Arthritis Support Group

My husband took his turmeric every morning. Wore the knee brace his doctor gave him. Took the cortisone shot every 3 months for 4 years. Walked 2 miles a day, slow as it was. He did everything right. He died from a fall on February 16th at 3:12 AM. He was 68 years old. Took his turmeric every morning. Wore the knee brace his doctor gave him. Took the cortisone shot every 3 months for 4 years. Walked 2 miles a day, slow as it was. The hospital bill was $48,000. The funeral was $11,200. His work boots are still by the back door. I can't move them. If I move them, he's really gone. I need to tell you what happened to Ed. Because I'm seeing the same posts on Facebook that I was making 3 weeks before he died. Women asking, "any tips for my husband's bad knees, he's getting worse," and it makes me physically ill. If you're over 50, or someone you love is, please read this entire thing. I know it's long. I know you're scrolling. I know you have things to do. 3 weeks ago I would have given anything, everything, for someone to tell me what I'm about to tell you. Ed came home from the hardware store on February 5th holding the railing harder than usual. "Knees just don't want to cooperate today," he said. "I'll take it easy this weekend, I'll be fine." I didn't think twice about it. Ed had been dealing with bad knees for 8 years. He always pushed through. That was Ed. By Monday his right knee was so swollen he couldn't get his work pants on. But he still walked to the kitchen. Still made his own coffee. Still telling me, "stop fussing, Maggie, it's just my knees, I've had worse." I called our doctor. Anti inflammatories. Ice. Rest. "If it's not better in a few days, bring him in for another shot." So we waited. By Wednesday he couldn't put weight on it without gripping the wall. He was sweating just walking to the bathroom. Limping so heavy his right shoulder dropped 4 inches with every step. I could hear this sound every time he took a step. A click. Then a grinding. Like a hinge that hadn't been oiled in 20 years. I'd never heard it that loud. "Ed, let me drive you to urgent care." "I'm fine." "You're not fine. I can hear your knee from across the room." "Maggie. I'm FINE." 39 years of marriage. I knew every version of that man. The stubborn version. The scared version pretending to be the stubborn version. This was the second one. By Thursday morning he couldn't get out of bed. Not wouldn't. Couldn't. I brought him a glass of water and his hand was shaking so badly he spilled half of it on his chest. He didn't even react. Just lay there. Staring at the ceiling. Not from pain. From something worse than pain. The look you get when your body has stopped doing what you tell it to do. I sat on the edge of our bed, the bed we've shared for 39 years, and I looked at his face. His skin was gray. That's when I knew something was very wrong. He convinced me to help him get up. He said he needed the bathroom. He wouldn't let me call anyone yet. He hated hospitals. I got him to the top of the stairs. I had my hand on his elbow. He had his hand on the railing. We did the first step together. Then the second. On the third step, his right knee just folded. I'll never get the sound out of my head as long as I live. The sound of him hitting those wooden stairs. The way his head bounced once. Then stopped. I called 911 at 6:52 AM. The paramedics were there in 9 minutes. As they wheeled Ed out of our house, past his recliner, past his tools, past 39 years of our life, he looked at me from the stretcher and said: "Don't forget to feed the dog. He gets cranky." That was the last thing my husband said to me in our home. The dog. I followed the ambulance. Ran every red light. Didn't care. At the ER, they wouldn't let me back. "We're stabilizing him, someone will update you." I sat in that waiting room for 2 hours and 23 minutes. I counted every single minute. The chairs were hard plastic. The TV was playing a morning talk show with the sound too low to hear. An old man across from me was asleep with his mouth open. A young mother was bouncing a crying baby in the corner. And I sat there. In the fluorescent light. Smelling that hospital smell, that mixture of bleach and recycled air and fear, and I prayed. I don't pray often. But I prayed. When the doctor came out, a woman about 50, gray hair pulled back, tired eyes, I knew before she opened her mouth. I knew from the way she was walking. "Mrs. Foley, your husband suffered a severe head injury and a hip fracture from the fall. The fall was caused by his right knee giving out completely. We're stabilizing him, but the next 24 hours are critical." "But he was managing his arthritis," I said. "He had the shots. He was on the medication. He took the supplements his doctor told him to take." She looked at me. And then she said something that will be burned into my brain until the day I die: "Mrs. Foley, those medications managed the swelling. They didn't fix what was breaking down underneath. The structure of his knee had been deteriorating for years. The shots and the pills only ever masked what was happening to the cells inside that joint. They didn't feed them." "So he was getting worse the whole time?" "The whole time. By the time a knee gives out completely, the cells inside the joint have been starving for energy for a long time. We're going to do everything we can." We're stabilizing him, but the next 24 hours are critical. That's what they say when they're not sure he'll see Tuesday. Ed spent 11 days in the ICU. I was there every morning at 7 when they opened the doors. I stayed until they made me leave at 9 PM. Every single day. I learned things about the ICU that I never wanted to know. I learned that the machines don't just beep. They have different beeps. A steady beep means things are okay. A fast beep means something changed. A long, sustained beep means you need to leave the room because people are about to rush in. I learned that sound. I heard it 3 times. Day 2, he hadn't woken up. They said the head injury was bad. They were watching for swelling on his brain. Day 5, his hip surgery. They said the bone was so weak the screws barely held. He was in surgery for 6 hours. I sat in that waiting room with a styrofoam cup of coffee gone cold in my hand. Day 7, he opened his eyes. Looked right at me. Confused at first. Then clear. "Maggie. Where's my truck?" I laughed and cried at the same time. "Your truck is in the driveway, Ed. Right where you left it." He squeezed my hand. Weak. But he squeezed. Day 9. His vitals dropped. They said an embolism. They said his body had been through too much. Day 10. He was awake. Quiet. He looked at me for a long time. "I'm sorry, Maggie." "For what?" "For not listening. You told me my knees weren't right. I should have listened. I thought if I just kept moving, just kept pushing, it would hold. I shouldn't have tried those stairs." I squeezed his hand and said, "Don't you dare apologize to me, Ed Foley. You just focus on getting better." But my face was doing something I couldn't control. And he saw it. He saw it. Day 11. February 16th. I was in the family waiting area. They'd asked me to step out while they repositioned him. At 1:47 AM, I heard the long beep. I heard running in the hallway. I stood up. A nurse came to the door. "Mrs. Foley, please stay here. The team is with him." I stood in that room for 1 hour and 25 minutes. At 3:12 AM, a doctor I'd never seen before walked in. I knew. "I'm so sorry. We did everything we could." I drove home at 4 AM. Ed's truck was in the driveway. The porch light was on because I'd left it on 11 days ago when the ambulance took him, and nobody had turned it off. I walked inside. His reading glasses were on the kitchen table. His tool belt was hanging on the back of his chair. The remote was on the arm of his recliner, right where he always left it. And his work boots. By the back door. Still there. From the morning of February 5th when he came home from the hardware store with knees that wouldn't cooperate. I sat in his recliner. I didn't move for 7 hours. The house was so quiet I could hear the refrigerator hum. 39 years. And now the only sound in my house was the refrigerator. The funeral was February 23rd. Ed's brother flew in from Tucson. Our son drove up from Columbus. Our 3 grandkids wore little black outfits that didn't fit them right. My 4 year old grandson asked me, "Grandma, when is Pop Pop coming home?" I told him Pop Pop was in heaven now. He said, "Can we go visit?" I had to walk out of the room. After the funeral, I tried to go back to normal. I don't know what "normal" is anymore, but I tried. I couldn't. Because every time I opened my phone, I saw women, women my age, women whose husbands were Ed's age, posting about their own bad knees. Bad hips. Bad hands. "I can't grip the steering wheel anymore." "My knees are killing me on the stairs." "Doctor says it's just wear and tear." And I knew. I KNEW. Some of them were going to end up where Ed ended up. And some of them were going to end up where I am now. I couldn't just sit in this chair and watch it happen. So I started researching. Not because I wanted to. Because I had to. Because if Ed died for nothing, if I can't save even one person from what happened to him, then I can't live with that. I spent weeks reading. Articles I barely understood. CDC numbers. Medical journals. Studies on what happens inside an arthritic joint. I read that 1 in 4 American adults has arthritis. That falls are the number 1 cause of injury death in adults over 65. That joint instability is one of the biggest contributors to those falls. That a fall that would have just bruised someone at 40 can kill someone at 68. Ed was 68. I'm 62. I read that cortisone shots, the ones Ed had every 3 months for 4 years, may not protect the joint the way we assumed. In one study, repeated shots were linked to more cartilage loss over time, not less. The shots Ed trusted. The shots his doctor kept giving him. I read that glucosamine, turmeric, collagen, fish oil, the whole shelf of supplements Ed tried over the years, none of them showed strong long term results in the studies. Some helped a little. Some did nothing. None of them changed what was actually happening. And I kept reading one thing over and over, in study after study, article after article: It's not the wear and tear that breaks your joints. It's your cells running out of energy to maintain them. This stopped me cold. Inside every joint, there are living cells. Their entire job is to maintain the cartilage between your bones. To keep things lubricated. To shut down inflammation when it's done its job. When you're young, those cells work around the clock. That's why you could kneel down, stand back up, and not even think about it. But those cells need energy to do their job. And that energy comes from a system inside your body called your mitochondria. Think of mitochondria as the power that makes your cells work. When you're young, your mitochondria run strong. Energy flows. Joint cells keep up with the wear. But as you age, your mitochondria slow down. They stop producing the cellular energy they used to. And modern life makes it worse. Processed food. Stress. Years of physical work piling up on the body. All of it shuts your mitochondria down faster than aging alone ever would. Your joint cells start to starve. They can't keep up with the cartilage anymore. They can't make enough fluid to keep the joint moving smoothly. They can't shut off the inflammation. So the inflammation just stays. And it starts wearing down the very tissue it was supposed to be protecting. That's what was happening inside Ed's knee. For years. While we trusted the shots and the supplements and the brace. His joint cells were starving. The shots weren't feeding them. They were just turning down the alarm. And nobody told us. I put my phone down when I read that. I walked around the block 3 times. I was shaking. Not from cold. From anger. From grief. From the realization that my husband's own body was supposed to be maintaining his knees and it couldn't, because he was 68 and his cells had been starving for years and nobody thought to mention it. So I started asking a different question. Not, "how do you treat arthritis?" "How do you make sure the cells inside your joints have the energy to keep up with the damage?" The first thing I tried was what I already knew. I went to Walgreens and bought everything on the shelf. Glucosamine. Turmeric. Collagen powder. A fish oil bottle. A $44 joint multivitamin. I started taking them every morning. I'd been taking glucosamine on and off for years. So had Ed. He had a bottle on the kitchen counter right next to his coffee mug. It didn't save him. Glucosamine hands your joints raw material the way lumber builds a house with no workers. It just sits in a pile. Your cells need energy to actually USE it. If the cells are starving, the lumber stays in the pile. The turmeric was the same story. I read the back of the bottle. 95% curcumin. I looked it up. Standard turmeric has terrible absorption. Most of it goes right through you. To get a real dose you'd need to take massive amounts that tear up your stomach. The collagen powder. I read 4 different studies on collagen for joints. The results were thin. And it has the same problem as glucosamine. You can drink collagen all day, but if your joint cells don't have the energy to use it, it doesn't matter. The fish oil was for inflammation. I'd been taking fish oil for 6 years. Ed had been taking it for longer. Didn't fix his knees. Didn't fix mine. After 2 weeks and $97 worth of products, I was exactly where I started. Nothing was actually feeding the energy problem inside the joint cells. Nothing was waking up the system that's supposed to do the work. And I was furious. Because why is there an entire AISLE of joint products and not a single one of them actually feeds the cells that are supposed to be doing the work? They all just hand raw materials to a body that doesn't have the energy to use them. It's like dropping bricks in a yard and expecting a house to build itself. That's when I found something different. I was reading a thread on Facebook. One of those groups for women over 50. And a woman posted something that stopped me cold. She said her mother was 78 years old. Had been diagnosed with severe arthritis in both hands and both knees 12 years ago. Was scheduled for double knee replacement. Couldn't open a jar. Couldn't cut her own food. Then her mother started taking something. Not a medication. Not a regular supplement. A year later, with her own doctor's blessing, her mother held off on the surgery. The woman in the post said her mom was gardening again. Holding her great grandkids. Going up and down the stairs without holding the rail. Someone asked what her mom was taking. She said, "Amla. It's an old Himalayan superfruit extract. Started it last year. I don't know exactly how it works. I just know my mom has her hands back." I almost scrolled past it. Amla? An old superfruit? For arthritis? It sounded like one of those wellness things that show up next to celery juice recipes. I'd tried turmeric. I'd tried collagen. I'd tried the whole Walgreens shelf. None of it had done anything for Ed. In what world does a superfruit extract help where cortisone couldn't? But I couldn't stop thinking about it. Because that woman's mother had been scheduled for SURGERY. And held off. Ed had been managing his arthritis for 8 years and ended up dead on a hospital bed. What was the difference? So I kept reading. And what I found made me so angry I had to put my phone down and walk outside. There's a superfruit called Amla. It's been used for over 5,000 years by Himalayan healers. They called it "the nurse." It was the one remedy they reserved for people whose bodies were breaking down at the cellular level. People aging faster than they should. They didn't understand why it worked back then. They just watched the results happen over thousands of years. And modern science is just now figuring out what they were seeing. Amla is tied to something called AMPK. AMPK is the master switch in your body for making new mitochondria. It's the on switch for the system that powers your joint cells. When AMPK is flipped on, your body starts producing cellular energy again, the way it did when you were younger. When the cells in your joints have energy again, they can finally do what they've been trying to do all along. Keep up with the cartilage. Calm the inflammation. Keep the joint moving smoothly. Give them the energy to do their own job again. That's the part that made me walk outside. For 8 years, every supplement Ed took, every shot he got, every brace he wore, NONE of it flipped that master switch. None of it gave his joint cells the energy they needed. They were all delivering lumber to a job site with no workers, while the workers were sitting in the corner starving. And Amla, this old superfruit nobody talks about, is one of the few things tied to flipping that switch. But here's why I'm telling you about Amla extract and not just Amla. Because I also learned that you can't just get this from regular food. Amla has to be concentrated to actually do anything. The whole superfruit, eaten plain, doesn't have enough of the active compound. You'd have to eat unrealistic amounts every single day. Nobody does that. A clinical extract is different. It concentrates the active compound so a single capsule delivers what would take pounds of fresh superfruit. And there's one more thing about Amla I didn't expect. When scientists tested over 3,000 different foods for antioxidant content, Amla came out at the top. One of the highest of any food ever tested. That matters because the same things that shut down your mitochondria in the first place, the oxidative stress, the free radicals from modern life, are still floating around your body. You don't want to just turn the system back on. You want to PROTECT it so it stays on. Amla supports both. It's tied to flipping the master switch that reactivates your mitochondria. AND it helps protect them from the damage that shut them down in the first place. Japanese studies. Indian studies. Universities you've heard of. The research isn't new. It's just never been put in front of the women I know. We've been taking glucosamine. I was furious. I'm still furious. But I wasn't going to just buy something off Amazon and hope for the best. I'm 62, not naive. So I kept researching. And I found out that most Amla products on the market are not the real thing. They're cheap powder. Stems and leaves. Old stock that's been sitting in warehouses for months. Filler. The active compounds are gone before you ever open the bottle. The kind of Amla that actually shows up in the studies is a clinical strength extract. Organic. Third party tested. Made in small batches so the compounds stay active. Not a $9 bottle of dust from a grocery store. I found a company. Novida. And I was skeptical. God, I was skeptical. After everything else had done nothing. After watching Ed trust shot after shot. After every joint product I've ever tried turned out to be either underdosed, weak, or designed to make me feel like I was doing something while doing nothing. I was not about to trust something new just because the internet said so. So I called the orthopedic doctor who'd seen Ed in the hospital. The doctor who was there. In the ICU. Trying to save my husband. I told him what I'd found. I asked him straight, "Is this real? Is this safe? Or am I grasping at straws because I can't accept that Ed is gone?" He was quiet for a long time. Then he said: "Maggie, the research on AMPK and cellular energy in joint health is some of the most promising work in the last decade. Amla is one of the most studied natural activators of that pathway. The antioxidant data is real. For most people there are no significant interactions at daily clinical doses, though anyone on medication should clear it with their own doctor or pharmacist first." Then he paused. "What I'll tell you is this. When the cells inside a joint have the energy to keep up, the structure tends to hold up better over time. That's the part nobody was paying attention to with Ed." I had to hang up the phone. I sat on the edge of the bed, Ed's side, and I cried harder than I cried at the funeral. Because a doctor, THE doctor, just told me that the thing nobody ever checked, whether Ed's joints were getting the energy they needed, was the thing that might have mattered most. If anyone had told us. If we'd just known. I ordered Novida's Amla that night. When it arrived 3 days later, I stood in the kitchen holding the bottle, terrified to open it. Not because I thought it would hurt me. Because if it did something, if this was real, then maybe more could have been done for Ed. And I don't know how to live with that. But I couldn't NOT try it. Because I have a daughter. A son. Grandchildren. Friends my age. And I'll be damned if I let what happened to Ed happen to anyone I can reach. First morning. 2 capsules with a glass of water. I called my own pharmacist first to be sure it was clean with what I take. It was. Less time than my coffee. I've been taking it every morning, first thing, for 6 weeks now. Day 4, I opened a jar of pickles for my grandson without even thinking about it. Halfway through the meal I stopped and looked at my hand. I hadn't opened a jar without help in over a year. By the end of week 2, I noticed I was getting up off the couch without using the armrest. By week 3, the morning ritual was gone. The hot water on my hands. The 20 minutes of waiting for my fingers to loosen up. Gone. I just got up and they worked. 3 weeks ago, my grandkids came over. They stayed the whole weekend. I got down on the floor with them. We played with the train set Ed had built our son 30 years ago. I got back up. I stood up off the floor. By myself. Without holding onto the couch. My daughter was watching from the kitchen. She didn't say anything for a long time. Then she said, "Mom. When's the last time you did that?" I couldn't remember. I called her later that night and I didn't say anything for about 30 seconds because I couldn't talk. She said, "Mom? Are you okay?" I said, "I think it's working." And then we both just cried. Because we were both thinking the same thing. If Ed had this. If we'd known. I've told everyone I know. My sister, she's 65, on a blood thinner, can't take most supplements because they interact with her medication. She asked her pharmacist about Amla and he said it was fine, no interactions with what she's on. She's been on Novida's Amla for a month now. She called me last Tuesday. "Maggie, I planted my whole front bed yesterday. I've been putting that off for 2 years." My neighbor Brenda. She's 64. Was on the surgery list for her left knee. She started taking it a week after I did. She knocked on my door last Friday and said, "I told my surgeon to take me off the list for now. I want to give this another 90 days first." My friend from church, Estelle. 71. Had hand pain so bad she stopped writing Christmas cards 3 years ago. She wrote me a thank you card last week. Her handwriting was shaky. But it was hers. Ed's brother in Tucson, 70, retired carpenter, hands shot from 50 years of work. He started it the day of the funeral. He emailed me last week. "Maggie, I built my granddaughter a dollhouse this weekend. First project I've finished in 4 years. I think Ed would want me to tell you this is real." I had to close my laptop when I read that. I'm not a doctor. I'm not a scientist. I'm not selling anything. I'm a 62 year old widow sitting in my dead husband's recliner at 4 in the morning because I can't sleep and I can't stop thinking about whether anyone will read this in time. Here's what I know because I lived it: Cortisone shots manage the swelling. They don't feed what's breaking down underneath. Glucosamine, turmeric, collagen, fish oil, all the things on the joint aisle. They give your body raw materials. But they don't give your cells the energy to use them. 1 in 4 American adults has arthritis. Falls are the number 1 cause of injury death in adults over 65. Joint instability is one of the biggest reasons for those falls. Your joint cells need energy to keep up with the damage. That energy comes from your mitochondria. And after 50, your mitochondria start shutting down. The cells in your joints start to starve. The damage piles up faster than your body can keep pace with. That's not "getting old." That's a system running low. There's a 5,000 year old superfruit, used by Himalayan healers, called "the nurse," that's tied to flipping the master switch that powers that system. That has one of the highest antioxidant contents of any food ever tested. That's in clinical research right now. That a hospital orthopedic doctor told me, on the phone, was the part nobody was paying attention to with Ed. I wish someone had told me this before February 5th. Before the hardware store. Before the bad day with his knees. Before the stairs. Before 3:12 AM. I can't go back. Ed can't come back. His work boots are by the back door and they're going to stay there. But you can still go forward. The page that explains what I just told you, the research, the science, what Novida's Amla actually does and why it's not the same as the other stuff on the joint aisle, it's the page that changed everything for me. It's the reason my friend Estelle can write Christmas cards again. It's the reason my grandkids still have a grandma who can get on the floor with them. I want you to read it. Not for me. For whoever you'd leave behind. This isn't a cure, and it's no replacement for your doctor. Keep taking what you're prescribed, and talk to your doctor or pharmacist before you add anything. But please don't wait the way we waited. 👇 https://novidanaturals.com/products/amla4 Ed used to say, "You don't wait until the roof caves in to climb up there." It's caving in. — Maggie Foley, age 62, Dayton, OH P.S. His work boots are still by the back door. 44 days now. I still can't move them. Every morning I walk past them and for one second I forget. For one second I think he's about to come in from the garage and pull them on and say "morning, Maggie." He's not. $48,000 in hospital bills. $11,200 for the funeral. And a daily capsule that costs less than a dollar a day. Please. Don't end up here. Don't let someone you love end up here. 👇 https://novidanaturals.com/products/amla4 P.P.S. I don't work for Novida. I don't get a penny from this. I'm writing this at 4:12 AM because I can't sleep and Ed's side of the bed is cold and if putting this on the internet reaches one woman, just one, then at least something good came from the worst thing that's ever happened to me. Novida is a small company. They make everything in small batches to keep the active compounds strong, and they sell out. There's a 90 day money back guarantee. If it doesn't do anything for you, you get every penny back. Ed didn't get 90 days. Ed didn't get a guarantee. Please. Share this with anyone you love over 50.