Dr. Samantha williams

Your hands remember. Let Xara help the rest

After six years of watching my husband disappear into Parkinson's — while every doctor kept telling me his medication was working — a stranger I got to talking to at a hair salon explained the one thing no neurologist ever had. My name is Carol. My husband Frank was diagnosed six years ago, four months after he retired. We’ve sacrificed all our lives to raise the kids, hoping one day after his retirement, we’d take all of those trips we’ve been wanting to take. We had finally reached the part of life where there was time to tick things off our bucket list. And four months in, a neurologist spent eleven minutes with us, diagnosed Frank with Parkinson’s, handed us a prescription for Sinemet, and told us to come back in six months. It started small. He got slower in the mornings. His handwriting shrank to something I could barely read. He stopped swinging his right arm when we walked. Little things you only notice because you've watched someone for thirty years and know how they're supposed to move. Then it stopped being little. He started shuffling — small, fast steps, like his feet were stuck to the floor. He'd grab furniture he never used to need. The first time he fell, in our own hallway, I aged a year on the spot. After that I lay awake listening for him at night, because that's when the falls came, when he got up to use the bathroom. His voice went quiet. I started leaning in to hear him at dinner. Then leaning in wasn't enough, and I'd ask him to repeat himself, and I could see what it cost him to say it twice — so eventually I just started nodding even when I hadn't caught it. His face stopped moving. Nobody warns you about that one. He'd be sitting there listening to me, interested, and his face would show nothing, and I'd think he'd checked out when he hadn't. After thirty years of reading his face, I had to stop trusting it. Some nights, he thrashed in his sleep, acting out a dream. The tiredness was unlike anything — not sleepy, just empty, a kind of worn-down that ten hours of sleep never touched. And the one that scared me most: he stopped reaching for things. The crossword he'd done every morning for twenty-six years sat there untouched. He'd sit in front of the TV not really watching it. Not sad, exactly. Just not reaching for anything anymore. And the whole time, I was doing everything right. I rebuilt our meals, because his Sinemet won't absorb right if he takes it too close to protein, so I moved the eggs to dinner and the meat to the evening and learned a whole schedule nobody warned me about. I set an alarm every three and a half hours for his pills so we'd never miss a dose and end up in one of those "off" stretches where the medication wears thin and he can barely move. I kept a notebook of questions for his appointments, because you get fifteen minutes and can't waste them. I filled two shelves in the kitchen cabinet with things I'd read might help — omega-3, CoQ10, B12, magnesium, a turmeric I researched for a week before buying — and wrote down every one and what I noticed. Mostly I noticed nothing. And every six months I'd describe what I was watching — the fatigue, the quiet, the way he just wasn't himself — and the neurologist would glance at his chart, tell me the tremor was well controlled, and say Frank was doing about as expected. That this was the normal course of the disease. That we were managing it well. I'd drive home from those appointments feeling like I'd tried to describe a fire and been told the smoke detector was working fine. The morning it broke me was our granddaughter's sixth birthday. The party was an hour away, at our daughter's house. Frank had looked forward to it for weeks — he adores that little girl. But that morning was a bad one, the unpredictable kind. He was wiped out before he'd even dressed, and an hour each way in the car was more than he had in him that day. He told me to go without him. To take pictures. To tell her Grandpa loved her. So I drove the hour alone. And when I walked in, my granddaughter ran up and the first thing she said was, "Where's Grandpa?" I told her he wasn't feeling well. She accepted it the way six-year-olds do and ran off. And I stood in my daughter's kitchen holding the present he'd picked out, and it hit me all at once that he was missing it. The thing he'd waited his whole working life to finally have time for. He was home in a chair, an hour away, and everyone in that bright, noisy kitchen carried on around me, and not one of them understood that I was grieving a man who was still alive. I smiled. I took the pictures. I left early. I cried the whole drive home, on a back road where nobody could see me. And somewhere on that drive I made my peace with the worst thing I've ever let myself believe — that this was just how it was going to go now. The medication did what it could, and the rest of him would keep slipping away a little more every year, and managing it was the most anyone could do. I believed that for almost two years. Then I met Linda. I was at the salon on a Thursday morning getting my hair cut — one of the few hours I take for myself — and she was in the chair next to mine. We got to talking the way women do under those capes, about nothing, and then about something. I mentioned I was mostly caring for my husband these days. She got a particular look — not pity, more like recognition — and asked, gently, what he had. I said Parkinson's. Six years. She was quiet a moment. Then she told me she worked with a lot of families dealing with exactly that — that she was a doctor, the holistic kind, twenty years in regular practice before she moved into it. She asked about Frank. Whether he still seemed like himself. And I found myself telling a stranger under a salon cape the thing I hadn't been able to put into words for years. The fatigue. The quiet. The way he was there and not there. The way the medication was working and he was disappearing anyway. She nodded the whole time, like she'd heard it a hundred times. Then she said the thing that rearranged six years for me. ========= She asked if I actually knew what was going wrong in there. I told her I wasn't sure I did. She explained that Parkinson's slowly drains a chemical in the brain called dopamine. Dopamine is what the body uses to control movement. As it runs low, the body stops getting told how to move properly. That's the shaking. The stiffness. The slowness. His Sinemet medication, she said, was for exactly that. Sinemet, Rytary, most of the Parkinson's drugs come from the same family called Levodopa. Levodopa tops up the dopamine, so the brain can send the movement signal again. That's why the shaking gets better on these drugs. That part works, she said. You keep him on it. But then she told me the thing nobody had told me in six years. A dopamine medication like Sinemet has a cost. For it to work, the body burns through its own stores of certain vitamins and minerals to process the drug. Year after year on it, those stores run down. The drug gives him movement with one hand and quietly empties the tank with the other. And those vitamins and minerals it's burning through — they're not small. They're what every cell in his body runs on to do its work. When they run low, the body keeps the essentials going and lets the rest slip. The energy. The focus. The get-up-and-go. Being all-the-way-there in the room with you. That's not the Parkinson's taking him in those moments, and it's not the dopamine running low. It's the tank the medication's been quietly draining that’s not getting refilled. I sat there in that chair and felt something come loose in my chest. Because that was it. That was the thing I'd watched and never had a name for. The medication that was keeping him moving was the same thing wearing him down — and no one had ever said so. "So what do you do?" I asked. "If the drug keeps draining it?" "You put back what it takes," she said. "You keep the Sinemet — he needs it. But you stop letting it empty him out. That's the whole idea. Refill the tank the medication keeps draining." She told me there was one thing she'd had real results with for exactly that. A mineral resin called shilajit, that seeps out of the rock high in the Himalayas. She said it's one of the most nutrient-dense substances on earth with over eighty different minerals and trace elements, the very ones a body on long-term Levodopa medication runs short of. For her patients, she said, it was the closest thing she'd found to simply putting back what the drug takes out. Then she said the thing that made me trust her completely. She told me not to take her word for any of it. Go home and read everything, she said. Talk to someone you trust who knows exactly what he's taking. And only then decide. I went home and did what I always do. I researched. For three weeks. Shilajit isn't some new invention. Himalayan monks used it for hundreds of years. The old name for it translates to "destroyer of weakness." It's dense with minerals, antioxidants, amino acids and organic compounds — the raw materials a worn-down body draws on to keep its cells running and protect them from wearing down faster. But I also learned the catch. Raw shilajit is often impure. It has to be cleaned and processed at low heat, or the heat destroys the very thing that makes it work. Most of what's sold is junk. So I wasn't about to grab the cheapest jar off the internet. The brand Linda's patients used was called Xara. They process theirs at low temperature, the slow way, to keep the fulvic acid and the minerals intact. And they'd built it into a ten-in-one — the shilajit plus other natural ingredients chosen to refill the same drained tank from different angles. It came as a gummy. Which mattered more than it sounds, because Frank already swallows a fistful of pills every morning, and the thought of one more capsule on that pile was its own small misery. But I didn't order it on the strength of my own reading. Linda had told me not to, and she was right. I called Ron. Ron is an old friend of Frank's. A pharmacist, retired now, and he's known about the diagnosis from the start. I read him the whole ingredient list. I told him what Frank was on, the Sinemet, the dose, all of it. He went through it slowly. Asked me a couple of questions. Then he told me he didn't see a thing in there that would clash with the Sinemet — and that putting back the nutrients a drug like that burns through was, in his words, "just plain sensible." He said start him on a low amount. Keep an eye on his "off" times the first week or two. And call him if anything felt off. That was the second opinion I trusted. I'll be honest about the first week, because I promised myself this whole thing would be honest or I wouldn't write it. Nothing happened. I almost asked for the refund. I'd been let down too many times to have much patience left. What stopped me was the reviews. The same line, over and over, from other people — that how long it takes to notice anything is different for everyone. Some a few days. Some a few weeks. So I kept going. The second week, I noticed the first thing. And it was small enough that I almost didn't trust it. Frank turned the radio on in the morning. He used to listen to a sports station with his coffee. He'd stopped sometime in the last year — I never even noticed the day it went. But that Tuesday it was on. And he was standing at the counter with his coffee, and he had something to say about what he was hearing. I didn't say a word about the radio. Six years has taught me not to make a thing of something that might be nothing. But I heard my husband have an opinion. And it had been a long time. The week after, it was the dinner table. Our daughter and her husband came over. And Frank talked. Not like before. I won't tell you it was like before. But he was in it. He had a thought about something our son-in-law said, and he followed it all the way through without losing the thread, and then he disagreed — pleasantly, the way he used to. Our daughter caught my eye across the table. She didn't say anything. But she'd noticed too. Then, about two months in, came the evening I keep coming back to. We were on the couch. Something was on the TV that neither of us was really watching. And out of nowhere, Frank started talking about Portugal. The trip we never took. He said maybe we should actually look into it. The spring, maybe. When the weather over there is good. He asked me what I thought. He had, sitting next to me on that couch, the energy to want something again. To think it through out loud. To ask me to think about it with him. We didn't book anything. I don't know that we ever will. But for the length of that one conversation, I had my husband back. Not the disease's version of him. Him. I got up and went to the kitchen so he wouldn't see my face. Now I have to say the careful part. Because I'd want someone to say it to me. Shilajit did not cure his Parkinson's. Let me be as plain as I can about that. He still has it. He still has hard days. Days the tiredness wins. Days he's low and quiet. Days I still find things to do on the other side of the house. The disease is still the disease. If I told you otherwise, you shouldn't believe me — because I wouldn't believe it either. All I can tell you is that the part I'd given up on — the worn-down part, the part nothing was refilling — has been fuller. More days than not. More Tuesdays with the radio. More dinners where he's all the way there. This past weekend, we drove the hour to our granddaughter's soccer game. Frank came. He sat in a folding chair on the sideline in the cold for the whole game. He cheered when she got near the ball. He asked our daughter questions about the team afterward. On the drive home, he talked about it. She'd given him a drawing she'd made. He held it the whole way home and said we should put it on the refrigerator. A year ago, he was home in a chair. An hour away. Missing her birthday. This weekend, he was on the sideline. I won't make it more than it is. But if you've been the one driving home alone with the pictures — you know exactly what it is. I'm writing this for the person I was two years ago. The one doing everything right. Watching the right things get managed, while the person she loved slipped away anyway. Believing that was just the deal now. Maybe that's you. Maybe it's your husband, or your wife. Maybe it's your mom or your dad, and you're the one driving them to appointments and lying awake at night. Here's what I didn't know back then. The medication does its job. But it has a cost — and nobody refills what it quietly takes. That cost is the part you've been watching. And that may be the part you can actually do something about. Before you do anything with what I've written, do exactly what Linda told me to do. Read it yourself. And talk to someone you trust who knows everything they're already taking — before you add a single thing. That's the most important step in this whole letter. I'd think less of myself if I didn't say it as plainly as I can. If you do decide to try it, Xara has a sixty-day guarantee. If you don't notice anything — in their energy, their evenings, the way they show up at your table — you don't pay. No questions. The link is below. — Carol P.S. One gummy at breakfast. That's the whole thing. Frank takes it like it's nothing — the one part of his morning that doesn't feel like medicine. After six years of watching him swallow a handful of pills with a glass of water, that's its own small mercy.