Cholesterol Wellness Hub Facebook ad: “Feel Like Yourself Again”

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The leaf blower died after 4 minutes. I was standing in my own driveway on a Saturday morning in the second week of October, 9:42 AM, with the cord stretched across the grass and my hands going numb from the inside out. Not from the cold. It was 58 degrees. From something else. Something that had been creeping into my hands for the last 2 years and that I had been pretending wasn't there. I shut the blower off. Set it down on the concrete. Sat down on the curb in front of my own mailbox and watched the leaves I'd just blown into a pile start to scatter back across the lawn in the breeze. My wife Diane came out on the front porch with a glass of water. She didn't say anything. She just walked down the driveway and held the glass out to me. I took it with two hands because one hand wouldn't grip it on its own. She sat down next to me on the curb. We looked at the leaves blowing back. After a long minute she said, Hank, this isn't right. I said I know. We sat there for another minute. She said, you used to roof a 2,800 square foot house in 3 days. I said I know. She said, you used to carry a bundle of shingles up a ladder one handed. I said Diane, please. She got up and went back inside. My name is Hank. I'm 58 years old. I live in Akron, Ohio, about a half mile from the old Goodyear airdock, in a brick split level my father in law sold to me and Diane for almost nothing in 1994 because his back went out and he couldn't keep up with it anymore. Now my back doesn't keep up with it either. There's a kind of justice in that, I guess. Or a kind of warning that I didn't listen to for 30 years. I was a contractor for most of my life. Started out framing houses for a guy named Gus Marusiak in Cuyahoga Falls when I was 19 years old. Made it to my own crew by the time I was 26. Built additions, garages, decks, the occasional small custom build. I had a four man team for a long time. Then a three man team. Then it was just me and a kid named Cody for a few years, and then Cody got hired by a bigger outfit and it was just me. And then 4 years ago my back went and my hands started doing this thing where they'd just turn off without warning, and I had to admit I wasn't going to be a contractor anymore. I sold the truck. Sold most of the tools. Kept the table saw and the framing nailer and the leaf blower and a small box of hand tools that had belonged to my dad. Diane and I figured we'd be fine. The house was paid off. The kids were grown. Our daughter Marcie lived in Columbus with her husband and a 6 year old named Quinn who calls me Grandpa Hank. Our son Brett lived up in Cleveland and worked at the port. We had Medicare on the horizon. I had a small pension from a brief 4 year stretch I'd done at a commercial outfit in the early 2000s. We weren't going to be rich, but we weren't going to starve. What I didn't plan for was what it would do to me to stop working with my hands. I want to tell you something about being a man who built things with his body for 35 years and then suddenly couldn't. You don't realize how much of who you are is wrapped up in what your hands can do until they stop doing it. The first year after I sold the truck, I told myself I was retired. I sat on the porch and read paperback Westerns. I helped Diane in the yard. I drove Marcie's husband Tom out to look at a property in Dublin one weekend. I told myself this was good. It wasn't good. I started waking up at 4:17 in the morning. Just sitting bolt upright in the dark next to Diane who never woke up, and I'd lay there for 2 hours staring at the ceiling fan. Thinking about the houses I'd built. Thinking about the way it felt to be on a roof at 7 in the morning with the sun coming up over a half framed truss and the smell of cut pine in the air. Thinking about how my hands used to know the weight of a nail before they'd even closed around it. By the second year I'd started avoiding mirrors. I'd catch a look at myself in the bathroom and I didn't know who that guy was. He looked tired. He looked like somebody's uncle who'd had a rough decade. His face was puffy in the cheeks in a way mine had never been. His shoulders had rounded down. He looked smaller than he used to look, and I'm a guy who was 6 foot 1 his whole life. And his hands. The hands looked old. Spotted on the back. The veins standing up like they were trying to escape. The knuckles thick the way an old man's knuckles get thick. Those weren't my hands. They couldn't be. But they were. Diane started noticing things before I'd admit them. She'd see me pause halfway up the basement stairs and pretend I was looking at something. She'd see me set down a gallon of milk on the counter and shake out my left hand without thinking. She'd see me get up out of my chair after dinner in two stages, one hand on the armrest and one hand on the table, like a man twice my age. She didn't say anything for a long time. That's not her way. Diane is the kind of woman who waits. She watches. She lets you come around to your own mess in your own time. But after the leaf blower thing she stopped waiting. That afternoon she sat down at the kitchen table across from me with a cup of coffee in her hands and she said, Hank, I want you to go see Dr. Pasternak this week. I started to argue. She held up her hand. She said, I'm not asking you to do it for you. I'm asking you to do it for me. Because I'm 56 years old and I'm watching my husband disappear and if you go and he tells me there's nothing wrong then at least I can sleep at night. I went on Wednesday. Dr. Pasternak is a good man. I've been seeing him since 2011. He's tall, bald, wears those wire glasses, has a way of looking at you over the top of them that makes you feel like he's actually paying attention. He took my pressure. 148 over 94. He took it again on the other arm. 146 over 92. He frowned a little. He drew blood. Sent me home. He called me on Friday afternoon. He said, Hank, I'd like you to come in next week. We need to talk. I went in on Tuesday. He showed me the numbers. The blood pressure I already knew about. Cholesterol up. Triglycerides up. Fasting glucose hovering in a range he called pre something. CRP elevated, which he said was a sign of inflammation. Some other marker I forgot the name of, also elevated. He said, Hank, you've got what I'd call early metabolic strain. Nothing here is a disease yet. But your body is telling us it's been running hot for a long time. The numbness in your hands is most likely circulation related. Your vessels aren't relaxing the way they're supposed to. Your blood isn't moving the way it should through the smaller capillaries. That's what causes the numbness. That's also what causes the tiredness. That's also what's putting pressure on your heart. He said, the good news is you're not on any medication yet. The bad news is if we don't change something in the next year or two you will be. He said, I'd like you to start walking 30 minutes a day. Cut sugar. Cut processed food. Lose 15 pounds. Come back in 4 months. I drove home from his office on West Market Street and pulled into the driveway and sat in the truck for a long time before I went inside. Diane was waiting at the kitchen table. I told her everything. She held my hand across the table. The numb one. She held it for a long time and didn't say anything. That night I lay in bed and thought about my dad. My dad died at 67 of a heart attack on a Sunday morning while he was changing the oil in his lawn mower. I was 31 years old when it happened. He'd been a sheet metal guy his whole life. He'd had high blood pressure for years and he kept telling my mother he'd get to the doctor next month. Next month. I was lying in bed at 58 years old thinking I was about to become my father. That terrified me more than anything Dr. Pasternak had said. So I tried. I really tried. I started walking in the morning. 30 minutes around the block, sometimes 40. I cut soda. I cut the donuts I'd been picking up at the gas station on the way home from Lowe's. Diane started cooking different. More vegetables. Less butter. Chicken instead of beef. We ate fish on Fridays. I lost 6 pounds in 7 weeks. My blood pressure came down a little. 138 over 88. But here's the part that broke me. The numbness didn't go away. The tiredness didn't go away. I'd still wake up at 4:17 staring at the ceiling fan. I'd still feel like a man wearing somebody else's body. I'd still get up out of a chair in two stages. I'd still drop things. I'd still set down a coffee mug and watch my left hand shake for no reason. I went back to Dr. Pasternak in February. He looked at my numbers. He said, Hank, you've made progress. Keep going. We'll start you on something low dose in the spring if these don't keep moving. I drove home and Diane asked me what he said and I told her and she said okay. That's what she said. Okay. And then she went out to the garage. She came back in 20 minutes later. Her eyes were red. She'd been crying in the garage so I wouldn't see her. I want to tell you the next part because if it hadn't happened I don't know where I'd be right now. I have a sister. Her name is Patricia. She's 4 years younger than me. She lives in Strongsville. We're not close in the way some siblings are close. We see each other twice a year, Thanksgiving and her birthday in June. She married a guy named Marv who owns 3 dry cleaners. They have a daughter who lives in Denver. Patricia called me on a Sunday afternoon in March. She wanted to know if Diane and I would drive down to Strongsville for an early Easter thing she was throwing because their daughter was going to be in town for the weekend. I almost said no. I want you to understand how serious that is. I almost told my own sister no to an Easter visit because I didn't have the energy to drive 45 minutes and sit on a folding chair for 4 hours and pretend to be the version of myself her family expected. Diane wouldn't let me say no. We drove down on a Saturday morning in late March. Patricia's house is a big colonial on a cul de sac, the kind of yard that always has tulips coming up in April. We pulled into her driveway and Marv came out to help with the cooler we'd brought, and the first thing he said to me was, Hank, you don't look so good buddy. He said it kindly. He said it the way a brother in law says it. But I felt it like a kick to the ribs. Inside, Patricia hugged me too long. She held onto me by both shoulders when she let go and looked at me. She said, Hank, what's going on with you. I told her about the numbers. I told her about the numbness. I told her about Dr. Pasternak and the medication conversation that was coming. She listened. She nodded. And then she said something that changed my life. She said, Hank, have you ever heard of pomegranate. I laughed. I said, the fruit. She said, yeah. The fruit. But not the kind you buy at Acme and try to eat with a spoon. A concentrated extract. There's a brand I've been on for almost a year now. Marv's been on it longer. I looked at Marv. Marv is 63 years old. He's a guy who used to drink 6 cups of coffee a day and take 2 different blood pressure medications and have to nap in his recliner every Saturday because the week wiped him out. I'd watched it happen to him over a decade. I'd seen Marv at Thanksgiving 4 months earlier. He had looked good. I'd noticed it then but I hadn't said anything because I figured he'd just gotten a haircut or lost some weight. Marv shrugged at me. He said, Hank, I'm down to one of the two pills. My doc took the other one off entirely. I sleep through the night. I haven't napped on a Saturday in 8 months. My grip's back. I lifted a 50 pound bag of softener salt out of my trunk last weekend with one hand. Couldn't have done that a year ago. I sat down on Patricia's couch and asked them to start from the beginning. Patricia got out her laptop. She showed me a brand called Auniva. She showed me their pomegranate product. She told me what she knew. She said, Hank, the active compounds in pomegranate are called punicalagins. That's a long word. I had to look it up. They're some of the most studied antioxidant compounds in nature. She explained it to me like this. Your body, she said, has always known how to keep your blood pressure steady on its own. Inside your blood vessels, your body makes something called nitric oxide. Its whole job is to tell your vessels to relax and open up. When that signal is getting through, blood flows easy, pressure stays low, your hands and your feet get the circulation they need, and you don't think about any of it. But over the years, that system gets worn down. Stress wears it down. Processed food wears it down. Decades of physical work and environmental garbage and aging itself wear it down. And as the system breaks down, your body produces more and more oxidative stress. She called it rust. Rust forming inside your blood vessels. And that rust attacks the nitric oxide the moment your body produces it. Destroys the signal before it can reach the vessels. So the vessels stay tight. Blood has to force its way through. That's high blood pressure. That's also why your hands go numb when the small capillaries at the ends of your fingers can't get enough blood to them. That's also why you feel tired all the time. Your body is working twice as hard to do the same job it used to do without thinking about it. She said, the pomegranate, the concentrated extract anyway, has been studied for the way its compounds help neutralize that oxidative stress. The rust. When the rust eases up, more of the nitric oxide signal that your body has always been making can actually get through. Vessels can relax. Blood can move the way it's supposed to move. Pressure can come down on its own, not because something forced it but because your body is finally getting the support to do what it's already built to do. She closed the laptop. She said, Marv took the bottle Hank. He took it for 60 days and at his next visit his doctor wrote up his chart and asked him what he changed. Marv nodded. He said, I told her pomegranate. She kind of smiled. Then she pulled up the studies on her computer and read them out loud to me and said keep doing it. I sat on that couch and stared at Patricia's coffee table. I thought about the leaf blower. I thought about Diane crying in the garage. I thought about my father dead in the driveway on a Sunday morning at 67. I asked Patricia to order me a bottle right there. She did. She used her own credit card and waved me off when I pulled out my wallet. She said, Hank, this one's on me. Just take it. Take it every morning. Give it a real shot. The bottle came to our house in Akron 3 days later. I started taking it the next morning with my coffee. 2 capsules at breakfast. Diane stood at the counter and watched me. She didn't say anything. She didn't have to. Here's what happened. Week 1. Nothing dramatic. I'll be straight with you because I want you to know I'm not making this up. I was waiting for some big shift and there wasn't one. But on day 6, I was carrying a bag of groceries in from the trunk and I realized I'd carried it from the car to the kitchen counter in one hand without my fingers going numb. I just stood at the counter holding the bag and stared at my hand for a minute. Week 2. The morning walk got easier. I'd been making it 30 minutes but barely. By the middle of week 2 I was out for 45 minutes and not breathing hard at the end. Diane started walking with me. She'd done that for the first 2 weeks and then stopped because I was so quiet and miserable that she said it was easier to walk alone. Now I was talking again. Week 3. I picked up a power drill for the first time in 18 months. Just to put up a curtain rod in the back bedroom. The thing felt light in my hand. I drilled 4 holes and put up the rod and I didn't have to set the drill down between holes to shake the feeling back into my fingers. Diane came into the room while I was tightening the last screw and stood in the doorway and watched me. She said, you look like Hank. I said what. She said, you look like Hank. Like my Hank. I haven't seen him in a couple years. I sat down on the edge of the bed. I had to. I didn't know what to do with what she'd just said. Week 5. I went back to Dr. Pasternak for my 4 month follow up. He took my pressure twice. He took it on both arms. He looked at me over the top of those wire glasses and he said, Hank, this is 126 over 78. He looked at the chart. He said, what are you doing. I told him. He didn't dismiss it. He said, that's interesting. He said the cardiovascular research on pomegranate, the standardized extracts particularly, was strong. He said keep doing what you're doing. He said we'd talk about the medication in 6 months and see if we even needed to. Week 7. I built Quinn a birdhouse. I want to tell you about that birdhouse because it was the day I knew something had really changed. Quinn is my 6 year old grandson. He had told me at Thanksgiving that he wanted a birdhouse for his backyard in Columbus and could grandpa Hank build him one. I'd told him yes. And then I'd put it off for 4 months because every time I went out to the garage and looked at my dad's old hand tools I'd feel that wave of exhaustion come over me and I'd just close the garage door and go inside. That Saturday in May I went out to the garage at 8 in the morning. I pulled out a piece of cedar Diane and I had bought 2 years earlier for some project I'd never started. I measured. I cut. I sanded. I drilled the hole for the entrance. I nailed the roof on. I painted it pale blue with white trim. It took me 5 hours and I never had to sit down once. When I brought it inside Diane looked at the birdhouse and then she looked at me and then she sat down at the kitchen table and put her hand over her mouth and cried. I'd never seen Diane cry like that. Quiet. No big production. Just sitting there with her hand over her mouth and tears running down her face. I sat down across from her. She said, I thought I'd lost you. I said I know. She said, I thought my Hank was gone. I thought he wasn't coming back. I thought I was just going to watch you fade out for the next 10 years until something took you. I didn't have words. I got up and walked around the table and put my arms around her and held her in our own kitchen for I don't know how long. Month 4. I drove down to Columbus by myself to give Quinn the birdhouse. Marcie met me in the driveway. She looked at me for a long second. She said, Dad, you look 10 years younger. I told her I felt 10 years younger. Quinn ran out of the house and hugged my legs. I picked him up. I picked up a 47 pound 6 year old with one arm and held him on my hip while I showed him the birdhouse with the other. I hadn't picked him up in 18 months. Month 6. I sleep through the night now. I don't wake up at 4:17 anymore. I wake up at 6:30 because that's when the alarm goes off, and I get up out of bed in one motion, not two. My hands don't go numb. I gripped a hammer last week and drove a nail into a piece of trim around the back door without my fingers turning off halfway through. I'm not 35. I'm 58. I'm not going to climb back up on a roof and frame a house. That part of my life is over and I made peace with it a long time ago. But I have my hands back. I have my mornings back. I have my wife back, in the sense that she stopped looking at me like she was watching me die. I'm telling you all this because I know there are men out there exactly like I was 8 months ago. Men in their 50s and 60s who used to be strong and don't understand what happened. Men whose hands have started doing things their hands never used to do. Men whose wives stopped asking them to help in the yard because they got tired of watching them struggle. Men whose doctors told them their numbers were borderline and that medication was coming if something didn't change. I'm not a doctor. I'm a retired contractor in Akron Ohio who almost became his father. The brand is Auniva. The product is Auniva Pomegranate. They sell it direct from their website. It's a clean concentrated extract standardized for the punicalagins that actually do the work, not the watered down store shelf version that Patricia warned me about. She'd done the research before she ever ordered her own bottle. They run a 90 day money back guarantee. You take it for 90 days, and if you don't feel a difference, you ship the bottle back and they refund every penny. That's the deal. I don't know how they can afford to do that, but they do. If you've been feeling like you're wearing someone else's body, give it a shot. If you've been getting up out of a chair in two stages, give it a shot. If your wife is crying in the garage where she thinks you can't hear her, give it a shot. 👉 auniva.co/pom/5 P.S. Diane and I drove down to Strongsville last weekend for Patricia's birthday. Marv met me at the door. He looked at me and grinned. He said Hank, you look like Hank again. I told him I felt like Hank again. Then we sat on his back porch and drank coffee for 2 hours and talked about everything we used to talk about before our bodies started running interference. It was the best afternoon I'd had in 4 years. P.P.S. Quinn's birdhouse has had birds in it. Marcie sent me a video. A pair of chickadees built a nest in there in late May and there were babies in June. Quinn calls me every Sunday to give me an update on the bird situation. I never miss a call now. I used to let them go to voicemail because I didn't have the energy to be a fun grandpa for 20 minutes. I have the energy now. P.P.P.S. If you order the bottle and it doesn't do anything for you, just ship it back inside the 90 days. No hoops. No fight. The website tells you how. I've read it. The only thing it costs you is the willingness to try something different than what hasn't been working. 👉 auniva.co/pom/5

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