Laura Peterson Facebook ad: “Feel Like Yourself Again”

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I told the man at the shoe store that my toes had felt asleep for 6 years and he sat down on the fitting stool and looked at me for so long I thought I had offended him. His name was Emilio. His store was called Zia Boot and Shoe, on Main Street in Roswell, New Mexico, and I had walked in on a Wednesday afternoon in the middle of April because my Skechers had finally given out and I needed a pair of walking shoes for my husband Bill's cousin's daughter's wedding in June. I had said, "Do you have anything wider in a 7. I have a hard time feeling my toes so I need a little room to know they're in there." I said it lightly, the way you make a joke about a thing you have made peace with. Emilio did not laugh. He sat down on the low stool where the shoe fitters sit and he put a shoe box down beside him and he looked at me across the top of it. He was about my age. Deep lines. Salt in his mustache. A gold cross on a chain visible at the open collar of his blue button down. He said, "How long has that been going on." I said, "Oh, a while." He said, "How long is a while." I said, "Six years, maybe. Longer if I'm being honest." He said, "Ma'am, when you say you can't feel your toes, what do you mean." I want to stop the story right there for a second, because I don't know if a stranger has ever asked me anything like that in my entire life. Six years of my toes feeling like they were somebody else's toes, and 4 different doctors, and my husband Bill, and my sister Yvette in Artesia, and none of them had ever asked me exactly what I meant by it. They had all nodded. They had all said the word "circulation" or the word "neuropathy" or the word "aging" and moved on. Nobody had ever said "when you say you can't feel your toes, what do you mean." My name is Dorothy. I am 63 years old. I was the postmaster at the Roswell, New Mexico main post office on Ballard Street for 34 years before I retired in the spring of 2022, and if you had asked anybody in this town about me before I retired, they would have told you I was the woman with the tightest ship in the state, and I would have taken that as a compliment. What they would not have told you was that for the last 8 years of my career I had been walking around that post office lobby with my toes feeling like they were made of wood. Not painful wood. Just wood. Like there was a small sock stuffed into the front of every shoe I owned. Like the ends of my feet had gone somewhere else and left something else in their place. I would come home at the end of a shift and take my shoes off and rub the balls of my feet on the carpet in the living room, and I would feel the carpet with the middle of my foot but I would not feel it with my toes. I first noticed it around 55. Just after long shifts. I told myself it was standing on concrete for 9 hours. By 58 it was there in the morning too. I would put my socks on and I could feel the sock on the top of my foot but not really on my toes. I told myself it was the compression socks I'd started wearing. Too tight. By 60 it was there all the time. I saw my regular doctor, Sabrina, who I've been with since she took over the practice in 2016. She checked my blood sugar, which was fine. She checked my B12. She said "you're not diabetic, Dorothy, and your labs look good." She told me to keep walking and to stay hydrated and to come back in a year. I went to a podiatrist over in Artesia my sister Yvette recommended. He looked at my feet and pressed on them with a plastic thing and I felt the pressure but not the point, and he said "some peripheral neuropathy, mild, common at your age, nothing to worry about," and he sold me a pair of $190 orthotics and told me to wear them every day. I wore them every day for 2 years. My toes still felt like wood. I saw a specialist in Albuquerque one time. It was a 4 hour drive each way. He said the same thing the podiatrist said, in different words. He said "this is what happens." He said "we'll monitor it." He said "let's do another EMG in 18 months." I did not go back. I want you to understand what it does to a person to have doctors tell you for 6 years that a real thing happening in your body is nothing to worry about. You start to believe them. And you start to believe yourself less. You start to walk around thinking you must be a woman who complains about things. A woman who exaggerates. A woman whose body has just gotten old and she needs to accept it. And you don't tell people about it anymore. You don't tell Bill. You don't tell Yvette. You don't tell your sons who live in Albuquerque and El Paso. Because they will nod and say "circulation" or "neuropathy" or "aging" and move on, and every time somebody says one of those words to you it makes you feel a little more alone than you were before. So you stop saying it. You stop taking your shoes off in the living room in front of Bill. You stop going to the pool at the Y with Yvette because the tile is cold and you can't feel the tile and you don't like walking on something you can't feel while she watches you. You stop making the trip out to Bottomless Lakes with your grandkids because the sand at the swimming beach is uneven and you don't like not feeling the sand under your toes when you step, and you don't want to have your grandkids see their grandma walking like she isn't sure where the ground is. You stop wearing sandals altogether. That is what 6 years of your toes feeling asleep does to a person. It makes you a woman who wears closed toe shoes in July in New Mexico. Which is why I walked into Zia Boot and Shoe on Main Street in Roswell on a Wednesday afternoon in April looking for a wider 7 for Bill's cousin's daughter's wedding, and made a small joke to a shoe fitter about the fact that I couldn't feel my toes. Emilio did not laugh. He asked me what I meant. I said, "I mean when I put a shoe on I can't tell if my toes are all the way in there. I mean when I walk on the carpet I can feel the carpet with the middle of my foot but not the tips. I mean I don't know if the water in the shower is too hot on my feet until it's already been running for a minute. I mean I got in the bath 3 weeks ago and I burned the top of my left foot because I couldn't feel that the water was too hot at the drain end, and Bill had to put ointment on it." I hadn't told anybody about the burn. I told a stranger in a shoe store about the burn. Emilio nodded. He did not react. He did not tell me it was aging. He said, "Do you have 20 minutes." I said, "I have as long as it takes to buy a pair of walking shoes." He said, "I'm going to get you the shoes. First I want you to come sit in the back with me for 15 minutes. There's some coffee back there. I want to tell you what my son told me 3 years ago." Zia Boot and Shoe has been on Main Street in Roswell since 1962. Emilio's father opened it. Emilio took it over in 1994. There is a hand painted sign in the window that says "our shoes are for feet, not for looks." There is a bell over the door. There is a small statue of San Crispín, the patron saint of shoemakers, on a shelf above the register. The back office was smaller than my old office at the post office. A metal desk. A folding chair for the customer. A drip coffee pot on top of a filing cabinet, the kind with the little basket you put the ground coffee in. A calendar from a leather supply company. And on the desk, in a wooden frame with a chipped corner, a picture of a young man in a white coat holding a stethoscope. I asked who that was. Emilio poured me a cup of coffee. He said, "My son Mateo. He's a physician assistant at a clinic in Las Cruces. He is the reason I walked in here 3 years ago and stopped feeling like my father in the last year of his life." I did not follow. Emilio sat down at the desk. He held his own coffee cup in both hands. He looked at me across the desk the way you look at someone you are about to tell something serious to. He said, "My father died at 68 with feet that had felt like blocks of wood for the last 6 years of his life. He couldn't feel the pedals on his truck. He gave up driving at 65 because of it. He gave up dancing with my mother at 63. By the time he was 66 he was walking on his heels because his toes wouldn't tell him where the ground was, and he fell in the driveway one morning in December of 1997 and broke his hip, and he never really came back from it." He said, "When I was 65 I started feeling it in my own feet. And I thought, of course. He was 65 when it hit him. My grandfather was 60 when it hit him. This is the Ortega men. This is what we are. This is what we get." He said, "Then my son Mateo came home for Easter of 2022 and I told him what I told nobody else. And he did not do what the doctors did. He asked me exactly what I meant. And then he told me what he'd been learning at the clinic in Las Cruces from the older PAs who had been reading up on this." Emilio said his son had told him this. He said the feet are the end of a long delivery route. Everything the body sends out to the feet has to travel all the way down there through the smallest blood vessels the body has, the ones farthest from the heart. And those small blood vessels don't work by themselves. They work because of a signal the body makes on the inside of the vessels, a signal called nitric oxide. And that signal is the thing that tells the small vessels in your feet to open up and let the blood through. He said when the signal is working, the blood reaches the ends of your toes and the nerves in your toes and everything works the way it did when you were 25. He said the signal gets worn down over the years. Every year of stress wears it down. Every processed meal. Every environmental thing you have been in contact with. Your body starts to produce more of something called oxidative stress, which he described to Emilio like rust building up on the inside of the vessels. The rust attacks the nitric oxide signal the moment your body makes it. The signal gets destroyed before it can do its job. The small vessels at the ends of your feet stay tighter than they should. The blood doesn't reach the nerves the way it used to. And the nerves in your toes stop reporting for duty. That is not being made of wood. That is nerves not getting the delivery they've been getting for 60 years. Emilio said his son had drawn him a picture. A heart. A long line down to a foot. And then little X marks all along the line. He said Mateo had told him, "Dad, it isn't nothing. It's a real thing. It's happening in the delivery route between your heart and your toes." I sat in that folding chair with my coffee getting cold, and I felt something in my chest that I had not felt in 6 years. Which was the feeling of somebody explaining a thing to me. I said, "So what did Mateo tell you to do." Emilio said Mateo had come home 6 weeks later with a bottle and set it on this desk right where the coffee cup was now. A small amber bottle. Auniva. Organic pomegranate peel extract. Standardized to punicalagins. 2 capsules a day. Made in the USA. Emilio said Mateo had told him the punicalagins are compounds specifically found in the peel of the pomegranate, which most people throw away. He said they had been studied for how they support the body's own antioxidant defenses, the ones that protect the nitric oxide signal from getting attacked and destroyed before it can do its job. He said Mateo had told him this. That most of the products on the shelf are not this. Pomegranate juice is not this. Pomegranate seeds are not this. Most pomegranate extract products you can buy at the supplement store are standardized to something called ellagic acid, which is a different compound found in a lot of fruits, and it doesn't reliably tell you if the punicalagins are actually in the bottle. The punicalagins are in the peel of the pomegranate. Auniva's is a peel extract, standardized to the punicalagins. Emilio had been taking it for 2 years and 8 months. I asked him what happened. He said the first month, nothing. He said the second month, one thing. He was walking from the store to his truck at the end of a Tuesday and he stepped on a small pebble in the parking lot and he felt the pebble. He said, "I stopped in the middle of the parking lot. I looked down at my shoe. I felt for the pebble again with the ball of my foot. And it was there. Under the front of my foot. I could feel it." He said his eyes had watered right there in the Zia Boot and Shoe parking lot on Main Street. He said his feet had come back in stages. First the pebble. Then he could tell hot bath water from warm bath water. Then he could feel the pedals in the truck without thinking about it. Then he was walking barefoot on the wood floor at his house at night without looking down. He said by month 6 he had gone dancing with his wife Iliana for the first time in 4 years. He said, "Ma'am, my father died with feet made of wood. I am 68 years old and I danced with my wife last Saturday. I am not the same man as my father. I am not sitting here telling you it will happen this way for you. I am telling you what happened for me." I sat there with the picture of Mateo on the desk in front of me. I said, "How do I get it." He said, "I'll write it down for you." He wrote it on the back of a Zia Boot and Shoe business card in blue pen. Auniva. He wrote auniva.co/pom/5 underneath. He told me the last thing he told me. He said, "Auniva has a 90 day money back guarantee. If it doesn't do anything for you, you send the bottle back and they refund you every penny. My son said that was the piece he wanted me to know. That there wasn't a risk. Just 90 days." I bought the walking shoes. He gave me a wider 7 in a soft leather. I paid at the register and I put the business card in my wallet next to my USPS retiree ID. I sat in my car in the Zia Boot and Shoe parking lot for a few minutes before I drove home. I looked at the card. I looked at my feet on the pedals. I couldn't feel the brake under my right toes. I could feel the pressure but not the pedal. I ordered the bottle from the URL that night at my kitchen table after Bill had gone to bed. I did not tell Bill. I want to tell you what happened over the next 9 weeks and I want to tell you honestly. Week 1, nothing. I took 2 capsules with my coffee at 6 AM. I went about my days. My toes felt exactly the same. Week 2, nothing. Week 3, nothing. I want you to hear me on that. I want you to hear me on the fact that for 3 weeks I took those capsules every morning and I felt exactly like a woman whose toes had felt asleep for 6 years and were still asleep. I almost stopped. Bill would have never known. Week 4 was the shower. Wednesday morning. I stepped into the shower and I turned the water on and it was too hot. I noticed it right away. Not after a minute. Right away. On my feet. On the tops of my feet. And I stepped back and I turned the tap and I stood in the running water and I looked down at my own toes for a long time. I didn't cry in the shower. But I stood there long enough that Bill knocked on the door and asked if I was okay. I said, "I'm okay. I'm okay. I'll be out in a minute." Week 5 was the mail. We have a set of concrete steps up to our front door, 4 steps, and I walked up them in flip flops after checking the mailbox on a Saturday morning and I felt the ridge of the concrete under the ball of my left foot and then under my toes. Both toes. The big toe and the second toe. Sensation. Real sensation. In April I couldn't have told you if the concrete was wet or dry under my foot without looking. In May, on that Saturday, I could tell. I called my sister Yvette that afternoon. I told her about the concrete. She said "Dot, are you crying," and I said, "a little." Week 6, Bill. Bill and I were sitting on the back porch in the evening. He was drinking a Modelo. I had my walking shoes off on the mat by the door and my bare feet on the porch boards. It was 72 degrees. I was moving my toes on the boards without thinking about it, and I could feel the grain of the wood under my feet. Bill looked over. He said, "Dot, what are you doing with your feet." I said, "I'm feeling the porch." He said, "Since when." I said, "Sit down. Let me tell you a story." I told him about Emilio. About the shoe store. About Mateo. About Emilio's father. About the pebble. About the shower on Wednesday. About the concrete on Saturday. About the URL on the back of the Zia Boot and Shoe business card. Bill listened for the whole thing without interrupting. When I was done he set his beer down and he said, "Dorothy Ann. Why on earth would you not have told me." I said, "Because I didn't think it was going to work." He said, "Do you know how many mornings I have watched you check your feet and pretend you weren't checking." I did not know that. Week 7, Bill's cousin's daughter's wedding. The wedding was at a family ranch north of Roswell. There was an outdoor ceremony under a big cottonwood tree. There was a reception under a white tent. And there was a part of the reception, near the end, where the DJ had everybody take their shoes off and come dance on the grass. I want you to picture me at this wedding. I had known about the shoes off part all week. I had almost told Bill I wasn't going to do it. My cousins would have understood. Nobody would have thought anything of it. The DJ made the announcement. Everybody kicked off their shoes. Yvette looked over at me across the table with a small careful expression on her face, and I saw her decide not to say anything. I reached down. I unbuckled my left sandal. I unbuckled my right sandal. I stepped out of them. The grass was cool. I could feel it. I felt it with the balls of my feet and I felt it with the arches and I felt it with my toes. Both feet. All 10 toes. Cold grass. A little damp from the sprinklers. A twig in one spot that I stepped around instead of onto because I could feel it and I knew where it was. I walked out to the middle of the grass and Bill took my hand and we danced to a Selena song from 1994, and I could feel every step. Yvette was watching me from the table. When I got back she stood up and hugged me and she said, "Dot, what did you do." I told her. She ordered a bottle the next morning. Week 8, I called Emilio. I went into Zia Boot and Shoe on a Wednesday afternoon in June. The bell over the door rang. Emilio came out from behind the register. I did not need shoes. I said, "Emilio." He said, "Ma'am." I said, "I could feel the grass at the wedding." He put his hand over his mouth. He nodded. He didn't say anything for a second. Then he said, "Come on back. There's coffee." We sat in the back office again. He asked me the details. I told him the pebble equivalent, which was the concrete on the front steps. I told him the water in the shower. I told him about my toes on the porch boards. I told him about the twig on the grass. He said, "I'm glad." He said, "Some people I tell don't come back to tell me. Some people do. I don't ever know which." I want to be careful with you about what I'm saying. I am not telling you that the feeling in my toes is 25 years old again. I am not telling you the numbness is gone. Some mornings my toes still feel a little muted when I first get out of bed. Some evenings after a long day of walking, the balls of my feet feel a little tired in a way they didn't when I was 40. What I am telling you is that a woman who had not felt cold tile on her feet in 6 years walked out of her guest bathroom in bare feet last Sunday morning and thought "the floor is cold" without looking down, and then stopped in the hallway because she realized what had just happened. What I am telling you is that I have a card in my wallet from a shoe store on Main Street in Roswell, New Mexico, with a website written on the back in blue pen, that a stranger wrote out for me on a Wednesday afternoon in April because his son had told him and his son had told him and nobody else had. If you are the woman who stopped taking her shoes off in front of her husband, or the woman who stopped going to the beach with her grandkids, or the woman who burned the top of her foot in the bath 3 weeks ago and didn't tell anybody, I want you to know something. There is a woman in Roswell, New Mexico who was doing all of those things a year ago, and she is telling you what a stranger in a shoe store told her. The company is Auniva. The product is their organic concentrated pomegranate peel extract, standardized to the punicalagins from the peel, not to ellagic acid like most of the products on the shelves. 2 capsules a day. Made in the USA. They give you 90 days. If it isn't working for you, you send the bottle back and they refund every penny. That is what let me press the order button on a Wednesday night in April at my kitchen table with a business card in front of me. You can order it from the same URL Emilio wrote on the back of that card. 👉 https://auniva.co/pom/5 P.S. I want to say one more thing about the peel, because I almost missed it. I would have gone to Albertsons the next morning and picked up a bottle of pomegranate juice and drunk it every day and nothing would have happened. The punicalagins are in the peel. Not the seeds and not the juice. Most of the extract products on the shelf are standardized to ellagic acid, which is a different compound found in a lot of fruits and doesn't reliably tell you if the punicalagins are in there. Auniva standardizes to the punicalagins from the peel. That is the whole difference. It is why Mateo told his father. It is why Emilio told me. It is why I use theirs. P.P.S. About the 90 days. It is a return guarantee. If it isn't working for you at day 89, you send the bottle back to Auniva and they refund you. That is the piece that let me sit at my kitchen table at 9 PM on a Wednesday and press order. I did not know if it would work. I knew the risk was 90 days of trying, and I had already spent 6 years not trying anything. P.P.P.S. If you order it, do not sit on your couch on day 4 waiting to feel something happen. That is not how this works. Emilio said it to me and I say it to you. You take the 2 capsules with your coffee. You live your Tuesday and your Wednesday and your Thursday. And one Wednesday morning 4 or 5 weeks in, you step into the shower and the water is too hot on your feet and you notice it right away, and you stand in the shower with the water running and you look down at your own toes and you know. 👉 https://auniva.co/pom/5

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Feel Like Yourself Again

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