How A 79-Year-Old In Michigan Started Using Her Own Stairs Again

“I bought the cream without telling her and left it on the counter. In March she wasn’t going upstairs at all. On Sunday she went up twice.”

Karen M., 54 · Michigan  /  May 24, 2026

She moved her bed downstairs in March and told me it was for the light.

My mother is 79 and she has never told me she was in pain, not even when she broke her wrist on the ice outside the Kroger.

She doesn’t want to be a bother, and she says she’s fine if you ask her.

I have to work most of it out from what she does.

It was a Tuesday night in March.

I’d gone over to drop off a prescription, and the kitchen light was on and she wasn’t in the room, and I found her sitting on the closed lid of the toilet with both feet in a dishpan of cold water, in her nightgown, with the door half shut.

She said the cold was the one thing that helped.

The cold water helps for about half an hour.

By the time she’s back down the hall it’s starting again.

She goes to bed at 10.

It comes on about an hour after she’s lying down.

She’s awake twice, and the second time she doesn’t bother going back, she sits in the front room.

She’s up for good before 6.

She’d been doing that since around Thanksgiving.

She did everything the doctors told her, for 3 years.

She was diagnosed at 76, and between us we spent 3 years and a lot of money on it.

So, roughly in the order we bought them:

• 2 prescription creams, from 2 different doctors
• The freezing rubs off the shelf at Meijer, at least 4 different ones
• Magnesium lotion that Pat next door swore by
• A foot spa
• Compression socks she couldn’t get on by herself
• Epsom salts, then the dishpan

Some of it did something.

The freezing rubs were honestly great for about 20 minutes, and then the cold went off them and she was back where she started.

I bought 4 of those before it sank in that 20 minutes was all any of them were ever going to do.

The magnesium lotion did nothing I could see.

I shouldn’t have bought the foot spa.

She had to fill it and empty it herself, and she can’t stand at a sink long enough to do the dishes.

The podiatrist was good about her shoes.

He had a poster of the bones of the foot with all of them named, and another one of a knee that I never worked out the reason for.

The little bone on the outside of the foot is called the fifth metatarsal.

So I stopped grabbing whatever was on the shelf at the drugstore and wrote down what the next one would have to do.

It had to say on it how it worked, in plain words.

The main thing was that it had to still be doing something at 2 in the morning.

And she had to be able to manage it herself, on the edge of her own bed, without me driving over.

At the bottom I’d written no more cooling creams and underlined it twice.

Anyway, every few weeks I brought her something new and the shelf over her sink got fuller.

The foot spa is in her basement now.

A nurse at work mentioned something, and I bought it without telling her.

Deb runs the health office at the school where I work.

We were at the copier and she asked how my mom was, and I said something about her feet, and she said she puts something on her own mother’s feet at night.

She’d been doing it about a year.

She wrote the name on the back of a lunch schedule.

I ordered it sitting in the parking lot.

I didn’t tell my mother.

I left it on the counter by the bread box and said nothing about it.

It sat there 2 days.

She used it on the Thursday. Or the Wednesday, I’m not sure now.

She told me later she did it sitting on the edge of her bed.

She didn’t mention it the next day, or over the weekend.

About 4 days after that she said she hadn’t been in with the dishpan in a while.

It had been a warm week and she sleeps better when it’s warm.

By the end of the month she still hadn’t been in there.

The jar said Lune on it.

I looked them up that night on my phone.

There were doctors’ names on the site, neurology and pain people, and something from Men’s Health.

I don’t know what any of that’s worth.

It’s a small jar, that one, smaller than I expected for the money.

There are 2 in the house now, one in the bathroom and one on the little table by her chair.

She went up to her own bedroom on a Sunday in May.

Half the list was things I recognized.

I read the back of it one night while she had her program on.

First thing on the list was frankincense.

I’d only heard that word in church at Christmas.

Then arnica. She’s had a tube of that in the house for bruises since I was a kid.

Frankincense · Arnica · Cayenne · Hemp seed oil

Magnesium chloride · Menthol · Peppermint · Camphor · Calendula · Witch hazel · MSM · Willow bark · Glucosamine · Algal omega‑3 · Niacinamide · Panthenol · Vitamin E · Jojoba · Mango seed butter · Arrowroot

I counted 6 things on the list that come from plants.

There’s menthol in here too, and peppermint.

That’s where the smell comes from.

When I saw that I thought I’d bought another freezing rub.

It’s the same menthol that’s in the blue tubs.

In this one it’s down near the bottom of the list, and there are other things in there that take a lot longer to do anything.

There was more than one thing going on with her feet.

I asked Deb about it in the parking lot the next week.

So, as far as I follow it, there’s more than one thing going wrong down there, and everything I’d been buying only went after one of them.

The blood isn’t getting all the way down to the ends of the nerves, and the feet are as far from the heart as you get.

The tissue around the nerve stays irritated, and that’s the part that gets worse at night.

And the nerve itself isn’t being fed properly, so it goes off when there’s nothing there.

A cooling cream only gets at the first of those.

Deb said there are 4 layers of skin between a cream and the nerve, and the nerve is at the bottom.

The warmth comes in the first 10 minutes.

She said that’s the blood moving again, and that has to happen before the rest of it does anything.

1. Scoop. A fingertip’s worth. Less than you’d think.
2. Rub. Tops and soles of both feet, until it stops looking wet.
3. Wait. It’s gone in about a minute. Nothing on the sheets.

It goes on when she brushes her teeth, and that’s the only reason she remembers.

The first week it was mostly the warmth.

By about week 3 she’d stopped thinking about her feet at night.

Her feet tingled the first few days and she almost stopped using it.

Deb said that’s normal, it’s the circulation coming back.

The arnica was the one I had wrong.

I wanted to know what I’d been putting on her.

I looked the cayenne up first.

The strongest research on it was done with a prescription patch, at a strength no cream in a jar gets anywhere near.¹

What’s in this one is there for warmth and for moving blood down.

It isn’t that patch and they don’t say it is.

I had it down as something for bruises and nothing else.

There’s something in it that switches off a signal called NF-kappa-B.

That signal is part of how inflammation gets started, and the research on it goes back to 1997.²

Somebody had also tested whether it gets through the skin at all.³

I looked the menthol up as well, since I’d been so down on it.

It opens up the small blood vessels in the skin, which is a different thing from the cold feeling.⁴

It hasn’t done anything for her hands.

She started getting it in her fingers over the winter, and we’ve been putting it on them since April, and if it’s helped I can’t see it.

Hundreds Of Verified Buyers, And A Good Many Bought It For Somebody They Look After

Go on Lune’s own site and you will find plenty of reviews from people who had run out of things to try.

Wives, husbands, daughters. People from all over, doing what I was doing.

I read a lot of them before I ordered her a second jar.