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

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I've been going to deer camp the second week of November since 1986. That's 38 years. Same cabin. Same road out of Rhinelander. Same coffee pot on the same propane stove. Same four guys, minus the ones we've lost and plus the ones we've brought in to replace them. This past November, a 10 point buck walked out of the pines at 7:14 AM on opening morning and I let him go. I didn't let him go on purpose. My hand wouldn't close on the stock. I sat there in that stand with the biggest buck I've ever seen in Oneida County standing 60 yards in front of me and I could not close my right hand tight enough to raise my rifle to my shoulder. I watched him step across the trail. I watched him stop and look at a doe I hadn't seen. I watched him disappear into the tag alders on the other side of the swamp. Then I sat there for another two hours and cried like a boy. Nobody saw it. That's the only mercy in the whole thing. I climbed down at 9:30 and walked back to the cabin and told Dale and Gus and my son in law Kevin that I'd woken up with a scratchy throat and I was going to nap it off in the bunk. I said maybe I'd hunt the evening sit. I didn't hunt the evening sit. I didn't hunt Sunday. I didn't hunt Monday. I sat in that cabin for four days pretending I had a cold and I let them all bring me soup and check on me and offer to drive me home if I was feeling worse. The whole time I was staring at the ceiling thinking one thing. My hands are gone. My name is Ray. I'm 61. I spent 34 years in Local 400 out of Milwaukee turning wrenches on industrial pipe. Chillers, boilers, steam headers, welded elbows in refineries and power plants and paper mills across four states. My hands were my whole living. There isn't a knuckle on either one that hasn't been broken, cut, burned, or crushed at least once. That's the job. I retired in the spring of 2023 and my wife Deb and I moved up to Rhinelander full time, into the cabin her folks left her. It's a real house now. We put in a foundation and a real kitchen back in 2011. But we still call it the cabin. I thought retirement was going to be perfect. Fishing. Hunting. Building the boathouse I'd been drawing on graph paper for 15 years. Fixing everything Deb had been asking me to fix since our daughter was in high school. Instead I sat in the recliner and watched my hands not work. It didn't happen all at once. That's the thing about it. If it had happened all at once I would have gone to the hospital. But it happened a piece at a time over almost two years and every piece was small enough on its own to talk myself out of. First it was the buttons on my flannel. I noticed one morning I was doing them up bottom to top by feel, without looking, like I had my whole life, and one of them was skipped. I looked in the mirror and my shirt was crooked. I laughed it off. I'd been half asleep. But then it happened again a week later. And a week after that. Then it was my coffee cup. I'd pick up the same mug I'd been picking up for 20 years and it would feel like I was wearing a mitten. Like there was something between my fingers and the ceramic. I'd hold it tighter. Sometimes I'd hold it so tight my wrist would ache. Deb noticed before I did, if I'm being honest. She'd hand me things and I'd fumble them. A pen. A saltshaker. The remote. Little stuff. She'd say "you okay?" and I'd say "yeah I just wasn't paying attention" and she'd let it go because that's what Deb does. She lets things go until she can't anymore. The real one, the one that scared me, was the socket wrench. I was under my truck last summer changing the starter. A 13 millimeter socket. I'd done it a hundred times over the years on different vehicles. I got the bolt broken loose and I was spinning the ratchet with my fingertips the way you do when you're just backing it off the last few threads, and the socket slipped off the bolt head and hit me in the eye. I couldn't feel the socket in my fingers. I didn't know it had slipped until it was already falling. I laid there under that truck with grease on my glasses and gravel in my hair and I thought "something is wrong with me." I went to Dr. Ambrose in Woodruff about a month later. He's a good guy. He was Deb's dad's doctor at the end. He ordered bloodwork and looked me over and pressed on the bottoms of my feet with a tuning fork and asked me if I could feel it. "Kind of," I said. "Kind of isn't yes," he said. The bloodwork came back and my B12 was on the low side of normal. He said "you're a pipefitter, Ray. Your hands have been through it. Your nerves have been vibrating in gloves for 34 years. This is common. This is the trade." He wrote me a script for a B12 supplement and told me to come back in six months. I filled the B12. I took it every morning for four months. Nothing changed. If anything, it got worse. By October my whole right hand felt like it was wrapped in cellophane all the time. The pinky and ring finger burned at night. I'd wake up at 2 AM and my hand would be curled into a claw and I'd have to work it open with my other hand. I went back to Dr. Ambrose. He said it might be some early neuropathy. He said the word carefully, like it was a piece of glass he didn't want to drop. He wrote me a script for something called gabapentin. He said "give it 30 days." I took the gabapentin for two weeks. It made me feel like someone had wrapped my whole head in the same cellophane that was on my hand. I couldn't remember what I'd walked into a room for. I fell asleep in the recliner at 6 PM watching the news and Deb couldn't wake me up. I stopped taking it. I tried alpha lipoic acid. Some guy on a forum said it helped him. I took it for six weeks. Nothing. I tried acetyl L carnitine. Same forum. Nothing. I tried acupuncture at a place in Minocqua. The lady was nice. My hand felt warm for about 40 minutes after and then it went right back. I stopped telling Deb. That was the worst part. I stopped telling her when things got worse because I couldn't stand the look on her face. The look of a woman watching her husband disappear one piece at a time and knowing there's nothing she can do about it. I'd had my mother do that with my father when the emphysema took him and I swore I'd never put anyone through it and here I was doing exactly that. So by the time deer camp rolled around, I hadn't told her that my right hand had started dropping things without warning. I hadn't told her I couldn't feel her fingers when we held hands on the drive up. I hadn't told her the rifle felt heavier every time I picked it up out of the safe. I just packed my truck and drove north and pretended. The stand I was in that morning is a ladder stand I put up in 2007 in a bottom between two ridges. It's about 18 feet up in a red oak. You can see the trail come in from the east and cross the swamp and go out to the west. My son in law Kevin sits the north stand. Dale sits the west stand. Gus sits down on the point. I climbed up that ladder at 5:45 AM in the dark. Deb had given me a thermos of coffee before I left the cabin. She'd kissed the top of my head and said "shoot straight, old man." I said "always." That was the last thing I said before I left. I got settled. Rifle across my lap. Muzzle pointed to my left. Coffee on the shelf. I watched the woods come up gray then pink then gold. I heard turkeys break roost about 300 yards north. I heard a chickadee land on the branch next to my head and take off again. At 7:14 that buck came out. He came out from the north the way they do when the wind is right. He wasn't hurrying. He was scenting a doe I hadn't seen. He took eight or nine steps into the opening and stopped and put his head down. I already had the rifle coming up. My left hand under the fore stock, my right hand on the grip. I've done this movement 10,000 times. My right hand would not close on the stock. It wasn't that it wouldn't move. It moved. It wrapped around the wood. It just wouldn't grip. It was like trying to close a hand full of Novocain. I could see it doing what I was telling it to do. I couldn't feel it doing anything. I tried to raise the rifle anyway. It came up crooked. I couldn't hold it steady. I couldn't feel the trigger against the pad of my finger. The buck heard the movement. He looked up. He didn't spook. He just looked. He took two steps toward the doe. Then he stopped. He looked right at me. I lowered the rifle back to my lap. I sat there. He walked across the trail. He stopped one more time. And then he was gone. That's when I started crying. Quiet, so nobody in the next stand would hear. I don't know how long I sat there. Long enough to finish the coffee. Long enough that my nose ran and I didn't wipe it. Long enough that I understood something I hadn't been willing to understand before. I was done. Whatever it was I was doing with my life, the physical part of it, the part where I made things and fixed things and hunted and fished and hauled and worked, was done. I was 61 years old and my body was leaving me. And nobody knew how to stop it and neither did I. Dale drove up from Wausau on the Wednesday of deer camp. He'd had a heifer emergency Monday and couldn't get away. Dale is my wife's sister's husband and my oldest friend. We've hunted this camp together every year since we were both 24 and Deb's dad first invited us. He's a retired large animal vet now. He spent 40 years with his arm up the back end of every dairy cow in Marathon County. He came in the door around 4 PM. Kevin was napping. Gus was in the shower. I was on the couch pretending to read a Field and Stream from 2019. Dale looked at me and said "you're not sick." He said it flat, like he was reading it off a chart. "I'm sick," I said. "No you're not. I know what sick looks like. I've been with sick animals my whole career, and sick men most of my life. You're something else. What is it." I didn't answer him for a minute. Then I said "my hands are gone." Dale sat down in the chair across from me. He put his beer on the floor. He said "tell me." So I told him. All of it. The buttons. The socket wrench. The gabapentin. The buck. I told him I hadn't told Deb any of it. I told him I hadn't been up in a stand for two years, that I'd been out here every November faking it, that the last three years I'd been climbing that ladder for an hour before dawn and just sitting there hoping nothing walked by. He listened all the way through. He didn't interrupt. When I was done he said "I had it. Both hands. Started three years ago. My granddaughter Erin got me onto something and I'm not going to tell you it's a miracle, I'm going to tell you what it is and let you decide." Erin is his oldest granddaughter. She's finishing pharmacy school at UW Madison. She's the sharp one of the grandkids. She'd been the one who noticed Dale dropping calving chains at the barn and asked him what was going on. Dale said Erin had been down a research rabbit hole for about six months on something called amla. He said it like "am la," two syllables, like he'd practiced saying it right. He said it's a fruit that grows in India. He said Ayurvedic medicine has been using it for 2,000 years and it's called "the nurse" in that tradition, which he thought was a nice touch given his line of work. He said "here's the thing she taught me that I couldn't stop thinking about. Your nerve cells are the most energy hungry cells in your body. More than muscle. More than brain, minute for minute. They need a constant flow of cellular energy to maintain the coating that lets them fire, transmit signals, keep the burning quiet, keep the feeling on. That energy comes from your mitochondria. The little power plants inside every cell. And here's what nobody had ever told me before Erin sat me down at the kitchen table with her laptop. Aging wears down mitochondria. So does 40 years of stress and processed food and diesel exhaust and every hard thing your body's ever been through." He said "when your mitochondria slow down, your nerve cells are among the first cells in your body to feel it. Because they need the most energy. They're the canary in the coal mine. That's why it started in your hands, Ray. Not because your hands failed. Because the cells in your hands were running out of power." I said "what does the fruit have to do with it." He said "there's a compound in amla called emblicanins. And research suggests it helps activate a pathway called AMPK. AMPK is one of the switches your body uses to support mitochondrial function. When AMPK is active, your mitochondria can start producing cellular energy more efficiently, closer to the way they did when you were younger. Cellular energy can start flowing back to the cells that need it most. And the most energy hungry cells, the nerve cells, can be among the first to notice." He said "everything you tried before, the B12, the alpha lipoic acid, the gabapentin, none of it did what you needed it to do. Because the problem wasn't that your nerves needed a numbing agent or a vitamin. The problem was that the little power plants that keep your nerves running were running low. Erin put it to me like this. She said imagine you're trying to build a house and the framers keep showing up on time and the lumberyard keeps delivering the wood and the plans are on the truck and everyone's ready to work. But there's no power to the site. No compressor. No saws. No lights. Doesn't matter how much lumber shows up. Nothing gets built." He said "and amla has one more thing going for it. It has one of the highest antioxidant profiles ever measured in a food. Which matters because the same oxidative stress that wore your mitochondria down in the first place is still happening every day. Amla helps protect them while they get back to doing their job." Dale reached into his duffel and pulled out a bottle. Small. White. Blue label. It said Auniva on it. He said "this is what Erin has me on. It's an amla extract. Two capsules a day. I've been on it 14 months. I climbed my stand this morning without stopping halfway up the ladder to catch my breath. I felt the safety of my rifle click under my thumb this morning for the first time in four years. Take this bottle. There's about 20 days in it. I'll ship you another one when you get home." I took the bottle. I turned it around in my hands. I read the back. Made in USA. 30 day supply. 90 day money back guarantee. I said "why haven't I heard of this." He said "because it's a fruit. There's no drug rep in the world who's going to walk into Dr. Ambrose's office with a briefcase of samples for something that grows on a tree in India. That's not how the system works. If it doesn't have a patent, it doesn't have a salesman. And if it doesn't have a salesman, your doctor doesn't know about it." I put the bottle in my duffel bag that night and I drove home Sunday morning and I sat at the kitchen table with Deb and I told her everything. She didn't cry. She said "why didn't you tell me." I said "because I couldn't stand watching you watch me." She said "Ray. I've been watching you. I've been watching you for two years." Then she cried. Then I cried. Then she said "start the bottle tonight." I did. Two capsules. Right after dinner. That was Sunday. For the first two weeks nothing happened. I want to say that up front. Because I think most of the stuff I'd tried before, I'd tried for two weeks and thrown out. If Deb hadn't been in it with me I probably would have quit on this one too. But she was tracking. She had a legal pad on the kitchen counter and she'd make me hold up my hands every morning and she'd ask me what I could feel. Days 1 through 12 I said "same." Day 13 I picked up my coffee cup and I felt the ridge on the handle where the ceramic wasn't glazed smooth. I hadn't felt that ridge in about a year. I stood there staring at the cup. Deb said "what." I said "the ridge is back." She wrote it down. Day 17 I tied my boots without looking. That doesn't sound like anything. But I'd been having to look down at the laces for about eight months because my fingers couldn't tell where they were. That morning I stood by the back door putting my boots on to let the dog out and I realized halfway through that I hadn't looked down once. Deb was in the kitchen. I didn't say anything. But she saw me and she smiled like she knew. Day 22 the burning in my pinky went from a constant to an occasional. Not gone. But not always there. That was the first thing that felt like proof. Day 28 I was standing at the workbench in the garage and I picked up a 9/16 socket by feel out of a bin of mixed sockets and I knew which one it was before I looked at it. That's a small thing. A guy who's worked with tools his whole life knows what I mean. Feeling a socket in the dark and knowing the size is like recognizing a voice. It comes back before language does. I stood there in that garage holding that socket and I got teared up like an old fool. Week 6 I dry fired my rifle in the workshop. Not for anything real. Just to see. I picked it up out of the safe and worked the bolt and set the safety and put my finger on the trigger. I could feel the trigger. Not the way I could when I was 40. But I could feel it. I could feel the checkering on the grip. I could feel the pad of the recoil pad against my shoulder. I closed my hand on that stock and it closed the way it was supposed to. I set the rifle down and I went inside and I asked Deb if we could go for a walk. She looked at me funny because I never ask that. I said "I want to hold your hand." So we walked down the road to the mailbox and back and I held her hand and I felt every knuckle and every ring and the little callus on her thumb from her needlepoint. She didn't say anything the whole walk. She didn't have to. Week 9 I ordered my second bottle from auniva.co. Then a third. Then I got on the phone with Erin, Dale's granddaughter, because Dale gave me her number. She talked me through the whole thing again from the pharmacy student side. She told me the same thing Dale had told me, but she used the words she used in her classes. AMPK. Mitochondrial biogenesis. Emblicanins. Oxidative stress reduction in neurons. She said the research is still developing on the neuropathy side and there aren't 40 years of massive human trials the way there are with prescription drugs, and she wanted me to know that. She said some people respond more than others. She said what I was experiencing was consistent with what some people report. She was careful. Pharmacists are careful. But she also said she'd put her own grandfather on it and she wasn't in the business of putting her own family on things that didn't work. I asked her why nobody knew. She said "Ray. Nobody makes money telling you a fruit works. There's no billion dollar rollout for a botanical. There's no direct to consumer TV spot with a labrador running through a field. It's just a small company selling a bottle to whoever finds them." I'm writing this in April now. Five months in. My hands aren't 25 years old and they aren't going to be. But last Saturday I built the boathouse frame I'd been drawing on graph paper for 15 years. I ran a chop saw all day. I threaded galvanized pipe. I held a nail between my thumb and finger and drove it home without looking. Deb brought me a sandwich at noon and I ate it with one hand while the other one rested on the workbench because it wasn't cramping into a claw the way it used to. I'm not going to tell you Auniva's Amla is a miracle. Dale told me not to tell you that and Erin told me not to tell you that and I don't believe it and neither should you. I'm going to tell you what it is. It's a fruit extract that supports the pathway your body uses to keep your mitochondria running. Your mitochondria are what power the cells in your nerves. When those cells have power, they can do their job. When they can't, you drop sockets and you can't feel your wife's hand and you let 10 point bucks walk by. If you've been where I was, or if you're watching someone you love go there and you can't do anything about it, and you've tried the vitamins and the pills and the acupuncture and the forums, this is worth 30 days. It's 2 capsules a day. 30 day bottle. Made in the USA. Free shipping. 90 day money back guarantee, which is more than the gabapentin came with. If it does nothing, you send them the bottle and you get every dollar back. That's not a bad trade for a shot at getting your hands back. I'm going to be in that ladder stand this November. I'm going to raise a rifle and I'm going to feel the checkering under my fingers and I'm going to feel the trigger break and if a 10 point buck walks out into that opening at 7:14 AM he's coming home in the back of the truck. That's the whole story. That's why I'm writing this. 👉 auniva.co/amla/33 P.S. You'll feel it in your hands before you feel it anywhere else, if hands are where it started. That's what Erin told me and that's what happened. The most energy hungry cells are the first to feel it when the power comes back. Little things. A coffee mug ridge. A shoelace. A socket in a bin. Keep a piece of paper on the counter and write those little things down. Because if you're the way I was, you've forgotten what small feelings feel like. When they come back you'll almost miss them because you weren't expecting them anymore. P.P.S. Auniva has a 90 day money back guarantee. Send the bottle back for any reason and you get every dollar. In two years on B12 and gabapentin and every other thing I tried, nobody offered me my money back for the pieces of my life those things didn't fix. Nobody at CVS refunded me for the socket wrench that hit me in the eye or the buck I let walk. The system doesn't do refunds. Auniva does. Think about what that tells you about who stands behind their product and who doesn't. P.P.P.S. Auniva is small. They sell out. Dale told me his last reorder took 11 days and I keep two bottles in the cabinet now because I'm not going back to where I was. If you're going to try it, buy enough that you're not counting capsules at the end of the month. They currently have a buy 3 get 2 free deal. I used that one myself. Not next week. Now. Every day your mitochondria don't have support is another day of the burning at 2 AM and the buttons that skip and the hands that curl into claws in your sleep. I waited two years to figure this out. Don't wait another month. P.P.P.P.S. If you have someone in your life who's stopped telling you about their hands, or their feet, or their balance, or the way the fork feels heavy in their fingers, order the bottle for them. Put it on the kitchen table. Don't make a speech. Just put it there. That's what Dale did for me and it's the reason I'm writing this instead of sitting in a recliner watching a hand I can't feel. Deb would have never known what to look for. Dale did. Be somebody's Dale. 👉 auniva.co/amla/33

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