Ahuja Pulliam Montgomery

at2a Nattokinase 10,000 FU

I'd rather be able to piss than be able to finish. That's the deal I made with myself at 57, alone, standing over the toilet at 1:14 in the morning, watching my pee come out cloudy as dishwater after a finish where almost nothing came out. Most men my age have made that same deal and never said it out loud. Turns out it was never a real deal, and I would have given a lot to read this a year ago. My name is Gary. I'm 57. I've run my own heating and air business outside Knoxville for twenty-six years. Three trucks, four guys, and a phone that rings at 6 a.m. every day from June to September. I am not a man who writes things on the internet. My wife Denise is the one who said I should, and I'll get to why. So. The toilet. I flushed it. Then I stood there in my shorts with the nightlight on and I could not make myself go back to bed. Milky. Like the water in the bucket after you mop the kitchen. I had never seen anything like that come out of me in 57 years. I went back in the bedroom real quiet and picked the tissue up off the nightstand. The one from twenty minutes before. I held it under my phone light like I was checking a coil for a leak. There was almost nothing on it. A damp spot about the size of a dime. That was it. Normal, for a grown man, is about a teaspoon. I know that now. I had been looking at a dime. I'm going to say the part men don't say. I checked again the next time. And the time after that. Four times over about three weeks I waited until Denise was asleep or in the shower, and I checked. Same dime. Same cloudy water after. I told nobody. Not her. Not my brother. Not the doctor. I carried it around in my chest like a brick. Driving to jobs. Crawling through attics at 130 degrees with a flashlight in my teeth. Thinking, this is how it starts. This is how my dad's started. My dad died at 68 of something they found too late. Then one night at 2 in the morning I was sitting on the edge of the bathtub with my phone and I typed it in exactly how it happened. "Finished nothing came out cloudy pee after." The first thing that came back was a word I had never heard in my life. Retrograde. It means backwards. It means it isn't that I'm not making anything anymore. It's going the wrong direction. Instead of out, it goes back into the bladder. And the next time you pee, out it comes, cloudy. That was my dishwater. And the second thing I read is what made me set the phone down on the bath mat and just sit there. It's a listed side effect. Of tamsulosin. Of the little capsule I had been taking every night after supper for five months. Let me back up. Last fall I went in because I was up three times a night. Sometimes four. Standing there in the dark waiting for it to start, like a truck that won't turn over in January. And when it did start, it came out weak and split, like a garden hose somebody's standing on. I figured it was age. Everybody figures it's age. The appointment was about eight minutes. Enlarged prostate. Very common. Here's a prescription. It'll help you go. That was the whole conversation. Nobody said one word about what it might do at the other end of things. Nobody asked me one question about my marriage. I didn't ask either, I'll own that. But I'm a contractor. If I'm putting a part in your house that has a known side effect, I tell you before it goes in. That's the job. You quote the price before you do the work. Nobody quoted me the price. And I want to be fair, because I've thought about this a lot. The pill works. For peeing, it works. I went from four trips to two. I'm grateful for that and I'm still taking it today. I'm not one of these guys telling you to throw your medicine in the trash. Don't do that. But I found out what it actually does, and it isn't what I thought. It doesn't shrink anything. It doesn't clear anything. It relaxes a muscle around the outlet so the water gets past. That's all. And the same relaxing that lets the pee through is what keeps the valve from shutting at the finish. So everything takes the easy road. Backwards. It's like propping a damper open with a screwdriver because the motor's shot. Air moves tonight. But you haven't fixed a thing, and you just made that damper useless for the other job it had. So there I am on the tub at 2 a.m., and I've gone from "I have cancer" to "I have a side effect nobody mentioned." Honestly, for about ten minutes I was relieved. Then I kept reading. That's what I do. When a system acts up, I don't stop at the part that broke. I want to know why the part broke. And I found out why I needed the pill in the first place. That was worse. Here's what nobody tells you about your prostate. It's fed by blood like everything else. Tiny vessels. Thinner than the finest capillary tube in my van. And after about 50, those little vessels start silting up with something called fibrin. It's a mesh. The same scaffolding plaque builds on in your arteries. Your body has its own enzyme to clear it, called plasmin, but after 50 it stops showing up for work the way it used to. So the tissue down there doesn't get enough blood. Starved tissue gets inflamed. Inflamed tissue swells. And when the gland swells, it squeezes the tube shut. That's your weak stream. That's your three trips a night. I didn't buy it at first. It sounded like something somebody made up to sell you something. Then I found out there's a hospital procedure for an enlarged prostate called prostatic artery embolization. PAE. And it doesn't touch the prostate. They go in through an artery and work on the blood supply feeding it. Real hospitals do it. Clinics run ads for it on Facebook. I sat there and thought: if the blood supply had nothing to do with my prostate, why is there an operation aimed at it? That was the click. And then came the part I still can't stop thinking about, as an HVAC man. In every house I've ever worked on, when a system starts to fail, which room complains first? Not the living room right off the unit. It's the back bedroom. The one at the end of the longest run, with the smallest duct. That room goes warm first in summer. Every single time. People call me about that bedroom for two years before the whole system quits on them in August. Your body works the same way. The smallest vessels report first. The ones feeding your prostate, the ones down below, those are your back bedroom. They're at the end of the run. So the weak stream and the night trips and all of it, that's not some separate bladder problem I happen to have. That's the back bedroom calling. That's the earliest warning I'm ever going to get about what's going on in pipes I can't see. Including the ones around my heart. My dad never got a warning. Or maybe he did, and nobody called it one. I got the warning. And I was handed a screwdriver to prop the damper open. That hit me harder than the dishwater did. Then I found the numbers. The pill runs somewhere around five to nine dollars for ninety capsules. Nobody's getting rich on that. But behind it sits a surgical market for enlarged prostates worth twelve and a half billion dollars, headed for seventeen billion by 2030. Lasers. Implants. Coring out the gland. Catheters and a bag strapped to your leg. Nobody makes money on the pill. Everybody makes money when the pill stops working. The pill isn't the fix. It's the waiting room. And I'd been sitting in it for five months without knowing I was in line. I'd tried the drugstore stuff before all this, by the way. Saw palmetto. A "prostate formula" with a picture of a man fishing on the label. I took the whole bottle. Not a dang thing. Now I understood why. Every one of those was aimed at the swelling. Not one of them was aimed at the blood supply. Like turning down the thermostat when the return is choked with lint. So I went looking for what actually works on fibrin. That's how I ran into nattokinase. It comes from natto, a fermented soybean people in Japan have been eating for over a thousand years. In 1980 a researcher named Dr. Hiroyuki Sumi put some natto in a dish next to an artificial blood clot and watched the clot dissolve. He named the enzyme nattokinase. There's been a lot of work on it since, including a study on 1,062 people taking around 10,800 units a day where the plaque and the thickness of the artery walls in their necks went down. I want to be straight with you, because I don't trust anybody who isn't. Nobody has done a study on nattokinase and prostates. Not one. I looked. What it does is work on fibrin in the vessels, and the vessels are what I'd figured out were the problem. The one I ended up with is At2a Nattokinase. I picked it the way I pick a condenser. I read the spec sheet. 10,000 FU of nattokinase, right up near what that big study used. Most of the bottles I found didn't even list FU, which in my world is like selling somebody an air conditioner without telling them the tonnage. But what sold me is it's built in three layers, and nothing else I found did all three. It clears. That's the nattokinase working on the fibrin. It calms. Turmeric, where an analysis of 697 men showed their prostate symptom scores came down. Pine bark, where a study of 75 men showed 31% fewer trips at night. Aged garlic. Bromelain from pineapple. Those work on the inflamed tissue itself. And it locks. Vitamin K2 sends calcium into your bones instead of letting it settle back into the vessel walls. Every prostate pill I'd bought did a weak version of the calming and nothing for the blood supply. Every nattokinase bottle I saw was sold for the heart and never once said the word prostate. This was the only one I found that did both. It's third-party lab tested. And it came with a 90-day money-back guarantee, which, I'll be honest, is the reason I hit the button. Worst case, I figured I was out a phone call. One thing they're very upfront about, and I'll pass it right along. If you're on warfarin or any blood thinner, or you take an aspirin every day, or you've got surgery coming up, this one isn't for you. It works on clots. That's the whole point of it. So don't be stupid about that. I didn't touch my prescription. I still take my tamsulosin after supper. I just started taking this every morning with my coffee in the truck. Week one, nothing. Week two, nothing I could put my finger on. Week three I noticed I wasn't standing there waiting anymore. I'd go, and it would just start. I didn't think much of it. By week five I was getting up once a night. Some nights not at all. I'd wake up at 5:40 and realize I'd slept straight through, and I'd lie there trying to remember the last time that happened. I couldn't. My hands stopped being cold in the morning. I have been the guy with ice-cold hands since high school. Denise used to make me warm them on my coffee cup before I touched her. She noticed before I did. And here's what I'll say about the rest of it, because I promised myself I'd be honest in this thing. I told Denise everything around week six. The tissue. The checking. The bathtub at 2 a.m. She was quiet a long time, and then she said, "You thought you were dying and you didn't tell me?" She cried a little. So did I, which I will deny if you ask me. I'm not going to tell you everything went back to the way it was when I was 35. I don't know what's going to happen down there and I won't pretend I do. But I stopped checking. I stopped holding my breath. Being with her stopped feeling like something I had to brace for and started feeling like mine again. Denise noticed. A couple weeks ago she was laughing at me in bed with her hand over her mouth, and I honestly can't remember the last time she did that. So here's why she told me to write this. For five months I'd made a deal in my head. I get to pee, and I lose the rest. That's the price. Grown man, take your medicine, quit whining. I thought that was the only deal on the table. It was never a deal. Somebody made that trade for me without telling me there was a trade, and it was built on the wrong idea of what was wrong with me in the first place. The stream and the finish run off the same set of pipes. One set of vessels. Nobody had touched them. Nobody even looked. If you're standing over a toilet at 1 in the morning looking at cloudy water and you think you're dying, you're probably not. But your body might be calling from the back bedroom. Pick up. This is the one I take: nt.muvost.com They were running low the last time I reordered, so if you're going to try it, I wouldn't sit on it. Gary, Knoxville. Denise says hi. P.S. If nothing else, type the word "retrograde" and the name of your pill into your phone tonight. Nobody's going to tell you. You'll have to look.