60 days. They have a 120 day money back guarantee, which means if you take it for 4 months and you don't notice anything, you can send the bag back and they refund you. No paperwork. No phone tree. I'm not affiliated with them. I'm a retired bus driver in Erie. I'm just a woman who almost lost her neighbor and is trying not to lose her husband. If you want to look at it, the link is below. Give it 90 days at minimum. That's what my niece told me. The switch doesn't fire on day three. It takes time for the lining to wake back up. My husband's hands didn't get warm until day 16. His numbers didn't move until the second month. The man came back to me in pieces, not all at once. 👉 https://aurivita.co/products/cayenne-pepper-softgels P.S. Walter came over yesterday with a tin of cookies his daughter made. He sat at our kitchen table for an hour. He's started taking Aurivita too. His daughter asked me where I got the name from. P.P.S. I keep that envelope with C A P S A I C I N written on the back of it in the kitchen drawer with the coupons. Some days when Dale is down in the basement painting his train cars I take it out and I look at it. It's just a word on an envelope. But it's the word that gave me my husband back. P.P.P.S. The 120 day guarantee is the only reason I tried it. If I'd been asked to risk that money with no way out, I wouldn't have. The fact that you can return it if it doesn't do anything for you is what made me say yes. It's also what made me feel okay telling you about it. 👉 https://aurivita.co/products/cayenne-pepper-softgels

Where the ad sends people

aurivita.co

I almost called the coroner before I called 911.

Support strong circulation today with our powerful cayenne pepper formula. 180 softgels and 60 servings per bag.