Neurologist Warns: This 1 Vitamin Could Be the Real Reason Your Feet Burn and Go Numb at Night

Written by Dr. Richard Hayes, MD

I'm about to make enemies of every pharmaceutical executive, every company selling nerve pain pills and every neurologist who has ever told a patient "we'll find the right dose."

Because what I'm about to share could cost them years of refills.

But I don't care anymore.

After watching my wife Carol, 61, sit on the edge of our bathtub at 2:40 in the morning with her bare feet under the cold tap...

After hearing her say, in our own bathroom, "They're on fire, Richard. And I can't feel the floor"...

After watching the "experts," me included, hand her gabapentin, then a higher dose, then Lyrica, then patches and creams and a nerve test, and call that progress...

I knew the system had failed her. And I was the system.

So I went looking for what nobody was prescribing, and found something that changed everything.

And if you're reading this with feet that start burning the minute you lie down, with toes that feel like they're wrapped in cotton wool, with that dread that builds every evening because you know the night is when it gets loud... please keep reading.

The next 5 minutes could be the most important of your life.

My name is Dr. Richard Hayes. I've spent 22 years in neurology, most of it with patients over fifty who have nerve damage in their hands and feet.

The National Institutes of Health has estimated that more than 20 million Americans have some form of peripheral neuropathy. Every week the same conversation happens in exam rooms everywhere. "It's past my ankles now. It used to be just my toes." And the answer is always the same. "Let's raise the dose."

What the doctor almost never says is this: the pill was never built to fix a nerve. It was built to stop seizures. It turns the signal down, and while the signal is down, nobody asks what the nerve is starving for.

But first, let me tell you about the night that shattered everything I thought I knew...

The night that shattered everything…

Carol is 61. We've been married thirty-four years. She taught kindergarten for most of them, and every summer of our marriage she has grown tomatoes and roses in the backyard like it was a second job.

She used to walk barefoot to the tomato beds and tell you which plants needed water by the feel of the soil.

Then it started. Pins and needles in her toes, like her feet had fallen asleep and forgotten to wake up. Then a burning at night, and before long most nights.

Fourteen months after her doctor wrote her first prescription, I woke up at 2:40 in the morning and her side of the bed was empty.

There was a strip of light under the bathroom door, and I could hear the tap running.

Carol was sitting on the edge of the bathtub in her nightgown with both bare feet under the cold tap, a folded towel in her lap.

I asked how long she'd been in there. She didn't look up.

"They're on fire, Richard. And I can't feel the floor."

Both at once. Burning and numb, in the same two feet. If you have it, you know exactly what she meant.

She wasn't crying. She wasn't asking me to fix it. She had stopped expecting me to.

And here's what killed me...

Carol had done everything she was told. A lot of it, I told her.

Her doctor started her on gabapentin, and I'm the one who told her to take it. Within a month she was walking our hallway at night with one hand on the wall because the floor kept tilting.

She soaked her feet in Epsom salts every evening at the kitchen table. She wore lidocaine patches on her soles to bed. She rubbed in a capsaicin cream that burned so badly she cried in the bathroom, which is what it's supposed to do at first, apparently.

She lay on an exam table while a technician taped electrodes to her leg for a nerve conduction test. The report told us what we already knew. Then she bought a TENS unit and sat on the couch at night with the pads stuck to her calf, buzzing.

Month seven, I sat in the back of a regional pain meeting while a paid speaker put up a slide about pushing gabapentin toward the top of the dose range. Everyone nodded. I had the question right there in my mouth. Then why is my wife worse? I let the pause close. Someone asked about the lunch.

So her doctor switched her to Lyrica. Carol put on eleven pounds in two months, and her ankles swelled so much her shoes left grooves in them.

Then the midnight purchases. A "nerve support" vitamin from an ad on her phone. She didn't tell me about that one. Remember that bottle.

None of it held.

By month twelve it had reached her fingertips, and she stopped telling me about it. The last thing she said about it was this:

"I used to know a tomato was ripe just by touching it. Now I can't feel the soil."

She said it to the kitchen window, not to me. "I put my hands in the dirt and it's like wearing gloves. And I'm married to a nerve doctor."

So that night, sitting on the bathroom floor next to her while the tap ran, I counted the times I had told a patient "we'll find the right dose." I had never once wondered what their nights sounded like.

And something inside me snapped.

I wasn't going to let this keep happening. Not to Carol. Not to one more patient.

The mind blowing discovery

Three weeks later, at a conference dinner, I sat next to a clinical biochemist named Helen and told her about Carol. She asked me one question.

"Before you muted her nerves, did anyone ask what the coating is made of, and whether she has what it takes to rebuild it?"

I gave her my twenty-two year answer. Neuropathy is nerve damage, usually from diabetes. The damage is done. The drug quiets the pain.

She said that's half right. The damage is real. But the nerves in your hands and feet aren't like the ones in your brain. They keep growing and repairing your whole life, and the repair job runs on supplies.

So I told her about the bottle I'd found behind the oatmeal. 100 milligrams of B6 a capsule, two a day. I'd thrown it out the morning I found it.

"So we tried vitamins," I said. "They made it worse."

Helen put her fork down.

"Two hundred milligrams a day? Richard, Europe's food safety authority puts the safe upper limit at twelve. Too little starves the nerve. Too much poisons it. So you threw out the vitamin along with the bottle. Did anyone ever check whether she had too little of it in the first place?"

Nobody had. We had gone from zero straight to poison and called the vitamin a failure.

I went home and read for three nights straight. What I found made me furious.

The entire nerve pain drug model is built on a seizure drug.

Gabapentin was approved by the FDA in December 1993 as an add-on treatment for seizures. Not nerve pain. Not burning feet.

Then the sales machine went to work. A former employee named David Franklin blew the whistle in 1996, and it kept rolling. By 2003 Neurontin was a $2.7 billion a year drug, and court filings say 90% of its sales came from uses the FDA had never approved.

In 2004, Warner-Lambert, the Pfizer-owned company that sold Neurontin, agreed to plead guilty and pay more than $430 million over that promotion. In 2010, a federal jury in Boston found Pfizer liable for racketeering over how Neurontin was marketed.

To this day, plain gabapentin has never been FDA approved for diabetic nerve pain. Its only nerve pain approval, from 2002, is for the pain that lingers after shingles.

Lyrica came next, approved in December 2004 for diabetic nerve pain. It brought Pfizer about $5 billion a year at its peak, and it was part of Pfizer's record $2.3 billion off-label settlement in 2009.

Today gabapentin is filled about 47 million times a year, for about 11.5 million Americans.

So how well does it work? In the 2017 Cochrane review, about 38 out of 100 people with diabetic nerve pain got real relief on gabapentin, meaning at least half the pain gone. On a sugar pill, it was 21 out of 100. And about 1 in 5 got dizzy.

That was Carol, holding the wall in our hallway.

Neither drug was designed to rebuild anything. The government's own fact sheet says they quiet nerve cell signaling. They mute the spark.

It's like pulling the battery out of a smoke alarm while the wiring behind the wall keeps fraying. The house goes quiet. Nobody opens the wall.

So what's actually going on underneath?

For a lot of people, the nerves aren't finished. They're starving.

The real root cause: why your feet burn and go numb at night

Here's the question I started asking every neuropathy patient. "Before this started... could you feel the sand between your toes at the beach?"

Most of them looked at me like I was asking if water was wet. Carol could tell a ripe tomato by touch.

That matters. Because if those nerves carried a clean signal for fifty or sixty years, the wiring wasn't defective. Something changed in the supply chain.

Every nerve running to your hands and feet is wrapped in a protective coating called myelin. The NIH compares it to the insulation around a wire, and special cells called Schwann cells build it and look after it for life.

The coating is made mostly of fats. One key family of them, called sphingolipids, starts at a single enzyme, and that enzyme can't run without Vitamin B6 in its active form, P-5-P.

B6 was identified in 1934 by a researcher named Paul György, who later received the National Medal of Science for discovering three vitamins.

So I spent $6,400 of my own money on blood panels for 40 of my neuropathy patients. Insurance pushed back on most of the B6 tests. The national guideline for working up this kind of nerve damage, reaffirmed in 2025, names three highest yield screening tests. Blood sugar, B12, and a protein test. B6 isn't one of them.

31 out of 40 came back with the same pattern. Active B6 low, or sitting at the very bottom of the range with "normal" printed right next to it. Nine were low on B12 too. Three were the opposite, way too HIGH, from megadose bottles they'd bought online. Most of them were taking metformin, an acid reducer, a blood pressure pill, or some mix of the three.

I call it "Silent Nerve Starvation."

And it explains EVERYTHING.

Picture the wiring in an old house, every inch wrapped in insulation, with a repair crew walking the line every night to patch the worn spots. As long as the crew has materials, the signal runs clean.

After fifty, three things can go wrong at the same time:

The supply dries up. A national study of more than 7,800 Americans found low B6 in nearly a quarter of the people who didn't take supplements, and in more than 1 in 10 people past 65. The crew shows up with half a truck.

The crew gets pulled off the job. The TB drug isoniazid can drain B6, which is why doctors are told to consider giving B6 alongside it. The label of the blood pressure drug hydralazine says to add B6 if numbness and tingling show up. Levodopa and birth control pills have been linked to low B6 too. Then metformin and acid reducers can lower B12, the other vitamin your nerves can't do without. Nobody tracks the balance.

The alarm gets stuck on. A damaged nerve gets noisy, like static on a telephone line, as the NIH puts it. Then the spinal cord turns the volume up through a receptor called NMDA, your body's pain amplifier, and magnesium is the natural plug in that receptor. Add low vitamin D, which studies link with more nerve damage and nerve pain in diabetes, and the whole system runs hot.

That's the whole picture. A crew that's starving, short handed, and working under a blaring alarm. And it gets loudest at night.

• Why it started in your toes... the nerves to your feet are the longest in your body, so that's where a starving crew falls behind first.
• Why it's worse at night... in a quiet, dark bedroom the static on the line is all your brain has left to listen to.
• Why the pill helped for a while and then the dose climbed... it was muting the spark, not patching the coating.
• Why the megadose bottle made it worse... too much B6 is itself a known cause of nerve damage. The crew needed materials, and it got a flood.

And the evidence behind the mute button was thinner than anyone told you. In 2009, the New England Journal of Medicine reported that of 20 company trials of gabapentin for off-label uses, only 12 were published, and 8 of those 12 reported a different main outcome than the one the study was designed to measure.

And the industry treats the starving crew like an afterthought.

You know why? Because a patient whose dose climbs every year is a patient who never leaves. A patient who can't sleep through the night without the next pill will never stop filling the prescription.

They don't want to fix the starvation. Because the starvation is the business model.

It's genius, really. If you see a human being's nights as a revenue stream.

The quiet fix hiding in plain sight

Remember Carol, on the edge of our bathtub at 2:40 in the morning?

Night six after we started feeding her nerves what they'd been missing, she slept until the alarm without one trip to the bathroom. She told me at breakfast like it was a question.

Week two she walked the whole grocery store without leaning on the cart.

Week four she took her socks off in the garden and told me the grass was cold. She hadn't said that in three years.

No new prescription. No stronger dose. No patch. No stimulator.

Truly life-changing.

I didn't take her off anything. With her doctor's knowledge, I added something alongside what she was already taking. Something designed to feed what the drugs were never built to touch.

To quiet a nerve that's been starving for years, you need to do THREE things at the same time:

Miss even ONE of these steps, and you're wasting your time.

That's why a higher dose of gabapentin doesn't work long term. (It mutes harder, and the dizziness comes along with it. It never patches the coating.)

That's why switching to Lyrica disappoints. (Same family, same job. Carol got eleven new pounds and swollen ankles.)

That's why creams and patches fail. (They numb the skin for a few hours. The nerve underneath is still starving.)

That's why megadose "nerve support" bottles fail. (Too much B6 is itself a known cause of nerve damage. Australia's drug regulator had logged 250 reports of nerve problems tied to B6 products by October 2025, and says the damage can happen at 50mg a day or even lower.)

That's why pharmacy magnesium fails. (It's often the cheap oxide form, and most of it stays in your gut.)

You need all three. At the same time. Working together.

A Triple Action Feed, Shield and Quiet. And that's exactly what this formula delivers.

This breakthrough is making a lot of people uncomfortable

After Carol's results, word spread fast.

My colleague Elena, a nurse practitioner in our clinic, stopped me in the hallway outside the nerve testing lab.

"Whatever you did for Carol. I have three patients who need it. Yesterday."

Elena has twenty-one years in neurology. Careful. Reads every study twice. She'd never asked me for anything.

But she had watched hundreds of patients cycle from gabapentin to Lyrica to the stimulator consults. The pill works for a while. The burning breaks through. The dose climbs. The patient learns to call it "managing," because nobody offers them the word "feeling."

She had a patient, a retired welder, 68. Forty years of the steadiest hands in the shop, and now he couldn't button his own shirt. His granddaughter held his hand on the walk to the car every Sunday and he couldn't feel it.

I gave Elena the full protocol. She walked her patients through it.

A few weeks later, she texted me.

"Richard. My retired welder buttoned his own shirt this morning. First time in two years. Twenty one years in neurology and I've never seen that. I need this for every patient I have. NOW."

After that I tried the same protocol with eleven more neuropathy patients. Ages 52 to 77. All with the same pattern: burning at night, numbness creeping higher, and a dose that kept climbing.

Nine out of eleven reported calmer nights within a month. Seven were sleeping through the night again.

Within 72 hours of telling Elena, I had people tracking me down. A church pianist who couldn't feel the keys anymore. A grandmother who had stopped walking on the beach because she couldn't tell if the sand was hot. A man who slept with his feet hanging off the end of the bed because the sheet touching them hurt.

One after another, they reported the same thing: the nights went quiet first. Then the mornings. Then getting out of bed and feeling the floor under them for the first time in years.

Not "learned to manage it" better. Not "found ways to cope" better.

ACTUALLY BETTER.

That's when the pushback started.

When you threaten the nerve pain drug business, they come for you

First, it was "friendly" warnings.

A pain specialist I'd known for fifteen years pulled me aside at a regional meeting: "Richard, patients are asking for vitamin panels instead of booking their stimulator trials. You're making the rest of us look bad."

Translation: Stop before WE lose money.

Then came a letter from the hospital's compliance office with FINAL WARNING stamped across the top. Three pages reminding me to avoid "off-guideline protocols." Prescribe what everyone else prescribes, or we have a problem.

Funny thing is, the drug I was being told to keep prescribing built its market on uses the FDA never approved. There's a guilty plea over it.

The final straw? The device rep who ran our Thursday lunch-and-learns stopped scheduling them. Her last email: "We're refocusing our outreach to practices that are aligned with current treatment protocols."

They wanted me quiet because I'd found something that made their entire model look like what it is. An escalation machine built on the assumption that a nerve can only ever be muted, never fed.

Two simple capsules a day that:

• Feed the nerve's repair crew (instead of muting the signal)
• Contain no sedatives and no opioids, and are non habit forming
• Cost less than a single specialist copay
• Let people rebuild at home, alongside the care they already have

But here's what those pharmaceutical industry vultures didn't count on...

I'd already partnered with a small team of formulators who had watched their own parents lose the feeling in their feet. Biochemists who understood exactly what the starvation looked like at the molecular level, which forms were bioavailable and which were garbage, and where the line sits between feeding a nerve and poisoning one.

And together, we'd turned my clinical protocol into something anyone could take.

Introducing the formula the nerve pain drug industry doesn't want you to know about

It's called CTRL.

And it's the only formula I've found that does all three in one daily dose, with a B6 dose that respects the line.

Vitamin B6 as P-5-P... The feeder.

5mg of Vitamin B6 in its active P-5-P form. That's less than half of Europe's 12mg safe upper limit, one twentieth of the 100mg US limit, and under the 10mg mark where Australia makes a product carry a nerve warning. A 2017 lab study found that plain pyridoxine, the cheap form in most megadose bottles, killed nerve cells in a dish while the active P-5-P form didn't. Researchers believe big doses of the inactive form can jam the active one. What CTRL deliberately leaves out is B12, because B12 should be dosed by your blood test.

Vitamin D3 and Rhodiola Rosea... The shield.

1000IU of Vitamin D3. A 2019 study in Diabetic Medicine found the lowest vitamin D levels of all in people whose diabetic neuropathy was painful. Plus 200mg of Rhodiola Rosea, standardized to 3% rosavins, an adaptogen studied for years in stress and fatigue, because years of pain and broken sleep keep the body on high alert.

Magnesium and L-Theanine... The quieters.

120mg of Magnesium Bisglycinate, a form people often find much gentler on the stomach than the cheap oxide. Magnesium is the body's own plug in the NMDA receptor, and a 2020 review in Nutrients calls that block the main way magnesium works against pain. And 200mg of L-Theanine to calm the background noise at night. In Hidese's study in Nutrients, four weeks of 200mg a day improved stress symptoms and sleep quality.

And 450mg of L-Tyrosine, the raw material your brain makes dopamine from. Researchers believe dopamine is part of the brain's own system for turning pain signals down.

That's six ingredients working on three failure points at once. Every dose printed on the label. No proprietary blends. No mystery ingredients. Third party tested.

You literally just take two capsules every morning with breakfast. And let the repair crew do its job, so the nerve still has materials when the night comes.

No megadoses. No sedatives. No prescription needed. No copay.

Just your nerves finally getting what they've been starving for:

Here is exactly how it feeds your nerves in 4 weeks

When you take CTRL every morning, here is what we see happen, week by week:

After four weeks? You lie down at night and your feet stay quiet.

Not numbed quiet. Not sedated quiet.

Not "managed." Not "coping."

Actually. Quiet.

The results that have nerve doctors scrambling

Over 18,600 people have used CTRL.

The results?

• An average rating of 4.8 out of 5
• Two capsules a day, no sedatives, non habit forming
• Many tell us the evenings got calmer first, then the nights

But my favorite stat? Fewer than 3 out of 100 people ask for a refund.

Don't take my word for it. Here's what real people are saying:

The price that is causing pharmaceutical industry panic

Let me show you what treating nerve pain REALLY costs in America:

The pharmaceutical industry LOVES that progression.

You know why? Because every step costs more than the last. A higher dose leads to a second drug, the second drug leads to an opioid, and the opioid leads to an operating room. Every stage is another bill.

It's a goldmine built on burning feet.

But here's what really bothers them...

I could have priced CTRL like a specialty prescription. I didn't build it to get rich. I built it because Carol told me "They're on fire, Richard. And I can't feel the floor," because Elena's welder buttoned his own shirt, because I was tired of writing the same prescription while the numbness crept higher every year.

So here's the deal: one tube of CTRL is $59. A full month. Already less than a single month of brand name Lyrica.

But that's not what you'll pay today.

The 44% off "middle finger" to the nerve pain drug industry

Remember the compliance letter I mentioned? The device rep who stopped scheduling lunch-and-learns? The hallway warnings?

Well, there's one more thing that makes me angry. Every week another patient walks into my office with a "nerve support" bottle they bought from an ad. Cheap copycat formulas with the right words on the label and the B6 backwards, the cheap form at many times the European limit.

My response?

I'm putting the 3 month supply on sale at 44% off.

When you take the 3 month supply, CTRL drops to $33 a tube.

That's right. About $1.10 a day.

Less than one specialist copay. Less than one week of brand name Lyrica. Less than the creams and the TENS unit you already bought.

For a formula built to feed, shield and quiet a starving nervous system at the same time.

Why would I do this? Because every person who feels the floor again is living proof the escalation model failed them. And because rebuilding takes time, and I want you to have enough of it. I make less money per tube than a pain clinic makes on one follow up visit. That's the point.

But here is the catch (and it's a big one)

CTRL is not a nerve pain drug. It will not replace your doctor.

If you're looking for another pill that mutes the signal for a few months and leaves the nerve exactly where it was, this is not it. CTRL feeds the system itself.

And let me be straight with you, because I still believe in medicine. Numbness or weakness that came on suddenly or is spreading fast, or a sore on your foot that isn't healing, belongs in a doctor's office this week. If you have diabetes, your blood sugar plan comes first. Ask your doctor to check your B12, especially on metformin or an acid reducer, because CTRL doesn't contain any. Already taking a B complex? Add up the B6 and show your doctor. And never stop or taper gabapentin or Lyrica on your own. Carol's doctor is still bringing hers down slowly. On gabapentin? Ask your pharmacist about taking it two hours apart from CTRL, because its label warns that magnesium antacids can lower how much of it your body absorbs.

You're feeding a repair crew that has been working on empty for years. That takes about four weeks to reach full stride, and feeling can take longer, because nerves regrow slowly.

That's why I recommend the 3 month supply. One tube is enough to start feeling the shift. Three gives your nerves the time they actually need to rebuild a real baseline, not a temporary spike, without a gap in between.

And here's the thing... we cannot just "make more" overnight. CTRL relies on standardized Rhodiola at 3% rosavins, which has to be sourced and tested for potency before we can formulate.

And every month you wait is another month you're:

• Feeding an industry that needs your dose to climb every year
• Paying the night tax every time you end up on the edge of the tub at 2 AM
• Starving a repair crew that's already working on empty
• Getting closer to the next "let's talk about a stimulator" conversation

While the solution is sitting right here... for about $1.10 a day.

My personal 30-day "calm feet or it's free" guarantee

Look, I get it. You've been burned before. Some of you literally. A capsaicin cream that set your feet on fire on purpose. A basin of Epsom salts every night at the kitchen table. A "nerve support" bottle from an ad that turned out to be part of the problem.

You've spent money on things that didn't work. You've spent hope on things that didn't work. And both of those are hard to get back.

So here's my promise:

Try CTRL for 30 days. Two capsules every morning with breakfast. Feed. Shield. Quiet.

And if you don't notice a difference...

I'll refund every penny.

No forms to fill out. No "store credit" nonsense. No questionnaire asking you to justify why you want your money back. Just email info@try-balanced.com and say "It didn't work." A real person will respond within 24 hours. Your refund goes out the same week.

Why am I so confident? Because fewer than 3 out of 100 people ask for a refund. That means more than 97 out of every 100 people who try this keep it. Not because they forgot to cancel. Because they noticed something.

And no, this isn't the type of guarantee every other supplement company slaps on the page and then makes impossible to use. We answer every email. We process every request. We don't argue.

I stand behind it. Period.

The choice that will define your next decade

Three months ago, Carol was shuffling across our bathroom tiles at night in thick grey socks, one hand flat against the wall. Telling me her feet were on fire and she couldn't feel the floor.

She'd done everything she was told. Gabapentin, then a higher dose, then Lyrica. Patches and creams. A nerve test. And every month the numbness crept a little higher.

Today she walks barefoot across the grass in her garden with a basket of tomatoes on her arm. She sleeps until the alarm. Last Saturday she spent an hour in the rose bed and came in with dirt under her fingernails and a grin I hadn't seen in three years.

The only thing that changed? We stopped muting the wire and started feeding the crew that looks after it.

That's what CTRL does. And that's the same choice sitting in front of you right now.

You can keep raising the dose. Keep spending your nights with your feet under the cold tap. Keep feeding a system that charges you more every year for a fix that never touches the nerve.

Or you can do what Carol did. What Ray did. What Marcus did. What over 18,600 people have done.

Feed the nerve.

$33 a tube on the 3 month supply. Less than one specialist copay.

30 days to decide if it works.

Your nerves weren't finished. They were starving.

Here is exactly what to do next

1. Click the button below that says "APPLY DISCOUNT & CHECK AVAILABILITY"
2. Choose your supply (Pro tip: get the 3 month supply. It takes about four weeks to reach full stride, and you'll save 44%.)
3. Fill out your shipping info (Every order ships within 48 hours)
4. Take two capsules every morning with breakfast
5. In 30 days, email us and tell us what changed (info@try-balanced.com)

But whatever you do... don't close this page thinking "I'll start later."

Later is another night on the edge of the bathtub. Later is another morning you can't feel the floor. Later is the next dose increase.

Your nerves have waited long enough. Click below and let's start feeding them.

GET 44% OFF CTRL NOW!

READER SPECIAL: The 3 month supply is $33 a tube, 44% off. Every order ships within 48 hours and is covered by our 30-day money-back guarantee.

With hope,
Dr. Richard Hayes

P.S. Carol sent me a photo from the garden last week. She's kneeling in the tomato bed with her bare hands in the soil, and under it she wrote "I can feel it." She told me that night it was the first time in three years she could feel the texture of the earth between her fingers. It's the background on my phone now. Not for the tomatoes.

P.P.S. The nerve pain drug model is simple: sell a seizure drug for burning feet, mute the signal, then raise the dose when the burning breaks through. CTRL gives the nerve's repair crew what it runs on, at a dose that respects the line between feeding a nerve and poisoning it. One of these models needs you back for more every year. The other doesn't.

P.P.P.S. The 3 month supply at $33 a tube is the lowest price we offer. Three months is enough time to feel your nights shift. Don't wait for the next "it's past my ankles now." Start feeding your nerves now.