Ad copy

I almost killed a family on Interstate 40 last Tuesday. I want to say that out loud because I have not said it out loud and I am 56 years old and I have been driving a truck for 31 years and I have never come close to what I came close to at 4:17 in the morning outside Little Rock. I was eastbound on I-40 hauling a load of paper products to a distribution center in Memphis. Standard run. I'd done it 200 times. I left Oklahoma City at 11 PM. I'd had a 6 hour break before that. I was not over my hours. I was not low on sleep on paper. Somewhere around mile marker 152 I zoned out. I don't know how long. Could have been 2 seconds. Could have been 6. What I remember is the rumble strip on the right shoulder waking me up and then seeing the back of a minivan in my headlights about 80 feet ahead going 20 miles per hour slower than I was going. I jerked the wheel. I hit the brakes. The truck shifted. I got it straight. I missed the minivan by less than the length of my own hood. The driver was a woman. I saw her face in her mirror as I went past her in the left lane. There were car seats in the back. I could see the outline of a child sleeping in one of them. I drove for another 4 minutes and then I pulled into the Pilot at the West Memphis exit and I sat in the cab and I shook for 22 minutes. I'm going to tell you what happened in that truck stop because what a waitress named Earlene told me at 4:47 AM on a Tuesday morning probably saved more than my CDL. And I think there's somebody else out there reading this who needs to hear it. My name is Wayne. I'm 56 years old. I drive for a midsize carrier out of Memphis. Long haul, mostly Texas to Tennessee, some runs up to St. Louis when they need me. I've been married to my wife Carla for 33 years. We have two grown daughters, one in Knoxville and one in Jonesboro, and a granddaughter named Riley who's 6 and thinks my truck has a name and asks me what Big Blue is doing every time I call her. I started driving in 1994. I was 24 years old and I'd just gotten Carla pregnant with our oldest and I needed to make money and a guy I knew said the trucking school in Jackson was hiring out their graduates faster than they could train them. I went. I learned. I got my CDL. I have not had a moving violation in 28 of those 31 years. The two I had were in 1996 and 1998 and they were both speeding tickets in Arkansas, which if you've ever driven through Arkansas you understand. I'm a careful driver. I'm a boring driver. I run my pre-trip inspection like I'm being graded on it. I take my breaks. I sleep when I'm tired. I do not push. But I'd been losing time. That's the only way I know how to put it. I'd been losing pieces of trips. Not falling asleep. Not nodding off. Just sort of going somewhere else for a few seconds and coming back and not knowing how I got from one mile marker to the next. It started maybe 8 months ago. Carla had asked me a couple of times if I was sleeping okay. I'd told her I was fine. The doctor had checked me out for sleep apnea last fall and the test came back negative. But I'd been tired in a way that felt different than tired. Tired like my brain wasn't getting enough of something. Tired like the lights were on but somebody had turned the dimmer down to about 60 percent and forgotten to turn it back up. I'd been blaming it on the road. On 31 years of bad coffee and worse food. On the fact that I was 56 and my back hurt and my knees hurt and I was 22 pounds heavier than I'd been at 50. I had not been blaming it on anything that I could actually fix. When I pulled into that Pilot at 4:17 AM I was wearing the same flannel shirt I'd put on in Oklahoma City and my hands were shaking and I called Carla and she didn't answer because it was 2:17 AM her time and she's a heavy sleeper and we've had an agreement for 30 years that I don't call in the middle of the night unless something is on fire. I sat in my truck for those 22 minutes. I thought about the woman in the minivan. I thought about Riley. I thought about Carla waking up to a phone call that was not from me. Then I got out and I went inside the Pilot to get coffee. The diner part of the Pilot was almost empty. There was one trucker at the counter eating eggs. There was one couple in a booth who looked like they'd been driving all night to somewhere they didn't want to go. And there was a waitress behind the counter who was probably 58 or 59 with grey hair pulled back in a low ponytail and a name tag that said Earlene in cursive. She looked at me when I walked in. Did not say hello. Did not ask me what I wanted. She picked up the coffee pot and a clean cup and she walked over to a booth and put the cup down and pointed at it and said, "Sit." I sat. She poured the coffee. Sat down across from me in the booth. Put both her hands flat on the table. She said, "What just happened to you, baby." I have not been called baby by anyone except my wife in 33 years. Something in the way she said it broke me open in a way that the 22 minutes in the cab had not been able to. I told her. I told her about the minivan. About zoning out. About the rumble strip. About the woman's face in the mirror. About the car seats. I told her I had a 6 year old granddaughter who calls my truck Big Blue. I cried at a Formica table at 4:47 in the morning in front of a stranger named Earlene and I did not feel embarrassed about it because it was the first honest thing I had done in 8 months. She let me finish. She poured me more coffee. She did not speak until I was done. Then she said, "My brother drove for Yellow for 26 years. Lost his route in 2019 because he failed a roadside test for not being able to do the heel-to-toe walk. He'd been zoning out for two years. Told nobody. Wouldn't go to the doctor. Almost killed himself running off a bridge in Tupelo." I was listening. I was holding the coffee cup with both hands. "He thought it was the road. We thought it was the road. The doctor thought it was the road. It wasn't the road, baby. It was something else." She told me his name was Roy. He was 61 by the time he lost his job. He went to live with their mother for 4 months because he couldn't pay his bills. He was depressed. He was tired. He was not the man Earlene had grown up with. Then his daughter, who was a pharmacist in Tennessee, started reading about something. She brought it up to him on a Sunday at his mother's kitchen table. He did not want to hear it. He'd had enough people tell him what was wrong with him. But she kept at him. What she'd been reading about was a fruit called Amla. I'd never heard the word in my life. Amla. It's a small green fruit that grows on trees in India. The English name is Indian gooseberry. People have been using it as food and medicine in South Asia for over 3,000 years. Earlene said her brother started taking it about 4 months after he lost his job. Something one of the studies his daughter showed him said had to do with cellular energy. Said something about how the cells in your body produce energy and what happens when those cells are running on a low battery. Said that the fruit had been studied for what it does to oxidative stress and inflammation, which are the two things that wear those cells down faster than the calendar should. She said her brother had not been a tired old man. He had been a man whose cells were producing less energy than his life required. And nobody, not the doctor, not the company medical, not the sleep specialist who'd run him through the apnea test, had been looking at it. She said by the time her brother had been on Amla for 7 weeks he was driving a delivery route again. Local. Smaller truck. But he was driving. And he'd passed the heel-to-toe walk. She said, "Baby, I'm not telling you a fruit is going to fix you. I'm telling you what fixed my brother. And what my brother had was the same look you got on your face when you walked through that door." I asked her how to spell it. She wrote it down on the back of a paper menu. A. M. L. A. I drove the rest of the way to Memphis that morning at 60 miles an hour with both hands on the wheel and the radio off. I dropped my load. I drove home. I told Carla everything when she got back from work that night. She cried. Then she sat down at the kitchen table with our laptop and she started reading. I'm going to tell you what we read because I think a lot of guys my age are dealing with what I was dealing with and they don't have an Earlene in their life to put a hand on the table and call them baby. Inside every cell of your body are tiny structures called mitochondria. They're the part of the cell that makes energy. Your body has trillions of them. They're in your muscles. They're in your heart. They're in your brain. The brain alone uses about 20 percent of all the energy your body produces, even though it's only about 2 percent of your weight. When your mitochondria are working well, you feel sharp. You feel awake. You can drive a truck through Arkansas at 4 in the morning and stay focused on the road. When they're under siege, when oxidative stress and chronic low grade inflammation are wearing them down faster than they can recover, they make less energy. They make it less efficiently. And the body keeps demanding more, but the supply isn't there. So your brain dims. Your reaction time stretches. You zone out for 4 seconds at a stretch and you don't know why. Your bloodwork is fine. Your sleep test is fine. The doctor doesn't know what to look for because the problem is one layer deeper than what the standard tests measure. Amla, from what we read, has been studied for its effects on the very things that wear mitochondria down. It's high in antioxidants and polyphenols that have been associated with reduced oxidative stress. It's been linked to lower markers of inflammation. There's research that suggests it influences a pathway called AMPK, which is sort of a master energy switch in the cells. When AMPK is active, your cells get pushed toward producing energy more efficiently and your mitochondria get supported in doing what they're supposed to do. I'm not telling you this because I'm a doctor. I'm telling you what I read with my wife at our kitchen table after I almost killed a family on the interstate. Carla ordered Alevia Amla that night. I want to tell you why we picked Alevia over the other options. I'd looked at the cheap Amla powder on Amazon. The kind with the giant bag and the no name brand. Carla wouldn't let me. She said for something I was going to be putting in my body twice a day at 56 years old after a near miss on the interstate, we were going with the company that used the right form of the fruit, the one used in the actual studies, in a dose that lined up with the research. Alevia had a 90 day money back guarantee. That's what closed it for me. If a fruit doesn't do anything for me in 3 months, I get my money back. That's a fair deal. The bottle came on Friday. I took my first capsule on Saturday morning at 6:30 AM with my coffee. I told my dispatcher I needed two weeks off. I had the time built up. He didn't ask why. The first 9 days I felt nothing. I told Carla. She told me to keep going. Day 14 I went out to the driveway to clean out the cab. I'd been putting it off for 4 months because I didn't have the energy. I cleaned the whole cab in 3 hours. Vacuumed it. Wiped down the dash. Pulled out trash I'd been ignoring since June. I came inside and Carla looked at me and said, "Wayne, you look different." Day 22 I took Riley to the park. We were there for 2 hours. I ran. I actually ran. I have not run after a 6 year old in 4 years. She thought it was the funniest thing she'd ever seen. Day 31 I went back on the road. Same run. Oklahoma City to Memphis. Eastbound through Arkansas overnight. I drove the entire 8 hour stretch with my brain on. I did not lose a second. I did not zone out. I pulled into Memphis at 5:42 AM and I went to find a Pilot off the 240 and I bought a coffee and I sat in the cab and I called Carla because I needed to hear her voice. I have been on Alevia Amla for 4 and a half months as I'm typing this. I have not had a single zone out in 4 months of running my regular route. My dispatcher told me last week I'm running tighter ETAs than I was running 5 years ago. I asked Carla to start taking it too. She has been on it for 9 weeks. She told me last Sunday she has not needed an afternoon nap on the weekend in 6 weeks, which for Carla is something close to a miracle. I drove past the Pilot at the West Memphis exit two weeks ago. I went inside. Earlene was there. She remembered me. She poured me a coffee and sat down across from me and I told her what had happened. She cried. Wouldn't let me pay for the coffee. Told me her brother Roy was driving a regional route now and had been off everything but Amla for a year. If you're a man my age and you've been telling yourself that the fog and the fade and the slow draining of your battery is just part of getting older, I am here to tell you that it might not be. It might be one layer deeper than your doctor knows to look for. And there is a fruit that has been used for 3,000 years that has been studied for the very thing that's happening underneath everything else. I am not a man who writes things on Facebook. My wife is typing this for me as I dictate it because I do not know how to do this on my own. But I made a promise to a waitress named Earlene that if Amla worked the way her brother said it had worked for him, I would tell at least one other man what she told me. So this is me telling you. If you want to try it, Alevia Amla has a 90 day money back guarantee. You don't have to gamble. If it does nothing, you send it back. If it does what it did for me, you'll write your own version of this for somebody else 6 months from now. P.S. The minivan I almost hit. I think about that family every single day. I will think about them for the rest of my life. If the lady in that minivan is reading this somehow, I am sorry. I am so sorry. I have spent every day since then trying to be a man who deserves the second chance you didn't know you gave me. P.P.S. The 90 day money back guarantee is what made me pull the trigger. I am not a man who throws money at things. Carla can confirm this. The guarantee was the difference between thinking about it and actually doing it. Alevia is the only company I've found that will refund the full purchase, no restocking fee, no questions, if you don't see what you came for. I respect a company that puts its money where its mouth is. P.P.P.S. Earlene's brother Roy and I are now Facebook friends. He sent me a message last month. He told me he runs his regional route through West Memphis on Thursdays and if I'm ever passing through to stop and have a coffee with him at the Pilot. We're going to do it next week. P.P.P.P.S. To the guy reading this in his cab right now in a truck stop somewhere off an interstate, with a load to deliver in the morning and 8 months of zone outs you haven't told anybody about. Call your wife. Tell her what's been happening. Don't wait for the rumble strip. 👉 https://alevia.com/amla/33