Tracey Coleman

I almost let my husband walk up the mountain alone 💔

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I almost let my husband walk up the mountain alone on our 30th anniversary. And I swear to God, if you're a woman over 40 who's been looked past by every doctor, told it's "just stress," told to "stay active," told the pain that's eating your life alive is somehow all in your head, you need to read what happened next because it might be the only thing standing between you and watching your entire life slip through your fingers while everyone around you thinks you're being dramatic. I'm getting ahead of myself. But I need you to understand something first. I know what it's like to wake up and immediately check your body like you're running a diagnostic on a machine that hates you. I know what it's like to open your eyes at 6 AM and already be exhausted, like sleep was just another chore your body failed at. I know what it's like to have pain that doesn't have an address, that shows up in your shoulders Tuesday and your hips Wednesday and your hands Thursday like it's playing some sick game of tag inside your own skin. I know what it's like to cancel plans so many times that people stop inviting you. I know what it's like to see your husband look at you with that expression that's half love and half something else you can't name but you know means he's doing math in his head about how many more years of this he can take. I know what fibromyalgia actually feels like. Not the pamphlet version. The real version. The version where you haven't felt like yourself in so long you've forgotten what "yourself" even means. My name is Denise Carter. I'm 52 years old. I live outside of Charlotte with my husband Marcus, who I've been married to for 30 years as of last spring. I work the front desk at a nursing home, which is its own kind of irony because I've spent the last 6 years watching residents get better care and more attention than I ever got from a doctor who looked at my chart instead of looking at me. I want to tell you about the hike. The moment on the cabin porch when I almost said "you go ahead baby, I'll be right here when you get back" instead of putting on my boots and walking up that mountain with the man I love. But to tell you about the hike I have to tell you about the 6 years before the hike. Because the 6 years are the actual story, and the thing that changed those 6 years is the thing I need you to understand before I can explain why I'm writing this at all. It started so slowly I couldn't tell you the exact day if you paid me. That's the thing about fibromyalgia. It doesn't kick down your door. It seeps in through the cracks. One morning you wake up and realize you've been accommodating it for months, maybe years, rearranging your entire life around a thing you never consciously agreed to let in. Where I come from you do not stop for pain. You get up. You go to work. You handle your business. That's what Mama did. That's what every woman I grew up watching did. So when the pain started, I didn't stop. I just kept going and kept it to myself. I think it was probably around 2018. Marcus and I were at his cousin's cookout in Wilmington and everyone wanted to walk down to the pier after we ate. Maybe a 15 minute walk. I remember being about halfway there and feeling like my legs were filled with concrete that someone had set on fire. Every step was a negotiation. I told everyone I had a blister forming and I walked slower and slower until Marcus finally said "baby you okay?" and I smiled and said "just this sandal" and I hated myself for lying but the alternative was explaining something I didn't have words for. That was the first time I lied about my body to the people I love. After that the lies came easier. I lied about why I was sitting in the break room instead of walking to the deli two blocks away with the other staff. I lied about why I'd stopped going to Saturday morning yoga with my sister. I lied about why intimacy had become something I dreaded instead of something I wanted, because how do you tell your husband that the thought of being touched makes you want to cry when you can barely explain it to yourself. I told Marcus I was just tired. I told him work was stressful. I told him I was probably fighting something off and I just needed a few early nights. He believed me because he loves me and because when your wife says she's tired you don't interrogate her about it. The world got smaller. I made it smaller, and Marcus shrank it with me because he's not the kind of man who pushes a woman to do things she says she can't do. Then there were the other things. I'm going to tell you about the other things because I think a lot of women reading this have a list just like mine and have never said it out loud. There was the brain fog. The fibro fog. The thing where you're standing in the kitchen and you cannot remember why you walked in there. The thing where your daughter is telling you about her week and you're nodding and smiling and you literally cannot follow the words coming out of her mouth because your brain is wrapped in wet wool. The thing where you used to be sharp, you used to be on top of things, you used to be the person people called when they needed something figured out, and now you're secretly terrified you're developing early dementia because how else do you explain forgetting your own anniversary dinner reservation. There was the sleep that wasn't sleep. Eight hours unconscious and waking up feeling like I'd been beaten with a baseball bat while I was down there. Morning pain so bad I'd lie in bed for 20 minutes just working up the courage to swing my legs over the side. There was the isolation. The slow disappearance from my own life. The birthday gatherings I missed. The girls' nights I bailed on. The Sunday dinners at my sister's house where I showed up looking "fine" and left before dessert because nobody could see that I was holding myself together with dental floss and sheer willpower. There was the thing nobody talks about, which is that fibromyalgia is invisible, so people look at you and see a regular woman and assume you're either exaggerating or being dramatic or both. I've had family members suggest I was making it up for attention. I've had a doctor look at my chart for maybe 90 seconds, never once look me in the eye, and tell me it might be depression and hand me a prescription for an antidepressant before he even ran a single test. Like that was an answer instead of a dismissal. Like that's what you do when a Black woman sits in your office and tells you something is wrong. You write it off as being in her head and you send her home. I've had someone at church tell me I should "just push through it" like I hadn't been pushing through it every single day for years until I had nothing left to push with. And the worst part is I almost believed her because that's what we do. We push through. We don't stop. We don't complain. We carry it. You want to know the loneliest feeling in the world? It's suffering visibly to no one but yourself. I went to my doctor in early 2023. He looked at my chart. He told me my symptoms were "consistent with fibromyalgia syndrome." He told me to try to reduce stress and get regular gentle exercise. He prescribed Cymbalta. He didn't run a magnesium panel. He didn't check my levels. He looked at the chart, not at me. I took the Cymbalta. I gained weight. My brain fog got worse. I felt like a zombie shuffling through my own life wearing a costume of myself. The Cymbalta made me feel like I was watching my life through a window. The pain dulled a little. But so did everything else. I remember Marcus trying to make me laugh at something the dog did and I couldn't find the laugh. It was like the medication had located my personality and smothered it along with the pain. I stopped taking the Cymbalta after 4 months. My doctor didn't love that. We had a conversation about "managing expectations" and "quality of life adjustments" that made me feel like he'd given up on me ever being the woman I used to be. That was the day I started to believe he might be right. Around March of 2023 I started doing something I hadn't done in a long time, which was sitting on our back porch by myself after Marcus went to bed and just letting myself feel how bad things had gotten. I thought about Mama. Mama was a force who worked the cafeteria at the elementary school until she was 67 and then just kind of stopped. Stopped going places. Stopped doing things. Stopped being the woman who had a word for everybody and a plate for anyone who walked through the door. Spent the last 12 years of her life in a recliner watching TV with the volume too loud because she'd lost interest in following the plot. She passed in 2019 and I remember standing at her service thinking she'd really left us a decade earlier and just kept breathing out of habit. Some bodies wear out faster. That's what she used to say. Like it was just a fact of life. Like there was nothing to be done about it. I had sworn my whole adult life I was not going to be her. And I was sitting on a porch at 52 years old becoming her anyway. Marcus came out one night. He brought a beer for himself and a tea for me even though it was 10 PM and I'd probably be up anyway, and he sat down next to me, and he didn't say anything for a long time. Then he said, "Denise. Talk to me." I sat there with the mug in my hands. I said, "I don't know how to explain what's happening to me, Marcus. I just know I'm disappearing and I don't know how to stop it." He held my hand. He didn't say anything. We sat there like that for maybe half an hour, and then he went inside to bed, and I stayed out there another hour by myself and I made a decision. I was going to figure this out on my own if I had to. I am not a scientist. I am not a researcher. I'm a front desk worker with a community college degree. But I started reading everything I could find. I read about fibromyalgia from the research side instead of the pamphlet side. I read about what's actually happening in the body when everything hurts and nothing helps. And I kept coming across something that made me stop and pay attention. Magnesium deficiency. Here's what I learned, and I'm going to try to explain it the way I explained it to myself at my kitchen table at midnight with three tabs open on my laptop. Your muscles need magnesium to relax. Your nerves need magnesium to calm down. Your brain needs magnesium to stop racing at 3 AM. This mineral is involved in hundreds of processes in your body, and when you don't have enough of it, things start to go wrong in ways that look a whole lot like fibromyalgia. Your muscles can't release properly, so they stay tight and painful. Your nervous system can't calm down, so everything feels amplified, sounds too loud, lights too bright, touch too intense. Your sleep architecture falls apart, so you spend 8 hours in bed and wake up feeling like you didn't rest at all. And here's the thing. Most people are deficient and don't know it. But for women who look like us, it's worse. The soil our food grows in has been depleted for decades. Stress burns through magnesium like a wildfire. Caffeine flushes it out. Common medications deplete it. And the standard serum test most doctors run barely scratches the surface of what's actually going on inside your cells. Unless you're actively supplementing with the right form, you're running on empty and nobody is checking. I sat at my kitchen table and I just stared at the wall for a while. Because this was the first thing in 6 years that made sense. This wasn't "reduce stress." This wasn't "manage your expectations." This was a specific mechanism explaining specific symptoms I'd been living with for years. And it explained why my doctor never caught it. He was looking at a chart. He wasn't looking at me. I kept reading. The research was clear that not all magnesium is the same. The form matters enormously. The form that kept coming up, study after study, was magnesium bisglycinate. It's attached to an amino acid called glycine, which allows your body to actually absorb it instead of flushing it straight through. I found a magnesium bisglycinate gummy that had the full 400mg dose per serving. Pharmaceutical grade. The form that actually gets into your cells. I ordered a bag, figuring if it didn't work I had nothing to lose except another 30 bucks I'd already wasted on things that promised everything and delivered nothing. And then I thought about Mama. Because Mama had magnesium in her cabinet for years. A big bottle of magnesium oxide from the grocery store. The cheap kind. The kind your body flushes straight through without absorbing hardly any of it. She took it every day and it didn't do a thing and she died in that recliner believing some bodies just wear out faster. She had the right idea. She just had the wrong form. And nobody told her. Nobody told either of us. I did not tell Marcus. I want to be honest about that. I was embarrassed. I'd been on prescription medication for 2 years and I was quietly adding a supplement to my nightstand like it was a shameful secret. I didn't want to make a thing of it. I didn't want to see the hope in his face and then have to watch it die when this didn't work either. I just started taking 2 gummies with my evening tea every night. The first week I noticed something. Around day 5, I noticed I was waking up differently. I want to be careful here because I don't want to oversell this. I'm not saying I felt like I was 25 again. I'm saying the morning pain that had been my normal for so long I'd forgotten it wasn't normal was softer. I could swing my legs over the side of the bed without the 20 minute negotiation I'd grown accustomed to. Around week 2, I walked to the mailbox and back without thinking about it. I need you to understand what that sentence means. I had been thinking about the mailbox for 3 years. It's maybe 150 feet from my front door. A 45 second walk for a healthy person. And I had been calculating whether I had the energy for it every single time, bracing myself, planning recovery time afterward. One Tuesday in April I walked out to get the mail and was back at my kitchen counter sorting through envelopes before I realized I hadn't thought about it at all. I stood there holding a credit card offer and I started to cry. By the end of May I was walking with Marcus after dinner again. Real walks. Not the shuffles around the block I'd been calling walks. Actual walks, 30 minutes, 40 minutes, through the neighborhood and past the church and around the pond at the end of our street. Marcus didn't say anything about it. He just put on his shoes when I put on mine. The brain fog started to lift somewhere around week 6. I had a conversation with my daughter on the phone and I followed the whole thing. I didn't lose the thread. I didn't have to ask her to repeat herself. I hung up and I realized that was the first real conversation I'd had in months where I felt like myself instead of a slightly broken version of myself pretending to keep up. By July I finally told Marcus. I sat him down at the kitchen table and I explained the research and I told him what I'd been taking and I showed him the bag of gummies I'd been hiding behind the expired vitamins like it was contraband. He looked at me for a long time. Then he said, "Denise, I noticed. I just didn't want to say anything in case I was wrong about why." He ordered himself a bag the next week. He said if it was helping me he wanted to give his own body the same chance. In August we booked the cabin. In October we drove up to the Smokies for our anniversary. Thirty years. We'd done this same trip for our 13th anniversary when our daughter was young and we'd left her with my mother for the weekend. We hiked Beech Mountain that time, 4 miles round trip, moderate elevation, and I'd been the one practically running up the switchbacks while Marcus stopped to catch his breath. On the morning of the second day, Marcus came out of the cabin in his hiking boots and his little day pack. He looked at me on the porch with my coffee. He said, "You coming?" I almost said no. I want to be honest about that. There's a groove in me that 6 years of saying no has worn deep into my bones. Some part of me was already planning the excuse. Already picturing myself waving him off and watching him disappear up the trail and spending 3 hours on that porch by myself rereading the same page of a book while he did the thing we'd come here to do together. And then I thought about Mama in the recliner. I thought about the woman in the mirror I didn't recognize anymore. I thought about the 30 years behind me and however many years were ahead and I asked myself if this was how I wanted to spend them. Sitting. Waiting. Wearing out. I put down the coffee. I went inside. I put on my boots. I came back out and I said, "Yeah. I'm coming." We made it to the top. I was slower than I wanted to be. I'm not going to lie to you about that. There were 2 places on the upper trail where I stopped to drink water and stretch my calves and Marcus waited for me with the patience of a man who's waited for a lot of things over 30 years. But I didn't have to turn back. I didn't have to send him ahead. We did the 4 miles in about 2 and a half hours, which the trail guide said was normal for two adults in reasonable shape. At the top there's a stone overlook where you can see the ridges folding into each other in that blue haze the Smokies are famous for. We sat on it. We ate the granola bars Marcus had packed. I could feel my legs and they felt like legs that had worked hard and done the job instead of legs that had betrayed me. Marcus leaned his head on my shoulder. He said, "Denise." I said, "Yeah." He said, "I missed you." I sat there for a minute before I could answer. I said, "I know. I missed me too." We sat there for maybe 20 minutes. We didn't need to say a lot else. On the walk down he held my hand for about half a mile. He put his hiking pole in his pack so he could do it. He doesn't usually hold my hand on a hike. But I think he knew the way husbands know that something had shifted. That he had a piece of me back he'd been waiting on for a long time. Mama was wrong about one thing. Some bodies don't just wear out faster. Some bodies have been running on empty for so long that nobody ever thought to check what was missing. If any of this sounds familiar to you, if you've been on a porch making excuses, if you've been watching your world get smaller and smaller while pretending everything's fine, if you've been told it's in your head or it's just stress or you need to push through it by people who have no idea what it's like to live inside a body that's fighting you every single day, I'd just say look into this. It's a magnesium bisglycinate gummy with the full therapeutic dose of 400mg per serving. The chelated form that your body can actually absorb and use. Two before bed. That's it. Tastes like raspberry, which sounds like a stupid thing to mention but I've choked down enough horse pills and chalky powders in my life that I actually look forward to taking this one. It comes with a 90 day money back guarantee. You try it, you take it for up to 90 days, and if you don't feel a difference you email them and they refund every penny. I checked the guarantee before I ordered because I've been burned enough times to read the fine print. It's clean. No runaround. One email and you're refunded. That guarantee mattered to me. I've spent thousands of dollars over 6 years on a doctor who shrugged, on a prescription that zombified me, on supplements that did nothing. Nobody offered to give me my money back when Cymbalta turned me into a ghost of myself. Nobody offered a refund when my doctor handed me an antidepressant instead of running a panel. Nobody apologized when Mama spent a decade taking the wrong form of the right mineral and died in a recliner thinking her body had simply given up on her. This company offers a real guarantee on a product that actually does what it says it's going to do, and that's not nothing. I'm not going to tell you it will fix everything. I still have bad days. I still have flares. I'm still figuring out the bigger picture and I'm not telling you to stop talking to your doctor. I'm telling you what happened to a 52 year old woman who almost let her husband walk up a mountain by himself on their 30th anniversary because she'd spent 6 years believing the lie that this was just her life now. That some bodies wear out faster. That there was nothing to be done. It gave me back enough to go. There's still more coming. I'm still walking with Marcus after dinner. I'm still taking the gummies every night with my tea. I'm not at the end of any road. I'm just on a different one than I was on a year ago, and this one goes up the mountain instead of ending at the porch. I think about that moment at the cabin a lot. The moment where I almost stayed behind. I am not ever going to let him walk alone again. Click Here: P.S. Something happened in November that I want to tell you about. Marcus and I were at his sister's house for Thanksgiving and her neighbor Lorraine, who's 58, was sitting in the corner of the living room not really talking to anyone. Marcus caught my eye across the room. I fixed two plates and went over and sat down next to her and we talked for over an hour. Lorraine told me she hadn't been on a real walk in 3 years. She told me her husband had stopped asking her to do things because she always said no. She told me her doctor had told her to "learn to live with it" and she was starting to believe that was the best she could hope for. I told her about the gummies. I just told her my story like I'm telling you. Lorraine started taking them about a month ago. Her husband called Marcus last Sunday to say Lorraine had spent the whole afternoon outside helping him put up Christmas lights. He said he didn't think he'd ever see her do something like that again. His voice cracked when he said it. I had to sit down when I got off the phone. P.P.S. About the 90 day money back guarantee. It's real. I verified it before I ordered. You email them within 90 days and they refund the full amount. No questions, no hoops, no "restocking fee" nonsense. I've never had a prescription come with that kind of promise. I've never had a doctor offer to refund me for treatments that didn't work. This company does. That says something about what they believe about their product. P.P.P.S. The thing I would tell you if you were sitting next to me on that porch where I sat by myself all those nights is this. Your body wants to work. It has always wanted to work. The system underneath has been running on empty for years and nobody has been addressing what's actually missing. Give your body the magnesium it's been starved of in the form it can actually use, and you give that system a real chance to do what it was always built to do. That's not a miracle and I'm not calling it one. It's simpler and more honest than that. It's giving an exhausted body the fuel it's been begging for and seeing what happens when it finally has it. Mama had the right idea. She just never had the right form. P.P.P.P.S. Don't wait the way I waited. Don't wait the way Mama waited. I lost 6 years. She lost 12. I almost lost a hike with the man I love on the anniversary of 30 years together. I almost watched him walk up that trail alone. Don't let that be the moment you finally do something. Today is a better day than that one was. Click Here.