Jennifer Miller

9g Collagen with Calcium, D3, K2 and Magnesium

I lost 46 pounds. Then I spent 70 minutes on my bathroom floor waiting for my husband to come home. In August I got up off my living room floor with one hand while my daughter, an ER nurse, counted out loud. This is everything that happened in between. Including the part nobody told me about those 46 pounds. If you've lost a lot of weight lately, and you've ever wondered, even for a second, whether you could get yourself up off a hard floor with nobody home, I wrote this for you. I didn't break anything. I want to say that first, because people always ask. No break. Just the floor. The cold tile. The towel I couldn't reach. My phone on the counter, face down, about three feet above my head. And the slow, sick understanding that my body could not get me up. My name is Jennifer Miller. I'm 59. I live in Ohio. For 22 years I was a radiology technologist, and most of those years I ran bone density scans at a hospital outpatient center. I have scanned the hips and spines of more than 30,000 women. I know exactly what a fall costs. And I still ended up on that floor. It was a Tuesday in late February. Rick, my husband, had gone to his brother's to help hang drywall. He said he'd be back by five. I ran a bath at about a quarter to four. I was cold all the time that winter. Getting out, I put my left foot on the bath mat and the bath mat went with it. I don't remember the fall itself. I remember the sound. My hip hit first, then my shoulder, then the side of my head against the cabinet door. Then I was lying on my side on the tile, wet, with no clothes on, looking at the underside of the sink. Everything hurt. Nothing screamed. I've watched enough women come through a scan room to know the difference. So I thought, okay, Jennifer. Get up. I rolled onto my hands and knees. My arms started shaking right away. I tried to bring one foot under me. My thigh just trembled. I grabbed the edge of the tub and pulled. My hands slid on the wet porcelain. I tried the toilet seat. It shifted under my weight and I went back down on the same hip. I tried scooting to the counter to reach my phone. I could touch the cabinet door. I could not get high enough to reach the top. I tried four or five more times. Each time I had a little less in me. Then I stopped trying and lay there. The tile was so cold it ached. I pulled the bath mat over my shoulder like a blanket. It was soaking wet. I watched the light from the little window go from white to orange to grey. I could hear the furnace kick on and off. I counted the cycles to keep from crying. I lost count around nine. At some point I wet myself. I'm telling you that because it's true and because nobody tells you that part. Rick came home at 5:10. He called my name from the kitchen, cheerful, and then he called it again, not cheerful. When he opened the door he made a sound I had never heard from him in 38 years. The next morning I looked at myself in the long mirror. My left hip was purple from the top of my thigh to my waist. My shoulder was green and yellow at the edges. There were tile-shaped red marks on my side from lying in one place. Rick called it the bruise map. He was trying to make me laugh. I didn't. Let me tell you how I got here. Six months before that floor, in August, I started a weekly weight-loss shot. My doctor and I decided on it together after twenty years of trying everything. It was the right call for me. I'm still on it, my doctor runs that prescription, and I'm grateful for it every week. And the weight came off. Ten pounds the first month. Twenty by Halloween. Thirty by Christmas. Forty by the end of January. I loved every pound. I went down three jean sizes. I sat in the mall parking lot and texted a picture of the tag to Bev. Women at church asked me what I was doing. Rick put his arms all the way around me in the kitchen and said, "There's less of you to hold." He meant it as a compliment. I took it as one. I wasn't hungry anymore. Most days I ate one small meal. A few bites of chicken. Some crackers. Half a yogurt if I remembered. Every Monday I wrote my weight on the calendar inside the pantry door. Every number smaller than the last. I was counting what left. That was the only thing I counted. Then the little things started. Jar lids first. I'd run a spaghetti sauce jar under hot water and bang it on the counter and still hand it to Rick. I thought, that's just my hands. Arthritis, probably. Then the couch. I started rocking two or three times to get up off it. I thought, I'm 59. That's what 59 is. Then the stairs. I started holding the rail. I'd stop on the landing with a laundry basket and pretend I was checking something. I thought, I'm tired. I'm barely eating. Of course I'm tired. I'd have told any patient those were worth mentioning to her doctor. I didn't mention one to mine. I was down 46 pounds and everyone was proud of me, and so was I. I did do something. I did what every woman in my group was doing. I bought things. First, calcium chews. The caramel ones, two a day. They stuck in my molars and they were just my mother's dish by the coffee maker in candy form. Then protein shakes, because somebody in the group said you lose muscle on the shot. I'd get a third of one down and feel full until dinner. I poured out more than I drank. Then a pink collagen tub with a woman's glowing face on the lid, because my hair was coming out in the shower drain. "Skin, hair and nails." It clumped in my coffee like wet flour. Not a word about bone. Then a "joint" pill for my knees on the stairs. About 1,000mg of collagen in a two-capsule serving. I found out later that studies on collagen peptides commonly use 2.5 to 15 grams a day. Mine was a sprinkle. By January I had four bottles lined up on the windowsill. Calcium chews, D, a magnesium, the joint pills. By Thursday they were just sitting there in the sun, and I'd remember them at bedtime, standing in the bathroom, looking at the tile. Six weeks later I was lying on that tile. Kayla came over the Sunday after the floor. Kayla is my daughter. She's 31, an ER nurse, nights. Rick had called her. I'd asked him not to. She walked in still in her scrubs, sat down at my kitchen table and said, "Show me." I lifted my shirt and showed her the bruise map. She didn't say anything for a long time. Then she asked me exactly how long I'd been on the floor. I said about an hour. Rick said, "Seventy minutes. I looked at the clock." Kayla put her hand flat on the table. "Mom. Do you know what we see when women come in after lying on the floor that long?" I said I could guess. "No. You can't." She told me about the women who come in by ambulance after a night on the kitchen linoleum. The ones who fell reaching for a light switch at 2am and weren't found until the paper carrier noticed the porch light still on. She told me about the skin. How it breaks down where the body presses into the floor. How some of them come in with sores already open on their hips and elbows after a few hours. She told me about the muscle. How muscle that's pinned under your own weight that long starts to break down, and it goes into the blood, and it hits the kidneys. How they hang bags of fluid to try to flush it before the kidneys quit. How the urine comes out the color of cola. "Lying on the floor for an hour or more is dangerous, Mom. That's not me being dramatic. There's a study. About half of older people who lay on the floor for an hour or more were dead within six months." I looked at the kitchen clock. Seventy minutes. "And here's what I keep seeing," she said. "It's more and more of them now. Women your age. Down forty, fifty, sixty pounds. Looking great. And they can't get up." She was crying by then. Kayla does not cry. She does chest compressions on strangers at 3am and drives home and sleeps. "You did bone scans for 22 years," she said. "Why didn't you ever look at your own?" I didn't have an answer. The honest one was that I'd been counting the wrong thing. That night Kayla didn't go home. She slept in her old room. At 1am I heard her up, the little blue glow of her laptop under the door. At 7 she was at the kitchen table with my coffee already poured and three pages printed and laid out in a row. "I went looking," she said. "Sit." I sat. "First page. When people lose a lot of weight, especially fast, they don't only lose fat. In the big trials of the new weight-loss shots, a large share of the weight lost was lean tissue." She tapped it. "Lean tissue includes muscle, Mom. Muscle is what gets you off a floor. It's what opens a jar." She slid the second page over. "Studies of weight loss in older adults keep finding bone density drops along with the weight." I'd read versions of that sentence in the break room for twenty years. I'd just never put it next to my own name. "And this one is the one that got me." The third page. "When you eat far less, far fewer nutrients reach the skeleton. You're eating one meal a day, Mom. Your bones are living on crackers." I said, "I take calcium." She looked at me exactly the way I used to look at women in the scan room who said that. "Grandma Opal took calcium pills for thirty years." And that sat in the kitchen like a third person. My mother, Opal, took a calcium tablet every morning for decades. She kept them in a dish by the coffee maker and she'd tap it and say, "Not me, honey. I'm covered." At 81 she stepped off the church van onto the curb in front of the fellowship hall after Wednesday supper. Her hip broke. She had surgery, then rehab and then into a nursing home and she never went home again. She was gone at 82. About 1 in 5 people over 65 who break a hip die within a year. I knew that number before I knew Opal would be one of them. Nobody told her the calcium wasn't the whole answer. Nobody told me either. And I was the one running the machine. Bone is not a rock. It's living tissue. Most of your skeleton is replaced about every 10 years. It's built like reinforced concrete. There's a frame, and there's mineral laid down on the frame. The frame is collagen. Collagen is about 90% of the organic structure of bone. Calcium is the mineral. It helps build and maintain strong bones. But mineral with nothing to sit on is chalk. And your body makes less collagen as you age. After menopause, it makes less faster. When I ran those scans, the machine only saw mineral. The grey shadows on the screen. The T-score on the printout that women folded in half and tucked in their purses. It doesn't show you the frame. And the bathroom scale is worse. It only counts what leaves. About 1 in 2 women over 50 will break a bone due to bone loss. And bone loss has no symptoms. Often the break is the first sign. I'd gotten lucky. I got a bruise map instead. Kayla made me call my doctor. He kept my prescription exactly where it was and ordered a bone scan. That's his department. Bev ran it for me in April, after hours, in the room where I'd worked. I'll just say I didn't like the grey. The windowsill was still my department. And the windowsill was a mess. I was failing at the one thing I'd spent my career telling women to do. Bev fixed it. Bev Tran was my work wife for 19 years. She's 60 and still runs the scan room. She came over for lunch on a Saturday in May, saw the windowsill, and held up the pink tub like a dead mouse. "Jen. What is this." I told her all of it. She dug in her purse and set a bag on the counter. "I've taken this every morning for a year and a half. DensiaPlus. One scoop. In your coffee." I started to say something about the four bottles. "Stop arguing with me." So I read the back of the bag, the way I'd read a requisition. 9 grams of collagen peptides. Not 1,000 milligrams. 9,000. Inside the range the studies use. Calcium. Vitamin D3, which helps your body absorb calcium. Without enough D, you absorb only a small fraction of what you take. Vitamin K2 as MK-7, which activates osteocalcin, the protein that binds calcium into bone. Magnesium. About 60% of the magnesium in your body is in your bones. Vitamin C, which your body needs to form collagen. Zinc and boron. The frame and the mineral, in one scoop. Instead of four bottles and a tub. Unflavored. Bev stirred one into my coffee right there. It tasted like coffee. That was the whole thing. One scoop, every morning. I ordered that afternoon. The bag came the following Wednesday. I set it next to the coffee maker, in the exact spot where my mother's calcium dish used to sit. I didn't plan that. I just noticed it the next morning and had to stand there a minute. Week two, Kayla came home off a night shift, watched me stir the scoop in, and didn't say a word. She opened the pantry, took out the pink tub and dropped it in the trash. Week three, I took the four bottles off the windowsill. One scoop is a thing I can do on a Thursday. Four bottles was not. Week four, I stopped writing my weight on the pantry calendar. I started writing what I ate first instead. Now, I'm going to be careful here, because I spent 22 years watching women get told things that weren't true. I can't tell you what's happening inside my bones. Nobody can tell you that from the outside, and anybody who says they can is selling something they shouldn't be. What I can tell you is what I do now. I haven't missed a morning. The bag sits next to the coffee maker where my mother's calcium dish used to be. I eat protein first. Before the crackers, before anything. Eggs, chicken, Greek yogurt, even when the shot says I'm not hungry. Two bites still count. And I need to say this plainly, because women ask me: Collagen isn't a complete protein and it doesn't replace protein-rich meals. The scoop is not my protein. My plate is. I lift soup cans. Two cans of tomato soup at the kitchen counter while the coffee brews. Rick laughs at me. I don't care. And every night before bed, I practice getting up off the floor. I put a folded quilt on the living room rug. I sit down on it. Then I get up. Hands if I need them. Then I try with one hand. Some nights I try with none. The first night I needed the couch arm and Rick's knee. Now I can do it with one hand on my thigh. Kayla came over one night in August and asked to watch. I sat down on the quilt in my nightgown and got up with one hand while she counted out loud like she does with patients. She didn't cry that time. She said, "Again." So I did it again. It's not about the number of times. It's about knowing that if it happens again, I'll get myself to the phone. In September I had my regular check. The nurse put me on the scale and started to read the number out loud. I asked her not to. I asked my doctor a different question instead. Not "How much have I lost?" but "What am I keeping?" He said a scale can't answer that, and that's what the spring scan is for. Then he asked how the floor practice was going. Kayla had told him. Of course she had. I get rescanned next spring. Bev is going to run it herself. I don't know what it'll say. I'm still on my shot. I'm still down 46 pounds. I'm still proud of it. I just count different now. I run a private Facebook group for women on the weekly shot. About 3,100 of us. After I told this story there, my inbox filled up for a week. A woman in Indiana wrote that she'd been on her laundry room floor for two hours. Her dog finally barked loud enough for a neighbor to come. A woman in Georgia wrote that she'd fallen in her driveway getting the mail and sat on the concrete until a school bus went by. A woman in Arizona wrote one line. "I can't get up off the floor without a chair and I haven't told anyone." Over and over, the same few things. Down 40, 50, 60 pounds. Thrilled about it. Eating a few bites a day. One calcium pill. Nobody asked what else was leaving. Nobody told them. Not one of them wrote that she wanted to quit her shot. Neither do I. My doctor runs my prescription and I never once missed a dose through any of this. They just wanted somebody to tell them what I wish somebody had told me, before the bath mat slid. So this is for you, if you're one of them. If you've lost 30, 40, 60 pounds and every number on the scale feels like a gold star. If you eat one small meal a day and call it a good day. If you hand jars to your husband now. If you rock twice to get off the couch. If you hold the rail on the stairs and tell yourself it's just being tired. If there's a calcium bottle by your coffee maker and you think that means you're covered. Please don't wait for your own bathroom floor. Ask your doctor about a bone scan. Eat protein first. Practice getting up. And feed the frame, not just the scale. DensiaPlus is 9 grams of collagen with calcium, magnesium, vitamin D3, vitamin K2 (MK-7), vitamin C, zinc and boron. One scoop in your morning coffee. That's the whole routine. Right now it's up to 70% off: buy 2 bags, get 1 free, or buy 3, get 2 free. And it comes with a 90-day money-back guarantee, empty or full. Send back the empty bag and you still get your money back. Count what you keep. P.S. If you take a blood thinner like warfarin, talk to your doctor before starting anything with vitamin K, this included. Calcium can affect how some medications are absorbed, so ask your doctor or pharmacist about timing. Keep taking everything you've been prescribed. P.P.S. Rick still calls it the bruise map. The photo is on my phone, and I look at it when I don't feel like practicing the floor. Seventy minutes on that tile. I won't do seventy more. P.P.P.S. The offer is the same one Bev pointed me to: up to 70% off: buy 2, get 1 free, or buy 3, get 2 free. 90 days to decide, empty bag or full.