Make America Pain Free Again

Nerve Pain? (Read This)

Last winter, the nerves in my feet done got so bad… I couldn't walk my granddaughter three houses down to the bus stop. My name is Ray. I'm 68 years old. I carried mail out of a small post office in Ohio, and I'm not a doctor, a nurse, or anything close to it. I'm a guy who walked for a living and then lost the ability to do it. If your feet burn at night like somebody left a griddle on under the sheets, and go numb and stupid by morning, I want you to read this all the way through. It's long. I'm going to tell you the whole thing anyway, because the short version is what everybody told ME, and the short version is what cost me six years. Six years I'm not getting back. Let me tell you who I was first, because you can't understand what the burning took until you know what it took it from. I started carrying mail in 1987. Past County Road 128, mostly gravel and mostly farms. 840 boxes. I walked the village stretch and drove the rest, and on a normal day my pedometer said somewhere between 8 and 11 miles. I did that for 31 years. I never missed a Christmas rush and I only called off twice, both times for a funeral. There's a line carved into the post office building in New York City about how neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stops the carrier from finishing his rounds. It isn't an official oath, and every carrier I ever knew treated it like one anyway. Mail moves in all weather. That was the whole personality of my working life. I have been chased by a Rottweiler, stuck in a ditch in an ice storm, and stung by a wasp nest inside a mailbox, and I finished all three routes. My wife Deb used to say she could set the clock by my boots hitting the porch at 4:40. That's who I was. Now hold that picture, because the man I just described is the same man who went down on a wet lawn in front of a 7-year-old last January. The slide started slow. It always starts slow. I retired in 2018, at 60, with a cake in the break room and a plaque I still can't find. That first winter, my feet started buzzing at night. Not hurting. Buzzing, like they'd fallen asleep and couldn't finish waking up. I blamed 31 years of boots on gravel and I told Deb it was nothing. That's the first lie you tell. By 2019 the buzz had turned into pins and needles most evenings. I'd sit down after supper and my feet would come alive in the wrong way, like somebody was flicking the soles with a rubber band. I mentioned it at my physical. The doctor looked at my chart, not at my feet. "You were on your feet for years, just age and wear and tear? Probably just mileage” Mileage? Like I was a truck with 400,000 on the odometer and the only honest thing left to do was park me. I drove home actually angry, and then I did what you do. I decided he was probably right. By 2020 it wasn't pins and needles anymore. It was heat. It came on around 10 at night, always at night, and it felt like the sheets were made of something warm that got warmer the longer you left it against your skin. I started sleeping with both feet hanging off the end of the bed. In January. Deb would find me at 2 a.m. standing on the kitchen tile in the dark, barefoot, holding the edge of the counter and waiting. The cold tile helped for about four minutes. Then the burning came right back and I'd stand there and wait some more. If you know that specific kind of lonely, standing in your own dark kitchen while the person you love sleeps fine in the other room, then you already know this isn't about feet. It's about your whole life shrinking to the size of the four minutes when it lets up. 2021 is when the numbness moved in on top of the burning, which I didn't know was possible. Burning and numb. At the same time, in the same foot. That's the visit where I finally pushed, and I got the second answer. "This is normal for your age." I was 63. My father was still splitting his own firewood at 63. I wanted to ask this man, out loud, exactly which part of not feeling your own foot on a gas pedal at 65 miles an hour he considered NORMAL. I didn't say it. I took the prescription instead, like a good patient, because that's what you do when a man with a stethoscope hands you a piece of paper and reaches for the door handle. The pills worked, in a sense. They turned the volume down in my head. They also turned everything else down with it. By the middle of 2022 I was falling asleep in my chair at 7:15 at night. I lost words. Real, ordinary words, standing in my own kitchen, pointing at a thing I've owned for 20 years. Deb caught me one night trying to describe the colander. She laughed, and then she didn't laugh, and neither of us said anything about it. That was the year I stopped mowing my own yard. I'd like to tell you there was a big dramatic decision behind that. There wasn't. I just paid the neighbor kid one time because my feet were bad that week, and then I never took it back. That's how it actually goes. Nobody quits their life in one afternoon. You sublet it out one small piece at a time and you tell yourself every piece is temporary. 2023 took the Tuesday coffee walk. Three retired carriers and a retired lineman, every Tuesday, two miles down to the diner and two miles back, for eleven years. I made excuses for four months, and then I stopped getting the text. I want you to sit with that for a second, because I still do. They didn't drop me. I just stopped answering until answering wasn't a thing anymore. By 2024 I had a graveyard under the bathroom sink. Menthol rubs, the roll-on, capsaicin cream that made the whole bedroom smell like a locker room and did absolutely nothing but sting. Deb counted eleven half-used containers when she finally cleaned it out. Eleven. Every one of them did the exact same thing: sat on top of my skin, made a sensation, faded in about twenty minutes, and left the burning right where it was. That was also the year of the third doctor and the sentence I still hear. "We can try to manage it." Manage it? I've heard that phrase from a doctor, from an insurance letter, and from a man trying to sell me a roof. It means the same thing in all three places. It means nobody has a plan and everybody would like you to stop asking. Now here's the part where I lose the thread of the story for a second, because I have to tell you about last January. I want you to picture this carefully, because I'm going to see it for the rest of my life. My granddaughter Josie is 7. She stays with us Wednesday mornings, and the bus stop is three houses down. THREE HOUSES. I used to walk 11 miles a day and I'd been telling myself for a year that three houses was still mine. It was 6:50 in the morning and there was that wet frost on the grass that isn't quite ice. We got past the Kellers' driveway and my feet did the thing where they go from burning to gone in about four steps. I felt the curb with my ankle instead of my foot. I remember thinking, very calmly, oh, I'm going down. My knee hit first and my hip came around after it and I ended up on my side on the Hendersons' front lawn with frost soaking through my coat and my hat about six feet away. I couldn't get up. My heart started pounding, Josie started screaming and crying… I scrambled to get off the ground, but I couldn’t. Josie dropped her backpack and grabbed my arm with both hands and pulled. She weighs 48 pounds. She pulled anyway, and she was making a sound I had never heard her make. Then she stopped pulling and put her face down next to mine and said, "Grandpa, should I go get Grandma?" Seven years old, deciding whether to leave me on the ground. The bus came. The bus driver, a woman named Trish who I have known for 15 years, got out and helped me sit up on the Hendersons' lawn while my granddaughter got on the bus alone and watched me through the window. I waved at her. I made myself wave, and I made myself smile while I did it, and then the bus turned the corner and I sat down on a stranger's frozen lawn and cried like I hadn't cried since my mother's funeral. Not because of my knee. My knee was fine. Because I was 67 years old and I had just been rescued from the ground by a school bus driver in front of a first grader who thinks I'm the strongest person in the world. I sat there and I thought: this is it, then. This is the part where it starts taking things faster than I can hide it. Deb found me at the kitchen table an hour later still in the wet coat. I said one sentence to her. I said, "I'm done, I just want somebody to cut off my feet. I’m not going to live like this, I’m going to find a way.” Something in me had actually changed, and it wasn't bravery. It was pure stubbornness, which is the only reliable thing I've ever had. I decided I was going to find out what was actually happening inside my feet, even if nobody with a medical degree would tell me. I'm a slow reader. I take my time and I write things down, which is a habit you pick up when your whole job is not losing anything. It took me about five weeks of nights. And what I found reorganized six years of my life in about an hour. Here's the thing I didn't know, and I'd bet you don't either. A nerve isn't a wire that either works or doesn't. A nerve is more like a door with a gate in it, and the gate opens to let a pain signal through. That's not a metaphor I made up to sell you something. Researchers who study pain have known for 40 years that there's a specific gate on the nerve cells that carry the loud signals. And here's the part that got me out of my chair at 1 in the morning. That gate is held shut by a plug. A real, physical plug, sitting in the mouth of the gate, keeping it closed when nothing important is happening. The plug is made of magnesium. I read that line four times. The thing holding your pain gate shut is a mineral. The same mineral your grandmother threw in the bathtub. Now here's how it goes wrong, and this is the whole ad, so stay with me. When a signal comes through hard enough and often enough, the charge across that gate flips and the magnesium plug gets pushed OUT of the opening. Not damaged. Pushed out. And once the plug is out, the gate stops being picky. Signals that should never have gotten through start getting through. Researchers have a name for the state your nervous system ends up in when that happens over and over. They call it central sensitization. It's not a disease and it's not a diagnosis, and I'm not a doctor so I'm not handing you either one. It's a process. It means the volume knob got turned up and then the knob broke off. Here's how I finally understood it, standing in my own kitchen. We've got a screen door on the back of our house that has been there since Deb's parents owned it. Two summers ago the latch wore down. Not broken. Worn, so it wouldn't quite catch. And every night the wind off the field would take that door and bang it, over and over, all night long. Nothing was wrong. Nobody was at the door. There was no danger anywhere on that property. The door banged anyway, because the latch couldn't hold it shut. That's your feet. Nothing is on fire down there. The latch just can't hold the gate closed anymore, so the alarm keeps going off in an empty house. And once I saw it that way, every single thing that had happened to me for six years finally lined up. The burning at night, when everything's quiet and there's nothing else for your brain to pay attention to. The pins and needles that show up out of nowhere while you're watching the news and not doing a thing. The numbness sitting right on top of the burning, which makes no sense at all until you realize the gate isn't reporting reality anymore, it's just stuck. And the worst one. The reason everything I swallowed either did nothing or turned me into a zombie. Because I want to be honest with you about the pills, and I'm not going to tell you to stop taking anything, ever. That is between you and your doctor and I mean that. But you deserve to know why they felt the way they felt. The nerve pills work up top, in your head, where they turn the volume down on everything. They're not aimed at the latch on your back door. They're aimed at your ears. That's why you can be foggy and slow AND still be standing on cold kitchen tile at 2 a.m. The signal never stopped. You just got worse at hearing it, along with everything else. And the creams under my sink? Every one of those eleven containers was doing the same trick. Menthol and capsaicin make a strong sensation on the surface of your skin so your brain has something else to look at. You know what that is? That's turning the TV up to drown out a banging screen door. The door keeps banging. You just gave yourself a headache on top of it. I sat with that for about three days and I got angry. Then I got over being angry, and I'll tell you why. My doctors aren't villains. Every one of those three men was trying to help me with the fifteen minutes and the tools he had. The system they work inside is built to catch what shows up on a test, and to name it, and to write something for it. There is no test that says "the latch on this man's back door is worn out." There's no billing code for a stuck alarm in an empty house. So they gave me the two things the system had: a word, and a prescription. It isn't their fault. It is absolutely not YOUR fault either. You're not weak and you're not soft. You didn't do this to yourself by getting older, either. You have been fighting an alarm by yelling at the alarm. Now. The reason I started reading in the first place wasn't the internet. It was something I'd been staring at for 31 years and never once thought about. For three decades I delivered mail to Amish farms. I want to be careful here, because I'm not going to sit and pretend I ran a study on my mail route. I don't have a study. I have 31 years of pulling up to the same 840 boxes and watching the same families get older. And here's what I can tell you I saw with my own eyes, over and over, for three decades. The 80-year-olds out on Route 4 didn't move like the 80-year-olds in town. I watched a woman I'd guess was closing in on 80 carry a bushel crate of squash across a barn floor in February with no cane, no wincing, and no hand on the wall. Same week, in the village, I watched a man ten years younger than her take four tries to get out of a folding chair at the fire hall. I noticed it my whole career the way you notice weather. It never once occurred to me to ASK about it. Until my own feet were on fire and I had nothing left to be proud about. So in March of last year I drove out to a farm I'd delivered to for 26 years, and I stood in a kitchen I had never once been inside of, and I asked a 79-year-old woman named Miriam how she does it. She thought I was making a joke. Then she realized I wasn't, and she sat me down and made me coffee and talked to me for two hours about something her mother did. And it turned out the answer wasn't exotic at all. It was the bathtub. Their people have been soaking sore hands and feet in magnesium salts for well over a hundred years. Epsom salt, which is magnesium sulfate, which is the SAME mineral that sits in that gate. They didn't know a thing about gates or plugs, and they didn't have to. They just knew it worked, and it got passed down, because in a community where you can't drive to a pharmacy on a Sunday, the things that don't work die out in one generation. Miriam's mother went one step further than the tub. She made a salve so the good part stayed on the skin instead of going down the drain with the bathwater. Arnica in it, which people around here have been putting on bruises and sore joints since before there were pills to take instead. And frankincense, which she called by its actual name, boswellia, which surprised me coming from a woman in a kitchen with no electricity. I went home that night and told Deb I'd just been given a hundred-year-old recipe by a grandmother in a bonnet. Deb said, and I quote, "So what are you going to do, make it in a pot?" Fair question. Here's the problem with the old way, and I ran into it hard. I tried the soaks for three weeks and they genuinely helped, for about an hour. Then it's over, because you got out of the tub and the magnesium went down the drain. You can't soak your feet at 2 a.m. every night for the rest of your life. You'd have to build your whole existence around a bathtub. What I needed was the same idea in something that STAYS ON. Which is where my daughter Angie comes in, because she's the one in the family who's good at the computer. She found a company called Old World Healing, and a cream they make called Old World Relief. She said, "Dad, read this and tell me if it's the thing that lady told you about." It was. It's a balm you rub in, built around the exact same idea Miriam's mother was working with, and it has four things in it. Magnesium sulfate, the plug mineral, the Epsom heritage. Arnica. Boswellia, which is the frankincense. And bromelain, which comes out of a pineapple, and I only know that because I looked it up expecting to catch them making something up. Now, I was a mailman for 31 years. I have been handed every miracle in an envelope that this country prints. So I did what I always do, which is read the boring part. I went and looked up the ingredients themselves, separately, away from anybody trying to sell me anything. Here's what I actually found, and I'm going to be careful to tell you what the research is about, which is the INGREDIENTS, not this particular jar. Arnica has the best one. Swiss researchers ran a real randomized, double-blind trial with 204 people with hand osteoarthritis, arnica gel against ibuprofen gel, 21 days. They came out the same on pain and hand function. The arnica group actually reported slightly fewer side effects. That study is in Rheumatology International, 2007, and you can go read the abstract yourself in about four minutes. Boswellia has a pile of trials behind it too, and a review of seven of them covering 545 patients found it eased pain compared to the control groups. One newer trial had people reporting a difference inside of five days. Magnesium is the one that closes the circle for me, because it's the plug. There's a body of research on magnesium's job at that gate going back to a 1984 paper in Nature, and a 2020 review in Nutrients specifically about magnesium and pain that lays out how it keeps that channel shut. And bromelain, the pineapple enzyme, has been studied for swelling and comfort in joints for decades. Four old ingredients. Every one of them looked at by people in white coats who had no idea a mailman in Ohio would be reading them at midnight. Now let me tell you what I'm NOT saying, because I promised myself I'd be straight with you. I'm not telling you a jar of cream reaches inside your spine and fixes a worn latch. Nobody can tell you that and I'd be suspicious of anybody who did. I'm not a doctor, this isn't a diagnosis, and I'm not promising you a miracle. What I'm telling you is what changed for me when I stopped fighting the alarm and started putting the mineral on the door, twice a day, where I could actually reach it. Because that's the whole thing, and if you take one sentence out of this letter, take this one. You can't fix a screen door from the kitchen. You have to walk out there and put your hand on the latch. A pill goes in your stomach and gets filtered, diluted, and split up among every organ you've got before any of it gets near your toes. Your feet are the farthest point in your body from your mouth. That's not a flaw in the medicine. That's just how far away your feet are. A balm you rub into your sole and up your calf starts at the door. Before I ordered, I did the last thing a burned-out buyer does. I went and read the reviews, and I read the bad ones first. What got me weren't the loud ones. It was a woman named Margaret Brammer, 82, out of Santa Rosa, California, who wrote: "within 30 minutes... a gentle warmth spread through my hands. I call it my little miracle in a jar. For the first time in years I'm sleeping through the night without having to shake my hands out at 3 a.m." I read that and I thought, she's describing my 2 a.m. kitchen. Different body part, exact same night. There was a guy named Todd out of Vacaville who'd had thumb pain for years and put it about as plainly as a man can: "I feel like myself again. Not like a guy who has to ask his wife to open the jar of pickles." And a woman named Laura, 62, who'd given up gardening because her hands hurt to dig, said "within 20 minutes the stiffness in my knuckles eases. No strong smell, no burn. Just gentle relief that lets me get back to what I love." No strong smell, no burn. After the capsaicin cream that made our bedroom smell like a wrestling mat, that line mattered to me more than anything else on the page. Then I found the part that actually made me click. 90 days. You use it for three months, and if you don't love it, you get your money back. I sat there and did the arithmetic that six years of this teaches you to do. The prescription that fogged me out for two years never came with a guarantee. Neither did any of the eleven containers under my sink. Nobody has ever once offered to give me my money back for being wrong about my feet. These people were offering to be wrong on their own dime. So I ordered the 3-jar bundle, because I'd learned my lesson about running out of things that work, and I put it on the auto-refill so it just shows up and I save another 15% without having to remember anything. It came in a glass jar with a wood-grain lid that screws down, and it looks more like something off a shelf in a farmhouse than something out of a pharmacy. The cream is the color of heavy cream. It's thick without being greasy, and it doesn't smell like medicine. First night, I sat on the edge of the bed at about 9:30 and did what the instructions said. A dollop about the size of a quarter, warmed between my palms first. Then into the sole of the right foot, up between the toes, around the heel, and up the calf for about 30 seconds a spot. Then the same on the left. The whole thing took me about three minutes. Then I lay down and waited, and I'll tell you exactly what I expected, which is nothing. At about the fifteen-minute mark I felt warmth. Not the sting of the drugstore stuff. Not cold. A slow, low warmth that came up from underneath instead of sitting on top, and it kept going for a good while. I remember lying there thinking, well, that's different. Now I want to be honest about what happened next, because if I lie to you here the rest of this letter is worthless. Week one was nothing to write home about. I slept a little better on two of the nights and I couldn't have sworn it wasn't the placebo effect and my own hope. If you're expecting to be healed on a Tuesday, this letter isn't for you and neither is that jar. By the end of week two, I stopped getting up. Not "I got up less." I got through five nights out of seven without standing on the kitchen tile at 2 a.m. Deb noticed before I did. She said, "You've been in bed all week," like she was accusing me of something. Week three, I felt the gas pedal. I don't have anything poetic to say about that. I came off the exit at Route 83, put my foot down, and felt the pressure of the pedal against my sole like a normal person, and I had to pull over for a completely different reason than the last time I pulled over. Week five, I mowed my own yard. Took me twice as long as it used to and I sat down twice in the middle of it and Deb watched me from the window the whole time like I was 4 years old. I didn't care. I paid that neighbor kid for two summers. Week seven is the one I'll actually remember. Tuesday morning, I texted a retired lineman named Denny and said, "Diner. If you'll slow down for me." He texted back one word. "Finally." Four miles. Two down, two back, and I was hurting in the honest way you hurt when you haven't done something in three years, not the way I'd hurt for six. And in October, I walked Josie to the bus stop. I want to tell you it was some big scene. It wasn't. She held my hand out of habit at the Kellers' driveway and then let go, because she's 8 now and letting go is what 8 looks like. We got to the corner and she got on the bus and she waved through the window the same way she did the morning I was on the ground. Same window. Completely different man waving back. I stood there on the corner for a minute after the bus left. Three houses. Fifteen months earlier that was the distance that ended me. Here's the part that closes the loop on the doctors. I went in this past spring, different practice, a young woman this time who actually got down and looked at my feet before she looked at her screen. I told her the whole thing, the salts, the balm, the Amish farm, all of it, and I braced for the eye roll I've earned six times over. She didn't roll her eyes. She said, "Whatever you're doing at night, keep doing it." Ten years of "that's just aging" and "we can try to manage it," and the first useful sentence anybody said to me was permission to keep doing something I found myself. I'm not going to sit here and tell you my feet are 25 years old. They're not. On a cold snap I still get a rough night, and if I get lazy and skip three days in a row, I can tell. It's a routine, not a magic trick. Three minutes at night and about a minute in the morning, the same way you brush your teeth. But the alarm in the empty house is quiet most nights now, and I'd forgotten what it was like to just go to bed and be asleep. So let me talk to you directly for a second, and then I'll leave you alone. If you're reading this at 2 a.m. with your feet hanging off the end of the bed, this letter is for you. If you've got a graveyard of half-used tubes under your bathroom sink and every one of them smells like a locker room, this letter is for you. If a doctor has ever said the words "we can try to manage it" to you and you drove home furious and then made yourself accept it, this letter is absolutely for you. And if you've started quietly giving away pieces of your life, the mowing, the Tuesday walk, the three houses down to the corner, and telling yourself each one is temporary, then I need you to hear the thing nobody said to me for six years. You're not being punished for getting old. Your latch is worn, and the door has been banging in an empty house, and every single thing you've tried was aimed at your ears instead of the door. So here's my ask, and it's small. I'm not asking you to believe a mailman. I'm asking you to go read the page. To get your first time buyer discount, tap the link below. Read what the four ingredients are, then go look them up yourself the way I did, away from anybody selling anything. Then pay attention to the 90 days, because that's the only part of this that's actually math. If you use it for three months and it does nothing for you, you send it back and you keep your money. Which means the only thing you're genuinely risking tonight is one more night of doing exactly what you did last night. I did that for six years. I don't recommend it. Ray P.S. The thing I'd take back isn't the falling. It's the six years I spent believing "mileage" and "your age" were answers instead of shrugs. If your feet have been burning for two years, you are four years ahead of where I was, and I'd give a lot to be standing where you're standing. Tap the link below and read it tonight instead of next winter. P.P.S. Here's a small test you can run on yourself this week, and it costs nothing. For the next five nights, write down the time you get out of bed because of your feet. Just the time, on a scrap of paper on the nightstand. Most people have no idea what the real number is, because you don't remember a 2 a.m. you were half asleep for. Deb kept mine for a week before I ordered anything, and seeing five numbers in her handwriting on one piece of paper did more to get me moving than any doctor ever did. P.P.P.S. On the guarantee, because I want to make sure you actually heard it. 90 days, money back, and you don't have to argue with anybody about whether you're "really" in pain. Nobody at that pharmacy ever offered me my money back for two years of fog. Nobody at the drugstore refunded me for eleven containers of nothing. A company that gives you 90 days is a company that expects you to still be using the jar on day 91. P.P.P.P.S. They make it in small batches out in Sonoma, so if the page has it in stock when you get there, I wouldn't sit on it the way I sat on everything else for six years. And remember the one line, even if you forget the rest of my letter. You can't fix a screen door from the kitchen. You have to walk out there and put your hand on the latch. Mail moves in all weather. So do I, finally. Tap the link below. Ray