Sarah Mitchell

I Almost Didn't Click Buy

I have visited the Neurobella product page four times in the last three weeks and every single time I closed the tab without ordering. I am not exaggerating. Four times. I scrolled the entire page each time. I read every line of the supplement facts panel. I read every review. I added the bottle to my cart twice and then sat there looking at the checkout screen and closed the browser. My name is Sarah. I am sixty eight years old. I am a retired dental hygienist in Tallahassee, Florida. I have been widowed for three years. I have dry age related macular degeneration that was diagnosed fourteen months ago. I have been taking PreserVision every single morning for the past twelve months and my vision has gotten worse on every single follow up appointment, and I have been staring at the Neurobella product page like a woman standing outside a restaurant reading the menu through the window because she is too scared to walk in and sit down. And last Tuesday my daughter sent me a photograph that made me walk in and sit down. I want to tell you about that photograph because if you are reading this you are probably standing outside the same window I was standing outside, and the thing that changed my mind might change yours. Let me explain why I was stuck. Because the stuckness is the whole point of this story and if I skip past it then the ending does not mean anything. Fourteen months ago my ophthalmologist in Tallahassee told me I had dry AMD in both eyes. He showed me the OCT scan on his monitor. He pointed to the drusen deposits with the tip of his pen. He said, Sarah, these are small but they are there and we are going to watch them. He told me to start on an AREDS 2 formula. He handed me a pamphlet for PreserVision. I picked up the first bottle at the CVS on Thomasville Road on my way home from the appointment and I started taking it the next morning and I have not missed a single morning in twelve months. Twelve months. Three hundred and sixty five capsules. Not one skip. I was a dental hygienist for forty one years. I do not skip appointments and I do not skip doses and I do not quit a protocol early. Here is what twelve months of perfect compliance on PreserVision bought me. My reading vision got worse. Not a lot worse, but worse. The fine print on my prescription bottles went from readable to blurry at the six month mark and the blur has not reversed. My night driving went from uncomfortable to something I now avoid entirely. I have not driven after sunset since November. My daughter drives me to Wednesday evening Bible study. Before the AMD I drove myself. The Amsler grid I taped to my kitchen wall next to the refrigerator started showing a wavy patch in the lower right quadrant of my left eye around month four and that wave has gotten slightly wider every time I check it. I went back for my twelve month follow up two months ago. The OCT scan showed the drusen had not shrunk. One of them had grown by a measurable amount. My specialist said, keep taking the PreserVision, come back in six months. I sat in the parking lot and I cried in the car because I had done everything he asked me to do for twelve months without missing a single day and the reward for my perfect obedience was a bigger drusen and a worse scan and a six month appointment that felt like a countdown. Here is the fear I have not said out loud to anyone except my daughter. I watched my husband lose his central vision to wet AMD in the last two years of his life. I watched the sharpest, most capable man I had ever known lose the ability to read the newspaper, lose the ability to drive, lose the ability to see my face clearly across the dinner table. He had the injections. He had the monitoring. He had every intervention his retina specialist recommended and his central vision still degraded to the point where he could not read the hymnal at church and I had to whisper the words to him during the songs. He died three years ago of a heart condition and not of his eye disease, but I will carry the image of him squinting at a page he used to read without glasses for the rest of my life. And I have known since the day of my own diagnosis that I am now walking the same road my husband walked. That is why I kept visiting the Neurobella product page. And that is why I kept closing the tab. Because the thought of spending another year taking another bottle that does not work, watching the drusen grow while the company takes my money, watching my own scan get worse the way my husband's scans got worse, that thought was more terrifying to me than doing nothing. My hesitation was not laziness. It was grief dressed up as caution. Here is what I already knew before I ever clicked on the Neurobella page the first time. I knew that PreserVision contains two macular carotenoids, Lutein and Zeaxanthin. I knew that because I had read the back of the bottle approximately three hundred and sixty five times while I was opening it every morning. I also knew, because I had read two other articles about Neurobella before I ever visited the product page, that the Neurobella 15 in 1 Advanced Eye Formula contains a third carotenoid called Meso Zeaxanthin that PreserVision does not contain. I knew that the three carotenoid combination is the one used in the macular pigment optical density research. I knew that Meso Zeaxanthin sits at the very center of the macula where the densest concentration of pigment is supposed to be. I knew all of this. I had done the reading. I had compared the labels. I had looked at the research. And I still could not make myself click the order button because knowing the science is not the same thing as believing the bottle will work when the last bottle you trusted did not. Last Tuesday evening my daughter Jennifer called me at about seven thirty. She said, Mom, I need you to check your text messages right now. I just sent you something. I opened the text. She had sent me two photographs. The first photograph was an OCT scan dated twelve weeks ago. The second photograph was an OCT scan dated last week. Both scans belonged to a woman named Carolyn who attends Jennifer's church in Jacksonville. Jennifer had been talking to Carolyn after a Wednesday service about my diagnosis and Carolyn had said, your mother needs to see my scans. Carolyn is seventy one years old. She was diagnosed with dry AMD sixteen months ago. She took PreserVision for four months and her drusen did not change. She switched to Neurobella 15 in 1 Advanced Eye Formula twelve weeks ago. The first scan, the one from twelve weeks ago, showed drusen deposits across her macula that her specialist had flagged as intermediate dry AMD. The second scan, the one from last week, showed the same macula with measurably smaller drusen. Her specialist had written a note on the printout. The note said, significant improvement in drusen volume, continue current supplementation. I sat on my couch and I looked at those two photographs on my phone for about ten minutes. I zoomed in. I zoomed out. I looked at the dates. I looked at the specialist's handwriting. And then I opened my browser and I went to the Neurobella product page for the fifth time and I did not close the tab. I want to say something honest about what I felt looking at those scans. I was not happy. Not at first. I was angry. I was angry because I had spent twelve months and twelve bottles of PreserVision doing exactly what my doctor told me to do, and a woman I had never met at my daughter's church in Jacksonville had gotten a better result in twelve weeks on a different bottle. I was angry because the information was there the whole time. The three carotenoid research was there. The Meso Zeaxanthin data was there. The Neurobella product page was there. I had visited it four times. I had the answer sitting in an open browser tab and I talked myself out of it four times because I was too scared of being disappointed again. Twelve months of decline on PreserVision because my doctor handed me a pamphlet and I did not question it. Twelve months of watching the Amsler grid get worse because I trusted the protocol instead of trusting the research. Twelve months of perfect compliance on a formula that was missing the single most important carotenoid for the center of the macula where my drusen are actually sitting. I am not angry at my doctor. He recommended what he was trained to recommend. I am angry at myself for taking twelve months to do what Carolyn did in one afternoon, which is read the labels, see the gap, and switch. I ordered the Neurobella that Tuesday night at eight fourteen in the evening. I know the exact time because I looked at the confirmation email. The bottle arrived Thursday. I took the first capsule Friday morning with my coffee. I am on day five as I write this, so I cannot give you my own scan results yet. I am not going to pretend I have data I do not have. But I can tell you what has already changed. The dread is gone. The specific dread I carried every morning when I opened the PreserVision bottle and thought, this is not working but I do not know what else to do. That dread is gone. I replaced it with something I have not felt in fourteen months, which is a reason to believe the next scan might look different than the last one. Not because of marketing. Not because of a headline. Because a seventy one year old woman at my daughter's church in Jacksonville took the same bottle I am now taking and her specialist wrote significant improvement on the printout in his own handwriting. That is not a testimonial on a website. That is an OCT machine and a retina specialist and a set of scans that my daughter held in her hands. If you are reading this then I already know something about you. I know you have visited the Neurobella product page at least once. Probably more than once. I know you have read another article about it. Maybe two. I know you have thought about ordering and then talked yourself out of it, because that is exactly what I did four times, and you would not still be reading an ad this long unless you were standing in the same spot I was standing in last Monday. Here are the two versions of next Tuesday. In the first version you close this tab. You go back to whatever you were doing. You take the same bottle you have been taking. You wait for your next monitoring appointment. You hope the scan does not get worse. In the second version you click the link at the bottom of this page. You order the same bottle Carolyn ordered. You order the same bottle I ordered last Tuesday at eight fourteen in the evening. You take the first capsule tomorrow morning. You tape an Amsler grid to your kitchen wall. You start your own twelve week test on your own retinas with all three macular carotenoids instead of two. The only difference between the first version and the second version is one click and about ninety seconds on a checkout page. I cannot get the last twelve months back. I cannot undo the drusen growth that happened while I was taking a bottle that was missing the third carotenoid. I cannot undo the nights my daughter drove me to Bible study because I no longer trusted my own eyes after sunset. I cannot give my husband back his central vision or his ability to read the hymnal or his ability to see my face across the dinner table. I grieve all of those things. But I can tell you that Tuesday night at eight fourteen was the moment I stopped grieving and started acting, and the only thing that changed between visit number four and visit number five was a photograph on my phone of two OCT scans from a woman I had never met who goes to my daughter's church. If you are waiting for permission to stop hesitating, this is it. If you are waiting for proof from someone who is not being paid to say it, Carolyn is not being paid. Her specialist is not being paid. My daughter is not being paid. The scans are real. The handwriting on the printout is real. The improvement is real. Here is the thing about macular degeneration that nobody tells you in the pamphlet. Every morning is a morning your macular pigment is either being rebuilt or it is thinning further. There is no pause button. The drusen in your macula are either getting smaller or they are getting larger. There is no holding pattern. The twelve months I spent on PreserVision were not a holding pattern. They were twelve months of decline that I documented on every single follow up scan. The bottle you are taking right now either contains all three macular carotenoids the research supports or it is missing the one that sits at the dead center of the macula. If it is missing it then every morning you take it is a morning you are feeding two thirds of a protocol to a problem that requires all three. That is not my opinion. That is the label. I am not a scientist and I am not a doctor and I am not a spokesperson. I am a sixty eight year old retired dental hygienist in Tallahassee, Florida, who visited this product page four times and closed the tab four times because she was terrified of being disappointed again. The link is below. It is the same page I visited five times. It is the same page Carolyn's daughter showed her before she placed her order. The bottle comes with a ninety day money back guarantee, which means if it does not do a single thing for your macula in twelve weeks, you get every dollar back. You cannot get your drusen back if you wait another twelve months. You can always get the money back. The risk is on the company. The clock is on your retinas. Click the link. Order the bottle. Take the first capsule tomorrow morning. I wish someone had sent me those scans twelve months ago. I am sending you this instead. https://neuro-bella.com/products/15-in-1-advanced-eye-formula