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

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The first time Ray fell off the tractor, I didn't see it happen. I found him. It was a Tuesday in late August, and I'd driven the pickup out to the north field because he hadn't come home for supper and he always comes home for supper. Ray is a creature of habit. 34 years married and I could set a clock by that man. The sun was almost down when I saw the John Deere sitting still at the end of a cut row. Engine off. No Ray in the cab. I got out of the truck and I saw him sitting on the ground next to the back tire with one boot off and his sock in his hand, just staring at his foot like it belonged to somebody else. He didn't hear me walk up. That was the part that scared me. Ray can hear a coyote a mile away, but he didn't hear his own wife walking through stubble two feet behind him. "Marlene," he said when he finally looked up. And he tried to smile. But his eyes were wet. "I missed the step," he said. "I was climbing down and I missed the step and I didn't even know I missed it until I was on the ground." I helped him up. He weighed more than he used to, or maybe I was just weaker than I used to be. We got him back in the truck and I drove the John Deere home myself, which I hadn't done since 1993. That was the first fall. The second was 8 days later, and it was worse. My name is Marlene. I'm 58 years old. I've been the secretary at First Baptist Church in Guymon, Oklahoma for 22 years. If you've ever needed a wedding scheduled, a funeral bulletin printed, or a bereavement casserole rotation figured out, you've probably talked to me on the phone. I know most of this town. I know who's sick and who's pretending not to be. I know which men in this county are too proud to go to the doctor and which ones will go the minute their wife tells them to. Ray is the first kind. Ray Lee Halstead. Born in 1962 out on his daddy's place east of Optima. Wheat farmer his whole life, same as his daddy, same as his grandfather. His hands have been in that red panhandle dirt since he was 6 years old riding on his father's lap in a Massey Ferguson. He is the most stubborn, quiet, dependable man I have ever known. He proposed to me at the Dairy Queen on Highway 54 in the summer of 1991 with a ring he'd been carrying in his shirt pocket for 3 months waiting for the right moment. When it came, he didn't even kneel. He just slid it across the table and said, "Well?" I said well back. We built our life on 640 acres of wheat and a small house with a wraparound porch that Ray added on himself the year our daughter Cassie was born. We had one child. We wanted more. It didn't happen for us. Ray never made me feel like it was my fault, not once, not in any of the 34 years I've watched him. Our life has been small. It's been steady. Church on Sunday, wheat in the summer, a trip to Amarillo maybe twice a year, and Ray in the field every evening at sundown because that's his favorite time of day. He calls it the gold hour. He says the wheat looks like it's on fire. He's been going out to that field at sunset since before we were married. He'd sit on the tailgate of his old Chevy and just watch the light change. Sometimes he'd bring a thermos of coffee. Sometimes he'd bring me and we'd sit shoulder to shoulder and not say anything for 20 minutes. That's the man I married. A man who could sit in a wheat field at sundown and be happier than most people ever get to be in a lifetime. I need you to hold onto that picture. Ray at sundown, on his tailgate, watching the wheat catch fire. Because for 2 years leading up to that first fall, I had been watching that picture disappear. It started with his feet. He'd come in from the field and take his boots off on the back porch and rub his feet through his socks and just look at them. I asked him about it once. He said, "It's like they're asleep and I can't wake them up." I asked him if it hurt. He said, "No. That's the problem. It'd be easier if it hurt." He'd been to the doctor in Guymon 3 times over 2 years. The first time they told him it was probably his boots. Buy better boots. Get insoles. The second time they took blood and told him his sugar was on the higher end of normal but not high enough to worry about. The third time they told him it was probably just aging. He was 61. He came home from that last visit and sat in the truck in the driveway for 20 minutes before he came inside. When he did come in, he took his hat off and set it on the counter and said, "I guess this is just what it's going to be from now on." I have not forgotten the way he said that. There is a certain flatness in a man's voice when he stops fighting for himself. I hear it sometimes at the church, in widowers who come in to plan their own arrangements. It's not sadness. It's worse than sadness. It's a kind of accepting. Ray started leaving the field earlier in the evenings. Not by much at first. Ten minutes. Then 20. Then he stopped going out at sundown at all. He'd come in at 4:30 and eat supper and sit in the recliner and be asleep by 8. He stopped taking his coffee to the tailgate. He stopped saying the wheat was on fire. He stopped saying much of anything. The burning came about 6 months in. He'd sit on the edge of the bed at night and pull his socks off and just breathe funny. I asked him what was wrong. He said his feet felt like they were sitting in a fireplace, but when he touched them they were cold. "How can they be burning and cold at the same time," he asked me. I didn't know. He started limping without knowing he was limping. He'd walk across the kitchen and his left foot would drag a little and he wouldn't feel it. I watched him trip over the threshold to the mudroom 3 times in one week. He asked me to stop moving furniture, and I hadn't moved any furniture. His balance started going. He held onto the counter when he stood up. He held onto the doorframe when he stepped down onto the porch. He held onto me when we walked in from the driveway after a Wednesday night service. I asked him to go back to the doctor. He said, "Marlene, they've told me 3 times it's just aging. What am I going to hear the 4th time that's different?" I didn't have an answer for that. The second fall was on a Wednesday. He'd gone out to check a fence line on the west side of the property. I was at the church. Pastor Miller called me at 4:15 and said Ray was in the parking lot and I needed to come. Ray had driven himself in. He didn't want an ambulance. He had a cut across his forehead and gravel in the heel of his hand and he was sitting in the driver's seat of his pickup with the door open, and he was shaking. He'd gone to climb out of the truck at the fence line and his left leg had just given out. He didn't feel it give. He said one second he was standing and the next second he was on his knees in the caliche, and he'd caught himself on the door handle and swung his head into it going down. "I couldn't feel my foot land, Marlene," he said. "I couldn't tell where the ground was." That was the night he told me he didn't want to go out to the field anymore. He said it looking at the floor. He said, "I don't want Cassie to find her daddy face down in the dirt one day." I sat next to him on our bed and I put my hand on the back of his neck and I didn't cry until later, in the bathroom, with the fan on so he wouldn't hear it. That's when I called Dwayne. Dwayne is Ray's cousin on his mother's side. He's 63, lives in Hooker, about 20 miles east. Vietnam vet, retired from the co-op, drives a red Ford that's older than my marriage. Ray and Dwayne fished together every summer of their childhood at Optima Lake and they've been closer than most brothers ever since. I called Dwayne because Dwayne is the one man on this earth Ray will actually listen to. I told him what was happening. I told him about the falls. I told him about the burning at night and the boots on the porch and the way Ray had stopped going to the field. Dwayne was quiet for a long time. Then he said, "Marlene, I'm coming out Saturday. I got something in the truck I want him to see." I didn't ask what it was. Dwayne is not a man who explains himself over the phone. He showed up Saturday morning at 9:15 with a thermos of coffee and a paper sack. He and Ray sat on the back porch and drank coffee for the better part of an hour before Dwayne pulled the sack up out of his boot and set it on the little table between them. I was inside washing dishes. I could hear them through the screen door. Dwayne said, "I had my 3 month at the Amarillo VA last week." Ray said, "How'd that go." Dwayne said, "You remember I told you about my feet." Ray said he remembered. Dwayne had been having some version of what Ray was having. Not identical. Every man's body does its own thing. But close enough. The tingling. The burning at night. The dead spots where a boot should have felt like a boot and didn't. Dwayne had been dealing with it for 4 years. Longer than Ray. He'd tried 2 different prescriptions from the VA that gave him headaches and didn't do much for the feet. He'd tried B vitamins. He'd tried alpha lipoic acid. He'd tried compression socks and warm foot soaks and one of those electric massagers his daughter bought him for Christmas. None of it did what he was hoping for. But 4 months ago, a woman he sat next to in the waiting room at the VA had told him about something her husband was taking. Her husband was a retired long-haul trucker out of Dumas who'd been dealing with the same thing for close to a decade. She said her husband had been on this thing for about 5 months and was finally sleeping through the night without kicking the covers off. The woman wrote the name down on the back of a receipt and handed it to Dwayne while they were both waiting to be called back. Dwayne started taking it about 12 weeks ago. He told Ray, on our back porch, that for the first time in 4 years he'd walked out to his mailbox that morning in his slippers and he'd felt the concrete cold against the bottom of his feet. "Ray," he said. "I felt the cold." There was a long pause. I stopped washing the dishes because I wanted to hear what my husband said back. Ray said, "What is it." Dwayne pulled a bottle out of the paper sack. I heard the plastic lid come off. I heard him say the word Amla. I'd never heard it before in my life. I dried my hands on the dishtowel and walked out to the porch and sat down next to Ray. Dwayne handed me the bottle so I could look at it. Amla. Also called Indian gooseberry. A little berry that's been used in traditional medicine in India for thousands of years. Dwayne said the woman at the VA had told him her husband's nephew, who is some kind of naturopath in Dallas, had walked her through the science of it. Dwayne is not a science man. He is a Ford man and a fishing man and a wheat man. But he had listened close enough to the woman that he could repeat it back to us, and this is what he said, sitting on our porch, in his own words. He said, "The nerves in your feet are some of the hungriest cells in your whole body. They need more energy than almost anything else you got. That energy is supposed to come from these little engines inside your cells called mitochondria. And when those little engines get worn down, the nerves get shorted first. Because they're at the end of the line and they need the most." He said, "This berry has something in it that helps those little engines start running better. Something called AMPK. She said think of it like a pilot light. When the pilot light comes back on, the engines fire back up. And when the engines fire back up, the energy starts flowing back out to the ends of the line. To your feet." Ray was leaning forward now. Elbows on his knees. Dwayne said, "Everything I'd tried before this was working on the wrong end of the problem. B vitamins, foot soaks, all of it. That stuff is trying to fix the wire. But the wire ain't the problem. The wire is fine. The problem is there ain't no power getting sent down the wire in the first place. You can't fix a lamp that ain't plugged in by polishing the bulb." I'll be honest with you. I didn't understand all of that in the moment. I was watching Ray's face. But I remembered enough of it to look it up myself that night on my computer at the kitchen table. And when I did, I fell down a rabbit hole for about 4 hours. The berry is called Phyllanthus emblica. It has one of the highest antioxidant profiles of any food that's ever been measured. That part surprised me because I'd been buying blueberries at Homeland for 3 years thinking I was doing something. The active compounds in it are called emblicanins. They've been studied for their effect on cellular energy production. The research on nerve cells specifically talks about how amla helps protect the mitochondria in nerves from the oxidative stress that wears them down over time. That oxidative stress is what all those years of hard work, sun exposure, processed food, and honestly just aging, does to a man's cells. I read the phrase mitochondrial protection in nerves probably 15 times that night. And I finally understood what Dwayne was trying to tell us on the porch. Ray's nerves were not broken. They were starved. Everything the doctor in Guymon had told him was about managing the symptoms. Better boots. Manage your sugar. Live with it. But not one thing anyone had ever told my husband was about supporting the little engines that were supposed to be keeping those nerves alive in the first place. He was delivering lumber to a job site with no power. That's exactly the way I explained it to Cassie on the phone the next day. Dwayne left us that bottle. He said, "I got another one at the house. You take this one. Give it a real shot. 60 days minimum. That's what she told me." I ordered our own bottle from the website he'd written down on the back of an envelope. It was called Auniva. The website was auniva.co/amla/33. It came in a plain brown box 4 days later. Ray started taking it on a Monday. 2 capsules with breakfast. He'd been up since 5:30, same as always, and he took them with his coffee at the kitchen table. I didn't expect anything the first week. Neither did he. Dwayne had said his own feet took closer to 5 weeks to really start showing him something and I had read enough on my computer to know that the cells in the body don't turn on a dime, especially not the ones that have been running on empty for years. The first thing I noticed, and I want to be careful how I say this because I don't want to overpromise anybody anything, was that Ray started sleeping different. Around day 10. He wasn't kicking the covers off at 2 AM anymore. He wasn't sitting on the edge of the bed at 3 AM breathing funny with his socks in his hand. He was just sleeping. I asked him about it on day 12. He said, "The burning is quieter." Not gone. Quieter. Around week 3, he stood up from the recliner one evening and didn't grab the arm to steady himself. He just stood up. Walked to the kitchen for a glass of water. Walked back. Sat down. I watched him do it and I don't think he even noticed he did it. Around week 4, he told me at breakfast that he'd felt the linoleum cold under his heel when he'd gotten out of bed that morning. He said it like he was reporting the weather. Flat. Not making a big deal of it. But I saw his hand shake a little when he lifted his coffee cup. Week 5, he went out to the field. Not at sundown. Not yet. Just out to check the north fence at 2 in the afternoon. I watched him climb up into the cab of that John Deere and I watched him climb back down 40 minutes later, and he came in and washed his hands at the sink and said, "I could feel the step under my boot both ways." He didn't look at me when he said it. He was looking out the window over the sink at the field. Week 6 is when it happened. I came home from choir practice on a Wednesday evening and Ray wasn't in the recliner. The truck was in the driveway. The porch light was on. The screen door was propped open with his boot like he was planning to come right back inside. I walked out to the back porch and he wasn't there. I walked out to the driveway and I looked south, toward the field. And there he was. Sitting on the tailgate of his old Chevy with a thermos in his hand. Watching the wheat catch fire in the last of the light. I stood in the driveway a long time before I walked out to him. I didn't want to interrupt whatever he was having. I just watched my husband sitting on his tailgate the way he had sat on his tailgate for 30 years. When I finally walked out, he made room for me next to him. He didn't say anything for maybe 5 minutes. Then he handed me the thermos and said, "The gold hour's back, Marlene." I put my head on his shoulder. I did not want him to see me cry. That was 4 months ago. Ray has been out on that tailgate every clear evening since. He is not the man he was at 40. Nobody is. He still has slow days. He still has mornings where his feet don't feel quite right for the first hour. This is not a fairy tale and I am not going to sell you one. But he is out at sundown. He is climbing in and out of the cab. He is feeling the step under his boot both ways. He is telling me the wheat is on fire. He is coming back to himself. If you are watching your husband or your father or your brother fade the way I was watching Ray fade, and you have been told for years that it is just aging, and you have watched him quietly stop doing the things that used to make him who he is, I want you to know about this berry. I am a church secretary in the Oklahoma panhandle. I am not a doctor. I am not a scientist. I am just a wife who was scared she was going to lose her husband to a slow disappearing that nobody was going to name. Auniva's Amla is 2 capsules a day. One bottle is 30 days. They ship from the USA. It comes with a 90-day money-back guarantee, which means if you give it a real shot and nothing changes, you send back the bottle and they refund your money. No arguing. No hoops. I'd rather you try it and find out for your husband what Dwayne found out for his feet. The link is below. It's auniva.co/amla/33. If you're going to do it, don't do it next week. Do it tonight. Ray lost 2 years to the flatness in his voice. Dwayne lost 4. Every evening you wait is another gold hour your person doesn't get back. P.S. I want to tell you something about the guarantee that I think matters. In the 2 years my husband was told by his doctor that his numbness was just aging, no one ever offered him a refund on the boots he bought or the insoles he bought or the doctor visits he paid for. Nobody offered him his time back. Nobody offered him his sundowns back. The 90-day money-back guarantee on this bottle is the first thing anyone has stood behind in this whole story. That tells you something about who is confident in what they're selling and who is just selling. P.P.S. You will probably notice something before the person taking it does. Ray still doesn't fully realize how much has come back. I do. I am the one who watched him drag his left foot across the mudroom threshold for a year. I am the one who watched him hold the doorframe on the way out to the porch. I am the one who watched him stop going to the field. When it starts coming back, even a little, the wife notices first. The husband, the father, the man himself, he has spent so long lowering the bar to make peace with his body that he doesn't remember what the bar used to be. You will remember. And when you see him climb down out of a truck without grabbing the door, you are going to have to stop yourself from crying in the driveway. Just so you're ready. P.P.P.S. Dwayne told me he keeps 2 bottles on hand now because he doesn't want to run out. He said it's a small operation and stock comes and goes. I keep 2 bottles too. One in the medicine cabinet and one in the drawer next to Ray's socks so he can see it when he's getting dressed in the morning and it reminds him. If your husband's feet have been asleep for years, don't wait for a third fall to do something about it. Ray had 2. Dwayne's neighbor down the road had 3 and one of them broke his hip. There is no prize for waiting. There is only more of the same. P.P.P.P.S. Do not forget about the 90-day money-back guarantee. You are risking a bottle. Ray was risking his sundowns. 👉 auniva.co/amla/33

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