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

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I've been walleye fishing with my brothers every opening day of the season for 23 years straight. This year I stayed home. The truck was packed. My tackle box was by the back door. Kevin and Denny were already up at Turtle Flambeau Flowage in the cabin we've rented from the same guy since 2003. His name is Ray. He's 78 now. He lets us stay for what he charged us the first year because he says we're the only ones who ever call him when it isn't fishing season just to check in. Kevin called me at 4:47 in the afternoon on the day I was supposed to drive up. He said, "Ronnie. Where are you." I said, "Kev. I can't make it this year." He said, "The hell do you mean you can't make it. You okay?" I said, "Yeah. I'm okay. Something came up." There was a long silence on the line. My oldest brother is not a man who fills a silence. He waits it out. I said, "Barb's not feeling great. I gotta stay close." Which was a lie. Barb was standing 4 feet from me in the kitchen when I said it. She looked at me over her reading glasses. She didn't say anything either. She just kept peeling potatoes. Kevin said, "Alright, Ronnie. You take care of Barb. We'll drink one for you." He hung up. I stood at the sink for a minute. Then I walked out to the garage where my truck was still packed. I stood there in the doorway. I looked at the tackle box on the passenger seat. The green Coleman cooler in the bed. The rain jacket folded on top of the cooler. Boots wedged behind the driver's seat. And I felt my feet. Or, more accurate, I felt what my feet felt like now. Which is nothing. Which is cotton. Which is like walking on a mattress covered in a wool blanket that someone else is wearing. Which is like every step lands about 3 inches farther down than it should. Which is what I've been feeling for going on 14 months. And getting worse. I couldn't tell my brothers I was skipping the trip because I was scared of losing my footing on the boat ramp at Turtle Flambeau and going into the water at 6 in the morning in 42 degree air with a boat backing down the ramp behind me. I couldn't tell my wife of 33 years I was skipping the trip because I couldn't feel my own feet. I hadn't told anybody the truth about this for over a year. That night, I sat in my recliner in my little brick house on Terrace Avenue in Marinette, Wisconsin, with the TV on to a Brewers game I wasn't watching, and I thought, this is how it starts. This is how a man ends up sitting in a chair for the rest of his life. You give up one thing. Then another. Then the chair is the only thing left. My name is Ron. I'm 57 years old. I was a union electrician for 34 years out of the local here in Marinette. I did the work at the shipyard for about 12 of those years. Big commercial jobs. I retired 2 years ago on a full pension. Not because I wanted to. Because I couldn't grip a wire nut anymore without watching my own thumb to make sure it was turning. My wife Barb is 55. She works part time at the clinic on Cleveland Avenue doing billing. We have one son, Tyler, 29, who lives outside of Green Bay with his wife and our little grandbaby Jack. I have two brothers. Kevin is 61, oldest, retired auto glass installer, lives in De Pere. Denny is 52, the baby, does hospital maintenance for one of the big hospital systems in Milwaukee. We've all lived in Wisconsin our whole lives. We were raised by my dad, who was also a union electrician, and my mom, who cleaned houses for the doctors on the north side of Marinette until she got sick in 2004. The walleye trip is the one thing the three of us have always done. Ice out. Opening weekend. Same lake. Same cabin. Same brand of coffee. We eat brats for supper on Friday, walleye we caught for supper on Saturday, and pancakes on Sunday morning cooked by whoever was the worst fisherman that weekend. That's the rule. It's usually Kevin. Missing it wasn't just missing a fishing trip. It was crossing a line. It was admitting that something was different now. Something was really different. The feet thing started in the spring of last year. I remember because I was still doing the odd job for cash after my retirement, and I was up on a scissor lift running conduit in the ceiling of a warehouse over in Menominee, Michigan. I was standing on the platform and I couldn't figure out why my balance felt off. Kept swaying a little. Grabbed the rail. I thought maybe the lift was moving. It wasn't. It was me. I was moving. I got off the lift that day and I didn't get back on it. I never told the guy I was working for why. Over the next few months, the pins and needles started. Just at night at first. Laying in bed, both feet buzzing like there was a low current running through them. Then it started in the daytime. Then it moved from buzzing to burning. Some nights it was so bad Barb would find me at 2 in the morning sitting at the kitchen table with my feet in a pan of cold water. Then the numbness started. That was worse than the burning in some ways. Because burning tells you something. Numbness tells you nothing. You just stop feeling parts of your body. And your body starts making mistakes because it can't tell you what it's doing. I went to Dr. Meinhardt at the clinic. He ran the tests. Blood work. Nerve conduction study up at Bellin. He said it was peripheral neuropathy. He said, "Ron, we're not sure exactly what's causing it in your case. It could be a lot of things. Age. Genetics. All those years around industrial chemicals in the shipyard. Sometimes we just don't know." He put me on gabapentin. The gabapentin made my head feel like it was full of wet cardboard and did approximately nothing for my feet. I went back. He upped the dose. Same story. He said, "Ron, we can try Cymbalta. Some folks get relief from that." I told him I didn't want another pill. He said, "Ron, at this stage, that's kind of what we have." I want to tell you something about Dr. Meinhardt. He is a good man. He is not the villain here. He does the best he can with what he was taught. But when your feet feel like cotton and the medicine they give you doesn't work and they don't have a better answer, you eventually stop going in. Because what's the point. So I stopped going in. I stopped telling Barb the truth about how bad it was getting. I stopped taking the walk we used to take in the evenings down by the marina. I stopped going bowling on Thursday nights with the guys from the hall. I stopped a lot of things. And I would have stopped the walleye trip and never told anybody why, if my brother Denny hadn't driven 4 hours to my house on a Sunday afternoon. I want to tell you about that Sunday. It was 6 days after I'd told Kevin I couldn't make the trip. I was on my porch. It was one of those late April afternoons in Wisconsin that finally feels like spring. Maybe 58 degrees. The redbud in the front yard was starting to come in. I was drinking a black coffee even though it was 3 in the afternoon because I don't know what else to do with my hands anymore. I saw a red Ram 1500 pull up at the curb. Denny got out. He didn't wave. He didn't holler. He just walked up my walkway, climbed my three porch steps, sat down in the empty rocker next to mine, and set a paper Culver's bag on the little table between us. He said, "I got you a butterburger. And a chocolate malt. Because Barb texted me you haven't been eating." I did not know Barb had texted my brother anything. I said, "Denny. What are you doing here." He said, "I'm sitting on your porch." I said, "You drove 4 hours to sit on my porch." He said, "Yeah." We sat there for a while. He ate his burger. I picked at mine. He drank his malt. I let mine melt. After maybe 15 minutes of nothing, Denny said, "Kev told me you bailed on the trip. And Barb told me you've been sitting in the recliner every night not moving. And Diane told me she wanted to talk to you and would I please drive up here and sit with you until you called her." Diane is Denny's wife. She's 51. She's been a home health aide in Milwaukee for 22 years. She goes into people's homes and helps them get out of bed and shower and eat and take their pills. Most of her patients are between 70 and 90. She has been doing this long enough that when she talks about somebody, she talks about them like she knew them her whole life. She's soft, but she's not stupid. And she has seen every kind of thing a body can do. I said, "Diane wants to talk to me." Denny said, "Ronnie. What's going on with your feet." I looked at my brother. He looked at me. And I don't know why, but I told him. Everything. The lift in Menominee. The pan of cold water at 2 AM. The gabapentin that didn't work. The walk I stopped taking. The bowling I stopped. The stuff I hadn't told Barb. The reason I hadn't gone up to Turtle Flambeau. The boat ramp thing. The thing about how you give up one thing and then another and the chair is the only thing left. I told my little brother the whole story I'd been carrying by myself for 14 months. When I was done, he was quiet for a while. Then he said, "Alright. Call Diane." He handed me his phone. He'd already dialed her. It was ringing. Diane picked up on the second ring. She said, "Hi Ronnie." I said, "Hi Diane." She said, "Your brother tell you why he came up there." I said, "He said you wanted to talk to me." She said, "I do. I've got 3 patients right now with what you're describing. And I've had probably 40 or 50 more over the last 22 years. I know what it looks like, Ronnie. And I want to tell you something." I said, "Okay." She said, "The reason nothing your doctor has given you is working is because none of it is doing anything for what's actually going on." She said, "The cells in your nerves need a lot of energy. More than most cells in your body. They're the most energy hungry cells you've got, because they've got to maintain that protective coating around them and they've got to fire those signals all day long." She said, "That energy comes from little tiny power plants in every cell called mitochondria. Everybody's got them. When you're young they're running strong. As you get older, and especially if you've spent your whole working life around industrial stuff the way you have, they start to slow down. And when the mitochondria slow down, the cells in your nerves are usually the first to feel it. Because they need the most fuel. And they're the first to run out of it." She said, "When your nerve cells don't have the energy they need, they can't maintain themselves. They can't manage the burning. They can't keep the signals clean. And you start feeling exactly what you've been feeling. Cotton feet. Pins and needles. Burning at night. Missing steps because the signal isn't getting through." She said, "The gabapentin they gave you tries to quiet the pain signal. It doesn't do a thing for the cells. Your cells are still starving. That's why it stops working after a while, or barely works at all." I sat there on my porch holding my brother's phone and I did not say anything. Because for the first time in 14 months, somebody had told me what was going on. Not what to take. What was going on. Diane said, "Ronnie. Are you still there." I said, "Yeah. I'm here." She said, "I want to tell you what I've been giving to my mama for the last 11 months. She's 79. She was where you are 2 years ago. She stopped going to the senior center. She stopped going to bingo on Wednesdays. She was sitting in her recliner in Green Bay just like you're sitting on your porch. Then I found something and I did the reading and I called my sister who's a nurse in Madison and she looked at it too, and we started my mama on it. And Ronnie, my mama is back at bingo. She's not the woman she was at 60. She's the woman she was at 74. And that's the woman I thought I'd lost." She said, "It's a fruit. From India. It's called amla. Some people call it Indian gooseberry. They've used it over there for 5,000 years. What it does, based on what the research is showing, is help support your mitochondria. Not force anything. Support them. There's a pathway in your body called AMPK. Amla helps activate it, and when AMPK is more active, the mitochondria can start producing energy the way they used to. And when the mitochondria are supported, your nerve cells are usually the first ones to feel it. Because they're the ones that were starving the worst." She said, "It also has one of the highest antioxidant profiles of any food they've ever measured. Which matters because a lot of what wears the mitochondria down in the first place is oxidative stress." I said, "Where do you get it." She said, "There's one company I trust. Auniva. Made right here in the States. 30 servings a bottle. Two capsules with breakfast. Free shipping. And here's what convinced me the first time. 90 day money back guarantee. If you take it for 90 days and you don't feel a lick of difference, you send back what you have and they refund your money. No questions. No arguing." She said, "I want you to try it, Ronnie. My mama is the reason I'm still standing. You're the reason my Denny is still standing. And I don't want to lose you to a chair." I did not say anything for a while. Denny was looking down at his boots on the porch floor. I said, "Send me the website, Diane." She said, "Already texted it to Denny. He'll show you." Denny showed me his phone. auniva.co/amla/33 I ordered 3 bottles that afternoon at the kitchen table with Denny standing behind me watching me do it because he said, and I quote, "I'm not leaving until I see you put in the credit card number." He stayed the night. Slept on our couch. Left the next morning. Kissed Barb on the cheek. Told me to keep him posted. The box came on a Wednesday. 4 days later. Free shipping like Diane said. I opened my first bottle on a Thursday morning with my breakfast. Now let me tell you what happened. Because I know how this reads. And I want to be honest with you the way Denny made me be honest with him. Week 1. Nothing. My feet still felt like cotton. I called Diane on Sunday night. She said, "Ronnie, this is your body. It's been doing what it's been doing for a year and a half. It's not going to fix in a week. Give it the time." Week 2. Nothing I could point to. But I slept a little better. That's it. That's all I got that week. Week 3. Something small. I was sitting on the porch at 8 in the evening. I had my socks off because the burning has always been worse in socks. I looked down at my feet and I noticed my right foot was tapping. Just a little. Little rhythm. I don't remember when my feet ever tapped last. Because you can't tap a foot you can't feel. Week 4. I was in the kitchen. I dropped a spoon on the floor. I bent down to pick it up. I felt the linoleum through my sock. Actually felt it. Cool linoleum. That was the first time I'd felt the floor through my foot in maybe 8 months. I stood there in the kitchen holding a spoon and I did not tell Barb what had just happened. Because I didn't want to jinx it. Week 6. This was Diane's week. She had told me on the phone that her mama noticed the real change around week 6. And she was right. Week 6, I woke up on a Tuesday morning and I did not have to sit on the edge of the bed for 3 minutes waiting for my feet to know they were feet before I stood up. I just stood up. And walked to the bathroom. And walked back. Barb was still asleep. I sat down on the edge of the bed and I looked at my feet on the floor. I said, quiet, to nobody, "There you are." Week 8. I walked down to the marina. All the way down. Two blocks. Came all the way back. Didn't stop once. Barb walked with me. She was talking about our grandbaby the whole time and I don't think she realized what was happening until we were back at the porch and I sat down and she said, "Ron. You just walked down and back." I said, "I know." Week 10. I called Kevin. I said, "Kev. I owe you an apology." He said, "For what." I said, "For lying to you the day I bailed on the trip. Barb wasn't sick. I was." Kevin was quiet for a while. Then he said, "Ronnie. I knew Barb wasn't sick. I've known you were something for a while. I was waiting for you to say something." I told him. Everything. Diane. Denny. The porch. The amla. The feet. He said, "Ronnie. Next year we're going back up to Ray's cabin. All three of us." I said, "Yeah, Kev. We are." Week 12. Barb and I drove up to Green Bay to see Tyler and our grandbaby Jack. Jack is 2. He wanted to walk around their backyard with his little wagon. I walked around that whole backyard behind that little boy for 45 minutes. On grass. Uneven ground. Over a garden hose. Up onto a little concrete patio. Back off. Around a tree. Every step, I felt where my foot was landing. At one point Jack turned around and hollered, "Papa! Come on!" I said, "I'm coming, buddy." And I was. I was coming. Tyler was watching from the back door. He came out to the yard afterward. He said, "Dad. You're moving good today." I said, "Yeah. I've been feeling a little better lately." He didn't push it. But I could tell he'd noticed. Now. Here's what I want to say to whoever's reading this. I'm not a doctor. I'm a retired union electrician who spent 14 months hiding from his own wife and brothers because he couldn't feel his feet and didn't want to talk about it. What I can tell you is what Diane told me and what I've lived over 12 weeks. Auniva's Amla isn't a cure for anything. Diane was clear about that. What it does is support what your body was built to do. When your nerve cells are supported, they can go back to doing their job. And when they can do their job, feeling can start coming back. Little bit at a time. If you're reading this on your porch on a Sunday afternoon and your feet feel like cotton, or your hands are tingling, or there's a burning at night nobody can explain to you, or if you're a wife whose husband stopped going bowling last year and won't say why, I want you to check into Auniva's Amla. That's all I'm asking. Check it out. You don't have anything to lose because they stand behind the 90 day money back guarantee. You take it for 90 days. If you don't feel a bit different, you send back what's left and they return your money. No questions. That's the deal Diane told me about and that's the deal I'm passing along. Auniva's Amla is made in the USA. 30 servings a bottle. 2 capsules with breakfast. Free shipping. You can go check for yourself right here. 👉 auniva.co/amla/33 P.S. Diane wanted me to make sure I said this. She said the number one reason people give up on it is they quit at 2 weeks. Your body has been running on empty for a long time. You have to give it long enough to actually respond. If 90 days come and go and you feel nothing, send it back. Auniva has stood behind that guarantee for our whole family and they'll stand behind it for you. P.P.S. This isn't at the Meijer over in Menominee. It's not at the Walgreens on Roosevelt. Only through the website. Denny made me watch him type it in the first time, so I'll do the same for you here. P.P.P.S. Kevin, Denny, and I have already booked the cabin at Ray's for next opening weekend. Ray answered the phone and I told him it was Ron Kowalski and he said, "Ronnie. Kev told me you were sick this year. You feeling better?" I said, "Yeah, Ray. I'm feeling better." He said, "Good. See you in April." I'm going to be walking down that boat ramp with my brothers next spring. First one on. Coffee in one hand. Tackle box in the other. Feet on the concrete like feet are supposed to be. If your Ron is out there somewhere, sitting in a recliner not telling anybody why, this is what he needs. Or you do. Whichever one of you is reading this. 👉 auniva.co/amla/33

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