Ad copy

I was teaching my grandson to parallel park in the Kroger parking lot when I realized I couldn't feel the brake under my own right foot. He was 16. I was 63. He was driving my Buick because his mom's car had been in the shop and I'd offered. He didn't notice anything was wrong. He was too busy gripping the wheel with both hands like he was trying to choke it. I told him to pull into the empty row near the cart corral so he could practice. Two orange cones. I'd brought them in the trunk like a kindergarten teacher with her flash cards. He pulled in too wide. Backed up. Tried again. I told him to ease off the gas. To use the brake gentle. I told him the brake was right there under his right foot, and as the words came out of my mouth I realized I couldn't feel my own. I pressed down on the floor mat just to check. Nothing. No pressure feedback. Just the floor. I made up some story about needing gas. Told him I'd drive home. He looked at me funny but he got out and switched seats. We drove home in silence. He played with the radio. I gripped the wheel and stared at the road like I was a brand new driver myself. I haven't driven him since. That was 11 months ago. My name is Brenda. I'm 63 years old. I live in Bowling Green, Kentucky in the same brick ranch my husband Roy and I bought in 1987 for $74,500. Roy spent 38 years as an HVAC tech for a small shop on the south side of town. He retired in May of last year. We have one daughter, Whitney, who teaches kindergarten and lives 6 minutes away in a neighborhood called Hartland. Mason is our only grandchild. I taught 4th grade for 31 years at Cumberland Trace Elementary. I retired the same year Roy did. We had it planned. We were going to drive the Buick down to Gulf Shores every February. We were going to take Mason out to the lake on weekends. We were going to be the grandparents who showed up. That was the plan. The tingling started about 14 months before that day in the Kroger parking lot. It started in my left foot. Just my pinky toe at first. The kind of pins and needles you get when you cross your legs too long, except it wouldn't go away when I uncrossed them. I ignored it for 2 months. Then it spread up to the ball of my foot. Then my right foot started. Then there was this burning at night, like someone had laid an electric blanket over the bottom of my feet and turned it up. Roy would feel my feet under the covers and ask why they were so hot. They weren't hot to him. They were burning to me. I went to my doctor. Dr. Patel. Good man. He's been my doctor since Whitney was in middle school. He ran some bloodwork. Said my A1C was a little high, my B12 was a little low, and that this was probably "just one of those things that happens as we get older." He put me on gabapentin. 300mg, 3 times a day. By day 4 I was so foggy I forgot how to spell my own street name when I was writing a check at the grocery store. I stopped taking it. I went down the supplement aisle at Walgreens like I was preparing for war. Alpha lipoic acid. B-complex. Methylated B12. Magnesium glycinate. Benfotiamine. A multivitamin called "Nerve Renew" that cost $59 a bottle and tasted like dirt when I opened the capsules to see what was inside. I bought compression socks. The kind that come up to your knees. I slept in them. They left red marks across my calves every morning. None of it changed anything. The tingling kept spreading. By the time of the Kroger parking lot it was in my right hand too. I'd started dropping things. A coffee cup at 7:22 one Tuesday morning. A jar of pickles that broke on the kitchen floor and I spent 40 minutes picking glass out of the grout. Roy noticed I stopped going to water aerobics on Wednesdays. He didn't say anything for a while. He just noticed. I'd stopped because I couldn't feel where my feet were in the pool. I'd kept stepping wrong on the tile and one time I almost went down in the shallow end with 6 other women watching. The lifeguard, a girl who's maybe 19 years old, asked if I was okay. I said "yes thank you sweetheart" and got out and never went back. The shame of that. You don't understand the shame of a thing like that until your body starts betraying you and the witnesses are 40 years younger. I'd started gripping the railing on our front porch coming down the 3 steps to get the mail. 3 steps. I'd grown up walking down barn ladders barefoot. Now I was holding a railing. So that Saturday in the Kroger parking lot was the moment something cracked. It wasn't that the parking lot itself was the worst thing that had happened. It's just that Mason was in the car. Mason was holding the wheel with both hands trying to learn to be a man, and his grandmother was sitting next to him pretending her foot worked while she was actually a hazard to him. I drove home with my left hand on the wheel because my right hand was tingling so bad I didn't trust it. I made small talk about his calculus teacher. I dropped him off at Whitney's. I drove home and got into the bathtub with the water running and cried so hard Roy heard me from the kitchen. He knocked. I told him I was fine. I lied to Roy that night for the first time in 41 years of marriage. He asked what was wrong and I said "nothing, just tired." Whitney called me the next morning at 8:14. She said Mason had told her something happened in the parking lot. She said Mason had said "Mom, something's wrong with grandma." She was at my kitchen table by 9:30. Whitney is 36. She teaches kindergarten now, but she went to nursing school first. She quit after her second year because she said she "couldn't stand watching people get treated like a chart." She switched to education the next semester. But she'd kept the brain. She'd kept the curiosity. She sat down at my kitchen table with a manila folder. A manila folder. From my own daughter. Like she was about to fire me. She opened it. There were printouts. Articles. Things she'd highlighted. A list of supplements with red Xs and green checks. She said "Mom, I've been listening to this podcast for 3 months. I didn't say anything because I wasn't sure. But after yesterday I'm sure." I asked what she was sure of. She said "I think I know why the nerve thing isn't getting better with any of the stuff you've been trying." I'm going to do my best to tell you what she explained, because it's the thing that ended up changing everything for me. And it wasn't what I expected. It had nothing to do with the nerves themselves. It had to do with cellular energy. Whitney said something that, looking back, was the first thing anybody had told me in 14 months that actually made sense. She said: the cells in your nerves are the most energy-hungry cells in your entire body. I'd never heard that before. Not from Dr. Patel. Not from anybody on the supplement aisle. Not from any of the labels on the bottles. She said your nerves use more cellular energy than your muscles, more than your skin, more than almost any other tissue. Because they're constantly transmitting signals. Constantly maintaining this protective coating around themselves called the myelin sheath. Constantly working. And all of that energy comes from tiny things inside your cells called mitochondria. Your body's cellular energy system. She said with age. With stress. With processed food. With medications. The mitochondria start to wear down. They produce less cellular energy than they used to. And the first cells to feel the shortage? The most energy-hungry ones. Your nerves. The tingling. The burning. The numbness. The dropped coffee cups. The feet that don't know where the floor is. She said it's not that the nerves are broken. It's that they're underpowered. She said it like that and I just sat there. Because for the first time in 14 months somebody was telling me something that explained why everything I had tried had failed. The alpha lipoic acid. The B12. The magnesium. The Nerve Renew. The compression socks. The gabapentin. None of it had been working on the energy. They'd all been trying to treat the symptom. They'd been delivering lumber to a construction site that had no power. That was Whitney's phrase. She said "Mom, you've been delivering lumber to a construction site with no power." I asked her what would actually help. What does support the energy. That's when she told me about amla. She said it the way you say a word you've practiced. Awm-la. Indian gooseberry. A fruit they've used in Ayurvedic medicine for 3,000 years. She said it nicely, like she didn't want to oversell it. She said amla helps activate something called AMPK. A pathway your body uses to support mitochondrial function. When AMPK is active, the mitochondria can start producing cellular energy more efficiently. The way they did when you were younger. Cellular energy can flow back to your cells. Including the most energy-hungry ones. The nerve cells. And when the nerve cells are better supported, they can start working on what they're supposed to be doing. Maintaining the myelin sheath. Transmitting signals properly. Calming the burning so feeling can start to come back. She said it nicely. She said "can." She said "may." She said "many people notice." She didn't promise me anything. Whitney has too much of a nurse in her to promise. But she said the research on AMPK and mitochondrial function was the most exciting thing she'd read in years. She also told me amla had one of the highest antioxidant profiles ever measured in a food. That mattered, she said, because oxidative stress is part of what wears the mitochondria down in the first place. So you'd be getting the energy support and the protection at the same time. She called it "the nurse." She said in the old Ayurvedic texts they called amla the nurse. Because it didn't push the body to do anything. It supported the body in doing what it already knew how to do. I asked her where to get it. She said most amla on the market wasn't very good. She'd been researching. The capsules at the grocery store were mostly filler. She'd found a small company called Alevia that made an amla extract here in the US, with the actual active compounds standardized. She'd already ordered a bottle. It was in her car. I told her she'd planned this whole intervention. She laughed. She said "Mom, I love you. Mason loves you. Take the bottle." I took the bottle. The bottle was small. 60 capsules. Take 2 a day. That was it. I started the next morning. A Tuesday. I remember it was a Tuesday because Roy was at the dump and I was alone in the kitchen. I took 2 capsules with my coffee. I didn't feel anything that day. I didn't expect to. I didn't feel anything by day 4 either. By day 9 I noticed I'd slept through the night without the burning in my feet waking me up at 2 in the morning. That had been happening 4 or 5 nights a week. I hadn't slept all the way through since the previous summer. I didn't say anything to Roy. I didn't say anything to Whitney. I figured it was a fluke. But it happened the next night too. And the night after. By the end of the second week I was sleeping through the night without the burning. Around week 3 I noticed I could feel the kitchen tile when I walked to the coffee pot in the morning. I hadn't realized how long I'd been walking on what felt like a foam mat over my own feet until the foam mat was gone. That's the thing nobody tells you about losing feeling. You don't notice the loss because it's gradual. You notice the return because the contrast is sharp. By week 5 I picked up a coffee cup without flinching first. I'd developed this little flinch over the last year. Every time I went for a cup or a glass or a plate, my hand would do this tiny stutter before it gripped because some part of me knew it might drop the thing. That flinch was gone. By week 6 I went back to water aerobics. I told Janelle, the woman who runs it, that I'd been "dealing with a thing" and was finally back. She hugged me. The other ladies clapped. The 19 year old lifeguard nodded at me from her chair. I cried in the locker room afterward and made it look like I'd just gotten chlorine in my eye. Around week 8 Roy and I drove down to a state park for the day, and on the way home I told him I wanted to take Mason out for a driving lesson again. Roy looked at me. He said "are you sure?" He hadn't known about the parking lot specifically. But he'd known something had happened. I said I was sure. I took Mason to the same Kroger parking lot on a Sunday morning. Same orange cones. Same Buick. He laughed when he saw the cones in the trunk. He said "grandma, I parallel park fine now, dad's been taking me." I told him I knew. I told him I just wanted to do this with him anyway. He pulled into the row. He set up. He went back. He pulled forward. He nailed it on the first try. I told him to switch. I drove the long way home. I felt every pedal. I felt the grain of the wheel under both hands. I felt the floor mat through the bottom of my shoe. When we pulled into Whitney's driveway, Mason said "you okay grandma?" I said "yeah baby, I'm okay." I know what you might be thinking right now if you're reading this and you've been going through your own version of this. You're thinking "I've tried supplements before, they don't do anything." I thought that too. I'd spent hundreds of dollars at Walgreens. I had a whole shelf of bottles in the bathroom Roy had started calling "the graveyard." But here's what I learned from Whitney and from my own reading after that. Most of those supplements were aimed at the wrong target. They were trying to give my nerves nutrients. The problem wasn't a nutrient shortage. The problem was an energy shortage. None of those bottles knew how to support AMPK. None of them were the nurse. You're thinking "if this was real, my doctor would have told me." Dr. Patel is a wonderful man. I trust him with my life. But Dr. Patel has a 12 minute appointment slot per patient. And the medical system he works inside of trains him to write prescriptions for symptoms. It doesn't train him to talk about cellular energy and mitochondria and Ayurvedic fruits. He's not allowed to suggest something he can't prescribe. The system isn't set up for "the nurse." It's set up for "the soldier." You're thinking "a berry? How could a berry do anything?" That's exactly what I said to Whitney. She laughed at me. She said "Mom, half the medications in your bathroom started as a plant. Aspirin came from a tree. Metformin came from a flower. Every active compound in pharmacy started in nature first. The reason this one isn't in pharmacy is because you can't patent a fruit." You're thinking "this is going to be expensive." It costs less than a couple of those Walgreens bottles I used to buy and a single bottle lasts a month. I have spent more than that on a single coffee mug at Cracker Barrel. It's been 7 months now since Whitney showed up at my kitchen table with the manila folder. Last Tuesday I drove Mason to Bowling Green Hot Rods stadium for a game. I let him ride shotgun with the windows down. He played country music too loud and I let him. I felt the seat under me, both feet flat on the floor of the Buick, my hands relaxed on the wheel. This Wednesday I went to water aerobics and lapped 2 ladies in the deep end who used to lap me. Saturday Roy and I are taking Mason to the lake. Roy started taking the amla too about 3 months ago. He said if I was going to live to 100 he needed to keep up. He says his knees feel better. I think he's just trying to make me feel good about my new "hobby." Whatever. He's taking it. I bought an extra bottle to keep in the cabinet because Whitney told me Alevia is a smaller company and sometimes they sell out, and I don't want to be without it for a single day. She's right. Three weeks ago they were sold out for 6 days. I had one capsule left when the new bottle arrived. I counted. I'm not going to tell you that taking a capsule from a fruit is going to fix everything in your life. I'm not Whitney. I don't have her caution. I'm just going to tell you what happened to me. A 63 year old grandmother in Bowling Green Kentucky who couldn't feel the brake pedal under her own right foot last spring, and who drove her grandson to the baseball field last Tuesday with both feet working and both hands relaxed and the country music up loud. That's it. That's the whole story. If you've been feeling the burning at night. If your hands have started flinching before they pick things up. If you've been gripping the railing. If you've stopped doing the things you used to do because your body doesn't trust the floor anymore. If somebody you love has been quietly fading because of something that everybody keeps telling them is "just part of getting older." I would try Alevia's amla. They have a 90 day money-back guarantee. If you don't notice anything, you send the bottle back and you get your money back. That's it. There's nothing to lose except the burning. 90 days. That's 3 months. That was enough time for me to go from the parking lot to the lake. 👉 alevia.com/amla/33 P.S. Whitney told me something I didn't quite believe when she said it, but I believe it now. She said the nerves are the first cells to feel the energy shortage, and they're often the first cells to respond when the energy comes back. That tracked with what I felt. The other things I noticed, the sleep, the steadier hands, the feeling back in my feet, the lifting in my mood, all of that came along too. But the nerve thing led the way. If you've been dealing with the tingling and burning and you've tried other things and nothing has worked, I think this might be the order in which your body responds. Nerves first. Then the rest. P.P.S. I am not a doctor and Whitney is not a doctor either (despite my best efforts to talk her back into nursing school). What I'm telling you is one woman's story. If you have other things going on, talk to your doctor. But if you've been having the same kind of "just one of those things that happens as we get older" conversation I had with Dr. Patel, I would not wait for him to bring up cellular energy. He won't. That's not his job. His job is the chart. Your job is your life. P.P.P.S. The 90 day money-back guarantee is the part that finally got me to order. I had so many bottles in the graveyard. The thought of buying another one I didn't believe in was nauseating. But the guarantee meant I could try it and send it back if it did nothing. Nobody at Walgreens had ever offered me a refund on a bottle of B12 that didn't do anything. Nobody at the gabapentin counter had offered me a refund either. Alevia did. Tells you who's confident in their product and who's just confident in your subscription. P.P.P.P.S. Alevia is small. They sell out. Like I said, 3 weeks ago they were out for 6 days and I came within one capsule of running out. I keep 2 bottles in the cabinet now. If you want to try it, check availability today, not next week. Mason is taking his driver's test in 11 days and I want to be the one in the passenger seat when he passes. Don't wait for your own parking lot moment. P.P.P.P.P.S. Don't forget about the 90 day money-back guarantee. You're risking nothing. I was risking everything. 👉 alevia.com/amla/33