At 64 it took me a full minute to walk from my bed to the bathroom and I had stopped telling anyone
I want to start this on a Tuesday morning at the pool.
I am 64 years old. I live in Bloomington, Indiana, in the same small ranch house my husband Dale and I have lived in for 31 years. I worked for 32 years as a horticulturalist at the Bloomington Botanical Garden. I retired 3 years ago. I have been gardening every day the weather would let me since I was 11. Dale and I have been married for 41 years. We have 2 grown children and 3 grandchildren.
I swim 2 mornings a week at the community pool. I had finished my laps and I was standing at the foot of the ladder holding the rail.
A woman my age, maybe a year or 2 older, got out of the pool at the ladder next to mine.
She did not hold the rail.
She got out of the pool the way a person gets out of a pool. She walked to her chair. She picked up her towel and walked to her car.
She moved the way I had moved for the first 58 years of my life.
I stood at the foot of the ladder holding the rail and watching her drive away. I sat in the locker room for 30 minutes after that. I did not cry. I have never cried in a locker room. I sat there and I did the slow honest math of the woman I had been at the pool 5 years ago and the woman I was at the pool that morning.
I drove home, made coffee and sat at the kitchen table.
I said, out loud, to our dog, who has heard me say a lot of important things over the years: "I would like to feel like myself again."
I want to tell you the part I have not told anyone before today.
There was a bottle in our medicine cabinet. It was an over-the-counter pain reliever. I am not going to name the brand. I had been buying it on the same grocery trip as the eggs and the milk, on a quiet rotation that had become part of my life.
I had been reaching for it 2 to 3 mornings a week.
For a year before that, it had been 1 morning a week. For the year before that, 1 morning every 2 weeks.
The bottle had originally been in the cabinet because Dale's father had stayed with us during a recovery and had needed it. We kept the bottle when he left. I had moved slowly, over 4 years, from the bottle being a thing Dale's father had needed once, to the bottle being a thing I reached for 2 or 3 mornings a week.
I had not told Dale. I had not told my daughter. I had not told my doctor, because she had not asked, and my bloodwork had been fine, and I had not wanted to bring it up.
I had also not been telling myself, in the way you do not tell yourself something you do not want to look at.
The mornings the bottle came down were the hard mornings. By 64 it was taking me a full minute to get from the edge of the bed to the bathroom door. I would sit on the edge of the bed for a long minute before I would put my feet on the floor. I would put my feet on the floor and not stand right away. I would stand and not walk right away. I would walk in a careful, narrow way I had not walked in my forties.
I called all of that being 64. I called it 40 years of working on my knees in flower beds.
It was both of those things. It was also something else.
The morning at the pool was the morning I admitted it.
I read for 3 weeks after the pool morning. I am a careful reader. 32 years of horticulture trains you to be suspicious of any claim about what supports growth that does not have careful research underneath it. The same suspicion applies, I have learned, to claims about what supports a human body.
I was reading for something that might support the way a body handles the small daily inflammation a 64-year-old body carries. Something that would help the body do what the body is already trying to do.
I want to be careful with my language because I am not a doctor. What I found was not a conversation about treating any condition. It was a conversation about the body's natural drainage system.
The lymphatic system. The network that runs alongside your bloodstream and carries the daily inflammatory waste out of your tissue. Unlike your blood, the lymphatic system has no heart pumping it. It depends on movement, breathing, and the contraction of the lymph vessels themselves to keep flowing.
When that system flows, the daily waste moves through and out. The body handles the small accumulating load of being 64.
When that system stalls, which it does in most women by 55 and accelerates after 60, the waste pools in the tissue. It sits in the joints. It sits in the connective tissue. It sits in the spaces between the muscles. The body has to brace and shift and inventory before it does the things it used to do without thinking.
The 4 herbs I kept reading about in the older European and American herbalist literature were Stillingia Root, Cleavers, Prickly Ash Bark, and Red Clover Blossom. Used together for 200 years to support the lymphatic system specifically. Stillingia dissolves the hardened buildup that compresses the lymph vessels. Cleavers sweeps the dissolved waste through the drainage channels. Prickly Ash Bark restarts the lymphatic pump from the inside. Red Clover Blossom calms the inflammation that locks the channels shut.
All 4 together. The literature was clear that you need all 4 or the system closes back up.
The form mattered too. Capsules sit in a sluggish gut and never absorb well, and a stalled lymphatic system usually means a stalled gut. Liquid tincture under the tongue absorbs straight into the bloodstream and reaches the lymphatic system in minutes.
I made 2 phone calls before I added anything to my routine.
I called the small pharmacy 2 blocks from our house and asked the pharmacist whether a 4-herb sublingual tincture at the dosage on the label would be sensible to add to my routine, given that I was occasionally taking the OTC pain reliever I had been taking. She asked me a few questions. She told me there were no concerns at the supplement dosage on the label, given what I had described. She told me to take it in the morning with food and water.
I also called my doctor's office. The nurse spoke to my doctor and called back. My doctor had no concerns and asked me to mention it at my next annual.
Both calls together took less than 10 minutes.
I want to say something now plainly. If you have been quietly taking an over-the-counter pain reliever for any length of time, please call your pharmacist before you add anything to your routine. Tell her what you have been taking and how often. She will tell you in 2 minutes whether adding a supplement is sensible. I am a retired horticulturalist. I am not the person to ask. Your pharmacist is.
I started on a Monday in mid-May. 2 droppers under the tongue every morning before coffee. I changed nothing else.
The first 2 weeks I felt nothing in particular. I had read enough by then to know I should not expect to.
What I noticed, I noticed in 2 specific places.
The first was the garden.
It was a Tuesday morning in late June, about 6 weeks after I had started. I was in the bee balm bed at the back of our garden. I had been on my knees for about 20 minutes pulling early weeds.
I went to stand up. I put my hand on the cedar bench next to me the way I had been putting my hand on the cedar bench every morning for 2 years.
Halfway up, I noticed something. My hand was not actually carrying any weight. My hand was on the bench because my hand had been on the bench every morning for 2 years. My legs were doing the work.
I stood up. I looked at the bench. I knelt back down. I tried it again without touching the bench at all.
It was not effortless. I was not pretending I was 40. But I stood up from a flower bed in my garden at 64 the way a person stands up from a flower bed.
I sat on the bench for a long minute. The dog watched me from the porch.
I did not say anything to Dale that morning. I needed to see if it would happen again the next day.
It happened again the next day. It happened again the day after that.
By the middle of July, I had stopped putting my hand on the bench. I had stopped thinking about putting my hand on the bench. The bench was a bench in my garden again, where it had been for 19 years, where I had been quietly using it as a piece of physical therapy equipment for 2 years without admitting it.
The second thing I noticed was the bottle in the cabinet.
I had been reaching for it 2 to 3 mornings a week. Over the months after I started the tincture, the mornings I reached for it got quieter and further apart. Not all at once. Not on a schedule. Not in a way I could have pointed to on a calendar. Just over time.
I still reach for the bottle some mornings. There are mornings my body wants what is in that bottle and I do not see any reason not to give it to my body. The mornings I do reach for it have just gotten further apart than they were 2 springs ago.
I am not telling you the tincture alone is what changed. I had been doing several things differently since the pool morning. I had been moving more deliberately. I had been honest with my body in a way I had not been honest with my body for 2 years. I had finally told Dale, on quiet evenings, what the previous 2 years had felt like, which means a morning being hard does not have to live alone inside my head anymore.
Several things were changing at once. The way they do when a careful woman finally watches another woman her age walk to her car without holding a rail.
What I can tell you is that I added one small thing to a list of small things I was newly doing. And the months that followed were qualitatively different from the 2 years that preceded them.
I went into my doctor's office in October for my annual. She did the bloodwork the week before. She reviewed the results. She did the rest of the physical.
She said: "Your numbers are in the same good place they have been for years. You are moving more easily through the exam than you did last year. I do not know what you have been doing. Whatever it is, please continue."
I told her about the woman at the pool. The garden bench. The bottle in the cabinet, and how the mornings I reached for it had gotten further apart. The 4-herb tincture.
She nodded. She said: "The research on lymphatic drainage support and the body's natural inflammatory balance is well-established. That was a sensible thing to add. Keep doing it. Come back in a year."
She wrote down the brand name on a piece of paper for her own reference and put it in her white coat pocket.
I am writing this letter for the woman who has been quietly opening a medicine cabinet 2 or 3 mornings a week. For the woman who has been putting her hand on a bench, a counter, a wall, the back of a chair, when she stands up. For the woman whose bloodwork is fine and whose doctor is kind and whose husband watches her without saying anything about what he is seeing.
I want to be direct with you in the last paragraphs of this letter, because the reason I started writing it was to tell you about the small thing that has changed how I move through my own mornings.
The brand I added is called Lymphoria. It is the only brand I found that combines all 4 of the herbs I had been reading about (Stillingia Root, Cleavers, Prickly Ash Bark, Red Clover Blossom) in a single sublingual liquid tincture at the doses the old herbalists used. It is slow-formulated by a naturopath who spent almost 20 years studying these traditions before she made her first batch. USA-made. Third-party tested. Honey-flavored from real raw honey.
It is a small company. They make their tincture in small batches and they sell out fast. Last month a friend of mine ordered and they were already on a waitlist for the next batch. I keep 2 bottles in our cupboard now because I learned the hard way that running out is worse than the cost of stocking up.
The bottle is $30. 2 droppers under the tongue every morning. That is the entire protocol. You do not change anything else.
It comes with a 30-day money-back guarantee. If it does not work for you, you send the bottle back and you get every penny back. No questions asked.
Before you add it to your routine, call your pharmacist. Tell her what you have been taking and how often. If she says yes, you have something new to try that you have not tried yet. If she says no, you have a piece of information about your own body and your own current routine that you did not have before.
Either way, you have asked.
Order the bottle. Try it for 30 days. If it does nothing, send it back.
But try it. Because the alternative is the medicine cabinet 2 to 3 mornings a week, and you already know how that conversation ends.
👉 https://lymphoria.co/products/natures-sunrise-lymphatic-drainage-supplement
