Renee Donnelly

Everyone with joint issues needs to see this ☝️

My sister was diagnosed with advanced osteoarthritis in June 2022. She'd never sat still a day in her life. After the diagnosis, she cut out every inflammatory food she could find. Walked two miles a day. Took the anti-inflammatory. Lost 34 pounds. She died of a heart attack on October 19th, 2024 at 4:17 AM. She was 59 years old. She cleaned out the pantry on June 8th. Anti-inflammatory diet for two years and four months. Lost 34 pounds. Walked her beagle two miles every single morning before work, rain or shine. She did everything her doctor told her. The hospital bill was $71,000. The funeral was $11,400. She lived with me. She moved into my back bedroom that same June, because the stairs in her own house had stopped being possible. My husband died in 2019 and I had the room and I had the quiet. Neither of us ever said out loud that it was permanent. Her reading glasses are still on the nightstand in there. I can't move them. If I move them, she's really gone. I need to tell you what happened to Sharon. Because every week I see posts on Facebook from women like me. "Nine years on an anti-inflammatory, X-rays still say stable, doctor wants to go up a dose, any tips?" And it makes me physically sick. If you're a woman over 50 with arthritis whose knees keep getting worse while your imaging keeps coming back fine, or you're the one watching your sister go through it, please read this whole thing. I know it's long. I know you're scrolling. I know you have things to do. Sixteen months ago I would have given anything for someone to tell me what I'm about to tell you. Sharon went in for her annual physical on June 9th, 2022. She felt like herself. Mostly. She'd just turned 57. She still worked a full book at the salon. She still walked the dog before six every morning. Her knees had been bad for eleven years and she'd made her peace with it, and honestly so had I. She'd never smoked. She'd never been heavy. Our father was 84 and still driving. Three days later her doctor called. Blood pressure 138 over 86. Inflammation markers higher than he wanted. X-rays unchanged from the year before. "Sharon, your imaging looks stable, but your numbers are moving in the wrong direction. We need to get ahead of this. I'm going to move you to a stronger anti-inflammatory and I want you on it every day." Sharon was quiet on the call. I was at the sink pretending not to listen. "What do I do?" "Cut the inflammatory foods. Drop 10% of your body weight. Walk every day. We'll recheck in six months." Sharon hung up the phone and sat at my kitchen table for forty minutes without saying anything. Then she stood up, opened the pantry, and started filling a trash bag. I watched her throw out the tomatoes. The peppers. Two eggplants she'd bought that morning. The whole bag of potatoes. The Ritz crackers. The bread. Three jars of pasta sauce. The Häagen Dazs she loved. The bottle of red wine that had been sitting on top of my refrigerator since Christmas. "That's it," she said. "I'm done." And she was. For 28 months, she didn't break it once. No nightshades. No sugar. No bread. No wine. Not at our brother's retirement party in Phoenix. Not at Katie's wedding, where she sat in front of a plate she didn't touch and told everyone she'd eaten before. Not on her own 59th birthday, when I made her grilled salmon and a salad and she smiled and said it was the best birthday meal she'd ever had. She stopped going to the Thursday dinners with the other girls from the salon, because everyone was eating pasta and drinking wine and she couldn't sit there with plain chicken without feeling like an alien. She stopped going to the Italian place on Ninth where she and her friends had been meeting since 1996, because there was nothing on the menu she was allowed to want. She lost her friend Marilyn, who told her "you're no fun anymore" and stopped calling. She gave up a table she'd been sitting at for 28 years. And she did it anyway. Because the doctor said to. She lost 34 pounds. She walked Otis every morning before work, summer and winter, didn't matter. She took the anti-inflammatory every single day and dealt with the stomach pain and the heartburn she never once complained about, but I knew, because I was the one finding antacids in every room of my house. She took the turmeric capsules her doctor "wasn't against." She put collagen in her coffee every morning until she couldn't stand the taste of coffee. She ate exactly what they told her to eat. She did everything right. The follow up labs came back on December 4th, 2022. Blood pressure: 136 over 88. Inflammation markers: essentially unchanged. X-rays: stable. Six months of doing everything right and nothing had moved. Her doctor said, "This takes time. Cartilage changes slowly. The medication needs time to work. We'll recheck in six months. Keep doing what you're doing." So she did. June 2023. Blood pressure 142 over 90. Markers up. Pain worse. December 2023. Blood pressure 146 over 92. Markers up again. Her doctor increased the dose. Added a second prescription for her stomach, to protect it from the first one. Said, "We need to be more aggressive. If this doesn't hold, we're going to need to start talking about cortisone." Sharon came home that night and sat at my kitchen table. The same table she'd sat at after the first phone call. She didn't say anything for a long time. Then she said, "Renee, I gave up everything. Everything I liked. For 18 months. And it's worse." I told her to give it more time. I told her the doctor said the higher dose would help. I told her to trust the process. She nodded. She kept walking the dog. She kept eating the chicken and the spinach. She kept taking the pill twice a day now and dealing with the stomach it was tearing up. The bad days were getting worse. She'd come home from the salon and be in her chair by 6:30. Her hands started locking up in the morning, and she'd stand at my sink running hot water over them for ten minutes before she could open them all the way. She started booking fewer clients because she couldn't do a full head of foils without stopping to sit down. Sharon had been cutting hair for 31 years. Her hands were the entire job. Now she was turning people away and telling them the schedule was full. And there was the stairs thing. Not pain. Just her heart pounding at the top of one flight, like she'd run somewhere. She mentioned it to her doctor. He said she was deconditioned and carrying extra weight and to keep walking. June 2024. Blood pressure 152 over 94. Markers up. X-rays "stable." The cortisone conversation happened. Sharon went white. She'd watched our mother take shots in both knees for six years and she said she'd rather die than start down that road. She didn't know what she was saying. October 2024. Blood pressure 158 over 96. Five days later she got up at 2 AM and I heard Otis barking. Not his normal bark. The panicked one. I found Sharon on my bathroom floor. Gray. Sweating through her nightgown. She said her jaw hurt. She couldn't get a full breath. I called 911 at 2:14 AM. The paramedics used the words "heart attack" before they had her out the front door. At the hospital they told me the artery across the front of her heart had closed. They opened it and put a stent in, but she'd been down too long and a lot of the muscle was gone. The cardiologist said years of inflammation had been quietly damaging the lining of her vessels the entire time. Every flare. Every bad week. All of it working on the vessel walls like sandpaper. For years. Sharon spent 6 days in the cardiac ICU. I learned things about inflammation I never wanted to know. I learned it doesn't just live in your joints. It runs in your blood. It works on the vessels in your heart. Your kidneys. Your eyes. Your brain. The whole time your X-ray is coming back stable. I learned that a heart attack doesn't always finish the job in one go. It takes what it takes and leaves you to see whether the rest holds. On day 4 she was awake and talking and asked me three times in twenty minutes whether anyone had let Otis out. Otis was at Katie's. She couldn't hold onto it. Day 5, she threw another clot. The doctors said years of inflammation had left the vessel walls damaged enough that clots were forming faster than they could stay ahead of them. Day 6. October 19th. I was in the family waiting room down the hall. They'd asked me to step out. At 4:11 AM I heard the long tone down the corridor. At 4:17 AM, a young resident I'd never seen walked into the waiting room. I knew. "Mrs. Donnelly. I'm so sorry. We did everything we could." I drove home at 6:30 AM. Her walking shoes were by my back door. The turmeric was on the windowsill above my sink, right next to the meloxicam bottle. The collagen was still in the cabinet over my coffee maker. Her reading glasses were on the nightstand in the back bedroom where she left them. Where they sit today. I sat down in her chair. I didn't move for seven hours. The house was so quiet I could hear Otis breathing on the rug. Fifty-nine years. She was two years older than me. There has never been one single day of my life that she wasn't in it. And the loudest thing in my house was a sleeping dog. The funeral was October 26th. Our brother Ray flew in from San Diego. Sharon's daughter Katie came up from Atlanta with the girls. Her son Michael flew in from Denver. The girls wore dresses that were too big for them. Katie's five year old asked me, "Aunt Renee, when is Grandma coming home?" I told her Grandma was in heaven now. She said, "Can we call her there?" I had to walk out of the room. After the funeral, I tried to go back to normal. I couldn't. Because every time I opened Facebook I saw women my age, women Sharon's age, posting things like "knees are worse than a year ago, doctor wants to up my dose, has anyone tried collagen?" Or, "Nine years on an anti-inflammatory, X-rays still stable, and I can't get up off the floor with my grandson. What else is there?" And I knew some of them were doing exactly what Sharon did. The diet. The walking. The pill. The turmeric. And ending up where I am. I couldn't just sit there and watch it happen. So I started researching. Not because I wanted to. Because I had to. Because if Sharon gave up two years and four months of everything she liked for nothing, and I can't save even one other family from what happened to mine, then I can't live with that. I read for weeks. Studies I had to read three times to understand. Papers on joint inflammation out of Japan and Germany. The first thing I found was a study in the BMJ. Women who take a daily anti-inflammatory for their joints are up to 50% more likely to have a heart attack than women the same age who don't. And the risk can start in the very first week. Nobody ever told Sharon that. Her doctor handed her the prescription and said it was the safest thing for the pain. And underneath it was the thing nobody had told either of us. The reason Sharon's numbers didn't come down is that an anti-inflammatory only quiets the pain. It doesn't touch the thing causing it. There are two things happening inside an arthritic joint. The pain you feel. And the damage underneath it. They are not the same thing. The pain is an alarm. Underneath that alarm, the joint is releasing enzymes that eat away at cartilage, the cushion that keeps bone off bone. The pill silences the alarm. It never stops the enzymes. They keep eating, every day, whether you feel it or not. That's why the pain always comes back worse. You were never treating it. You were muting it. And here's the part nobody told us. Those enzymes are not only in the knee. The fire that produces them runs through your blood, and it runs everywhere your blood goes. Your X-ray can only show cartilage you've already lost. It cannot show the fire that's eating it, and it certainly can't show what that fire is doing to your arteries. Read that again. Sharon's blood pressure wasn't climbing because she was getting older or carrying weight. It was climbing because the same inflammation eating her cartilage was stiffening her arteries at the same time. Every day. For eleven years. In a woman whose imaging said she was stable. Cutting out the nightshades gives the fire less to burn. It doesn't put it out. And the pill she swallowed every morning to quiet the alarm was, on top of everything else, adding its own strain to the exact heart that fire was already working on. That's why her numbers wouldn't move. She gave up every food she liked to starve a fire that was already burning inside her, while the one thing she took every day made sure she couldn't feel it. I sat with that for three days. And then I started looking at what I'd been doing. I threw out Sharon's turmeric the week after the funeral. Then I bought a new bottle for myself. Because I'm 57. Because my own knees have been going for four years. Because my blood pressure came back at 134 over 88 at my last physical, and my X-rays said stable, which I now understand means nothing at all. I took it for a month. My internist, a different doctor than Sharon's, one I called because I trusted her, was direct with me when I told her. "Renee, turmeric nudges inflammation a little. But almost none of it survives your stomach, and what does get through doesn't reach the enzymes doing the damage. It sits on the surface." Then she said something I'll never forget. "If Sharon had been on something that actually reached the enzymes instead of the pain, her story might have been very different." I stopped breathing for a second. "Why didn't her doctor tell her that?" She was quiet for a long time. "Because we don't prescribe supplements. And what addresses this isn't a prescription." I went to CVS the next day. I stood in that aisle for forty five minutes. Glucosamine. Chondroitin. MSM. Collagen. Turmeric with black pepper. Copper sleeves. "Joint support" blends with 22 ingredients on the label. A multivitamin that said "mobility." Generic turmeric, $16.99 a bottle. I bought the turmeric. Everyone online said it was "nature's anti-inflammatory." Took it for three weeks. The reflux had me sitting up at 3 AM three nights running. My knees were exactly the same. I started digging again and what I found made me throw the bottle in the trash. Curcumin, the active compound in turmeric, has roughly 1% oral bioavailability. That means 99% of what you swallow never reaches your bloodstream. And even the 1% that gets through works on a different mechanism. It doesn't reach the enzymes. Most joint supplements are the same story. Underdosed. Built on the wrong mechanism. Or loaded with 20 ingredients in trace amounts that don't deliver enough of anything. I had been doing the right thing in the wrong form. I was furious. About two weeks later I was up at 1 AM reading through an arthritis group on Facebook, the same one I'd been reading since Sharon died, and a woman in Ohio posted something that stopped me cold. She said she'd had osteoarthritis in both knees since she was 52. Nine years on a daily anti-inflammatory. Her blood pressure climbed every year anyway and her imaging never changed. Sound familiar? Then she found a cold-pressed tart cherry extract, something she'd only ever associated with gout, and everything changed. Morning pain went from a 7 to a 2 in eleven weeks. Blood pressure 148 over 94 down to 122 over 78 for the first time in six years. The heart pounding on the stairs stopped. Without changing anything else. I read that post four times. I started looking into tart cherry. And what I learned is that there's a group of compounds in it called anthocyanins. They're what give the cherry its color. And they're one of the few things the body can actually use against the enzymes doing the damage, instead of against the pain sitting on top of it. Your body can't make anthocyanins. It has to get them from food. And tart cherry is one of the only places on earth they show up at a dose that means anything. When they're in your system at a real dose, the enzymes finally have something working against them. The fire comes down. Not the alarm. The fire. Same knees. Same life. Your body just stops burning through itself. That's what makes it fundamentally different. Drugs force your body. They block the signal, override the alarm, and hand the bill to your stomach and your heart. Tart cherry doesn't force anything. It gives the body back the raw material it's been missing. But here's the part most people don't realize. You're not getting the cherry you think you're getting. The tart cherry juice on your grocery shelf? It's boiled so it can survive shipping and six months on a shelf. Heat destroys anthocyanins. Then they cut what's left with water and filler and sweeten it. You're drinking red sugar water. The powders? Heat processed. Same problem. By the time it reaches the shelf the active compounds are gone. You're paying for red dust. The cheap ones on Amazon? Commercial fruit, no verification of what's actually inside. Read those labels closely and most of them don't say extract at all. They say blend, or powder, or complex. Those words are doing a lot of work. I went through every product I'd looked at. Not one of them was a real extract, cold-pressed, at a dose that matched the studies. That's when I found GoodGrove. Cold-pressed tart cherry extract. 3,600 mg equivalent per serving. Third-party tested. Made in the USA. Low temperature processing that never cooks the anthocyanins out of it. Not a blend. Not a powder. Two capsules every morning. 90 day money back guarantee. If your numbers don't improve, every penny back, no questions asked. I almost didn't order it. After the CVS aisle. After the turmeric. After Sharon. After everything. But our younger sister Denise is 54 and sitting on a blood pressure of 154 over 96 and knees her doctor wants to start injecting. Sharon's daughter Katie had just been told at 41 that the stiffness in her hands was early arthritis and she was "too young to worry about it." I had my own numbers going the wrong direction. I ordered it. Denise first. I didn't ask. I sent her a bottle and a note that said, "If you don't take this every morning I will never speak to you again, Denise, I mean it." She took it. She didn't stop her prescription. She's stubborn the way Sharon was stubborn. But she took the two capsules every morning. She went back to her doctor last month for her follow up. Blood pressure: 128 over 80. Down from 154 over 96. In ten weeks. Morning pain from an 8 to a 3. She hadn't changed anything else. Same food, same walks, same life. The only thing different was the capsule she took with her coffee. She called me from a Kroger parking lot and couldn't get a word out for almost a full minute. My little sister. Fifty four years old, sitting in her car, because she'd carried the groceries out to it without once thinking about her knees and it undid her. Then she said, "Renee, I think Sharon died because nobody told her about this." I had to hang up. Then there's Katie in Atlanta. 41, two little girls, early arthritis in both hands. Started taking it nine weeks ago. She says her hands don't lock up in the morning anymore. She's back at her sewing machine. Last week she carried both girls' backpacks up the stairs and didn't think about it until she was at the top. My neighbor across the street, Patricia. Her husband died of a heart attack three years ago. His doctor had been watching his blood pressure for a decade. Two widows on the same cul de sac. She's got arthritis in both hands and she started taking it three days after I told her, just to get ahead of it. She says it's the first time since he died that she doesn't feel like she's waiting in line for her own diagnosis. I told our brother Ray in San Diego. I told the women in my Bible study. I told every one of Sharon's clients who called the house that fall not knowing. I'm not a doctor. I'm not a scientist. I'm not selling anything and I don't get one penny from any of this. I'm a 57 year old woman who has buried a husband and a sister, sitting in my dead sister's chair at 2 in the morning because I can't sleep and I can't stop thinking about Denise in Cleveland and Katie in Atlanta and the women on Facebook posting "my knees are worse, what else is there." Here's what I know because I lived it. Cutting out the nightshades gives the fire less to burn. It doesn't put it out. The anti-inflammatory works on the pain. It never reaches the enzymes eating the cartilage, and it never once touched what that same fire was doing to her arteries. Glucosamine and turmeric nudge things around the edges. Almost none of it gets into your blood, and none of it reaches the enzymes. Sharon gave up everything she liked for 28 months and it didn't save her, because nobody ever told her what was actually broken. I wish someone had told us before June 9th, 2022. Before the phone call. Before the trash bag in my kitchen. Before the 28 months of plain chicken and spinach. Before October 19th at 4:17 AM. I can't go back. Sharon can't come back. Her reading glasses are still on the nightstand in my back bedroom and they're going to stay there. But you can still go forward. Your sister can. Your daughter can. You can. The page that explains all of this, the alarm and the fire, why cutting out the foods was never going to be enough, and what's actually in GoodGrove's cherry, is the page I found at 3 AM. Not the pain. The fire. That's the line that finally made it click for me. I want you to read it. Not for me. For whoever you'd leave behind. Sharon used to say it about hair, but she meant it about everything. "You can't undo a cut. You can only decide what happens from here." You can decide what happens from here. This is my personal story. Not medical advice. Talk to your doctor before making any changes to your medication. ~ Renee Donnelly, age 57, Elmhurst, IL 👉 https://trygoodgrove.com/cherry P.S. Her reading glasses are still on the nightstand. I still can't move them. The door to that room is open because it was always open. Every morning I walk past it and for one second I forget. For one second I think she's about to come out of there asking me where I put Otis's leash. She's not. $71,000 in hospital bills. $11,400 for the funeral. 28 months of her giving up every food she liked for nothing. And a capsule that costs less than the collagen she bought every month, something my own doctor told me could have changed everything if we'd known. Please. Don't end up here. Don't let someone you love end up here. P.P.S. I don't work for GoodGrove. I don't get a penny from this. I'm writing this at 2:38 AM because I can't sleep and there's a light in the back bedroom I keep almost turning on and Denise in Cleveland is 54 and Katie is 41 with two little girls and the women on Facebook are still posting at 2 AM and I'm terrified every time my phone rings. Share this with any woman you love whose knees keep getting worse. Even if her X-rays are "stable." Even if her doctor says she's fine. Especially then. Please. 👉 https://trygoodgrove.com/cherry