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My husband couldn't get his coffee cup to his mouth at Cracker Barrel. He tried 4 times. Both hands wrapped around that thick white mug, elbows up on the table, leaning forward, and his hands shook so bad the coffee was sloshing onto his wrist and the saucer was rattling and he just kept trying, this stubborn look on his face, like if he tried hard enough he could will them to stop. I watched him for about 90 seconds and then I reached across the booth and I took the mug out of his hands and I set it down and I said "Ronnie, stop." He looked at me with the saddest eyes I've ever seen on a man. Then he put his hands in his lap under the table so the waitress wouldn't see. My name is Linda. I'm 57 years old and I live in Effingham, Illinois, right where I-70 and I-57 come together. I've been a hairdresser since I was 19 but I had to cut back to 3 days a week 2 years ago, mostly because my husband Ronnie needed me at home more than my clients needed their roots done. Ronnie is 61. He drove a long haul truck for Schneider National for 34 years. The big orange ones. He retired the day after his 60th birthday because his feet had gotten so bad he couldn't feel the pedals right anymore. That was supposed to be the beginning of the good part. The traveling part. The grandkids part. The "we made it" part. That's not what happened. I want to back up and tell you how we got to that Cracker Barrel booth, because the booth was the moment everything changed, but the road there was 5 years long. Ronnie started having trouble with his feet around 2020. Pandemic year. He'd come off a run and sit down in the recliner and pull off his boots and just stare at them. He said his feet felt like they were full of bees. That was his word. Bees. I asked him what he meant and he said it felt like the bottom of his feet were buzzing. All the time. Even when he was sitting still. Especially when he was sitting still, actually. He said when he was driving the vibration of the truck kind of drowned it out and that's why he kept working so long. Then it moved up into his calves. Then it started in his hands. His hands were the part that scared me. Ronnie's hands have been his living since he was a teenager. Before trucking he worked at his uncle's auto body shop in Mattoon. He can take an engine apart and put it back together with his eyes closed. He fixed my car for 30 years. He fixed our kids' cars. He fixed his buddies' cars in our driveway on Saturdays for the price of a case of beer. Hands that worked. And now they were shaking when he tried to pour the milk into his coffee. Now he was using both hands to lift a sandwich. Now he was setting the wrench down in the middle of a job because he couldn't trust his grip on the bolt. He stopped working on cars about a year before he retired. Just stopped. Didn't say anything. Just stopped going out to the garage on Saturdays. Started watching TV in the recliner instead. I'd go out there and the garage would smell like it always smelled, oil and rubber and that particular dust that comes off metal, but his work bench was just sitting there. Tools in their drawers. Nothing happening. He went to the doctor. Of course he went to the doctor. Ronnie is the kind of man who goes to the doctor. He's been with the same family practice in Effingham for 22 years. Dr. Bauman did the thing. The little hammer on the knee. The tuning fork on the foot. The pinpricks. The walking heel to toe down the hallway. Then Dr. Bauman sent him to a neurologist in Champaign. The neurologist did the nerve conduction study. The one where they put little electrodes on you and shock you and measure how fast the signal travels. Ronnie came home from that appointment and sat in the recliner and didn't say anything for an hour. I finally asked him what they'd told him. He said the neurologist had used the word "neuropathy." And then he said the neurologist had told him there wasn't much they could do. That word. That word "neuropathy" came into our house and it never left. I'm going to be honest with you because I think you need to hear this. The next 3 years were the hardest years of our marriage. Not because of anything Ronnie did wrong. Ronnie didn't do anything wrong. The man I married 38 years ago was still in there, but his body was changing in ways neither of us understood and neither of us knew how to talk about. He stopped wanting to go places. Restaurants were the first thing to go. He told me he didn't like the way the silverware felt in his hands. Said he could feel it but he couldn't really feel it. Said it made him feel stupid. I told him he wasn't stupid. He just shrugged. Then it was church. He stopped going to church because the hymnal felt weird in his hands and standing for the long parts of the service made his feet burn. Then it was our grandson's t-ball games. Our daughter Megan lives in Bloomington and our grandson Caleb was 6 that summer, and Ronnie had been to every game the year before, and that year he just stopped going. He told me he didn't want Caleb to see him stumble in the bleachers. I went alone. I told Caleb that Pop Pop wasn't feeling well. Caleb is 6. He doesn't ask follow up questions. But our daughter Megan did. Megan called me from her car after the game and she said "Mom, what is going on with Dad?" I didn't know what to tell her. I told her about the neuropathy. The hands. The feet. The doctor saying there wasn't much they could do. She was quiet for a long time. Then she said "Mom, he's only 60." I know, baby. I know. The medication didn't help. They tried him on gabapentin first. That just made him sleepy and didn't do anything for the burning. Then they tried something else. I don't even remember the name now. That one gave him such bad dry mouth he stopped taking it after 3 weeks. He bought one of those infrared foot massagers off the TV. $200. We still have it in the closet. It did nothing. He tried the B vitamins his sister told him about. Took them for 4 months. Nothing. He tried alpha lipoic acid. Some forum on the internet said it was supposed to help. He took it for 6 months. Maybe a little less burning, maybe not. He couldn't tell. He started icing his feet at night. Just sat in the recliner with ice packs on his feet because cold was the only thing that quieted the bees. His feet in ice packs. At night. In our living room. While we tried to watch TV. That was our life. Now I'm going to take you back to the Cracker Barrel. It was a Saturday. Late October last year. We had driven down to Mt. Vernon to see Ronnie's brother Earl, who had just gotten out of the hospital after a gallbladder thing. The visit had gone fine. Earl was up and around. Earl's wife had made us a nice lunch. We'd stayed about 2 hours and then we got back in the car to drive home. About 40 minutes in, Ronnie said he needed coffee. He'd been driving and he was getting sleepy. We pulled off at the Cracker Barrel right by the interstate. I went to the bathroom. He got the table. By the time I came back he had his coffee in front of him and he was trying to take a sip. That's when the 90 seconds happened. That's when I took the mug out of his hands. That's when he put them in his lap under the table. We sat there for a minute. Neither of us said anything. The waitress had come and gone with menus and we were just sitting. Then she came back with a refill pitcher. She was a woman in her early 60s. Glasses on a beaded chain around her neck. Name tag said "Dottie." Brown hair going gray at the temples, pulled back in a low ponytail. The kind of woman who'd been on her feet for 40 years and was probably still going to be on her feet for another 10. She poured Ronnie a fresh cup of coffee and then she set the pitcher down on the edge of the table and she looked at him for a second. Then she pulled a straw out of her apron pocket. One of those wrapped paper ones. She set it down next to his cup. Didn't say anything about it. Just kept moving. She looked at me. She said "Honey, can I bring you all some water?" I said yes. She walked away. Ronnie unwrapped the straw and put it in his coffee and drank from the straw and didn't look at me. When Dottie came back with the waters she sat down on the edge of the bench seat next to me. Not all the way down. Just kind of perched. She had that thing waitresses do where they read a table. She said "My Hank had that. The hands. The feet." I looked at her. She said "Started when he was 58. By the time he was 63 he couldn't button his own shirt." She didn't say it like she was being dramatic. She said it like she was telling me what time it was. Ronnie looked up from his coffee. She said "I'm not supposed to talk to customers about this kind of thing. But I'm gonna talk to you for one minute because I would have given anything for somebody to have told me what I'm about to tell you back when it would have mattered." She looked at Ronnie. She said "It's not your nerves. Not really. It's underneath your nerves." I'm going to do my best to repeat what Dottie told us in that booth, because it changed the direction of our lives, and I want to get it right. She told us that the cells in your nerves are some of the most energy hungry cells in your whole body. They need more cellular energy than almost anything else, because they have to maintain this protective coating around them, and they have to transmit signals all day long, and they have to stay healthy in a body that's constantly trying to wear them down. That energy doesn't come from nowhere. It comes from these little power plants inside every one of your cells. They're called mitochondria. That's where the body makes the fuel that runs everything. She said when you get older, and you eat the way most Americans eat, and you live with the stress and the medications and the pollution we all live with, those little power plants start to wear down. They don't make as much energy as they used to. And the cells that get hit first? The nerve cells. Because they're the most energy hungry. She said when your nerve cells aren't getting the energy they need, they can't maintain their coating. They can't transmit signals the way they used to. The signals get scrambled. That's the burning. That's the buzzing. That's the bees in your feet. That's the shaking hands. Dottie said "Everything your husband has tried, none of it supported the power plants. They've been giving him things to quiet the noise. Nobody's been giving him anything to power the system back up." She said "It was like delivering a load of lumber to a job site that has no electricity. You can drop the lumber off all day long. Nothing's getting built." Ronnie sat there holding his coffee with his straw in it. I asked her how she knew all this. She said her daughter in law was a pharmacist in St. Louis. After Hank passed she had spent 2 years reading everything she could get her hands on, because she had been mad. Mad at the doctors. Mad at the system. Mad at herself for not figuring it out sooner. And in all that reading, the thing that kept coming up, over and over, was a fruit she'd never heard of. Indian gooseberry. Amla. She said the active compounds in it, things called emblicanins, had been shown to help activate something called AMPK. Which is the pathway the body uses to support those power plants. The mitochondria. When AMPK is active, she said, the mitochondria can start producing cellular energy more efficiently. The way they did when you were younger. And that energy can start flowing back to the cells that need it most. Including the nerve cells. Because they're the most energy hungry, she said, they're often among the first to respond. When nerve cells are better supported, they can work on maintaining that protective coating. They can work on transmitting signals more smoothly. The burning can start to quiet down. Feeling can start to come back. She said amla also has one of the highest antioxidant profiles ever measured in a food. Which matters because the same oxidative stress that wore down the power plants in the first place is still doing it every day. The amla helps protect them. Dottie said all of this in a quiet voice in 4 minutes flat. She was on the clock. She had other tables. When she finished she pulled a little notepad out of her apron and she wrote something on it and tore the page off and pushed it across the table. "Look this up tonight. That's the brand my daughter in law puts her own father on." She got up. She refilled the table behind us. She moved on. Ronnie and I sat there and looked at the piece of paper for a long time. Then he said "Lin. Pay the check." We didn't even drink the coffee. We left a $30 tip on a $16 ticket. We got in the car and I drove home because Ronnie was tired. That night, after he was asleep in the recliner, I sat at our kitchen table with my laptop and I looked it up. The brand Dottie had written down. The research on amla. The mitochondria. The AMPK. I read until 2:30 in the morning. By 3 AM I had ordered a bottle of Alevia Amla. I told Ronnie about it the next morning over breakfast. I told him I'd ordered it for him. I told him he was going to take 2 capsules every morning with his coffee starting the day it showed up. I'm not usually the one who lays down the law in our marriage. But that morning I did. I told him he had nothing to lose. I told him the company had a 90 day money back guarantee, so if it didn't do anything we'd send back what was left and they'd refund us. I told him that for the cost of a bottle and 90 days of his life, we were going to find out. He nodded. The bottle arrived 3 days later. He started taking it on a Wednesday. Now I want to tell you what the next 8 weeks looked like, and I want to be careful here because I know how these stories get told. I am not going to tell you he was healed. I am not going to tell you the neuropathy disappeared. But something started shifting. Week 1, nothing. He took the capsules. We waited. Week 2, he told me on a Thursday morning that his feet hadn't woken him up the night before. He had slept through the night for the first time in maybe a year. He said it kind of confused. He said "Lin, my feet didn't wake me up." I said "Okay." He said "I don't know if that means anything. Probably doesn't." I didn't push it. I just made him another cup of coffee. Week 3, he was sitting in the recliner watching the news and I noticed something. I couldn't figure out what it was at first. Then I realized. The ice packs weren't on his feet. I asked him about it. He looked down at his feet like he was just noticing too. He said "Huh." He said "I forgot to get them." Week 4, we were at the grocery store and Ronnie was holding the cart and pushing it down the aisle, and at the end of the aisle, in the canned soup section, he reached up and grabbed a can of Campbell's tomato off the top shelf with one hand. Just reached up, grabbed it, brought it down. I stood there in the aisle and watched him do it. He didn't even notice he'd done it. I had to lean on the cart for a minute because my knees got weak. Week 5, our daughter Megan came down with Caleb for the weekend. Saturday morning Ronnie made pancakes. He hasn't made pancakes in maybe 2 years. He flipped them with one hand. He held the spatula like a man who trusted his hand to do what he was asking it to do. Caleb was 7 by then. He sat at the counter watching his Pop Pop flip pancakes and he said "Pop Pop, you make 'em pretty." Ronnie laughed. The big chest laugh I hadn't heard in a long time. Megan looked at me from the kitchen table and she didn't say anything. She just looked at me. I went into the bathroom and closed the door and sat on the edge of the tub for 5 minutes. Week 7, Ronnie went out to the garage on a Saturday morning. I heard the door open. I didn't go look. I didn't want to make it a thing. I just listened. I heard the lights click on. I heard drawers opening. I heard a tool being set down on the bench. Then another one. Then I heard him whistle. He whistled. He came back inside an hour later and he said "I think I'm gonna do an oil change on the Buick this afternoon." I said "Okay." He said "Don't make it a thing, Lin." I said "Not making it a thing." I went into the laundry room and cried into a towel for about 4 minutes and then I came back out and made him a sandwich for lunch. Week 9, our grandson Caleb had a fall baseball game in Bloomington. Ronnie came with me. He sat in the bleachers for 2 hours. He stood up and cheered when Caleb got a hit. After the game he walked across the parking lot to Megan's car and helped her load Caleb's gear into the trunk. He lifted the bat bag with one hand. In the car on the way home, Ronnie said "Lin, pull over at the next exit. I want to drive." I pulled over at the next exit. He drove us home from Bloomington to Effingham. For the first time in 2 years. I sat in the passenger seat and I looked out the window and I thought about Dottie at that Cracker Barrel. I thought about her sliding that straw across the table. I thought about her writing on that little notepad. I thought about a woman named Dottie I'd never met before and would probably never meet again, who had decided to break the rule about not talking to customers about this kind of thing, because she'd lost her Hank, and she didn't want me to lose my Ronnie. I want to tell you something now, because I think it matters. If you're reading this and you're somewhere on the road we were on, you might be thinking the same thing Ronnie thought for 3 years. That this is just what aging looks like. That the doctors have told you there isn't much they can do. That you've tried things and none of them have worked. I want to tell you what Dottie told us. It's not your nerves. It's underneath your nerves. The cells in your nerves have been starving for years. They've been trying to do their job on empty. And when you give them what they actually need, which is energy at the cellular level, they can start doing what they're supposed to do again. Not because they were broken. Because they were starving. If you want to try what we tried, you can find it at alevia.com/amla/33. It's a 30 day bottle. 2 capsules a day, taken in the morning with coffee or water. Made in the USA. They ship it free. The thing that made me click the order button at 3 AM was the 90 day money back guarantee. If you take it for 3 full months and you don't notice anything, you send back what's left and they refund you. No phone calls. No hoops. That guarantee is what let me bet on a man named Ronnie who could barely hold a coffee mug. I won that bet. P.S. Last week Ronnie went out and changed the brake pads on Megan's CR-V in our driveway. Took him about 2 hours. He kept his shop manual open on the workbench because he said he hadn't done a CR-V before. He didn't drop a single bolt. His hands didn't shake. I brought him a glass of iced tea and he drank it standing up, holding the glass in one hand, and I watched him from the kitchen window and I thought, you came back. You came back. P.P.S. I want to come back to Dottie for a second. I went looking for her about a month ago. Drove back down to that Cracker Barrel by Mt. Vernon. She wasn't on shift. The hostess told me Dottie had cut back to weekends only because her own mother had moved in with her. I left a note for her with my phone number. She called me a week later. I told her what had happened with Ronnie. I told her about the pancakes. The brake pads. The drive home from Bloomington. She didn't say anything for a minute. Then she said "I'm so glad somebody believed me, honey." I told her she'd given us our life back. She said "I just poured the coffee." P.P.P.S. They keep selling out of these. I don't know what the supply is right now but I know when I went to order Ronnie's third bottle there was a delay. So if you go to that site and it's in stock, I would not wait. I waited 3 years to find out what was actually going on. Don't wait 3 weeks. The 90 day guarantee is the part I keep telling people about. They give you 3 full months. By 3 months, you'll know. We knew by week 2. But they give you 3 months, and if it doesn't do what you hoped, you don't lose a dollar. What I lost was the version of my husband who sat in a recliner at 60 years old with ice packs on his feet. I'm not getting those years back. But I'm getting every year after. 👉 https://alevia.com/amla/33