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

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I was sorting through a shoebox of birthday cards last Sunday afternoon. Not a metaphor. An actual Buster Brown shoebox that used to hold a pair of my daughter's Mary Janes in 1988, that I've been putting my birthday cards in for 35 years. Every year on September 14th my husband Cletus goes to the Hallmark on Cherry Road and picks me out a card, and every year he writes something on the inside of it in his own handwriting, and every year I put it in the shoebox. 35 cards. One shoebox. Held together by a rubber band that snapped when I picked it up. I was going to put them in a scrapbook. That was the plan on Sunday afternoon. I laid them out on the dining room table in the order the years were on the postmarks. And I sat there with my reading glasses on for about an hour just reading what he'd written to me. Some of them made me laugh. He always signed our anniversary cards "your Cletus" but he signed the birthday cards "Clete" like we were dating in 1979. Some of them made me cry a little. There was one from 1999 when I turned 37 that just said, "I would marry you again in the morning." And then, somewhere around the middle of the pile, I noticed something. The handwriting changed. Not the ink. Not the paper. The handwriting itself. The letters got smaller. And they started slanting. And the lines of writing that used to run straight across the card started drifting down toward the bottom right corner like they were being pulled by gravity. I put the cards back in order by year. I laid them out chronologically on the dining room table. And I could pinpoint it. Before 2019, big loopy handwriting. After 2019, the letters shrank like they were trying to hide. I looked up from the dining room table through the sliding glass door onto our back porch. Cletus was sitting out there in his rocker trying to button the top button of the flannel shirt he'd just put on for supper. He'd been at it for what looked like 4 minutes. Both hands. Fumbling. And I understood what I'd been watching for six years. My name is Deloris. I'm 63 years old. I live in Rock Hill, South Carolina, off Ebenezer Road, about a mile from the Winthrop campus. I worked as a unit secretary at Piedmont Medical Center for 26 years and I retired in 2021 with a small pension and a cake with my name misspelled on it. My husband Cletus is 65. He's a retired letter carrier. He walked a route out of the Rock Hill main branch on Chatham Avenue for 38 years, in the heat and the ice and the days when it rained sideways off Highway 21. He knew every dog on his route by name. He knew which mailboxes stuck and which porches had a rotten step to avoid. He retired the same year I did. We had it all planned. We were going to drive to Myrtle Beach for a long weekend that fall. We didn't go. Cletus said his feet hurt too bad to walk the boardwalk. I didn't understand it. I thought his feet hurt because he'd walked a mail route for 38 years and now his body was catching up with him. That's what his doctor said too. That's what the neighbor who used to be a paramedic said. That's what every article in the AARP magazine said. Old man feet. But it wasn't old man feet. I want to walk you through what changed and when, because I only saw it clearly on Sunday afternoon at the dining room table. Cletus started dropping things in 2018. Coffee mugs. A pair of tongs off the grill. My mother's crystal candy dish, which he stared at on the kitchen floor like he was looking at a photograph of somebody he used to know. In 2019 he stopped playing guitar. He played guitar in the same church band at Bethel Baptist for 22 years. Rhythm guitar. He wasn't good enough to solo and he knew it, but he could hold down a chord progression on "Just As I Am" that made the whole choir feel steady. He put the Takamine in its case in the spare bedroom sometime that fall and told me his fingers weren't cooperating anymore. I thought he meant arthritis. He didn't say the word tingling. He didn't have the words. In 2020 he stopped tying his own dress shoes. He wore loafers to church every Sunday from then on. I didn't notice for a long time because loafers on a 60-something Southern man aren't strange. But he used to wear his black leather Florsheims with laces every Sunday for 30 years, and one Sunday he stopped and it was because his fingers couldn't do the loops. In 2022 he stopped writing checks. He didn't announce it. He just started asking me to write them for the water bill, then the gas bill, then the check for the pest control man who comes on the last Wednesday of every month. When our granddaughter had a piano recital and he wanted to give her a $20 bill inside a card, he asked me to write "For a great performance, love Papa Clete" on the card and he'd sign his name at the bottom. His signature was a wobble. In 2023 he stopped driving after dark. In 2024 he stopped driving on the highway. This year, 2026, he almost didn't come to the dinner table on my birthday because he couldn't get his belt through the loops of his slacks. His doctor at Family Practice on Herlong Avenue has known him for 30 years. Kind man. Went to church with us. Every time Cletus went in for his physical, the doctor would ask about the foot burning and the finger fumbling and the balance thing and he'd say some version of the same sentence. "Clete, you walked a mail route for 38 years. Your feet earned every ache they've got. Take the ibuprofen. Stretch in the mornings. And come see me next year." Cletus tried the ibuprofen. He tried the stretches. He tried a foot bath with Epsom salts every night for a summer. He tried alpha lipoic acid because a man at the barbershop off Cherry Road told him about it. He tried some kind of magnesium spray that his sister sent from Florida. He tried B12 shots. Nothing. And every year the handwriting got smaller. I did not put this together in real time. That's what I want you to understand. I was not sitting on our couch every night watching my husband deteriorate. I was living my life. I was working my job until 2021 and then I was helping with the grandkids and I was doing the laundry and I was fixing suppers and I was going to Zumba on Tuesday nights at the Y. Cletus was next to me the whole time. Just quieter. A little slower. A little more careful about which chair he sat in. I did not put it together until I laid out 35 birthday cards on a dining room table on a Sunday afternoon. And I saw a decline written in ink. I sat there for a long time on Sunday. I let the pot roast in the crockpot burn a little on the bottom. Cletus came in from the porch at 5:20 asking why the house smelled like burnt onions and I said, "Give me a minute, hon," and he walked back to the porch without arguing. I stared at those cards. And I felt something I want to name for you because I think a lot of women feel this and don't have a word for it. It wasn't grief. Grief comes when somebody dies. It was preemptive grief. The grief you feel while somebody is still sitting on your back porch trying to button a flannel shirt. The grief of watching somebody disappear one card at a time. I called Rennie on Monday morning. Rennie is Renata. She was my best friend at Piedmont Medical Center for 22 of my 26 years there. She was in labor and delivery, I was on the medical-surgical floor. We took our lunch breaks together in the cafeteria almost every day. She retired 3 years before I did and moved down to Fort Mill with her husband Curtis, who's about 70 now. Curtis had foot burning too. Rennie had told me about it years ago and I'd nodded and forgotten because it wasn't my problem yet. I called her Monday and I told her about the birthday cards. Rennie was quiet on the phone for a while. Then she said, "Delly, when can I come see you? I want to bring you something and I want to tell you a story and I don't want to do it on the phone." She drove up on Wednesday. She brought two bottles of what looked like a supplement, and she brought a photocopied stack of research articles that she'd printed at the library, and she brought a coconut cream pie from the Piggly Wiggly because she knows me. We sat at the same dining room table where I'd laid out the cards on Sunday. Cletus was on the porch. Rennie put her hand on my arm and told me about her husband Curtis. Curtis is a retired heating and air man. His feet started burning in 2016. His hands started tingling in 2018. He dropped his cordless drill on a job site in Chester in 2020 and that was the day he told Rennie he thought he was done. Rennie went through everything I went through. The doctor said age. Curtis tried alpha lipoic acid, magnesium, B12, all of it. Nothing. Then Rennie's niece, who is a doctor of pharmacy in Charlotte, sent Rennie an article about a fruit called amla. She said, "Aunt Rennie, this isn't a cure. But this is the mechanism piece I've been looking for you." Rennie read the article three times. Then she started reading the actual research. I want to try to tell you what Rennie told me the way she told me, because she talked to me for close to two hours at that dining room table. She said we've been thinking about nerves wrong. We've been thinking about nerves like they're wires. Wires wear out. When wires wear out you have to accept that they're worn out. But nerves aren't wires. Nerves are cells. Living cells. And every living cell in your body runs on cellular energy. That energy is made inside the cell by tiny little structures called mitochondria. You may remember that word from high school biology. Powerhouse of the cell. Here's the thing Rennie said that I did not know. Nerve cells are among the hungriest cells in your entire body. They eat more cellular energy than almost any other kind of cell you've got. They have to maintain a coating around themselves called myelin, they have to transmit signals up and down their length constantly, and they have to keep themselves alive despite being some of the longest cells in the body. Your longest nerve runs from your lower back all the way to your big toe. That cell needs a lot of fuel to keep the far end functioning. When your mitochondria start to slow down, and they do slow down as we age, and they especially slow down after 38 years of walking a mail route in the summer heat and the winter ice and the days when it rained sideways off Highway 21, the nerve cells are the first to feel it. Because they were the hungriest to begin with. That's why the fingers were the first to fumble. That's why the feet were the first to burn. That's why the handwriting shrank first, and the guitar chords stopped working first, and the shoe laces became too much first. The mail route didn't damage his nerves. The mail route wore out the batteries that were powering his nerves. And every supplement Cletus had tried, and every stretch he had done, and every ibuprofen he had swallowed, was doing what Rennie called "delivering lumber to a construction site with no power." His nerves had the raw materials. What they didn't have was the electricity to do anything with the raw materials. Amla, Rennie said, works differently. There's a pathway in the body called AMPK. AMPK is a switch inside your cells that tells the mitochondria to work harder. When AMPK is on, mitochondria produce more cellular energy. When AMPK is off, or working poorly, they produce less. Amla contains compounds called emblicanins that help support that pathway. And emblicanins also happen to be some of the most concentrated antioxidants ever measured in a fruit, which helps protect the mitochondria from the day-to-day oxidative wear that slowed them down in the first place. Both ends of the problem. The mitochondria getting supported, and the wear on them getting slowed. Rennie said it took Curtis about 5 weeks to feel a difference. And then it took him about 12 weeks to feel a real difference. And that at 6 months he was back doing small handyman jobs for neighbors in Fort Mill, and he'd repaired the swing chain on their back porch himself, and he'd started writing checks again. She pulled out one of the bottles she'd brought. The bottle said Auniva. The website printed on the side was auniva.co/amla/33 Two capsules a day. 30 servings per bottle. Made in the United States. Free shipping. And most importantly to me, sitting at that dining room table looking at bottles I'd never heard of from a company I didn't know, a 90-day money back guarantee. Rennie said, "Delly, I'm not a salesperson. I'm not affiliated with these people. I bought these two bottles for you at my own cost because I love you and I want you to try them for Cletus. If they don't do a thing, you send them back and Auniva will refund every penny. That's the deal they run. That's the reason I even tried it for Curtis to begin with. I don't trust anything I can't return." She left the bottles on the table. She hugged me. She said, "Delly, this is not a cure and it's not a promise. It's a nutritional support. But if what's happening to Cletus is what happened to Curtis, this could be the piece that's missing." She went home. I sat with those two bottles for the rest of the afternoon. I want to be honest about the next part. I did not put the bottle on the counter that night. I did not tell Cletus about it that night. I put both bottles in my top dresser drawer under a nightgown I don't wear anymore, and I let them sit there for 5 days while I thought about it. Cletus is a stubborn man. If I'd walked out to the porch on Wednesday night and said, "I bought you a supplement," he would have said "No, ma'am," the way he does when I try to change his laundry detergent. He would have shut it down before he understood what it was. So I read the research papers Rennie left. I went on the Auniva website and I read the ingredient sourcing page. I read the guarantee terms all the way through. I called Rennie on Friday morning and asked her three follow up questions. And Saturday morning I made bacon and eggs and I put one of the capsule bottles next to Cletus's coffee mug at the breakfast table. He looked at it. He picked it up. He turned it around and read the label. He said, "What is this." I said, "It's something Rennie brought me on Wednesday. Her husband Curtis has been taking it for a year. She says it helped him." He said, "Curtis the HVAC man?" I said, "That Curtis." He was quiet for a while. Then he said, "He walk again?" I said, "He never stopped walking. But he says his feet don't burn like they used to." Cletus opened the bottle. He took two capsules with his coffee. He did not say anything else about it. The first thing I noticed was not something Cletus said. He wouldn't have said anything if his hair was on fire. The first thing I noticed was at week 4. He was buttering his toast on a Tuesday morning and he buttered all the way to the corners. I don't know if you know what I mean by that. If you've watched a man with tingling fingers butter a piece of toast, he butters the middle. He can't manage the corners because the knife shakes when he tries to get to the edges. Cletus had been buttering the middle of his toast for probably 4 years. That Tuesday he buttered corner to corner. I didn't say anything. I ate my grits. Week 6 he took the trash out to the curb without me asking. He hadn't done that in about 2 years because the bag had gotten too hard for him to hold. Week 8 he put the Takamine on his lap on the couch on a Thursday night. He didn't play it. He just held it. He rested his fingers on the fretboard for about 20 minutes while a football game played with the sound off. I stayed in the kitchen and washed the dishes so I wouldn't stare. Week 11 I heard three chords come from the living room. Not a song. Not even a progression. Three chords. G. C. D. In slow motion. Held for a long time each. But three chords in a row. I put my hand on the kitchen counter and cried into the sponge. Cletus came into the kitchen a little later. He stood in the doorway. He said, "My fingers are cooperating a little." I said, "I noticed, hon." He said, "That thing you gave me. That supplement." I said, "Yes." He said, "I don't want to say anything for sure. But it's not nothing." That was three months ago. Two Sundays ago my birthday came around. I turned 63. Cletus went to the Hallmark on Cherry Road by himself, which he hadn't done in three years, and he picked out a card. He wrote on the inside. I opened it at the dinner table with the whole family there. The letters were still not as big as they used to be. He is 65 years old and 38 years of walking a mail route can't be undone. I'm not going to sit here and tell you a fable. But the letters didn't slant down toward the corner. The lines ran straight across the card. And what he wrote was, "Delly. I would marry you again in the morning." The same thing he wrote in 1999. He didn't remember writing it before. I checked. I'm sitting at my kitchen table typing this on a laptop my son set up for me because there are a lot of women out there sorting through their own shoeboxes right now. Women whose husbands used to write big loopy handwriting and now scribble. Women whose husbands used to play guitar and now don't touch it. Women whose husbands used to tie their own shoes and now wear loafers to church. You have been told it's age. You have been told there's nothing to do. You have been told to accept it as part of getting older. I'm not qualified to argue with a doctor. I'm a retired unit secretary from Rock Hill. But I know what I watched happen at my own dining room table over 6 years, and I know what I've watched happen at my breakfast table over the last 3 months, and the two don't add up if the only answer is age. Auniva's Amla comes in a bottle of 60 capsules. 30 servings. Two capsules a day with breakfast. Made in the USA. Free shipping. And a 90-day money-back guarantee that Rennie said was the reason she even tried it for Curtis to begin with. If it doesn't do a thing for your husband, you send it back and you get every penny. The website is: 👉 auniva.co/amla/33 P.S. I want to say something about the guarantee because it's the part that made me finally act. Every specialist Cletus saw over the last 6 years charged us a copay and a bill and a lab fee, and not one of them ever offered our money back when Cletus walked out of the appointment feeling no better than he walked in. The B12 shots didn't come with a refund. The alpha lipoic acid didn't come with a refund. Even the magnesium spray his sister sent from Florida didn't come with a refund. Auniva is the only thing in this whole 6 year search that said "if it doesn't work for you, send it back." That kind of confidence in a product tells you something. Nobody offers a guarantee on something they don't think is going to help. Nobody in medicine offers one at all. P.P.S. Rennie called me two weeks ago and said Auniva had been out of stock when she tried to reorder Curtis's bottles. She said it happens more than it used to because word is spreading in the neuropathy world. I keep three bottles at the house now, one open and two sealed in the pantry, because Cletus does not miss a day and I do not intend for him to. If your husband's fingers have been fumbling with buttons for a while, or if you've been quietly writing his checks for him without saying anything about it, I would not wait. Every week that goes by is another week the mitochondria aren't getting the support they need. Cletus lost 6 years to "it's just aging." You don't have to lose 6 more. P.P.P.S. Do not forget about the 90 day money back guarantee. That is the piece I want you to hear one more time. 90 days is 3 full bottles. That is enough time to see if it does anything for your husband. It's enough time for the mitochondria to start responding. It's enough time to see him butter his toast to the corners again. And if it doesn't happen, you send it back and Auniva refunds every dollar. There is no risk here except the risk of not trying. 👉 auniva.co/amla/33

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Feel Like Yourself Again

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