The Nerve Health Community

I'm fifty-eight, and for about two years I have been giving each day a little less than I used to give it. Last fall, a man eighteen years older than me showed me what I had been doing without showing me anything. I'm fifty-eight years old. My name is Walter. I run a custom-cabinetry business out of a shop in the small town outside Pittsburgh where my wife, Linda, and I have lived for thirty-one years. I started the business at thirty-five. I have nine people who work for me now. Most of them have been with me for more than ten years. Two of them have been with me for more than twenty. We make kitchens, mostly. Built-ins. Custom libraries. The kind of work where every piece is sized to a house and every piece has to fit. I am telling you that because the wood I use matters to me, and the place I buy the oak I use most often is a small Amish sawmill in Holmes County, Ohio, run by a family I have been buying from for twenty-three years. The man who runs the sawmill is named Samuel. Samuel is seventy-six. The story I want to tell you is about a Tuesday in September last fall, when I drove out to Samuel's mill for a load of oak, and I came home with a question I had been avoiding for almost two years. I want to back up. For about two years before that Tuesday, I had been quietly noticing that the body I had been running my cabinetry business with was not delivering the way it used to deliver. Not failing. Not declining in any clinical sense. Just less. And there was a particular part of it I had been avoiding looking at, which was my feet. I had been getting to the shop a little later. Six-thirty had become seven. Seven had become seven-fifteen on the days I didn't have an early install. Part of that, if I am honest, was that the first hour on the concrete shop floor had started to make my feet buzz, a faint pins-and-needles I would shake off and not mention. I had been finishing the day a little earlier. Five had become four-thirty. Four-thirty had become whatever the guys can finish without me. The Saturday work I used to do, drawings, quotes, the small administrative catch-up had quietly stopped happening. I was sitting on the couch with my coffee from nine until almost noon on Saturdays. The drawings sat in the truck. I had stopped going down into the basement on Sunday afternoons to work on small projects for the house. The deck rail had been waiting for me for a year. The trim around the basement windows had been waiting for two. I told myself it was time. Part of it was that the stairs down to the basement had started to feel uncertain under my feet, a numbness in the soles, like the step was a half-inch farther away than it was. I had been going to bed by nine-thirty. I had been a man who could read until eleven and get up at six and feel like myself. That stopped, in small pieces, over the course of the year I turned fifty-seven. Some nights it was a faint burning along the tops of my feet that I noticed only once the house was quiet and there was nothing else to notice. I was not sick. I was not declining in any measurable way. My annual physical at fifty-seven was clean. My bloodwork was where my doctor wanted it. My blood pressure was good. My cholesterol was in range. My weight was where it had been for ten years. I take a low dose of metformin. I have taken it for a little over six years. Other than that, I am on nothing. There was no chart-level problem. There was just a man who had been giving the days a little less than he used to, and a man who had been quietly explaining away what his feet had started doing in the evenings. I had been telling myself it was age. I had been telling myself it was twenty-three years of running a business. I had been telling myself it was the stress, the sleep, the long winter we had had two years in a row. I had not been telling myself the simpler thing, which was that I had been quietly accepting a level of less that I would have been embarrassed by at fifty. The Tuesday in September was a normal trip out to Samuel's. I drive out two or three times a year. The drive is about three and a half hours each way. I load the truck with quarter-sawn white oak boards I have ordered ahead. I have lunch with Samuel and his sons. I drive home. I have been doing this run since 2001. I have known Samuel since the year he turned fifty-three. That last Tuesday, I drove in around eleven. Samuel was at the back of the mill, helping his oldest son and one of his grandsons get a long board off the carriage. He was wearing the same kind of work shirt and work pants he has worn for twenty-three years. He looked, from across the yard, exactly like he had looked when I had first started buying from him. He saw me, walked over, shook my hand, and we went into the small office at the front of the mill to look at the bill of materials. After we were done with the paperwork, he asked me whether I wanted to walk back and see a piece of curly maple they had been holding for me. I said yes. We walked the length of the mill yard together. It is about a quarter mile from the office to the back lot where they were holding the maple. The yard is gravel. The day was cool. We walked at the pace Samuel was walking, and what I noticed, about halfway back, was not that I was out of breath. It was that I could not quite feel the gravel under my feet. I was watching the ground a little, the way you watch a stair you are not sure of, and I was placing my feet more carefully than a man should have to on flat ground. I am fifty-eight. Samuel is seventy-six. He was feeling the ground he walked on. I was guessing at it. We looked at the curly maple. Samuel and his son loaded it on the truck with the oak. Samuel and I went back to the small house behind the office where his wife had laid out lunch. I sat at the table across from Samuel. He ate the way he has eaten for twenty-three years, which is with the appetite of a man who has been working with his hands since he was twelve years old. I ate well enough, but I was quiet, the way you are quiet when something you have been not-looking-at has just made itself a little harder not to look at. About halfway through the meal, Samuel, who is a quiet man and does not say much at lunch, looked at me across the table and said, in his careful English: "Walter, you are not yourself today." I told him I had been tired. He said: "For how long?" I told him: "For about a year. Maybe two." He chewed for a while. He is a man who does not rush a sentence. He said: "What does your doctor say?" I told him my bloodwork was good. My blood pressure was good. Everything was where my doctor wanted it. There was nothing to fix. He nodded. He took another bite. He chewed. He swallowed. He said one thing more, and then he changed the subject. He said: "Walter, the body that gets you through a long day is the body you are paying attention to. If you have stopped paying attention to it, it will stop getting you through a long day." He ate the rest of his lunch. We talked about the maple, and about a chair he had been making for his grandson, and about the price of fuel. I drove the three and a half hours home thinking about Samuel feeling the gravel under his feet at seventy-six while I had been guessing at it at fifty-eight. I drove the rest of that week thinking about it. By the weekend, I had started reading. I am the kind of man who has been ordering oak from the same sawmill for twenty-three years. I am not a man who jumps at the next thing. I read carefully, slowly, the way I read a set of plans for a kitchen that I am about to build. I read for almost three weeks. I read about the nerves in the feet and hands, the long ones, the ones that reach the farthest from the spine, the ones that are the first to let you know when something they need has been running low. I read about the protective coating around those nerves, and about the one nutrient the body uses to keep that coating maintained: Vitamin B12, and the family it belongs to, the B-complex. And I read one thing that stopped me, because it was sitting in my own medicine cabinet. The metformin I had been taking every morning for six years quietly depletes B12. It is in the prescribing information. It has been for years. The very thing the nerves in my feet needed, the medication had been slowly drawing down the whole time. Nobody had told me that, in six years, and nobody had checked. I read about the long, patient relationship the research community has had with B12 and the B-complex, in the context of supporting healthy nerve function and the body's own nerve maintenance, in people whose numbers are already in the range their doctors want them in. None of what I read was a fireworks story. It was the opposite of one. The language being used in the careful corner of the research conversation was supports healthy nerve function, supports normal sensation, supports the body's own nerve maintenance, in people whose numbers are already in range. Not fixes anything. Not replaces what your doctor has you on. Not gives you your forty-year-old body back. That was the language I had been looking for and had not been finding in the supplement aisle at the drugstore. I also read why the ordinary B12 pill so often does nothing, which mattered, because I am the kind of man who wants to know why a thing fails before I trust the thing that replaces it. After fifty, the stomach changes. It stops taking B12 in the ordinary way. So a man can swallow a B12 tablet every morning, faithfully, and have most of it pass straight through him. Not because the B12 is wrong. Because the delivery is. Under the tongue gets around that. It goes in directly, without having to pass the part of the system that has stopped doing its job. And the form matters too. Most pills use the cheap, inactive kind the body has to convert before a nerve can use it, a conversion that weakens with age and with the very medication I was on. The active kind is already in the form the nerve can use. Nothing has to be converted. I picked one of the brands I had read about, a small company called Olvexa, and I picked it for one specific reason. It used the active form, under the tongue, at a real amount, the three things my reading had told me actually mattered, instead of the cheap form in a pill, which is the faster and cheaper way to make a supplement. That is a slower way to make one. It costs them more. I have been a cabinetmaker for twenty-three years. I have spent twenty-three years paying attention to the small decisions craftsmen make when no one is watching. That choice told me something about who was making the supplement. The other thing I liked was the simplicity. A dropper under the tongue in the morning. I am fifty-eight and I run a business. I am not interested in a protocol that requires its own shelf. Now I want to tell you about the call I made before I started taking it. I am on metformin. That is the one prescription I take. I called my pharmacist before I added anything to it. His name is Bill. He is the pharmacist at the small pharmacy in our town. I have been buying my multivitamin from him for fifteen years. I called him because I am a careful man and because I wanted somebody who knew what was on my chart to confirm that adding a B12 supplement to the metformin was the right thing to do at my age. He pulled up my profile. Confirmed the metformin and nothing else. Told me he had no concerns at the dosage on the label. In fact, he told me something I had not expected, that he sees it often, that the metformin I was on is well known to draw B12 down, and that a man in my position putting some back was a sensible thing to be doing. He told me to call him back if I ever started any other prescription medication in the future, because the conversation would be different at that point. He told me, before he got off the phone, that he wished more of his customers made the call I had just made. I want to say something now, plainly. If you are on any prescription medication at all, metformin, anything for blood pressure, anything for cholesterol, anything you take regularly, please do not skip the call I am about to ask you to make. Call your pharmacist or your doctor's office before you add anything new to what you are already taking. Do not, under any circumstances, change a prescription on your own on the strength of what some cabinetmaker outside Pittsburgh wrote in a letter you read on the internet. The people who know your chart will tell you in two minutes whether the supplement is safe for you. I called Bill before I added even one drop of anything. The two minutes were worth every second. I was adding it. I was not stopping anything. I was not adjusting anything. I kept taking my metformin exactly as I always had. I started on a Monday. The first two weeks I felt nothing in particular. I had read enough alongside Samuel's sentence about paying attention to know that bodies are different. Some people notice something within the first week or two. Some people take much longer. Some people don't notice much at all. I was prepared to land in any of those camps. What I noticed, I noticed slowly. The first thing I noticed, around week four, was the morning at the shop. I had been getting to the shop around seven for the last year. Around week four, I caught myself unlocking the shop door at six-thirty on a Tuesday, and I realized I had stood on the concrete for the first hour without once stopping to shake out my feet. I didn't make a thing of it. I had read enough not to make a thing of one observation. The next Tuesday, I was there at six-thirty again, and the floor was just the floor. The second thing I noticed, in week six or seven, was the Saturday drawings. I came down to the kitchen on a Saturday morning, had my coffee, finished it, and got up at eight to go out to the truck and bring in the folder of drawings that had been sitting there for nine months. I worked on them at the kitchen table from eight-thirty to about one. Linda walked through the kitchen sometime around ten and didn't say anything. She brought me a sandwich at noon and didn't say anything then either. She is a quiet woman and she notices things. That afternoon I finished two drawings I had been putting off and started a third. The third thing I noticed was the basement. In early November, about ten weeks in, I went down into the basement on a Sunday afternoon to look for a particular hand plane I had been meaning to use for a project at work. I went down the stairs without watching them. I noticed that only at the bottom, that I had not been counting the steps with my eyes, that my feet had known where the stairs were. I found the hand plane, and then I noticed the trim around the basement windows that had been waiting for me for two years, and I noticed I had brought a sandwich and a cup of coffee down with me, and I noticed the radio was on in the corner the way it used to be when I worked down there on Sundays. I worked on the basement window trim for the rest of that afternoon. I worked on it again the following Sunday. By Christmas it was done. Linda noticed without saying anything. She is a quiet woman, as I said. The fourth thing I noticed was the next trip out to Samuel's. I drove out in February for another load. The drive was about three and a half hours, the same as it always is. When I got to the mill, Samuel was at the back of the yard with his sons. He saw me, walked over, shook my hand. We walked the length of the yard together to look at a new run of oak. I walked at his pace, and I felt the gravel under my feet the whole way. I was not watching the ground. I was not guessing at it. I noticed that about halfway back to the office and I did not make a thing of it. We sat down to lunch. Samuel ate the way he eats. I ate the way I had been eating before the year of giving the days less. About halfway through the meal he looked at me across the table and said, in his careful English: "Walter, you are more yourself than you were last time." I told him I had been doing some of what he had told me to do, which was paying attention to the body that gets me through a long day. He nodded. He did not ask me what specifically I had been doing. He is not a man who needs the details. He said: "The body responds when you pay attention to it. It also stops responding when you stop. Keep paying attention." We talked about the oak. I want to be careful with what I am telling you, because I am writing this to people I do not know and I do not want to overstate anything. I am not telling you Olvexa did any of those things on its own. I had been protecting my sleep more carefully, on the strength of Samuel's sentence about paying attention. I had been eating more carefully. Linda had noticed me reading the labels on a few things and had quietly adjusted what was in the refrigerator. I had been generally, in small ways, paying more attention. There were several things changing at once, the way there are when a man finally decides to stop avoiding the things he has been quietly avoiding. All I am telling you is that I added one small thing to a long list of things I was starting to do again, kept everything else exactly the same, including my metformin, and a stretch of months followed that was qualitatively different from the two years that had preceded it. That is the honest version. I would not trust anyone who gave you a cleaner one. I went into my regular annual physical at fifty-eight, about six months after I had started. My bloodwork was where my doctor wanted it, in the same ranges it had been the year before. She did not ask me whether I had changed anything. I told her anyway. She told me that B12 is exactly what the nerves rely on, that metformin is well known to draw it down, and that she understood the thinking. She told me to keep doing what I was doing. That is the whole story. If you are a man or a woman, somewhere in your fifties or sixties, and you have been quietly accepting a level of less the way I had been quietly accepting it for two years, and quietly explaining away what your feet have started doing in the evenings, I want to say a few things to you carefully. I do not know you. I do not know your bloodwork or your medications or what your doctor has said. Bodies are different. Some people notice something within the first week or two of adding something like this. Some people take much longer. Some people don't notice much at all. That is the honest version, and anyone offering you a cleaner one is selling you harder than I am. Here is how I think about Olvexa now, in the words I would actually use. It is something the body uses. The research community talks about it in the context of supporting healthy nerve function, normal sensation, and the body's own nerve maintenance, in people whose numbers are already in the range their doctors want them in. It is not a fix for anything. It is not a substitute for anything your doctor has you on. It is one small thing you add to the long list of things you are already doing for yourself. Please call your pharmacist or your doctor's office before you add it. If you are on metformin, or on any prescription medication at all, this is non-negotiable. I called Bill before I added it to my metformin. You should make the call too, whatever you are on. The people who know your chart will tell you in two minutes whether it makes sense for you. I am a cabinetmaker outside Pittsburgh. I am not the person to ask. Your pharmacist or your doctor is. The company has a ninety-day satisfaction guarantee. If you are not satisfied, for any reason at all, including just changing your mind, they refund you. It is not tied to your bloodwork. It is not tied to anything you have to prove to anybody. If you are not satisfied, you are not satisfied. That is the whole policy. It is a small operation, and the active form and the under-the-tongue preparation take longer and cost more than the ordinary pill. There are stretches when they are in stock and stretches when they are not. I mention that not to push you, please do not let anybody push you into a health decision, but so that if you go to the site and they are out, you know why. That is all I have. Thank you for reading this far. I hope something here was useful to you. — Walter P.S. I want to come back to the form of the B12 for a second. Most pills use the cheap, inactive kind, the kind your body has to convert before a nerve can use it. That conversion weakens with age, and with the very medication a lot of us are on. Olvexa uses the active kind, the kind already in the form the nerve can use. Nothing has to be converted. And it goes under the tongue, so it does not have to pass the part of the system that, after fifty, has stopped doing its job. It costs them money and time. They made the choice anyway. At fifty-eight, after twenty-three years of running a custom-cabinetry shop, I pay attention to the small decisions craftsmen and companies make when no one is watching. Those decisions tell you everything. P.P.S. A dropper. Under the tongue. In the morning. That is the entire protocol. No powder to mix. No afternoon dose to remember. No schedule taped to the inside of the cupboard. I keep the bottle on the kitchen counter next to my coffee, right beside the metformin I have always taken. Linda has the coffee waiting at six. The bottle is there. I take it. I am out the door by six-thirty. That is the rhythm of my morning at fifty-eight. We have earned a simple one. P.P.P.S. I am going to say it one more time. Please. Call your pharmacist or your doctor's office before you add anything new to what you are already taking. Especially if you are on metformin, or anything for blood pressure or cholesterol. They have your whole picture. I have written you a letter. There is a difference, and the difference matters. The two minutes it takes to ask are worth every second. P.P.P.P.S. The guarantee, again, in case you skimmed. Ninety days. Any reason at all. You do not have to prove a single thing, not to them, not about your numbers, not about how you feel. If you tried it and you are not satisfied, you are not satisfied, and they send the money back. That is the whole policy. A small-company policy. The kind of thing companies used to do when companies still answered the phone. P.P.P.P.P.S. The sentence Samuel said to me at the table that Tuesday in September, the body that gets you through a long day is the body you are paying attention to, has been with me every day since. I am not a man who quotes other men. I am a cabinetmaker, not a writer of letters. But Samuel said that sentence over a meal his wife had laid out for us, after we had walked the length of his mill yard together, him feeling the ground at seventy-six, me guessing at it at fifty-eight, and the sentence broke something open in me that needed to be broken open. I do not know what your equivalent of Samuel is. Maybe it is a man you buy lumber from. Maybe it is a woman you sit next to at a meeting. Maybe it is your own father. I hope you have one. I hope they say something quiet to you the way Samuel said it to me. And I hope, in a year from now, you find yourself walking the length of your own yard feeling the ground under your feet the way you could not feel it a year earlier, and you know it when you are. I hope that for you. That is the whole reason I wrote this. — W. https://tryolvexa.com/products/olvexa-vitamin-b-complex