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I cut a woman's hair on a Thursday afternoon last March and I couldn't feel the comb in my left hand. I want you to picture this with me. I was standing behind my chair at the salon, the one I've owned for 19 years, working on a regular client named Pam who's been coming to me since 2008. Pam talks about her sister's dog the whole time I cut her hair. The dog's name is Biscuit and Biscuit has been on a special diet for kidney stones for going on 4 years now. I was halfway through her layers, scissors in my right hand, comb in my left, and I suddenly realized I couldn't tell if I was holding the comb or not. I looked down to check. The comb was there. My fingers were wrapped around it. But the part of my brain that's supposed to feel that, the part that tells you yes, you are holding a thing, you have not dropped it, you can keep cutting, that part wasn't sending any signal at all. I just kept cutting. I didn't tell Pam. I didn't even change my expression. I finished her cut, I blew it out, I rang her up, she tipped me $8 on a $52 cut like she always does, and she walked out the door talking on her phone about Biscuit's vet appointment. The second she left, I locked the front door. I flipped the sign to "closed" 90 minutes before my last appointment of the day. I went into the back room. I sat down on the little stool where I sit to fold towels. And I cried for almost an hour. My name is Marlene. I'm 56 years old. I live in Fort Wayne, Indiana, in the same house my husband Ron and I bought in 1997, a brick ranch with a basketball hoop in the driveway that none of our kids have used in 14 years and that Ron still won't take down. I've been a hairdresser for 34 years. My salon is called Marlene's. I'm not creative. It's the same name I put on the door when I bought the place from the woman who owned it before me, and I never changed it. The sign is the same sign. The chairs are the same chairs. I've reupholstered the cushions twice and I had to replace one of the hydraulic pumps in 2014 but other than that, it's the salon I started with. I have 3 other women who rent chairs from me. Tasha, who's been with me for 11 years. Donna, who's been with me for 6. And Kayleigh, who's 28 and rents the chair in the corner and listens to TikTok audio out loud while she works, which I have made my peace with. I cut hair Tuesday through Saturday. I have a regular client list that goes 4 weeks deep most of the year and 6 weeks deep in October when everybody wants to look nice for the holidays. And the night I sat on that towel stool in the back room, I was looking down the barrel of losing all of it. Because here's the thing nobody tells you about being a hairdresser. Your hands are the whole job. The hands are the work. The hands are the income. The hands are the reason a woman drives 32 minutes from Auburn every 5 weeks to sit in your chair instead of going to the place down the street from her house. She doesn't come for the conversation. She comes because your hands know what to do with her cowlick and the place down the street's hands don't. If my hands went, I went. And my hands had been going for about 14 months. It started slow. Of course it did. These things always do. The first thing I noticed was a tingling in the tips of my fingers at night. Like I'd been holding a vibrating phone for too long. I'd wake up at 2 in the morning and shake my hand out and roll over and go back to sleep and not really think about it. Then it was the cold mornings. I'd walk into the salon at 8:15, turn the heat on, and for the first hour I couldn't feel my fingertips at all. They were just gone. Like someone else's fingers attached to my hands. I'd run warm water over them in the back sink to wake them up, and around 9:30 they'd come back online and I'd start my first appointment. Then the buttons. This is the one that scared me first. I was getting dressed for church one Sunday and I couldn't button the top button on my blouse. I tried for almost 4 minutes. My fingers wouldn't pinch tight enough to hold the button steady. I ended up wearing a different shirt, a pullover, and I told Ron my blouse didn't fit right anymore. That was 8 months before the Pam haircut. I knew something was wrong. I knew it the way you know it when your dog stops eating. You don't have a diagnosis. You just know. But I didn't go to the doctor. I'm gonna be honest with you. I didn't go because I was scared of what they were going to say. I was scared they were going to tell me I had nerve damage. I was scared they were going to put a name on it that meant my career was over. I was scared of words like "permanent" and "progressive" and "you need to consider a different line of work." So I just kept cutting hair. I started doing little tricks. I started warming my hands up under the dryer between clients. I started writing my appointment notes in big block letters because my regular handwriting had gone shaky. I started having Kayleigh do the foils on my high maintenance color clients because foils require pinching and I couldn't pinch the way I used to. I told Tasha I was "having a flare up of something." She didn't push. We don't push each other in this salon. We just work next to each other and trust that everyone's got their own stuff. After the Pam haircut, sitting on that stool, I called Ron from the back room. He picked up on the first ring. He always does. He's been a parts manager at a Ford dealership for 31 years and his desk phone is always in front of him. I told him what had happened. He was quiet for a second. Then he said "Marlene, you're going to the doctor on Monday." I said okay. I didn't fight him. Which is how he knew it was bad. I usually fight him on stuff like that. The doctor sent me to a neurologist. The neurologist sent me to get bloodwork and a nerve test where they zap your arms with electrodes and watch what happens. I sat in a paper gown in a cold office while a woman named Brittany attached wires to my forearms and made my fingers twitch involuntarily. The neurologist called me back in to go over the results. He said the nerves in my hands were showing reduced conduction. He used those exact words. Reduced conduction. He said it was consistent with the symptoms I was describing. He said it was something that often shows up in people my age, especially women, and that there were a few different possible underlying causes. I asked him what we did about it. He sort of half shrugged. He said there were some prescription options that might help with the symptoms. He said I should be careful with my hands. He said sometimes these things stabilize on their own and sometimes they progress, and there wasn't always a great way to predict which. I left his office and sat in my car in the parking lot for 25 minutes. I called my sister Carolyn. Carolyn is 4 years older than me. She lives in Bloomington and she's a retired elementary school librarian and she is the person I call when I don't know what to do with my life. I told her everything. She said "Marlene, listen. I know this is going to sound out of nowhere. But you remember Linda Voss? From Springwood Elementary? She had something similar in her hands. About 5 years ago." I vaguely remembered Linda. Carolyn and her had been close. I'd met her at a Christmas party once. Carolyn said Linda had gone through her own version of the same thing. Doctors, tests, prescriptions that didn't really do much. And then Linda had gotten obsessed, the way Linda always gets obsessed, and had gone deep into the research on what was actually going on inside the nerves themselves. Not the symptoms. The underlying biology. And Linda had ended up taking something called Amla. Carolyn said "I'm not telling you this is a magic bullet, Mar. I'm just telling you Linda's been taking it for almost 4 years and she's playing the piano again, which she hadn't done in a decade." I asked her to spell it. A-M-L-A. Indian gooseberry. She said Linda had explained it to her at length and Carolyn had only half retained it but it had something to do with how the nerves stay healthy as we get older. I drove home that night and I told Ron I was going to do some research before I made any decisions about what the neurologist had said. Then I spent the next 11 days reading. I sat at my kitchen table after dinner every night with my laptop and a yellow legal pad and a cup of decaf, and I read. I read articles. I read studies. I read forum posts from people who'd been in the same boat as me. I read Reddit threads from medical professionals talking about peripheral nerve health and what supports it and what doesn't. Here's what I learned. I'm going to try to put it in regular words. Your nerves are like wires that run from your brain down through your spinal cord and out into every corner of your body. Hands. Feet. Face. Everywhere. Those wires have a coating around them, like the rubber coating around an electrical cord. That coating helps the signal travel fast and clean. When the coating is healthy, your fingers feel things instantly. The brush. The button. The comb in your left hand while you're cutting Pam's layers. But as we get older, especially in our 50s and 60s, that coating can start to get patchy. The nerve itself can get a little sluggish. The signal that used to fly down the wire starts hitting bumps and slowdowns. And the parts of your body that depend the most on fast, clean signals, your fingertips, your feet, the small precise movements, those are the parts where you feel it first. The medical name for that whole category of issue is neuropathy. But the underlying problem is that your nerves and the tissues around them are stressed. They're running hot. They're not getting the support they need to stay healthy and conduct properly. A lot of what stresses those nerves is something called oxidative stress. It's like rust, basically. Internal rust. It happens at the cellular level and it builds up over decades and it's one of the main reasons our bodies start losing function as we age. Amla, from what I read, is one of the most concentrated natural sources of compounds that support the body's defense against that kind of cellular stress. Polyphenols. Vitamin C. A whole stack of antioxidants that the research has linked to healthier nerve function and better circulation in the small blood vessels that feed those nerves. When the cellular environment around your nerves is healthier, the nerves themselves have a better shot at doing their job. It's not a numbing agent. It's not a painkiller. It's working on the underlying conditions that determine whether your nerves can do what they're supposed to do. I read that and I sat at my kitchen table and I thought about Linda Voss playing the piano. I ordered a bottle of Auniva Amla that night. Ron came in while I was checking out and he looked at the screen and said "How much?" and I told him. He nodded. He said "Get two." I got one. I wasn't ready to commit to two. The bottle came in 4 days. I started taking it the next morning. With my coffee, before I left for the salon. Now, I want to tell you what happened, but I want to tell it right. Because I think a lot of these stories make it sound like you take the pill and the next morning you're a brand new person. That is not how it happened for me. For the first 2 weeks, nothing changed. I kept doing my routine. I kept warming my hands under the dryer. I kept having Kayleigh do the foils. I kept dropping the comb every couple days and pretending I hadn't. Around the start of week 3, I noticed I wasn't waking up at night to shake out my hands. I didn't think much of it at first. I just noticed it had been a few nights in a row. Week 4, I buttoned my blouse on Sunday morning. The same blouse I'd given up on 6 months earlier. I buttoned the top button on the first try. I stood in front of my closet mirror staring at my own collarbone for about 30 seconds. Then I called Ron in from the bathroom and showed him. He didn't say anything. He just kind of grunted, which is Ron's highest form of emotional expression. Then he kissed me on the forehead and went downstairs to make coffee. Week 6, I did a full color and cut on a woman named Robin who has hair down to her waist. That's a 3 hour appointment. Foils and a trim. I did the entire thing myself. I didn't ask Kayleigh for help. I didn't drop the foils. I didn't have to warm my hands up between the foil placement and the haircut. I sat down in my chair after Robin left and I just stared at my own hands in the mirror. Week 8, I caught myself drumming my fingers on the counter while I waited for my next client. I have not drummed my fingers on a counter in maybe 3 years. The fingers wouldn't do it. They couldn't tap in sequence anymore. And there I was on a Tuesday afternoon, drumming my left hand on the counter without even thinking about it. Tasha noticed before I did. She looked over at me and said "Marlene, what are you doing?" And I looked down and I realized. I started laughing. And then I started crying. And Tasha came over and hugged me and asked me what was wrong, and I told her the whole story right there, leaning on the front counter with a 2 o'clock client coming in 6 minutes. That was a year ago. I'm still taking Auniva Amla every morning. With my coffee. Before I leave for the salon. My hands are not 30 years old. I'm not going to lie to you. I'm 56 and I've been gripping scissors for 34 years and there's wear and tear that no berry is going to undo. But I can feel the comb. I can button my blouse. I can do a 3 hour color appointment without my hand giving out halfway through. I can drum my fingers on the counter. And I have not had to turn away a single client in 14 months. That salon is mine. Those chairs are mine. That sign on the door has my name on it. And for a few months last spring, I really thought I was going to have to take it down. I didn't. If you've made it this far down this story, I'm guessing it's because something in it sounded familiar. Maybe it's your hands. Maybe it's your feet. Maybe it's a husband whose grip isn't what it used to be, or a mom who's stopped doing her crossword because she can't hold the pen the right way, or maybe it's just you, lying in bed at 2 in the morning shaking out your fingers and telling yourself it's nothing. I want to tell you it might not be nothing. But I also want to tell you it might not be permanent either. Not the way I was scared it would be. Auniva Amla is what I take. It's a clean formula, made in the United States, third party tested. The company stands behind it with a 90 day money back guarantee. Which means if you take it for 3 months and you feel exactly the same and nothing's changed, you send the bottle back and they refund you. Just like that. No phone tree. No making you justify yourself. They just refund it. That guarantee is the reason I felt okay clicking the button the first time. The worst case was I lost a few minutes of my time. If you want to try it, the link is below. P.S. I called Carolyn after my appointment with Robin to tell her what had happened. She started crying on the phone, and then she called Linda Voss right after we hung up, and Linda apparently called me 20 minutes later and we talked for an hour about nerves and pianos and what it feels like to get a part of yourself back. Linda told me she still keeps her bottle on her kitchen windowsill so she sees it every morning and remembers. I do the same thing now. P.P.S. The 90 day guarantee is the thing I really want you to hear. It took me 3 weeks to notice anything. It took 4 weeks for the button. It took 8 weeks for me to drum my fingers on the counter. Everybody's different. 90 days is long enough to actually know. P.P.P.S. The day I drummed my fingers on the counter, I went home and took the bottle of statins my doctor had prescribed me 3 years ago and put it in a drawer in the bathroom that I don't open. I'm not telling anyone what to do with their prescriptions. I'm just saying that when something starts working, you find yourself reconsidering a lot of the things you thought you had to do. That's all. 👉 https://auniva.co/amla/33