This is a story about eleven tablets before breakfast, a son who noticed what the rest of them had stopped seeing, and two parents who write, in their own words, about what it means to live again instead of just managing. I’ll let Ramesh and Sunita take it from here.
– Dr Anupam Gaur
The Story of Ramesh & Sunita
Lucknow · Brought here by their son Nikhil, 38
Hum dono ne milke yeh review likhne ki koshish ki hai. Mere husband Ramesh ji ne kuch likha, maine kuch likha. Unki handwriting theek hai, meri nahi — toh typing humne milke ki. (We have written this review together. My husband Ramesh wrote some, I wrote some. His handwriting is better than mine — so we typed it together.)
We are not doctors. We do not understand most of the medical words they use in reports. So we will not use them here. We will just tell you what our life was like before, and what it is like now. That is the only review we know how to write.
Our health had been “managed” for many years. I was diabetic since 2009. Sunita’s blood pressure started in 2012. Between our family doctor in Lucknow and occasional visits to specialists, our numbers were mostly under control. But “under control” did not mean we felt well. I was tired by noon every single day for years — we thought it was age. Sunita had stiffness in her hands and back every morning that took two hours to settle — age. I had body aches with no particular reason — age. She had a heavy, foggy feeling in the evenings where she could not focus on anything — age. Everything was age. Age had become the answer to every question we had stopped asking.
The honest truth is: we had quietly stopped expecting to feel better. We had accepted that this — the fatigue, the stiffness, the dependence on tablets, the sense that the body was working against us — was simply what getting older felt like. Every doctor we saw adjusted a number, changed a dose, added a tablet. Nobody ever said: let us look at what is underneath all of this.
Then Nikhil came home for Diwali.
We resisted, as parents do. We said we were fine, our doctors were good, we did not need to travel to Gurugram for a checkup. Nikhil listened to all of this politely and then booked the appointments anyway. That is our son.
The consultation with Dr. Gaur was unlike anything we had experienced in thirty years of visiting doctors. He did not just look at our reports. He talked to us — both of us, for a long time. He asked about our sleep, our energy at different times of day, when the stiffness was worst, what our diet looked like over the years. He asked Ramesh about his stress levels during his working years, which were high. He asked me what I had enjoyed doing that I had quietly stopped because it had become too tiring.
That last question made me cry a little, which surprised me. Because the answer was: quite a lot of things.
After he reviewed everything, he said something we have both thought about many times since. He said: “Your doctors have been doing the right things for the problems they were trained to see. What has not been looked at is the environment inside your body that is producing these problems. That environment has been changing for fifteen years — and it is showing up as fatigue and stiffness and brain fog, not just as sugar numbers and blood pressure readings. Those symptoms are not old age. They are signals. And signals can be read.”
We did not understand every word. We asked him to explain simply, and he did, without making us feel foolish. He said the body is like a garden — the diabetes, the blood pressure, the fatigue are not the weeds themselves, but what happens when the soil has not been tended for a long time. Treating the weeds without improving the soil means more weeds will come. We had been pulling weeds for fifteen years. Nobody had looked at the soil.
| Medication | Before | Now (14 months later) |
|---|---|---|
| Ramesh — Diabetes tablets | 2 tablets, twice daily | 1 tablet, once daily |
| Ramesh — Blood pressure | 1 tablet daily | Monitoring, may discontinue |
| Ramesh — Joint aches (pain relief) | Nearly every day | Rarely needed now |
| Sunita — Blood pressure | Daily, higher dose | Half dose, stable |
| Sunita — Thyroid | Unchanged for 6 years | Dose adjusted, now stable |
| Various supplements | 6 different, unsystematic | 3, specific and targeted |
All medication changes were made in full consultation with our family physician and respective specialists. Dr. Gaur worked alongside them — never separately or against their advice.
We want to say clearly: Dr. Gaur did not simply take away our medicines and declare us better. That is not how it worked. He was always very respectful of our existing doctors. He never said anything against them. What he added was a level of understanding that nobody had offered before — about why the numbers were doing what they were doing, what was underneath them, and what could be changed that was not a tablet.
For Ramesh, the biggest change was something almost too simple to say: his diet was changed not just to “avoid sugar” but to actively nourish things in his body that had been depleted. He started a simple exercise routine structured differently than just “go for a morning walk.” After about three months, the fatigue that had settled over him for years began lifting. Not all at once — slowly, like fog thinning. By month five he was getting up from the sofa without that heavy effort we had both stopped noticing. We had normalised it so completely that when it was gone, we both felt it.
For me, the stiffness in the mornings. For years I had been sleeping poorly because of it, waking up feeling like I needed two hours to “warm up.” Dr. Gaur explained that this kind of morning stiffness is often the body’s internal inflammation speaking loudest in the early hours when the joints have been still. It is not simply age. By month four, I was getting out of bed and just — walking to the kitchen. No wincing. No warming up. I cried the first morning it happened. I had genuinely forgotten what that felt like.
Nikhil asked us one evening what the biggest change was. Ramesh said it was the energy. I said it was the freedom. Then we both said at the same time: it was the feeling of living again, not just managing. Jeena aur manage karna mein bahut fark hota hai. There is a very big difference between living and managing.
There are small things that matter more than the reports and the numbers. These are the things we want other families to hear.
People say the best gift you can give your parents is time. We think that is true. But Nikhil gave us something that made time worth having — he gave us the ability to actually use it. What is the point of more years if you spend them tired, medicated, and unable to do what you love? He did not give us a bigger television or a holiday. He gave us our health back. There is no price for that.
We are not saying we have no conditions anymore. Ramesh still has diabetes. My thyroid is still managed. We are 71 and 67 and we are not pretending to be 40. But there is a very large difference between having a condition and being defeated by it. Before CFOH, our conditions were winning. Now we feel like we are managing them — not the other way around.
To other families — especially the sons and daughters watching their parents slow down and assuming it is simply age: please look more carefully. Not everything that looks like ageing is ageing. Some of it is the body asking for a kind of attention it has never been given. That attention is what Dr. Gaur provides.
And to other couples our age — please do not accept fatigue and stiffness and tablets and fog as the price of getting older. It does not have to be this way. We are proof of that. Aur hamara beta bhi, jo itne pyaar se yahan leke aaya. And so is our son, who brought us here with so much love.