Jennifer Miller

9g Collagen with Calcium, D3, K2 and Magnesium

I've scanned the bones of more than 30,000 women. For 22 years I told every one of them, "Your doctor will go over the results with you." Eight months into my weekly shot, I watched my own hip come up grey, and I folded my own printout into my purse. My name is Jennifer Miller. I'm 59, and I live in Ohio. I was a radiology technologist for 22 years at a hospital outpatient center, and most of those years I ran the bone density scanner. The DEXA. The quiet one. You lie flat on a padded table, an arm slides slowly over your hip and your spine, and I tell you to hold still and breathe normally. I never once lay down on it myself. Not in 22 years. I'm writing this because of what happened the first time I did. And because of one word I said to my own mother that I can't take back. Here's what you need to know about me first. Fourteen months ago my doctor and I started me on a weekly weight-loss shot. I'm down 46 pounds. I'm still on it, and my doctor runs that prescription, not me and not anybody on Facebook. I want to be clear. I'm grateful for that shot. I can tie my shoes standing up again. I also run a private Facebook group for women on the weekly shot. About 3,100 of us now. Every day somebody posts a before-and-after. Down 38. Down 52. A wedding dress that fits. I hit the heart on every one. In the eleven months since I started it, nobody in that group has ever posted a bone scan. I didn't either. I'd never even had one. Twenty-two years running the machine. Bev used to say the cobbler's kids have no shoes. Bev Tran is my best friend. She's 60 and she still works in that scan room. We spent 19 years side by side at that console. In April she texted me on a Thursday. My doctor had ordered a scan in March, and I'd been putting off booking it for a month. "Come by at 5:30. Room's empty. I'll run it myself." I knew exactly what she meant. I laughed and said no. She sent back one word. "Jennifer." So I went. The room smelled exactly the same. Alcohol wipes and warm plastic and that old gray carpet that never really dries. I put my belt and earrings in the little plastic cup I'd handed to 30,000 women and lay down on the table. Bev put the foam block under my knees, the way I taught her when she was new. "Breathe normal," she said. "Hold still." I turned my head so I could see the screen. I couldn't help it. Twenty-two years of habit. The arm started its slow pass over my left hip. And I watched my own bone come up. Strong bone comes up bright. Dense and white, like chalk on a blackboard. You can see the edges sharp and clean. Mine came up grey. Soft grey. The neck of the femur, the part that snaps when a woman's hip breaks, looked thin and washed out, like a photo left in a window too long. I knew before the number came up. I'd seen that grey on a thousand screens. Bev stopped talking. That was the worst part. Bev never stops talking. The number came up. Osteopenia. Low bone mass at the hip. Not osteoporosis. But not where you want to be at 59 with your mother's history. I don't know what that number was five years ago. Or ten. I never checked. That's the part that keeps me up. I spent 22 years measuring everybody else's bones and I have no idea how long mine had been going grey. The printer started up. That sound, the little whir and click. I'd heard it 30,000 times from the other side of the room. Bev pulled the sheet off the tray and held it out to me, the same way I used to hold it out. I took it. Then I sat in the chair by the door. The patient's chair. The one where women put their shoes back on. I'd never sat in it before. It's lower than it looks. Before I stood up, Bev tore a strip off the paper roll on the table, drew a box of crossed lines with dots along them, and pushed it into my hand. "Read that later," she said. And I folded that printout into quarters, put the strip inside it, and put them both in my purse. My hands just did it. Exactly like every woman I ever scanned. That's when I understood why they all did that. You don't fold it because you plan to read it later. You fold it so you don't have to look at it in front of anybody. You fold it small so it feels small. And for 22 years, I helped them. "Your doctor will go over the results with you." I said that because technologists aren't allowed to interpret your scan. That's the doctor's job, and it should be. I said it because women were scared and it was the only thing I was allowed to say. But sitting in that low chair with my purse on my knees, I heard it the way they must have heard it. It's not just a number. It's your mother's hip. It's whether you go home. And when they'd stand at the door with their coat half on and ask me, "So what do I do?", I gave them the same answer every time. "Calcium. And walk more." One word, mostly. Calcium. It's what the pamphlet in the waiting room said. It's what I said to my own mother. Rick picked me up. My husband. He's 62 and he'd been sitting in the parking lot listening to a ball game on the radio. "How'd it go?" he said. "Fine." He drove about six miles. Then I took the printout out of my purse and unfolded it on my lap and said, "It's not fine." He pulled into a grocery store lot and turned off the engine. He's a good man. He didn't say anything for a while. Then he asked the question every husband asks. "Okay. So what do they tell you to do?" I opened my mouth and the word came out before I could stop it. "Calcium." It sounded so small in that car. Rick looked at me. "Jen. You've been eating those calcium chews every morning since Christmas." He was right. Caramel chews from the bulk store, two every morning with my coffee, since somebody in my group said calcium in December. And I'd just watched my hip come up grey. So I told him about my mother. My mom's name was Opal. She took a calcium tablet every morning for about thirty years. She kept them in a little dish by the coffee maker so she wouldn't forget, and she'd tap the dish and say, "Not me, honey. I'm covered." She never forgot. Not once that I know of. When she was 74 she asked me about her own scan. She'd had one at her doctor's office and she didn't understand the paper. I looked at it for maybe ten seconds and said, "Just keep taking your calcium, Mom. You're doing everything right." She was so relieved. She put that paper in her purse. At 81, she stepped off the church van after Wednesday supper. One step down to the curb. She'd done it a thousand times. Her hip broke. I've read enough reports to know it may have broken before she hit the ground. Sometimes the bone gives first, and the fall is what happens after. She lay on the sidewalk outside the Methodist church in her good blue coat while the van driver called 911. Somebody put a casserole carrier under her head. She never went home again. Surgery. Then a rehab place with a roommate who watched game shows at full volume. Then a nursing home room with a window that faced the dumpsters. I brought her African violets from home. They died before she did. Opal died at 82. About eleven months after the van. About 1 in 5 people over 65 who break a hip die within a year. I knew that number from work for 20 years. I didn't know it would be my mother. She did everything right. She took her calcium every morning for decades. Nobody told her it might not be enough. I was the one who should have. I was the expert in the family. And I gave her one word. I sat in that grocery store parking lot and cried harder than I did at her funeral. Here's what I couldn't stop thinking about that night. About 1 in 2 women over 50 will break a bone due to bone loss. One in two. Look at the women in your church pew. Every other one. And bone loss has no symptoms. None. It doesn't ache. It doesn't wake you up. You can feel wonderful right up to the curb. Then I thought about my group. 3,100 women. Most of us over 50. Most of us down 30, 40, 60 pounds and proud of it. I'm proud of it too. And I thought about the things I'd learned in 22 years that nobody puts on a before-and-after photo. 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 people lost was lean tissue. Not fat. Lean. Studies of weight loss in older adults keep finding bone density drops along with the weight. And when you eat far less, far fewer nutrients reach your skeleton. I'm not saying that's what happened to me. I don't know what happened to me. I don't have a baseline. Nobody can tell me which pound took what with it, and I won't pretend they can. But I know what I eat now. Half a yogurt. A few bites of chicken. Coffee. On a good day, half a sandwich. I'm full after six ounces of anything. For eight months I stepped on the scale and counted what left. The scale only counts what leaves. It never once asked me what I was keeping. My daughter Kayla is an ER nurse. She's 31. I called her that night. She was quiet for a second. Then she said, "Mom, I had one Tuesday. Sixty-three. Down fifty-some pounds. She showed me her old driver's license photo while we were splinting her. So proud. She'd slipped getting out of the tub. Wrist in two places." "Did anybody ever tell her?" I said. Kayla said, "Tell her what?" That's the whole problem. Nobody told her. The next morning I took the printout to my doctor. He's a good doctor. He kept my prescription right where it is and we talked through the scan. That's his department, and I'm glad it is. But I'm a technologist. When something's wrong, I want a checklist. So I went home and started fixing it myself. And I got it wrong. Five times. First, I doubled the calcium chews. Four a day instead of two. I'd watched my hip come up grey on four months of chews, and my answer was more chews. That's how deep that one word goes. Second, the protein shakes. Everybody in my group swears by them. I already had half-finished bottles in the fridge door from the winter. I bought another case anyway. On the shot, I could get through maybe a third of a bottle before my stomach said no. The fridge door filled up with half-finished bottles going warm. Rick started calling it the graveyard. Third, the pink tub. Collagen powder from the grocery store with a young woman's face on the front, all glowing skin. I'd bought it in January because my hair was coming out in the shower drain, and I dug it back out of the pantry. Two heaping scoops. It clumped in my coffee like wet flour. It was a beauty product. I knew that when I bought it. I bought it anyway because it said collagen. Fourth, the "joint" pill I'd been taking for my knees since January. The box said collagen in big letters. This time I turned it over the way I used to check a requisition. About 1,000 milligrams of collagen. In a two-capsule serving. A thousand milligrams. That's a gram. Fifth, and this is the embarrassing one. I bought a separate K2 and a separate vitamin C and lined them up on the kitchen windowsill with the chews, the vitamin D, the magnesium and the joint pills. Six bottles. By Thursday I'd forgotten every one of them. I ran a hospital machine for two decades without missing a calibration. I couldn't remember six bottles for four days. Bev came over for lunch on a Saturday in May. She came in through the garage without knocking, the way she always does, and stopped in front of my windowsill. She looked at the bottles. She looked at the graveyard in the fridge door. Then she picked up the pink tub and held it up like a dead mouse. "Jen. What is this." Then she reached into her purse and set a bag on the counter. "DensiaPlus," she said. "Every morning. In the coffee you already drink. Stop arguing with me." "I've got six bottles right here," I said. "I can see that. Sit down. Get out that strip of paper I gave you," she said. "I'm going to ask you two questions and you're going to answer like a tech, not like a patient." I sat. "What does our machine measure?" "Mineral," I said. "Bone mineral density." "Right. What's bone made of?" And I knew. Of course I knew. I just hadn't thought about it as my bone. Bone isn't a rock. It's a living frame of collagen with mineral laid down on it. Collagen is about 90% of bone's organic structure. The calcium is the chalk. The collagen is the frame the chalk sits on. "We spent 22 years measuring the chalk," Bev said. "That's all that machine sees. Nobody ever asked a single woman on that table about the frame." Not once. Not me. Not the pamphlet. She kept going. The body makes less collagen as you get older, and it drops faster after menopause. Bone is living tissue. Most of your skeleton gets replaced about every 10 years. It depends on what you eat every single day. Vitamin C is needed to form collagen. Vitamin D3 helps your body absorb calcium. Without enough D, you absorb only a small fraction of what you take in. Vitamin K2, the MK-7 kind, activates osteocalcin, which binds calcium into bone. And about 60% of the magnesium in your body is in your bones. "Your chews are the chalk," Bev said. "Your pink tub is a beauty product. And your joint pill is a sprinkle." She tapped the joint pill box. "Studies on collagen peptides commonly use 2.5 to 15 grams a day. That's one gram." Then she pushed the bag across the counter at me. "Nine grams of collagen. Calcium, magnesium, D3, K2, vitamin C, zinc, boron. All in one scoop. I've had it every morning for a year and a half." I picked it up and turned it over. Same as the joint pill box. I read every line like a requisition. Nine grams of collagen peptides. The joint pill had about 1,000 milligrams. This had 9,000. The calcium, with the D3 and the K2 beside it. The magnesium. The vitamin C. One scoop. Unflavored. I started to say something about the protein shakes, and Bev put her hand up. "No. Collagen isn't a complete protein and it doesn't replace protein-rich meals. You still eat protein first. Every meal. Even when you're not hungry. This is the frame. It's not dinner." Then she said it again. She'd been saying some version of it to me since April. "Every morning. Stop arguing with me." So I stopped arguing. Bev stirred one scoop into my coffee right there, with the same spoon I use every day. It dissolved. The coffee tasted like coffee. I ordered that afternoon. My own bag came the following Wednesday. That was five months ago. I want to be honest about what's happened since, because I've read too many printouts to lie to you about one. I can't see my bones. Nobody can from the outside. I'm not going to tell you I feel stronger or that anything has changed in there. I don't know. Here's what I do know. I haven't missed a morning. Not one. Because it's in the coffee, and I have never in my life forgotten coffee. The six bottles are gone. One scoop replaced the row. I eat protein first now. Two eggs before anything else, even when the shot says I'm not hungry. Chicken first at dinner, even if dinner is four bites. Rick cooks the eggs. He says it's the least he can do after that grocery store lot. I lift the soup cans. Two cans of tomato soup, while the coffee brews. Over my head and down, ten times. It's a joke in my house. I don't care. And I practice the floor. Kayla made me. She said the women who scare her most aren't the ones who fall. They're the ones who can't get back up. Lying on the floor for an hour or more after a fall is dangerous all by itself. So every night before bed, I get down on the living room rug and get back up. No hands if I can. One hand if I can't. Rick counts. Next spring I'm going back to Bev's table for another scan. I don't know what it'll say. I really don't. I've seen too many of those printouts to promise anybody anything. But I'll know I fed the frame this time. Not just the chalk. And I'm not folding it into my purse. I'm going to read it in the car with Rick, out loud, before we leave the parking lot. Last month I did something I'd never seen anyone do in that group. I posted my printout. The real one, unfolded, with my name blacked out. I wrote one line under it. "Twenty-two years on the other side of this machine, and this is mine." By morning there were over 400 comments. Women who'd never had a scan. Women who'd had one and couldn't remember where they put the paper. A woman who said hers was still in her purse from 2019, folded in quarters, and she was afraid to open it. One of them just wrote, "Nobody told me either." I'm writing this for those 3,100 women, and for anybody who isn't in the group yet. If you're on a weekly shot and you're down 30, 40, 60 pounds and proud of it. You should be. If dinner fits on a saucer now and your vitamins haven't changed in ten years. If you've got half-finished shakes in the fridge door and a pink tub in the pantry. If you've ever had a scan and folded the paper so small you didn't have to look at it. If the only answer anybody ever gave you was one word. If you've never had a scan at all. If your mother did everything right. Then please hear one technologist who sat in the patient's chair. The scale only counts what leaves. The scan only sees the chalk. Nobody's going to ask you about the frame. So I'm asking. Keep your shot. Your doctor runs that. Eat your protein first. Get down on the floor and get back up. And feed the frame. 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. It comes with a 90-day money-back guarantee, empty or full. 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. The printout I folded in April is unfolded now. It's on the side of the fridge with a magnet, next to Bev's strip of paper with the lines and the dots. Rick reads it every time he gets the milk out. So do I. P.P.P.S. Up to 70% off: buy 2, get 1 free, or buy 3, get 2 free. If it isn't for you, you have 90 days to send it back, empty or full.