If Your Magnesium Worked For A Couple Of Years And Then Quietly Stopped, Nobody Ever Told You Where It Was Actually Working

I stood at my kitchen counter last February with 3 tablets in my hand, already knowing they weren't going to do anything.

I'd been taking them for 6 years.

The first 2, they worked. I need to be clear about that, because everything else depends on it.

"Magnesium doesn't make a difference," my cardiologist told me the first time I brought it up.

I took it anyway, because I could feel the difference every day.

I've been the one in this house who books everybody's appointments and reads everybody's labels for 40 years. I trusted myself over him.

Then somewhere in year 3 it started slipping.

Not all at once. It just worked less, that's the only way I know how to put it.

And by that morning in February I was holding 3 tablets I didn't believe in anymore.

My sister Diane went through the exact same thing 5 years ahead of me.

Same routine, same forms, same brands. She built hers first and I copied her.

Hers held about 2 years too. Then it stopped.

And everybody kept telling her it was managed, right up until the list of things they could still do for her got short.

I'm not where she is now.

Not because I got lucky. Because I finally quit asking why the magnesium stopped and started asking a different question.

And the answer wasn't a shortage of anything.

Let me back up.

The two explanations, and how much I hated both

Here's the part I didn't say out loud to anybody for about a year.

That routine was mine. I found it, I paid for it, I did it even though a doctor told me not to, and it was the one piece of all this I was handling myself.

When it quit holding, I was left with 2 explanations and I hated both.

Either my heart was getting worse on its own and nothing was going to touch it.

Or none of it had ever done anything, and I'd been fooling myself for 6 years.

Nobody ever offered me a third one.

I started leaving the hall light on at night.

I couldn't tell you what week that started. I only know I used to sleep in a dark house, and then I didn't.

I never mentioned it to my husband.

So I did what I've always done when something stops working. More of it.

3 doses spread through the day. 2 forms at once. I pushed it until my stomach let me know I'd gone too far.

It bought me nothing.

And I'd already been through the rest of it.

7 years on a beta blocker for the atrial fibrillation. I finally talked my doctor into letting me quit, and getting off it was worse than being on it.

CoQ10 gave me palpitations. I figured that out myself by stopping it and starting it again.

Taurine. Potassium. Fish oil. A hawthorn off the shelf at the drugstore that did absolutely nothing.

Coffee gone. Wine gone. The artificial sweeteners in everything, gone.

When I brought all of it to my own doctor, he looked at the list for about 4 seconds.

"This is what hearts do at your age," he said.

I asked him what that meant for the next 10 years.

He said we'd keep an eye on it.

I'm 68. That's not that old.

The drive home from Diane's appointment

I drive Diane to her appointments now.

That's its own thing, being the one in the passenger seat after 40 years of being the one holding everybody's folder.

Last March I sat in the room with her while they went through what was left.

The ablation she'd had held about 2 years, and then it didn't.

The doctor was kind about it. He was also honest.

"A redo at your age doesn't have the numbers the first one did," he said. "About half of them are still holding at 10 years, and that's counting everybody. Including people 20 years younger than you."

Diane asked what happened if this one didn't hold either.

He didn't have a good answer for that.

And nobody in that room was wrong. That's the thing I keep coming back to.

Her medicine does the exact job it was built to do. The list was just shorter than the last time we sat there.

I did the math on the drive home.

Diane's 5 years older than me, and I'd been quietly telling myself that meant I had 5 years.

But hers held 2 full years before it faded, and mine started slipping at 18 months.

So I'm not 5 years behind my sister. I'm somewhere closer than that, and I don't know how much closer.

The phone call about next summer

My daughter called that Sunday about next summer.

She rents a house on the lake every other year and she was working out bedrooms.

I said put me down.

There was a pause on the phone. Not a long one.

"We can decide closer to the time, Mom."

I said that was fine. We talked about something else.

Then I hung up and sat in the kitchen a while.

My own daughter had started planning next summer around the chance that I wouldn't be in it.

And I couldn't argue with her. To argue, I'd have had to tell her what my routine was actually protecting me from. I didn't know.

I'd been saying "I'm fine, it's managed" for 3 years and I couldn't back one word of it.

Ruth asked me one question

That Tuesday I told Ruth.

Ruth's in my water class at the Y. She's in her mid 70s, 30 years in a cardiac ICU before she retired.

I'd known her for ages and never once talked about any of this.

We were in the changing room and it just came out of me.

"My magnesium stopped working and nobody can tell me why," I said.

She didn't tell me to try anything. She pulled her towel down off the hook and said, "Where do you think it was working?"

I said what do you mean, where.

"You've taken it 6 years," she said. "Where in the cell do you think it's going?"

I stood there with my hair dripping and I had no answer at all.

6 years, and I'd never once thought about where.

The dripping tap

I don't take anybody's word for anything, so I went home and read for about 3 weeks.

Most of what's out there is nonsense said with a lot of confidence. I can spot it by now.

Then I found a recorded talk by a heart researcher, and I watched it 3 times.

You know how a tap can be dripping and it's not because you're short of water?

The water's all there. Turning the pressure up or down doesn't stop it.

There's a little washer behind the handle. When that wears out and stops sitting flush, a bit of water slips through even when the tap's turned off all the way.

One bad washer. One drip you can't stop.

He said there's a gate inside every heart cell that works almost exactly like that. It's got a name, RyR2, but a gate is all it is.

Its job is to let calcium out so the cell can squeeze.

Between beats, it's supposed to close up tight.

The cell has its own little power plants inside it, and as they run they throw off waste. Free radicals, he called them.

Those free radicals can damage that gate over the years. It ends up like a washer that's stopped sitting flush.

And a gate that doesn't seal lets a little calcium slip through when it's meant to be shut.

That little slip of calcium is the kind of thing that can set off one extra beat that shouldn't be there.

The tap looks closed. The washer behind the handle just isn't sealing. He said that gate can do the same thing.

Then he put up heart tissue from people in atrial fibrillation next to tissue from people in a normal rhythm. That gate was more oxidized in the first group.

My magnesium was in the wrong room

Then he said the thing that took the floor out from under me.

Magnesium works around the outside of the cell, out at the wall where the electrical signals fire.

That gate is deeper in.

And a worn seal isn't a shortage of anything.

Turning the water pressure up doesn't fix a washer. Taking more of a mineral doesn't automatically undo that kind of damage to the gate deeper in.

That doesn't mean magnesium is useless. Mine was doing a real job out at the wall, and I'd still take it.

It just wasn't aimed at the thing deeper inside that he was describing.

My magnesium was never weak. It was in the wrong room.

Which left one question sitting there.

What can get back behind the handle, where the worn seal actually is?

The doorway

That's the whole reason ergothioneine caught my eye.

Your body has a little doorway on the cell. He called it OCTN1. One of the things it does is carry ergothioneine inside.

Once it's in, it gathers near those power plants, which are one of the places that waste gets made.

So it reaches the same part of the cell, and helps protect against that damage there.

I'm not going to tell you it's a new washer, or that it seals the gate, or stops anything. Nobody's shown that in a person, and I'd have closed the tab on anybody who claimed it.

It was just the first explanation I'd come across that even made sense of where the problem was.

There was a second one in there too, isorhamnetin. All I understood was that it backs up the body's own antioxidant defenses through a separate path.

A second layer of the same protection.

And what set it apart had nothing to do with the milligram numbers on the front of a bottle.

It was the doorway. Ergothioneine has its own transporter, that OCTN1 he'd talked about, so it's carried into the cell on purpose.

And once it's inside, it settles near those power plants. The same part of the cell the dripping tap is about.

That was the difference. 15mg of ergothioneine, the one that's actively carried into cells, with 300mg of isorhamnetin behind it for a second layer of antioxidant support.

Two weeks of turning bottles over

2 weeks on Amazon turning bottles over and reading the one-star reviews first.

Most of them failed on the first thing.

The one that didn't was called TrueBeat, and I read the panel through twice before I trusted what I was looking at.

Three things I checked before I ordered

The dose bothered me at first. In the groups I'm in, people talk about hawthorn at 1,500 and 2,000 milligrams, and here was 900.

Then I understood what standardized means.

A bottle that says 2,000mg and doesn't say what it's standardized to is telling you how much powder is in there. Not how much of the part that does anything.

900mg standardized to 2% vitexin is a known quantity. The bigger number on the drugstore bottle wasn't a bigger dose. It was just more powder.

The second thing was the timing, and nobody wants to hear this. I didn't either.

Mine was 3 weeks before I noticed anything, and I wouldn't have said it out loud until closer to 2 months.

If you need to know by Friday, don't start.

The third was my prescriptions.

I take mine exactly the way I did before. I told my cardiologist I was adding this at my next appointment, and I'd tell you to do the same. Especially if you're on a blood thinner.

Anybody who tells you to keep a supplement from your doctor is telling you something about themselves.

Three weeks later the hall light was off

I took the first 2 with my oatmeal on a Thursday.

Nothing happened.

Nothing was going to. There's nothing to feel with this.

No warmth, no calm, nothing you'd notice at all. If a bottle promises you that, put it down.

I told myself I was giving it a fair shot. I wasn't. I was waiting for it to fail so I could stop hoping about it.

I set it next to my magnesium, because I wasn't stopping anything. I figured it'd be in the drawer with the rest of them by summer.

3 weeks later I noticed the hall light was off.

Not that night. 2 days after, standing in the same hallway, when it hit me. I'd been sleeping in a dark house again, and I hadn't decided to.

I didn't credit the capsules. I've had good weeks before.

I waited for it to come back, the way it always comes back, usually right when I've let my guard down.

It didn't come back that month.

Somewhere in there I stopped reaching for my wrist before my feet hit the floor. I only know because one morning I caught myself not doing it.

By June I checked my reading out of pure habit and it was boring.

I sat there with the coffee going, and I felt more relief over a number that told me nothing than I'd felt in years.

And I stopped doing the math.

That's the part I'd want you to hear. Not the rhythm. The math, the every-single-night math about whether I'd still be here.

The porch at the lake

We went to the lake in July. I'd been down as a definite since March.

The last night, I was out on the porch after everyone went in.

My daughter came and sat on the step below me. She said she was thinking about doing it again in 2 years, somewhere with more bedrooms, because the grandkids are getting too big to share.

I said yes before she finished the sentence.

She turned around and looked at me for a second.

She'd noticed the pause was gone too.

The third explanation

Here's what I keep coming back to.

When something you built yourself stops working, they hand you 2 explanations, and both of them are about you.

Your body's failing, or your judgment was bad.

Nobody ever offers the third one, which is that it was only ever covering part of the ground.

So if you're standing there with a bottle in your hand you've stopped believing in.

• If yours worked, and then it didn't, and nobody could tell you why.
• If you've settled on it being either your heart getting worse or you being a fool, and you've quit saying out loud which one you think it is.
• If you've changed some small thing in your house you've never mentioned to anybody.
• If you've started leaving a little pause before you answer about next year.
• If you just want to say yes to something 18 months out and mean it.

Then I think you're about where I was in February.

I'm not going to tell you it'll do for you what it did for me. Nobody can tell you that, and you should be suspicious of anyone who does.

What I can tell you is it's the only thing I found that was aimed at the room my magnesium was never in.

And keep taking everything your doctor has you on. I did, and I still do.

This isn't instead of anything. Tell your cardiologist you're adding it.

If you don't, nothing dramatic happens.

You just spend another year the way I spent last year. With the light on and the math running, waiting for somebody to finally explain the thing nobody ever explains.