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My husband stopped wearing slippers in October because he couldn't feel them on his feet anymore. He didn't say that's why. He's not the kind of man who says anything. He just stopped putting them on. I noticed because Ray has worn the same brown leather slippers for 11 years, the ones our daughter Becca bought him for Christmas back when she was still in nursing school, and he wore them every morning from the bed to the coffee pot to the back porch where he reads the paper and looks at the birds on the feeder. Then one Tuesday in October I came out of the bathroom and he was standing in the kitchen in just his socks. White cotton socks. On the cold tile. I said, "Where are your slippers?" He looked down at his feet like he was surprised to see them there. He said, "I don't know. I guess I forgot." He didn't forget. I want to tell you about my husband. His name is Ray and he's 65 years old and we live in a yellow ranch house on the south side of Tulsa, Oklahoma, on a street where everybody mostly minds their own business but waves when you drive past. Ray was an HVAC technician for 38 years. He retired at 62. He has hands like baseball gloves and a laugh like a screen door slamming. He's the most patient man I have ever known. He's also a Type 2 diabetic, diagnosed when he was 53, which is 12 years ago now. We've done everything. The metformin. The blood sugar log book on the kitchen counter that he updates every morning at 6:40 AM after he tests his finger. The walking. The cutting back on the foods he loves. He doesn't drink Dr. Pepper anymore and that was the hardest thing he ever gave up, harder than cigarettes, which he gave up in 1998. For a long time he was fine. The numbers were okay. The doctor said good job, Ray, keep doing what you're doing. Then about 3 years ago his feet started going numb. Just a tingle at first. Pins and needles after he sat too long. He'd shake his foot out and laugh it off. Then it was both feet. Then it was the bottoms of his feet feeling like they were wrapped in cotton. Then it was the burning at night, the kind he'd describe as "like somebody dipped my feet in vinegar." He'd kick the sheets off at 2 AM. I'd hear him out in the kitchen filling a bowl with cold water and putting his feet in it. The doctor said it was diabetic neuropathy. He said, "Ray, this is what happens. We manage it. We don't fix it." That sentence has been ringing in my head for 3 years. We manage it. We don't fix it. The neurologist Dr. Vargas put him on gabapentin first. Took the edge off the burning a little. Made him groggy. Made him forgetful. He left the truck running in the Walmart parking lot one afternoon and didn't realize it for an hour. He was halfway home when I called him from the produce aisle wondering where he went. Then they switched him to Lyrica. Lyrica was worse. It made his ankles swell up like grapefruits and he gained 16 pounds in 6 weeks and he stopped being able to follow the plot of a TV show. We went back. Dr. Vargas said we could try both at lower doses. So now Ray is on two medications that don't fix anything, that just take the edge off, that make him slow and puffy and not quite himself, and his feet are still numb, and the burning still comes at 2 AM, and he sleeps in the recliner now most nights because lying flat makes it worse. This is what we mean when we say "managing it." This is what the system calls success. My husband, who used to be on his feet 10 hours a day crawling through attics in 110 degree summer heat, who used to dance with me in the kitchen when George Strait came on the radio, who used to chase our grandkids around the backyard pretending to be a bear, can't feel the floor. And his slippers sat by the bed. In October I started to lose him. Not all at once. Slowly. Like a radio station fading out as you drive away from town. He stopped going out to the back porch in the morning to look at the birds. He said it was too hard to walk on the wood with bare feet. He said the floorboards felt different than they used to. He stopped going to Lowe's on Saturday mornings. He used to spend 2 hours there walking the aisles, talking to the guys in the plumbing section, coming home with one washer and a story about somebody he ran into. He stopped going because he said it tired him out too much and his feet hurt by the time he got back to the truck. He stopped going to church. He said his feet got cold in the pew and he didn't want to be uncomfortable for an hour. He stopped going downstairs to his workshop. He used to be down there 4 nights a week building things. Birdhouses for the church craft fair. A jewelry box for my mother before she passed. A toy chest for our grandson Eli. He stopped because he said the stairs felt funny and he didn't trust his feet. He just sat in the recliner. And I sat in the kitchen pretending I wasn't watching. I want to tell you something I haven't told anyone, including Ray. In late October, after he'd been in that recliner for about 3 weeks straight, I went into the bedroom one afternoon while he was napping in the living room and I sat on his side of the bed and I looked at his slippers. They were dusty. Not a lot. But enough to see. His slippers had been dusty for 3 weeks. And I sat there and I cried so hard my chest hurt, because I realized what it meant. It wasn't that he forgot them. It wasn't that he was being lazy. It was that he was retreating from his own life one piece at a time, and the slippers were the first thing to go, and the porch was the second, and Lowe's was the third, and his workshop was the fourth, and I didn't know what was going to be the fifth, but I knew it was coming. I have known this man since I was 22 years old. I was watching him disappear from inside the same body. I called Becca that night after Ray fell asleep in the recliner. Becca is our oldest. She's 38. She's a hospice nurse at the Saint Francis Health System in Oklahoma City. She drives down to see us about once a month. She has a son named Eli who is 6, and a husband named Curtis, who is a good man. She works with dying people for a living and I think it has made her one of the most honest people I have ever met. I told her about the slippers. She was quiet for a long time on the phone. Then she said, "Mom. I'm coming down on Friday. I want to talk to you about something." She came down on Friday. I made chili because that's what I make when Becca comes home. We ate at the kitchen table. Ray ate slowly, the way he eats now, like he has to think about each bite. He kept his socks on under the table. After dinner Ray went to the recliner. He was asleep in 11 minutes. Becca and I sat at the table with a second cup of coffee and she pulled something out of her purse. It was a small white bottle with orange writing on the side. She set it on the table between us. She said, "Mom, I want to talk to you about something. I don't usually do this. I see a lot of stuff at work and I am not the kind of person who pushes things on people. But I have been watching Dad for the last 6 months and I need you to listen to me." I listened. She told me that one of the patients she'd cared for in the spring, an older man named Mr. Whitfield from Bartlesville, had Type 2 diabetes and bad neuropathy. He came in for unrelated reasons. But she'd noticed that his feet were not the feet of a diabetic with 14 years of neuropathy. They were warm. He had feeling in them. He told her his daughter had put him on amla 2 years ago, that he took it every morning with his blood pressure medicine, and that his neurologist had been baffled by how stable he'd been for so long. Becca had never heard of it. She looked it up that night at the nurses' station. She read for 3 hours. What she found, and what she explained to me at my kitchen table while Ray snored softly in the next room, is this. Your nerves, especially the long nerves that run down to your feet and your hands, are some of the most energy-hungry cells in your entire body. They need a tremendous amount of cellular energy to maintain themselves. They need energy to keep their protective coating intact. They need energy to send signals back and forth. They need energy to repair the small damage they take every day. That energy comes from your mitochondria. The little engines inside every cell. In a diabetic body, what happens over years is that the high blood sugar creates oxidative stress, and that oxidative stress wears down the mitochondria. And once the mitochondria can't keep up, the nerves don't have the energy they need to maintain themselves. That's when the protective coating starts to thin. That's when the signals start to go wrong. That's when the burning starts at 2 AM. That's when you can't feel your slippers. The gabapentin and the Lyrica, Becca said, work on the signal. They quiet the noise the broken nerve is making. They do nothing about why the nerve is broken. The nerve is broken because the engines inside it ran out of fuel. She told me about amla. She told me it's a fruit that grows in India. She told me it has been used in traditional medicine for thousands of years. She told me what got her attention was that it does two things at once. It helps activate something called AMPK, which is one of the main pathways your body uses to support mitochondrial function. So it can help the engines start running better. And at the same time it has one of the highest antioxidant profiles ever measured in a food, which matters because oxidative stress is what wore the engines down in the first place. So you're putting fuel back in. And you're stopping the damage that was draining the tank. Becca said, "Mom. I'm not telling you it's a miracle. I'm not telling you Dad's neuropathy is going to go away. I am telling you that for the first time since I have been watching him decline, I have read something that addresses what's actually happening inside him instead of just covering it up. And after Mr. Whitfield, I had to try it." She slid the bottle across the table to me. She said, "It's Alevia. It's the brand he was on. I bought one for him and one for you. I want you to try it together." I sat there with the bottle in my hand and I thought about the slippers. For 3 years we had been managing it. We had not been fixing anything. We had been quieting noise. Nobody had ever once mentioned the engines. I want you to understand something. I am not a woman who buys things off the internet. I am not a woman who falls for fads. I have been married to an HVAC technician for 42 years and I have learned how to be skeptical about claims and salesmen and people who tell you they have the answer. But my daughter is a hospice nurse. And she had sat at my kitchen table and explained to me, in plain English, why the thing my husband was being treated for was not what was actually broken. I started Ray on it the next Monday. I didn't tell him what it was at first. I just put two capsules next to his metformin on the kitchen counter and I said, "Becca brought these. They're supposed to be good for circulation. Try them with me." He looked at me over his reading glasses. He said, "Sue. I love you. But I'm not taking another pill." I said, "It's not a pill. It's a berry. Becca said try it. Please try it." He said, "If I do it for a month and nothing changes, I'm stopping." I said, "Fine." He took it that morning. Now I want to tell you what happened over the next 90 days, because this is the part I want to be careful about. The first 2 weeks, nothing. I was watching him like a hawk. I would ask him every night, can you feel the floor? Can you feel your socks? And he'd shake his head no and shrug and go back to the TV. I almost gave up. In week 3, he told me something at breakfast. He said, "I slept in the bed last night." I'd been so out of it I hadn't even noticed. He hadn't slept in the bed in 4 months. He'd been in the recliner every night. I said, "How was it?" He said, "Feet didn't burn till 4." That used to be 2. In week 4, something happened that I will remember for the rest of my life. I was washing dishes at the sink. Ray walked into the kitchen behind me. I heard him stop. I heard him say, "Huh." I turned around. He was standing on the tile floor. In his slippers. He looked at me. He looked down at his feet. He looked at me again. He said, "Sue. I can feel them." I want you to know that I cried at the sink with a soapy plate in my hand. I cried so hard I had to sit down on the kitchen floor. He came over and sat down next to me. On the tile. In his slippers. And he held my hand for I don't know how long. By week 6, the burning was down to once or twice a week instead of every night. He was sleeping in the bed. He was walking out to the back porch in the morning with the paper. He fed the birds. By week 8 he went to Lowe's on a Saturday. He came home with a piece of pine and a story about a guy he ran into who used to work at the same HVAC company he worked at in the late 80s. By week 11 he was downstairs in the workshop building a birdhouse. He told me last weekend he wants to make Eli a toy box for his 7th birthday next spring. He said, "I want him to have something I made." I am writing this from the kitchen table. Ray is downstairs. I can hear the sander. He is still on his metformin. He is still on his gabapentin, but at a lower dose, which the doctor agreed to last month after his last appointment because his nerve function tests had improved. Improved. That word. After 3 years. His neurologist actually asked him what changed. Ray told him. He said the doctor wrote it down on the back of a prescription pad. I don't know what that doctor did with the note. But I know he wrote it down. I am not going to sit here and tell you that my husband's diabetic neuropathy is cured. The doctor was very clear with us that we are still managing a condition. He is still a diabetic. He still has to test his finger at 6:40 AM. He still has to be careful. But the engines are running. He feels his slippers. He sleeps in the bed. He builds things again. And I have my husband back. If you are reading this and you are watching somebody you love retreat from their own life one piece at a time, if you are watching a husband or a father or yourself stop doing the things that made you who you are, if the doctor has told you that this is just how it is now and we just manage it, I want you to know there's another way to think about it. The engines can be supported. Alevia Amla is what Ray takes every morning. 2 capsules with his coffee. There are 30 servings in a bottle. It's shipped from the USA and made in the USA from amla that's sourced from where it grows. They offer a 90-day money-back guarantee. You can use the whole bottle. You can use 3 bottles. You send them back and they refund you. No phone calls. No arguments. Try it for 90 days. The same 90 days Ray tried it for. Worst case, you send it back and you get your money. Best case, your husband walks out to the back porch in his slippers and feeds the birds. P.S. I want to tell you something about Becca. She's been a hospice nurse for 11 years. She sees a lot of people at the end of things. She told me one time that the saddest thing she sees is not the dying itself. She said the saddest thing is the family that sits at the bedside and tells her how the patient was 5 years ago, how he used to fish, how she used to garden, how he used to dance, how she used to laugh, and Becca thinks, "Why did you wait? Why did you watch them disappear for 5 years before you got worried?" She told me that's why she gave me that bottle. She said she didn't want to be sitting at our kitchen table 5 years from now hearing me tell some other nurse about how Dad used to build things. She said she wanted to give us a chance to not be that story. P.P.S. The 90-day guarantee is real. I asked. I called Alevia and asked them to spell it out for me. They said even if the bottle is empty, mail it back, full refund, no questions. That is not how any of Ray's prescriptions work. The Lyrica that made his ankles swell up like grapefruits and put 16 pounds on him did not come with a money-back guarantee. The gabapentin that left a running truck in the Walmart parking lot did not come with one. Nothing in our medicine cabinet does. The pharmacy industry does not refund you when their product makes you worse. Alevia does. That tells you something about who's confident in what they're selling. P.P.P.S. Alevia is a small company. They run out. I've had to wait once already for a reorder. I now keep two bottles in the cabinet because I am not going back to October. I am not going back to dusty slippers. I am not going back to my husband retreating from his own life one piece at a time. If you have been watching somebody you love fade for too long, please don't wait another month. Please don't wait for the next thing to go. The slippers were Ray's first thing. The porch was second. By the time it was the workshop, I was losing him. Don't wait for the workshop. P.P.P.P.S. Becca came down last weekend for dinner. Ray was downstairs sanding. She and I sat at the kitchen table the way we did in October. She said, "Mom. Dad's back." I said, "I know." She said, "Did you ever think this would happen?" I said, "No. I really didn't." She squeezed my hand and she said, "Mr. Whitfield's daughter told me when I asked her about the amla, she said, 'I just wanted to give Dad a chance.' That's what you did, Mom. You gave him a chance." That's all I'm asking you to do. Give the person you love a chance. 👉 https://alevia.com/amla/33