Nerve Support Community Facebook ad: “Feel Like Yourself Again”

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I found my husband sitting on the edge of the bed at 4:12 in the morning rubbing his feet. He did not know I was awake. The bedroom light was off. There was just the blue glow from the alarm clock on the nightstand and the sound of his hands moving over his own feet like he was trying to warm them up. I laid there and watched him for a full minute. He was leaning forward with his elbows on his knees and his palms wrapped around the tops of his feet, working his thumbs into the arches. His mouth was set in that hard line he gets when he does not want to make a sound. I finally said, "Ronnie." He jumped. Actually jumped. Like he was a kid caught eating cookies. He said, "Go back to sleep, Wanda. I'm fine." I said, "You are not fine. It is 4 in the morning and you are rubbing your feet like they are on fire." He was quiet for a long time. Then he said, "They kind of are." We have been married 38 years. Ronnie Caudill has never once used the word "kind of" about pain. That man broke his collarbone in 1994 loading a pallet of Doritos and drove himself home to Pikeville from Lexington on Route 23 in a Frito-Lay truck with his arm hanging off his shoulder. He does not do "kind of." Which is how I knew. Let me back up. My name is Wanda. I'm 61 years old. I live in a double wide on 3 acres off Route 194 outside Pikeville, Kentucky, about 4 miles up from where the Big Sandy River comes through. My husband Ronnie is 63. I retired 2 years ago from cooking in the cafeteria at Bob Amos Elementary, where I worked for 22 years. I fed most of the second grade class in Pike County chicken nuggets and green beans, and I know that half of them are now grown men working the mines or the pipeline or driving trucks. I still get hugs at the Food City from boys who are 6 feet tall and remember me by name. Ronnie drove a Frito-Lay route out of the Prestonsburg warehouse for 32 years. His route ran up through Martin and Betsy Layne and out to Wheelwright and back. Same route, same stores, same order every week for three decades. He knew the name of every stock boy and every store manager and every dog behind every counter. He worked the route in snow, in floods, in the 2015 ice storm that had power out for 8 days. He never called in sick. Not one time. He retired 3 years ago. The plan was he was going to spend more time at Fishtrap Lake with his grandson Bryson. He was going to fix up the little aluminum john boat that had been sitting behind our shed since 2019. He was going to teach Bryson to run trot lines the way his own daddy taught him on the Levisa Fork in 1972. That was the plan. That was not what happened. The trouble started about a year before he retired. Just a tingling in his toes at night. He told me it was because he stood on the truck floor all day and his boots were too tight. He bought new boots. It kept happening. Then it was a burning. Down deep, he said. Like his feet were sunburned on the inside. It would wake him up at 2 or 3 in the morning and he would go sit on the couch and put his feet on the coffee table and just stare at them. Then it was the numbness during the day. He told me one Sunday after church, over a plate of beans and cornbread, that he had not been able to feel the gas pedal in the truck for almost a week. He had to look down to make sure his foot was in the right spot. He was on Route 23 doing 65 miles an hour with a full load of chips behind him and he could not feel his own foot on the pedal. That was 2021. He drove that route for another 6 months. He would not tell his boss. He would not tell his doctor. He would not tell me the truth about how bad it was getting. I finally made him go to the clinic. The doctor there tested his sugar. His sugar was fine. His A1C was normal. The doctor said, "Well, it looks like some kind of neuropathy. We usually see this in diabetics, but you're not diabetic. Sometimes it just happens with age. There's a pill I can put you on for the nerve pain. It might help. It might not. It might make you sleepy." That was the whole conversation. Ronnie took the pill for 4 months. It made him sleepy. It did not make his feet stop burning. It did not make his feet come back during the day. The doctor doubled it. Then he added a second pill. Then he added a cream. None of it did anything. Ronnie retired on schedule in March 2022. He came home from the last day at the Prestonsburg warehouse with a plaque and a $50 Cracker Barrel gift card and a look on his face I had never seen before. He said, "Wanda, I don't know what I'm going to do." I thought he meant he did not know what to do with his time. That is what men say when they retire. I was wrong. He meant he did not know what to do with his feet. He tried to work on the boat. He would go out to the shed after breakfast and I would hear the compressor kick on. 20 minutes later I would look out the kitchen window and he would be sitting on an overturned bucket next to the boat with his boots off, working his toes. He tried to fish. Bryson would come over on Saturdays and Ronnie would drive them out to Fishtrap Lake. Bryson would fish. Ronnie would sit in the folding chair with his feet in the water. He told me the cold water was the only thing that helped. He would sit there for 3 hours and drive home and be so tired from just sitting that he would fall asleep in his recliner before dinner. He tried to walk. Our next door neighbor Judy said walking was supposed to help nerve issues. Ronnie tried to walk our driveway. It is a quarter mile long. He would get halfway down and have to turn around. By the summer of 2023 he had stopped going to church. Not because he did not want to go. Because sitting on the pew for 45 minutes made his feet burn so bad he could not concentrate on the sermon and he was embarrassed to be shifting around. Our pastor Brother Wells came by the house 3 times to check on him. Ronnie told him he was fine. Ronnie is a proud man. He stopped picking up Bryson from the bus stop on Wednesdays. Bryson is 9. Ronnie had been picking him up every Wednesday since kindergarten. He told Bryson's mama Kaycee it was because his back was bothering him. That was a lie. It was his feet. He could not trust his feet on the gravel by the bus stop. The Wednesday he stopped picking up Bryson was the day I knew we were losing him. Not losing him in a dramatic way. Losing him the way you lose someone who is still sitting right next to you on the couch. He was still there. He was just quieter. He was still Ronnie. He was just less of him every month. I want to say something about that, because I think there are women reading this who know what I'm talking about. When your husband stops being the man he was, it does not happen all at once. It happens the way water leaves a bathtub. Slow. Quiet. You do not notice the level dropping until one day you look down and there is barely anything left. Ronnie was 195 pounds of Eastern Kentucky truck driver who could sling 40 pound cases of Fritos onto a two wheeler for 32 years without breaking a sweat. He built the deck on our double wide with his own hands in 2003. He killed a copperhead in our yard in 2018 with a garden hoe and did not even mention it until dinner. That is who he was. By last October, he was a man who sat in a recliner at 4 in the afternoon with his feet in a bucket of ice water. The night I found him at 4:12 was 2 weeks after the porch step. Let me tell you about the porch step. We have 4 steps up to the front deck of our double wide. Ronnie built them. They are pressure treated 2 by 6 with a decent handrail. On a Tuesday afternoon in October he was carrying a load of groceries in from the truck and his right foot did not land where he thought it did. His foot rolled and he went down on his knee and dropped a plastic bag of eggs and a gallon of milk on the concrete pad in front of the steps. I heard the noise from inside. I came out on the porch and Ronnie was sitting on the steps with his elbow bleeding through his flannel shirt and the milk pouring out sideways across the concrete and 6 broken eggs at his feet. He looked up at me and he said, "I could not feel where the step was." That was the whole sentence. I sat down on the step next to him and I put my hand on his back and I did not say anything for a long time. He did not want me to say anything. He wanted me to just sit there. So I sat there. That was a Tuesday. The next Tuesday I drove into Pikeville to the Food City on North Mayo Trail because I needed to pick up a prescription for my thyroid medicine. Our daughter in law Kaycee works the pharmacy counter there. She married our son Dustin in 2014. She is 34 years old and she is one of those young women who has more sense than most people twice her age. She rang up my prescription and she said, "Wanda, you look tired." I said, "Ronnie fell off the porch." She stopped moving. She said, "Is he okay?" I said, "Yeah. Skinned his elbow. But Kaycee, he could not feel the step. He said it out loud. He could not feel where his foot was going." Kaycee did not say anything for a second. She just looked at me. Then she said, "Wanda, come back here for a minute." She walked me around behind the pharmacy counter to a little back corner where they have a table and a coffee maker for the pharmacy techs on break. She had me sit down. She said, "You know my mom's cousin Ellis, up in Louisa? He drove coal trucks for 30 years. Same problem. Feet burning at night, going numb during the day, no diabetes, no answers from any of the doctors he saw. He fell off his back porch in July of last year. Broke his wrist." I said I did not know. She said, "Aunt Sherry started him on something in August. He is walking his dog every morning again. He came to my mom's Christmas in December and he was standing up telling stories in the kitchen the whole night. He had not stood up at Christmas in 4 years." I said, "What is it?" She reached into her purse under the table and pulled out a small brown bottle. She said, "I keep one in my purse because I was going to bring it by the house next week. I have been meaning to talk to you about it for a month, Wanda, but I did not want to be pushy." She set the bottle in front of me on the break table. It said Auniva on the top. Underneath that it said Amla. I said, "Amla." She said, "It's a berry. From India. I know. I said the same thing to Aunt Sherry. But hear me out." Kaycee has a bachelor's in pharmacy tech and 11 years working behind a pharmacy counter. She is not the type of woman who sells you a berry from India. So I heard her out. She said, "Everything the clinic gave Ronnie works on the pain signal. The nerve is screaming. The pill tries to quiet the nerve down. It does not do anything about why the nerve is screaming. The nerve is screaming because it does not have enough energy to work right." I said, "Energy." She said, "Nerve cells are some of the most energy hungry cells in your whole body. They need more fuel than almost any other cell you have. And that fuel is made by little parts inside the cells called mitochondria. Think of them as tiny power plants. As we age, and with everything modern life throws at us, those little power plants start running down. And the nerve cells are usually the first ones to feel it, because they need so much." I said, "Okay." She said, "When the nerve cells do not have enough energy, they cannot keep up with the maintenance work they need to do. The little coating around the nerve, called the myelin sheath, that's what protects the signal. When the cell does not have enough energy to keep the coating in good shape, the signal gets scrambled. That is the burning at night. That is the numbness during the day. That is why Ronnie could not feel where the step was." I sat there with the bottle in my hand. Kaycee said, "This berry helps activate a pathway called AMPK. It is a switch your body already has. It is what helps those little power plants start working better again. When AMPK is active, the mitochondria can make more energy, the way they used to when he was 30. That energy can flow back to the nerve cells. And because the nerve cells are the hungriest, they can be some of the first ones to feel a difference." I said, "How do you know this?" She said, "Aunt Sherry sent me an article. I read it 3 times. Then I called the pharmacist here, Mr. Damron, and asked him. He said the science on Amla is real. He said he has been reading about it for about 5 years. He said if his own daddy would take it he would put him on it. His daddy will not take anything. But mine will, and I already talked to Uncle Ellis about how he takes it and he told me the whole story. That's how I know." She flipped the bottle over. She said, "Look. 90 day money back guarantee. Made in USA. 60 capsules. 2 a day. If it doesn't help, you send it back. You do not lose a thing." I said, "How much." She said, "$49." I put the bottle in my purse. I told her I was going to talk to Ronnie about it that night. That night at dinner I set the bottle on the kitchen table next to the sweet tea. Ronnie looked at it and looked at me and said, "Wanda, what is that." I told him. He said, "A berry." I said, "Yes." He said, "From India." I said, "Yes." He said, "You know I do not go in for that kind of thing." I said, "Ronnie. You have been sitting on the edge of the bed at 4 in the morning rubbing your feet for 2 years. You could not feel the porch step. You have not put a line in Fishtrap Lake since May. Bryson has not been in this house on a Wednesday afternoon in 6 months. What do you have to lose. If it does not work you send it back." He was quiet for a long time. He looked at his plate. He looked at the bottle. He looked out the kitchen window at the shed where the boat was sitting. He said, "Alright, Wanda." I ordered it that night from the same address Kaycee had written down. 2 days later a small box came in the mail. Ronnie opened it at the kitchen table. He held the bottle up to the light like he was looking for something suspicious. Then he opened the seal and took 2 capsules with his coffee. The first 2 weeks, nothing. He was patient about it. Ronnie has patience the way some men have humor. He would take his 2 pills every morning and go about his day and not say a word. Week 3 was the first thing. He came in from the porch at about 6 in the morning. I was making biscuits. He stood in the kitchen doorway and said, "Wanda, I want to tell you something and I want you to not make a big deal out of it." I said okay. He said, "The steps did not feel like nothing this morning. I felt the wood under my foot. Both feet." I stopped rolling out biscuits. I said, "Ronnie." He said, "I said don't make a big deal out of it. It might be nothing. I just wanted to tell somebody." He turned around and walked back out onto the porch and sat in his rocker and drank his coffee. I made biscuits and I did not say a word and I did not cry over the flour. I got in the shower and I cried in there. Week 4, he woke up at 6 AM instead of getting up at 4. He did not know he had done it until I told him. He said, "I did not feel my feet last night." Not with sadness. With surprise. Like a man realizing he had gotten a full night's sleep for the first time in 3 years. Week 5, he went into the shed. He was in there for 2 hours. When he came in he said, "That boat is going to need more work than I remembered." He said it the way a man says something he is looking forward to. Week 6, he picked Bryson up from the bus stop. Bryson was so surprised he could not say anything. He got in the truck and Ronnie drove him home to Kaycee and Dustin's house and Kaycee texted me a photo of the two of them coming up her front walk. Bryson was holding Ronnie's hand. She wrote under the photo, "He said he could feel Bryson's hand today, Wanda. He told me before he even said hello." I have looked at that photo maybe 400 times. Week 8, he took Bryson to Fishtrap Lake. Standing in the boat. Not sitting in a folding chair with his feet in the water. Standing. In his old fishing boots that had been on a shelf in the shed for a year and a half. Week 12, he built a birdhouse for our back yard. From scratch. His own design. He measured with the tape measure between his teeth the way he used to. He cut the pieces on the miter saw. He nailed it together in the shed and hung it on the maple tree by the kitchen window. There is a pair of chickadees in it right now. We are 5 months in. Ronnie is not the man he was at 30. Nobody is at 63. He still takes his time on stairs. He still stretches his feet in the morning before he stands up. But he stands up and he walks. And he feels the floor. And he feels the gas pedal. And he feels Bryson's hand. Here is what Kaycee wrote out for me on a piece of pharmacy paper, because I made her write it down so I could read it back to Ronnie and to my sister Marlene and to Judy next door. The cells in your nerves need energy to keep their protective coating in good shape, to send signals right, and to stay healthy. Nerve cells need more energy than almost any other cell in your body. That energy is made by tiny power plants inside every cell called mitochondria. As you get older, and with everything modern life piles onto your body, those power plants start to wear down. They do not make as much energy as they used to. The nerve cells feel it first, because they are the hungriest. When they do not have enough energy, the coating around them starts to slip. The signal gets scrambled. That is the burning. That is the tingling. That is the numbness. That is why you cannot feel the porch step. Amla helps activate a pathway called AMPK. AMPK is one of the switches your body uses to help those little power plants start running better. When AMPK is switched on, the mitochondria can make more energy again. That energy flows back to the nerve cells. And because the nerve cells are the hungriest, they can be some of the first ones to feel the difference. Amla is also one of the highest antioxidant foods that has ever been measured. It helps protect the mitochondria from the wear and tear that ran them down in the first place. Modern life is hard on those little power plants. Amla is like shade for them. That is why the nerve pill did not work. The nerve pill was trying to quiet down a signal. The signal was screaming because the nerve did not have any fuel. Amla goes further back in the line. It works on the fuel. I did not understand any of that when Kaycee first told me. I understand it now, because I watched my husband stand up in a boat at Fishtrap Lake in April and reel in a 4 pound bass and net it himself. I am writing this on my own because Ronnie is not the kind of man who tells his business to strangers. But I am writing it because I know how many women in this part of the country are watching their husbands or their brothers or their fathers slowly go quiet. Coal miners. Truck drivers. Linemen. Farmers. Men whose bodies did too much for too long and are now being told by clinic doctors that this is just aging and here is a pill to quiet down the noise. It is not just aging. It is cells running out of fuel. And there is something you can do about the fuel. Auniva's Amla is $49 for a 30 day bottle. 2 capsules a day. Made in USA. Free shipping. And they give you 90 days to try it. If it does not do what it did for Ronnie, you send the bottle back and you get every dollar back. Nobody at the clinic in Pikeville ever offered us our money back on the nerve pill. Or the second nerve pill. Or the cream. Or the sleep pill they gave him when the burning was keeping him up. Nobody in that whole system has ever offered us a refund. Auniva does. If you want to try it, this is where I ordered ours. 👉 https://auniva.co/amla/33 P.S. Ronnie went to church last Sunday. Sat through the whole service. Sang 4 hymns. Shook Brother Wells's hand at the door. Brother Wells looked at him for a long minute and then just said, "Welcome home, Ronnie." I do not think Brother Wells knew what he was really saying. But I did. Ronnie has not been home for a long time. He is home now. P.P.S. About that 90 day guarantee. I want you to really hear this. You buy the bottle. You take 2 capsules a day. If in 90 days you are not feeling a difference, you send it back and you get your money back. Every dollar. That is the whole deal. Compare that to any prescription in your medicine cabinet. Compare it to the copay on the last clinic visit that told you nothing. Compare it to the nerve cream you tried last summer that did not work. Nobody offers you your money back on something they know does not work. And nobody offers you your money back on something they are unsure about. The people at Auniva have that guarantee for one reason. Because they have seen what this does for people. And they know what happens when you give it 90 days. P.P.P.S. I want to say something to the women watching a husband disappear the way I was watching mine. I know how alone that gets. He is right there and he is a thousand miles away at the same time. He is quiet. He is tired. He is embarrassed. He is not fishing. He is not going to church. He is not picking up the grandkids. And every doctor you take him to shrugs their shoulders and gives him another pill that does not do anything. You start to think maybe this is just how it ends. Maybe you are just going to watch him fade for the next 20 years. Please do not accept that. That is not a life sentence. His cells are hungry. That is all a lot of this is. Feed the cells and see what comes back. It cost me $49 and 3 weeks of patience to get my husband back. I would have paid $500 and waited a year. Try it. If I am wrong, you get your money back. P.P.P.P.S. Kaycee told me Auniva is a small company and they run out sometimes. There was a wait when Aunt Sherry went to reorder for Uncle Ellis in February. I keep 2 bottles in the medicine cabinet now. One Ronnie is on and one waiting behind it. He is not going back to 4:12 in the morning on the edge of the bed. Not on my watch. If you are ready to try it for the man in your life, or for yourself, do it today. Not next Wednesday. Bryson is going to be at our house this Wednesday afternoon and his Papaw is going to be in the driveway waiting for him. That is worth $49. That is worth everything. 👉 https://auniva.co/amla/33

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