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

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Ray sat in the driveway for 47 minutes on a Tuesday morning in December before I realized he wasn't coming inside. I was at the kitchen sink rinsing the coffee pot and I looked out the window over the yard and saw his truck idling with the exhaust curling up white into the cold air. I thought maybe he was on the phone. Ray takes calls in the truck sometimes because the reception is better than in the house. I turned back to the dishes and I put a load in the washer and I made the bed and when I came back through the kitchen the truck was still there. So I opened the back door and I called out to him. He rolled the window down about 2 inches and said he was fine. He said he was just warming up. He said the truck was acting funny. I went back inside because that's what you do when Ray tells you something is fine. Ray has been telling me things are fine since 1987 and I have learned that pushing him only makes him quieter. I put the kettle on. I watched him from the window over the sink. He wasn't on the phone. He wasn't looking at anything. He was just sitting with both hands on the steering wheel staring at our own front door. I finally went out there in my house shoes because the ground was frozen and my slippers would've soaked through. I walked around to the driver's side and I tapped the glass and he looked up at me with a face I had never seen on him in 38 years of marriage. He couldn't turn the key. Not the truck key. He'd gotten the truck started. That part he could do because the fob has a button. He couldn't turn the house key in our own front door. Ray Whitfield is a locksmith. Has been since 1986 when his daddy started teaching him in the back of the shop on Fifth Street. He can rekey a Kwikset in under 4 minutes. He can pick a Master Lock with a bobby pin and a piece of a Coke can. He rebuilt the ignition on a 1972 Cadillac last year for a man from Toomsuba who cried when Ray handed him the keys. Ray's hands know locks the way my hands know pie crust. They just do it. They don't think about it. And he couldn't turn the key in our own front door. He'd been sitting in that driveway for 47 minutes because he was ashamed to come in and tell me. My name is Deloris Whitfield. I'm 62. I live in Meridian, Mississippi, in the same white shotgun house we bought in 1989 off Highway 39, three blocks from where Ray's daddy used to run the shop before it moved out by the Sonic. I retired from the post office in 2022 after 34 years of sorting mail on Front Street. Ray and I have 2 boys, both grown, one in Hattiesburg working for a paving company and the other one right here in Meridian doing HVAC. We have 4 grandchildren. We have a peach tree in the backyard that Ray planted the year our first grandson was born. I make pound cake for the church bake sale twice a year and I don't like doing it but I do it anyway because Sister Loraine will not let it go if I don't. That morning in the driveway was not the first time. I want to be honest about that. It was the first time I couldn't unsee it. But it wasn't the first time. The first time was probably 2 years earlier. Ray was at his workbench in the garage rebuilding the guts of an old Schlage lock for a house on 25th Avenue. He does the delicate work at home now because the shop is too loud. He had all the little brass pins laid out on a green felt cloth the way he always does, lined up like teeth. I brought him a glass of sweet tea and I stood in the doorway watching him and I saw him reach for a pin and miss. His fingers just closed on air. He said something under his breath and reached again and got it that time and I pretended I didn't see it. Because Ray doesn't miss. The next thing I noticed was the cold. Ray started saying the garage was too cold to work in, which was strange because Ray has worked in that garage in every kind of weather since Reagan was president. He was born in Mississippi. He does not get cold. But that winter he started wearing 2 pairs of gloves out to the garage and I'd catch him rubbing his fingertips together at the kitchen table like he was trying to start a fire between them. He said his hands went numb sometimes. He said it was just circulation. He said it was just getting old. He was 63. Then it was the tingling. He described it to me exactly one time, in bed, with the lights off, which is when Ray tells me things he can't say in the daylight. He said it felt like ants. He said his fingers felt like there were ants walking on the inside of them, from the tips down to the second knuckle. Both hands. Worse on the right. He said it woke him up at night sometimes and he'd sit on the edge of the bed working his fingers open and closed until it went away. I asked him if he'd told Dr. Weems and he said he'd mentioned it at his last physical and Dr. Weems had said it was probably nerve compression from all the years of gripping tools. Just part of the job. Just part of getting older. Take some ibuprofen if it bothers you. That was the answer for everything for the next year and a half. Just part of getting older. Ray started dropping things. Little things at first. A screwdriver. A pen. A coffee cup that shattered on the kitchen tile and he stood there looking at his own hand like it had betrayed him. He started asking me to open jars, which if you knew Ray you would understand what that means. Ray has opened every pickle jar in this house since 1988. When he asked me to open the first one I thought he was joking. He wasn't joking. He handed it to me and walked out of the kitchen and didn't come back until dinner. He stopped taking new lock jobs that required fine work. He'd call the guy at the shop and say he was booked up and hand it off. He'd been the guy people asked for by name for 30 years. Now he was passing the work along and telling nobody why. And the whole time he kept telling me he was fine. And the whole time I kept pretending to believe him. Because what else do you do. You've been married 38 years. You know when a man is scared. You know when a man is falling apart. And you know that the fastest way to make him fall apart faster is to name it out loud. So we lived like that for almost 2 years. Ray shrinking. Me watching him shrink. Neither of us saying it. Until the Tuesday in December when he sat in the driveway for 47 minutes because he couldn't turn his own house key. I took the key out of his hand and I opened the door and I made him a bowl of oatmeal and I sat across from him at the kitchen table and I said Ray. I said Ray we have to tell somebody. I said we have to tell Kenya. Kenya is our daughter in law. She's married to our younger son Marcus, the one who does HVAC here in town. Kenya is a night shift LPN over at Rush Hospital, been there almost 9 years, works the med surg floor from 7 at night till 7 in the morning. Kenya is the person in our family who knows things. When my sister had her gallbladder scare it was Kenya we called. When Marcus threw his back out on a job it was Kenya who told him which chiropractor to go to and which one to avoid. Kenya is 34 years old and has more common sense than the rest of us put together. Ray didn't want to call her. Ray said this was between him and Dr. Weems. Ray said Kenya had 2 little ones and a night shift and didn't need to be worrying about him. I called her that afternoon while Ray was in the garage. She came over Saturday morning with a thermos of coffee and both babies in the car. She left the babies with me in the front room and she went out to the garage where Ray was pretending to organize his bins and she was out there with him for over an hour. I don't know what they talked about. I know when she came back in she was quiet for a minute and then she asked me to sit down. She said she'd watched him try to pick up a pin off the workbench. She said he'd tried 3 times. She said the way his fingers were moving reminded her of some of the older patients on her floor. She said it wasn't nerve compression from tools. She said tools don't do that. She said tools give you calluses and arthritis, not what Ray had. She said what Ray had looked like the small nerves in his hands were not getting what they needed. She said she'd seen it before in patients with sugar problems and in patients whose circulation was poor and in patients whose bodies were just not delivering to the smallest, farthest places anymore. She said it was the fingertips and the toes that went first because they were the farthest away. I asked her what we do. She said she'd been reading about something for months. She said she almost hadn't brought it up because she doesn't like giving family members medical advice, but she said what she'd been learning about wasn't medical advice, it was more like nutrition, and she said it was something she was thinking about for her own grandmother who has similar issues. She said the word amla. I had never heard of it. Neither had Ray when she said it to him. Kenya said it was a berry, an Indian gooseberry, that people in India had been using as a wellness food for thousands of years. She said the reason she'd been reading about it was because of what it does with something called AMPK, which she said is a pathway your body uses to support your mitochondria. She said the mitochondria are the little parts inside your cells that make cellular energy. And she said the cells in your nerves are some of the most energy hungry cells in your whole body. She said your nerve cells need a huge amount of cellular energy just to keep their protective coating in place and to keep sending signals down to your fingertips and back. She said when the mitochondria wear down, the nerve cells feel it first because they need the most. She said think of it like a power grid. She said the house at the very end of the line is the one whose lights flicker first when the grid gets weak. She said your fingertips are the house at the end of the line. She said Ray's mitochondria had probably been running on low power for years. She said all the things I'd been watching, the numbness, the tingling, the missed pins, the ants at night, all of it was consistent with nerve cells that were not getting enough cellular energy delivered to them anymore. She said amla was one of the few things she'd read about that appeared to support AMPK activity in a real way. She said when AMPK is active, the mitochondria can start producing cellular energy more efficiently again, more like they did when Ray was 40. She said amla also has one of the highest antioxidant profiles ever measured in a food, which she said matters because oxidative stress is one of the things that wears the mitochondria down in the first place. She said it was like feeding the power plant and also protecting the power lines at the same time. I remember sitting at that table and thinking two things. The first was that this was the most sense anybody had made to me in 2 years. Dr. Weems had said nerve compression. He'd said aging. He'd said take an ibuprofen. Nobody had ever said the word mitochondria to me. Nobody had ever explained why Ray's fingertips specifically. Why the farthest points. Why the ants at night. The second thing I thought was that a berry sounded ridiculous. I said as much to Kenya. I said Kenya, honey, a berry. She laughed and she said Deloris, I know. She said I thought the same thing 6 months ago. She said what changed her mind was reading about how amla works on the actual cellular machinery, not on masking symptoms. She said most things people try for numb hands are trying to quiet the alarm, not fix why the alarm is going off. She said amla wasn't quieting anything. She said it was supporting the energy production system that had gotten worn out. She said that was different from anything Ray had been doing. She said the brand she'd been reading about was called Auniva. She said Auniva Amla was a concentrated extract made in the USA, 2 capsules a day, and they had a 90 day money back guarantee. She said she'd been keeping the link on her phone for weeks trying to work up the nerve to bring it up with her own grandmother. She said maybe she was supposed to bring it up with Ray first. Ray was quiet. Ray had listened to the whole thing at the kitchen table not saying a word. Then he said okay. That was it. Just okay. Ray does not make big speeches. He makes decisions and then he executes them. He said okay and he pushed back from the table and he went out to the garage and I ordered the first bottle from Kenya's phone that afternoon. The bottle came on a Thursday. Ray took his first 2 capsules with orange juice on Friday morning standing at the kitchen counter while I made breakfast. I want to tell you what happened next but I want to tell you honestly because I've read enough of these stories to know when somebody is making it up. Nothing happened for about the first 2 weeks. Ray took his capsules every morning. I asked him every night if he felt any different and he said no. He said maybe he was a little warmer at night. He said his feet weren't as cold. But he said his hands felt the same. The ants were still there. Around the middle of the third week I noticed something at the dinner table. Ray reached for the salt and he picked it up on the first try. It sounds like nothing. But I had been watching him for 2 years and I had watched him reach for things and miss and I had watched him second-guess his own fingers before he even tried, and that night he just picked up the salt shaker without thinking about it. I didn't say anything. I just watched. The next week he came in from the garage and he said Deloris come here. He walked me over to the workbench and he'd rebuilt a Baldwin deadbolt. All the pins were seated. All the springs were in. The cylinder turned. He'd done the whole thing himself, at his bench, with his hands, and he'd finished it. I asked him how long it took. He said about 90 minutes. He said before, that job would have taken him 3 hours and he'd have thrown 4 pins across the room in frustration. He said it just went. By the end of week 5 the ants were gone. He told me at night, in bed, with the lights off, the same way he'd first told me they were there. He said he'd woken up 3 nights in a row and just realized nothing was crawling on his fingers. He said he hadn't sat on the edge of the bed working his hands open and closed all week. Week 6 was when Kenya came over for Sunday dinner and Ray got up and unscrewed the tight lid on the pickle jar without being asked. Kenya looked at me across the table. I looked at Ray. Ray didn't even notice what he'd done. He set the pickles down and asked the babies if they wanted to see the peach tree. Week 8 he took a lock job he would have turned down 6 months ago. A woman over in Toomsuba had a 1918 Yale mortise lock on her front door and needed the whole thing rebuilt. That is finicky, patient, small-work stuff. Ray did the whole job at the kitchen table on a Saturday afternoon. He was humming. Week 10 he showed me his hands one night. He held them out palms down under the kitchen light and he said look. He said look at my thumbs. His thumbnails had these little vertical ridges that had been there for years, and he said they were smoother than they'd been. I don't know if that means anything. I'm not a nurse. But Ray noticed it. Ray, who never notices anything about his own body, noticed his own thumbnails. It has been almost 7 months now. Ray takes his 2 capsules every morning with orange juice. The bottle sits on the counter next to the coffee maker. I take them too now, because after I watched what happened to Ray's hands I started wondering what was happening to the small nerves in my own body that I was ignoring, and Kenya said there was no reason a healthy 62 year old woman shouldn't be supporting her mitochondria too. I take mine at the same time as him. It has become part of the morning. Ray is back at the shop 3 days a week doing the fine work again. He is not 40. He is not going to be 40 again. But he is Ray. He turns the key in our front door. He picks up the brass pins off the green felt cloth without missing. He opens the pickle jars. He drove 40 miles last month to help our older son in Hattiesburg install a security system on the man's new office and he came home tired but he came home whole. He rebuilt the ignition on our neighbor's 1994 Chevy Silverado last week. Charged the man 60 dollars. The man tried to pay him 200. Ray refused because that's how Ray is. The reason I am writing this is because I know there are women reading this who are watching their husbands sit in the truck in the driveway for 47 minutes and not knowing why. I know there are women watching their husbands drop the coffee cup and stare at their own hand like it lied to them. I know there are women who have been told by a good doctor with a nice smile that it's just nerve compression, it's just aging, take some ibuprofen. I know because I was one of them. If your husband is fading in the small ways nobody else can see, and you have been watching it happen and you have not been able to name it, I want you to know two things. First, you are not imagining it. You've been watching what I watched. Your eyes are telling you the truth. Second, there may be something you can try. It is not a prescription. It is not a treatment. It is a concentrated amla extract that supports the AMPK pathway and helps the mitochondria do what they used to do. It is called Auniva Amla. It comes in a small bottle. 2 capsules a day. Made in the USA. Free shipping. And they stand behind it with a 90 day money back guarantee, which means if it doesn't do anything for your husband or for you, you send the bottle back and you get every penny returned. No questions. No fight. That guarantee is what let me push the button that first Thursday. I didn't have anything to lose. Neither do you. If you want to check on availability or read more about how the AMPK pathway works, this is where I ordered ours from. 👉 auniva.co/amla/33 P.S. If you are the wife of a man who works with his hands, and those hands have been slowly getting away from him, you already know what I'm talking about. A man's hands are his identity when he's worked a trade his whole life. When his hands go, something else goes with them. He gets quieter. He sits in the truck. He stops taking calls. He hands the interesting work off to the younger guy at the shop. You watch him disappear one lock pin at a time. What Kenya explained to me about the mitochondria and the nerve cells at the ends of the power grid finally gave me the map for what I'd been watching. It wasn't Ray giving up. It was his cells not getting what they needed to keep firing all the way out to his fingertips. Once we started supporting that, Ray came back. Not overnight. But he came back. P.P.S. About the guarantee. I want to say this plainly. Dr. Weems has been prescribing Ray blood pressure medicine and cholesterol medicine for 11 years and not one of those prescriptions has ever come with a money back guarantee. Nobody has ever offered to refund the ibuprofen he was told to take for his hands. Nobody offers refunds when a medication doesn't work. Auniva does. That tells you something about who is confident in what they're selling and who is just confident that you'll keep paying whether it works or not. If you order a bottle of Auniva Amla and your husband takes it for 90 days and nothing changes, you send it back and you get your money back. That is the deal. That is the whole deal. P.P.P.S. I want to be honest that Auniva is a small company and they do run out of stock. When I went to order Ray's second bottle I had to wait 6 days for it to ship because they had sold through. I keep 2 bottles in the pantry now, one open and one in reserve. If you are thinking about trying it for your husband or for yourself, check availability now instead of later. There is currently a multi bottle deal on the site that I used to stock up for us and for Kenya's grandmother. Ray did not have another 2 years to wait sitting in that driveway. Your person may not either. P.P.P.P.S. That Tuesday in December, when Ray sat out there for 47 minutes because he was ashamed to come in and tell me he couldn't turn his own house key, I want you to understand that was the worst morning of our marriage. Not because of the key. Because of the 47 minutes. Because of what it meant that my husband would rather sit alone in a cold truck than let me see what was happening to him. That is what silence costs. Last Sunday morning Ray unlocked the front door, came in, hung up his coat, and asked me if I wanted to ride out to the peach tree with him because he thought he saw a bud. He wasn't even thinking about the key. That's the part I want you to hear. He wasn't thinking about the key. He just used it. And I stood there in the kitchen with my hands in the dishwater and I cried a little because a man using his own house key without thinking about it is the most beautiful thing I have seen in 2 years. 👉 auniva.co/amla/33

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