Jacob Nash Facebook ad: “Pulled A Boy From The Ice. Then My CT Came Back”

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I went through the ice at Kettle Lake on Christmas Eve to pull out a nine-year-old boy I had never met. The boy went home that night with a cold and a story for school. I went home with a CT scan, a prescription that had my father's whole life written on it, and ninety days to prove a doctor wrong. It was about four in the afternoon. Already getting dark, the way it does up here in December. My wife Deb and I were walking the dog along the shore road like we do every Christmas Eve before we go to her sister's. Ray Duchene from next door was with us, because his wife was cooking and had thrown him out of the house. Then the ice went. If you've never heard it, it sounds like a rifle shot under your boots, even from the shore. Then a kid screaming his brother's name. Two boys had walked out toward an old ice shanty somebody left by the pressure ridge. The little one went through about forty yards out. I'm 61. I spent thirty-one years climbing poles for the power company, a lot of them in ice storms. I know what cold water does to a body in four minutes. I also know you never run out onto bad ice. Ray had an aluminum extension ladder on the back of his truck, because Ray has everything on the back of his truck. We laid it flat on the ice. I crawled out on it on my belly while Ray fed it from behind and held the end. Deb was on the phone with 911 shouting our location at a dispatcher who kept asking her to calm down. The boy's name was Owen. When I got to him he had stopped yelling, and that's the part that scares you. His lips were grey and his fingers were barely holding the edge. I got him by the hood of his coat and pulled, and he came up. The ice under my chest didn't hold. I went in up to my shoulders, then under. I remember how loud it was, and then how quiet. I remember my head cracking on the underside of the shelf as I tried to come up. Ray told me later he dragged that ladder back with both of us on it like he was starting a lawnmower. He doesn't remember deciding to do it. I don't remember much after the cold. Owen's mother got to the hospital about an hour after the ambulance. She came down the hallway in slippers and her husband's work coat and grabbed me so hard my IV tore out. They kept me overnight with hypothermia, a gash on my scalp and a cracked rib. They scanned my head and my chest to be sure nothing was bleeding. Deb sat by the bed. Thirty-six years married, and she called me the dumbest hero in Fond du Lac County, then cried into my blanket. Around two in the morning she fell asleep in the chair. I didn't. I never do anymore. Two, three in the morning, eyes open, heart going, mind running laps. It had been that way for years. Under those hospital lights I looked down at myself in the gown. I hadn't looked at my own body straight on in a long time. At home it's shirt on, lights off, towel up fast after the shower. The gown pulled tight across my chest. I had chest on me now, soft, the kind you see on old men at the beach and swear you'll never have. When I sat up, my belly sat on my thighs. Round and hard, like I'd swallowed a basketball. I've been six foot one and around 205 most of my life. My arms and legs never changed. Somewhere after fifty it all went to the middle and the chest, and I told myself it was the beer. Every Fourth of July, the whole road meets at the public dock on Kettle Lake. Every year since she was five, my granddaughter Ellie has asked me to jump off the end of that dock with her. Every year I tell her Grandpa's knee is acting up. There's nothing wrong with my knee. I haven't taken my shirt off in front of anybody since 2016. The ER doctor came in around seven. Maybe forty, tired, kind. She said my head was fine, the rib would heal on its own, and then she pulled the stool closer. "Mr. Hutchins, I want to talk about something else your chest scan picked up." She turned the screen toward me. "See this grey around your organs? That's fat. Visceral fat. It sits inside the abdominal wall, around your liver and your gut. Your liver's showing it too." She scrolled. "Your pressure's been running 150s over high 90s all night, and you've been lying flat on pain medication. Your A1C came back 6.1. That's prediabetes." Deb was awake now. "I'd like to start you on lisinopril today, a low dose, for the blood pressure. I'll send a note to your primary about the sugar." Then she said the sentence. "With this picture at your age, most men end up on two or three medications within a few years. Better to get ahead of it." Deb looked at me. I looked at the ceiling tiles. Because I'd heard that sentence before, said to my father. My dad, Walt, got his first blood pressure pill at 61. My age, to the month. Forty years a union pipefitter, hands like vice grips, built half the paper mills on the Fox River. Then they added a water pill for the swelling in his ankles. Then a cholesterol pill. Then metformin when his sugar crept up. Then a pill for the leg cramps that kept waking him up, which his doctor said were probably from the water pill. Then one for his stomach, because of all the others. He's 84 now. Fourteen pills a day, sorted every Sunday into a plastic organizer the size of a tackle box. His numbers are "controlled", which is the word they use. And he still has the exact belly he had at 61. Last November was opening day of deer season, like every year since I was eight. Dad's stand is a fourteen-foot ladder stand on the edge of the north field. He's hunted from it since 1971. My son Jake and I walked him out in the dark. He put his hand on the third rung and stood there looking up. He got one boot on the bottom rung, then the second. Then he went grey in the face and grabbed the rail with both hands. "Head rush," he said. "I get them standing up lately. It's the pressure pills." He waited. Tried the next rung. His calf locked up so hard I watched the muscle jump through his hunting pants. He came down one rung at a time, very carefully, like the ladder might bite. "Jake," he said, "you take it." Then he walked back to the truck. He sat in that truck the whole day with the heater running and the tackle box of pills on the dashboard. Around noon I brought him coffee from the thermos. He didn't look at me. He just patted his gut and said, "It starts with one, Gary. One little pill. I was your age." Then he said, "Fourteen a day, and not one of them ever touched this." Lying in that hospital bed, I could hear that ladder rattle. "Can I have some time before I start anything?" I asked. The doctor didn't love it. "I can't make you take it. But I'm not comfortable leaving 150 over 98 alone." She thought about it. "If you want to try lifestyle first, I want you checking your pressure at home twice a day and writing it down. Back in my office in ninety days. If it hasn't moved, we start the medication. Deal?" Deal. I pulled a boy out of that lake on Christmas Eve. Now I had ninety days to pull myself out. I went at it like a man with a deadline. Beer only on Fridays. A rowing machine off Facebook Marketplace for the garage, $140. Three miles a day with the dog in the snow. Deb made chicken and broccoli so many nights in a row the dog stopped begging. I wrote my pressure on the calendar on the fridge every morning and every night. Week two, my belt was on the same hole. Week four, the cuff said 148 over 96. Week five, Deb came out to the garage at midnight looking for me. I was sitting on the rowing machine in my boxers, eating a cold bratwurst out of the package. She stood in the doorway. I stood up, and neither one of us said anything. Six weeks of rowing and broccoli, and the scale said two pounds. Still up at 3 a.m. Still the same belly hanging over the same belt. Then in February I climbed my own extension ladder to knock the ice dam off the gutter. Halfway up, the world tipped. My vision went sparkly at the edges, I grabbed the rail with both hands, and I stood there breathing. I hadn't taken a single pill. My body was already climbing my father's ladder. The second Friday in March, Deb and I met Ray and his wife Linda for fish fry at the supper club out on Highway 23. We'd gotten close after the lake. You pull somebody out of the ice together, you're tied to each other a little. Linda went to the bar with Deb, and Ray asked how I was doing. I don't talk about this stuff. Nobody I grew up with does. But I'd had two old fashioneds, and it all came out. The scan, the 6.1, the deadline, the bratwurst. My dad in the truck. Ray set his fork down. "Gary. That was me. Three years ago." "What was?" "Pressure in the 150s, sugar creeping, the gut, the 3 a.m. thing. My doctor had the pill ready. Same one." I looked at him. Ray is 64. He was sitting across from me in a shirt tucked into his jeans. Flat in the front. I'd honestly never noticed. "You're not on it?" "Never started." "So what'd you do?" He leaned in like it was a secret. "My daughter's an ICU nurse down in Milwaukee. She sat me down and said, Dad, they're going to chase your numbers for the rest of your life. Pressure, sugar, cholesterol. Nobody's asking why the belly's there in the first place." I almost laughed. "Ray, come on. That sounds like something off Facebook." He didn't get mad. "Has any doctor ever asked you why the belly showed up at fifty? Or do they just measure what it's doing to you?" I didn't have an answer for that. "Cortisol," he said. "Your stress hormone. Mine was stuck on. Yours is too, I'd bet the truck on it. Thirty years of ice storms and overtime and 3 a.m." "When cortisol stays high, your body thinks you're under attack. So it packs fat around your middle and your chest to protect your organs. That's the visceral stuff on your scan. That's your chest." "And every day it stays high, it burns through your magnesium. Magnesium is what your body uses to bring cortisol back down. So the more stressed you run, the less magnesium you've got, and the less magnesium you've got, the higher cortisol stays." "It's a loop. You've been stuck in it for ten years." "My blood work's always fine for magnesium," I said. "That's what I said. My daughter told me the regular blood test checks the magnesium floating in your blood. That's about one percent of what you've got. Your body robs your muscles and bones to keep that one percent looking normal." "And here's what got me. The water pill your dad's been on for twenty years? It flushes magnesium out with everything else." I thought about his calf jumping on that ladder. The leg cramps. The pill for the leg cramps. "So the rowing machine," I said. "Your body won't let go of belly fat while it thinks it's in danger. You could row to Green Bay. I did the gym thing for six months and lost a belt hole I gained back in a week." "Why wouldn't the doctor say any of this?" Ray shrugged. "She's got fifteen minutes with you and a computer that wants a code. There's a pill for pressure and a pill for sugar. There's no button for 'his stress hormone's stuck.' She's not a bad doctor, Gary. She's doing what she's built to do." I drove home thinking about it. The next morning I went to the local pharmacy and bought the store-brand magnesium. 500mg, $8.99, a big plastic bottle of tablets the size of my thumbnail. I took one every night for two weeks. The only thing that changed was I learned where every bathroom on Highway 41 is. I texted Ray a picture of the bottle. He called me ninety seconds later. "Turn it around. Read me the first line." "Magnesium oxide." "Gary. That's the cheapest form they make. Your body takes in about four percent of it. You swallowed 500 and used maybe twenty. The rest went exactly where you found out." "How was I supposed to know that?" "You weren't. Most of what's on the shelf at the pharmacy is oxide. Same mistake I made." He told me what his daughter made him check. Five things, and if you can't say yes to all five, keep walking. One, it has to be magnesium bisglycinate. That's magnesium bonded to glycine, so your body takes it in like food. It absorbs around ninety percent instead of four, which is twenty-two times more. It's also one of the forms that gets across the barrier around your brain, which is where cortisol gets told to calm down. Two, the full dose. 400mg. Three, a gummy, not a hard pill. After forty your stomach acid gets weaker, and those hard tablets can go straight through without breaking down. Four, nothing hiding. If the label says "buffered" or "blend", there's oxide mixed in. Five, every batch tested by an outside lab, including for heavy metals, because you're taking it every night for the rest of your life. I sat at the kitchen table with my reading glasses and my phone for two hours. The big pharmacy brand was half the dose in capsules. Another one called itself high absorption and said "buffered" in tiny print on the back. Another needed four tablets to get to a real dose. One passed all five. SPNutrition. Pure bisglycinate, 400mg in two sugar-free gummies. Pharmaceutical grade, made in a US facility, tested every batch. 46 times less heavy metals than other brands. They turned down seven cheaper mineral sources before they picked the one they use. I called Ray back. "That's the one my daughter put me on," he said. "Look, I'm going to tell you the bad part first." "You're going to feel like an idiot. A grown man eating two little fruit gummies before bed like he's five." "The bag looks like something next to the checkout at the health food store." "And the first week, you won't feel a thing. You'll think I'm full of it." "But my daughter works ICU. She rolls her eyes at every supplement a patient's family brings in. She keeps a bag of these in her locker, and she buys them for her husband with her own money." "There's over six hundred doctors and nurses who put their names on it, and nobody paid them a dime to do it." I ordered that night. Week one, Ray was right. Nothing. I took two gummies every night at eight and went to bed feeling like a fool. Day nine, I woke up and the window was light. 6:10 in the morning. I hadn't slept through to daylight in I don't know how many years. Deb was propped on one elbow staring at me. "You didn't get up once," she said. "I checked if you were breathing." Week three, the 3 a.m. thing just stopped. My head stopped running laps. Ellie knocked a full glass of grape juice onto the carpet at Sunday dinner, and I heard myself laugh. Six months ago I would have barked at her. Deb noticed. She didn't say anything, she just squeezed my hand under the table. Week five, I went to the next hole on my belt. I stood in the bathroom staring at that hole like a kid with a report card. Week seven, I was at the sink in a T-shirt and Deb walked up behind me and grabbed my waist with both hands. "What the hell have you been doing?" "Rowing." "You rowed all winter and nothing happened. Gary. Are you on that shot?" "No." She turned me around and looked at my chest, then at my face. Week eight, she pulled me back to bed on a Saturday morning when I was getting up to make coffee. I'll leave that there, except to say it had been a long time, and neither of us had to pretend. Week ten, I climbed the extension ladder to take the storm windows down. All the way to the top. No sparkles, no grabbing the rail. I stood up there longer than I needed to, just because I could. Day 88 I was back in her office. She looked at the calendar sheet I'd brought, with every morning and every night written down. She took my pressure, frowned, and took it again on the other arm. Then she put the cuff on her own arm to make sure the machine was working. Then she measured my waist. "You were 44 in December," she said. "What am I now?" "Forty and a half." She sat back. "Your pressure's in a range I'm comfortable with. Who put you on medication?" "Nobody." "Did you start one of the weight loss injections?" "No, ma'am." She looked at the screen for a long time. "I'll be honest with you, Mr. Hutchins, I don't see this much. Not at sixty-one, not without something prescribed. I'm not starting the lisinopril. I want labs again in six months." "And when you come back, you're telling me exactly what you've been doing." Ray was at the mailbox when I pulled in. I held up four fingers out the truck window and then a half. He threw his mail in the air. "Told you," he yelled. "You're buying fish fry for a year." The Fourth of July came. The whole road at the public dock on Kettle Lake, coolers and brats, kids everywhere. Owen's family drove up from Oshkosh, because they come every year now. Owen did a cannonball and splashed Deb on purpose. Then Ellie took my hand. "Grandpa. Jump with me." I stood there on the dock. Then I pulled my shirt off over my head. First time in nine years in front of anybody. Owen's mom whistled with two fingers. Deb stood up out of her lawn chair and yelled, "That's MY husband," loud enough for the whole lake to hear. Ellie and I ran off the end of that dock holding hands. Same water I went through on Christmas Eve. In July it was warm. I think about that ice a lot. If that boy doesn't go through, nobody scans my chest. I keep telling myself it's the beer, and in a few years I'm sitting in a truck with a tackle box on the dashboard. I pulled Owen out of that lake. That lake is what pulled me out of mine. If you're a man over fifty and you got this far, I think you know why. Maybe your doctor just said "prediabetes", or "let's get ahead of it." Maybe there's a pill on the table and you haven't filled it yet, or you have and the belly hasn't moved an inch. Maybe you're up at 3 a.m. right now, reading this on your phone so you don't wake her up. Maybe you're still telling yourself it's the beer. I told myself that for ten years. Here's what I know. There are two ladders. One is the one my dad climbed. One pill at 61. Then the water pill, then the one for the cramps the water pill gave him. Fourteen pills, controlled numbers, and the same belly he had the day he started. And one November morning, he puts his hand on a rung he's climbed for fifty years and hands it to his grandson. The other one is what Ray handed me across a plate of walleye. Two gummies a night. The right form, the full dose, the kind your body takes in. You'll feel nothing the first week. Then one morning you'll wake up and the window will be light. My dad still sits in that truck every opening day with the heater running. Don't wait in the truck. https://spnutrition-us.com/pages/consumer-tested-men-listicle P.S. What I take is SPNutrition Magnesium Bisglycinate Gummies. 400mg in two sugar-free gummies, eaten in the evening, a couple hours before bed. No horse pills, no powder, and no running for the bathroom like the pharmacy stuff. If you've tried magnesium before and felt nothing, turn your bag or bottle around. If the first line says oxide, you just found out why. P.P.S. I drove a bag up to my dad in May. His doctor knows, and he's still on every pill they gave him. I'm not touching that. Last Sunday Mom called and said he walked to the mailbox and back without sitting down on the bench halfway. I don't know what it means yet at 84. I know what it felt like to hear it. P.P.P.S. To the wives reading this over his shoulder, because I know some of you are: Deb is the one who kept the calendar on the fridge. Put the link in front of him tonight, before his next appointment. He needs the weeks. P.P.P.P.S. They sold out twelve times last year. When they're out, it's a four to six week wait, and that's four to six weeks your ninety days keep ticking. Check what's in stock and today's bundle deal on the page. They've got a money-back guarantee, and you don't even have to send the bag back. Ray says fewer than two in a hundred people ever ask.

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Pulled A Boy From The Ice. Then My CT Came Back ☝️

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