Susan Bennett

I came home from Mexico alone.

I am going to say something that nobody with liver problems wants to hear and I don't give a f*k if it upsets you. My husband quit drinking on July 2024. Poured every bottle down the sink. Went on the Mediterranean diet. Walked three miles a day. Started juicing kale, of all things. He did everything the doctor told him. He died of liver failure on October 19th at 4:17 AM. He was 61 years old. Quit drinking on July 8th. Ate nothing that wasn't approved. Lost 22 pounds. Walked three miles a day, rain or shine. The hospital bill was $63,000. The funeral was $11,200. His favourite Norlan glass is still on the shelf above the sink. I can't move it. If I move it, he's really gone. I need to tell you what happened to Robert. Because I'm seeing the same posts on Facebook that I was making just months before he died — "my husband's doctor told him his liver enzymes are too high, any tips?" — and it makes me physically ill. If you're over 50 and you drink, or someone you love does, please read this entire thing. I know it's long. I know you're scrolling. I know you have things to do. Fifteen months ago I would have given anything — everything — for someone to tell me what I'm about to tell you. Robert went in for a routine physical on June 28th, 2024. He felt fine. Better than fine. He'd just turned 60. He still split his own firewood. He still rode his motorcycle on the weekends. He thought he was indestructible and honestly so did I. Two days later his doctor called. ALT of 198. AST of 187. "Your liver enzymes are very elevated, Robert. We need to talk about your drinking." Robert was quiet on the call. I was in the kitchen pretending not to listen. "How much do you drink?" "Couple bourbons a few nights a week. Beer at the game on Sundays. Maybe whiskey at a wedding." "That's enough to do this. You need to stop. Completely. No exceptions. We'll retest in three months." Robert hung up the phone and sat at the kitchen table for forty minutes without saying anything. Then he stood up, walked to the bar cart, and took everything out. I watched him pour out a $180 bottle of Blanton's. A $90 bottle of Buffalo Trace. A $40 bottle of Maker's Mark. Two cases of beer down the kitchen sink. The whole bourbon shelf — gone in under an hour. "That's it," he said. "I'm done." And he was. For 103 days, he didn't touch a drop. No bourbon. No beer. No whiskey. Not at his nephew's wedding in August. Not at the Bears game in September. Not at his own 61st birthday dinner in October where his brother ordered an old fashioned right in front of him and Robert drank seltzer water with a lime. He stopped going to his Tuesday night poker game because he couldn't sit there sober while everyone else got loose. He lost his buddy Mike, who told him "you're no fun anymore" and stopped inviting him. He lost the Friday bar night at the country club. He lost a piece of himself he'd been carrying for 35 years. And he did it anyway. Because the doctor said to. He lost 22 pounds in those three months. He bought a juicer — Robert, with the juicer, I still can't picture it. He started walking three miles every morning before work. He took the milk thistle his doctor "wasn't against." He took a multivitamin. He ate a salad every day, the man who used to call it "cow food." He did everything right. The follow-up labs came back on October 7th. ALT: 184. AST: 176. He'd quit drinking entirely for 90 days and the numbers had barely moved. The doctor said "give it more time. The liver heals slowly. We'll retest in 6 months. Keep doing what you're doing." Robert came home that night and sat at the kitchen table again. The same table he'd sat at after the first call. He didn't say anything for a long time. Then he said: "Susan, I gave up everything. Everything. And it didn't work." I told him to give it time. I told him the doctor said six months. I told him to trust the process. He nodded. He kept walking. He kept juicing. He kept taking the milk thistle. Five days later — five days — he woke up at 2 AM with a pain in his right side that doubled him over. I drove him to the ER. By the time they admitted him at 4:30 AM, the whites of his eyes were yellow. Not "a little off." Yellow. Like a highlighter. Like someone had switched the lights out behind them. The ER doctor — a young guy, couldn't have been 35 — looked at Robert's bloodwork and his face did this thing. "Mr. Baker, your bilirubin is 8.2. Your ALT is now 847. Your liver is in acute decompensation. We're admitting you to the ICU." "But I quit drinking three months ago," Robert said. The doctor just looked at him. "I know, Mr. Baker. I'm sorry." Robert spent 11 days in the ICU. I learned things about the liver I never wanted to know. I learned that when a liver shuts down, the toxins your body produces every single day — ammonia, mostly — start building up in your blood and crossing into your brain. They call it hepatic encephalopathy. It means your husband stops being your husband. He looks at you like he's trying to remember who you are. He says things that don't connect. On day 6, Robert asked me three times in twenty minutes if I'd fed the dog. We don't have a dog. We haven't had a dog since 2009. I learned that they inject something called NAC intravenously when a liver is shutting down. The nurse told me it's the same compound they use for acetaminophen overdoses. She said it forces the liver to start rebuilding the master antioxidant it uses to protect itself — something called glutathione. She said without glutathione the liver cannot neutralize what's coming through. Without it the damage has nowhere to go. She also told me about NAD+. The coenzyme every cell uses to produce energy. The fuel that powers every repair process the liver runs. She said at Robert's stage both had been critically depleted for a long time — the glutathione that neutralizes the damage, and the NAD+ that powers the cells doing the repair work. She said by the time someone reaches acute decompensation, both have been running on empty for years. That's what they were trying to restore through the IV. That's all they had left to try. It bought him 11 days. Day 8, his kidneys started failing. The doctors talked about a transplant. Then they talked about him not being a candidate because of how fast he was declining. Then they stopped talking about transplants altogether. Day 10, his belly swelled up like he was nine months pregnant. They drained 4 liters of fluid out of his abdomen. Four liters. The nurse called it ascites. I called my daughter. Day 11 — October 19th — I was in the family room down the hall. They'd asked me to step out while they intubated him. At 4:09 AM I heard the long beep. At 4:17 AM, a doctor I'd never seen walked into the family room. I knew. "I'm so sorry. We did everything we could." I drove home at 6 AM. The juicer was still on the counter. The walking shoes were by the back door. The milk thistle was on the windowsill above the sink, next to the multivitamin. His favourite Norlan glass, the one he left because it was his favourite — was still on the shelf above the sink. Where it sits today. I sat in his recliner. I didn't move for six hours. The house was so quiet I could hear the refrigerator hum. 38 years. And now the only sound in my house was the refrigerator. The funeral was January 19th. Robert's brother flew in from Arizona. Our daughter drove up from Bloomington. The grandkids wore suits that were too big for them. My five-year-old granddaughter asked me: "Grammy, when is Pop-Pop coming home?" I told her Pop-Pop was in heaven now. She said: "Can we call him there?" I had to walk out of the room. After the funeral, I tried to go back to normal. I couldn't. Because every time I opened my phone I saw people my age, men Robert's age, posting things like "doctor said my numbers are a little elevated, anyone tried milk thistle?" or "annual physical, slightly fatty liver, no big deal." And I knew — I KNEW — some of them were doing exactly what Robert did. Quitting. Eating clean. Walking. Juicing. Taking the milk thistle. And dying anyway. I couldn't just sit there and watch it happen. So I started researching. Not because I wanted to. Because I had to. Because if Robert gave up everything for nothing — if I can't save even one person from what happened to him — then I can't live with that. I read for weeks. Medical journals I barely understood. Hepatology forums. Studies out of Japan and Germany. And one thing kept coming up, over and over, that no doctor ever told us: The reason Robert's numbers didn't come down is that quitting drinking only stops the damage. It doesn't restore what's already been depleted. Two things specifically. Glutathione. And NAD+. Glutathione is the master antioxidant your liver uses to filter everything that passes through your body — every medication, every toxin, every drink, every greasy meal, every breath of polluted air. Every cell in your liver depends on it to neutralize damage before it binds to liver cells and breaks them down. NAD+ is the coenzyme every cell uses to produce energy. The fuel that powers the enzymes responsible for breaking down toxic byproducts. Without adequate NAD+, even a liver trying to repair itself cannot power the process. The cells have the intent. They don't have the fuel. Both decline with age. Both get burned through faster when the liver is under chronic load. And here's what no one told us. After age 40, glutathione production drops by about ten percent every year. NAD+ declines on the same timeline — dropping to roughly half of what it was at thirty by the time most men reach their late fifties. Both depleting simultaneously. Silently. Without any standard panel measuring either one. When glutathione is low, the drink that's supposed to be neutralized harmlessly now starts damaging liver cells. When NAD+ is depleted, the repair process that's supposed to clear that damage cannot run at full capacity. Robert's liver wasn't damaged only because he drank. It was damaged because both tanks were already running low by the time the bourbon was being processed through them. Read that again. Quitting stopped how fast he drained what was left. It did not refill what was already gone. That is why his numbers wouldn't move. He gave up everything he loved to stop the bleeding from a wound that was already inside him. The bleeding slowed slightly. The tank stayed empty. The damage kept building underneath while the monitoring treadmill called it slow progress. I sat with that for three days. And then I started looking at what I'd been doing. I'd thrown out Robert's milk thistle the week after the funeral. But I bought a new bottle for myself. Because I'm 59. Because my labs were "borderline" at my last physical. Because I was scared. I took it for three weeks. My doctor — a different one to Robert's, who I called because I trusted her — was direct when I told her. "Susan, milk thistle protects the liver cells you still have working. But you can't protect cells running on empty tanks. It sits on the surface. It doesn't refill the glutathione. It doesn't restore the NAD+. It doesn't address either of the two things that were actually failing in Robert." Then she said something I'll never forget: "If Robert had been restoring his glutathione and his NAD+ consistently — addressing both depletions at the same time — the picture over those 103 days might have looked very different." I stopped breathing for a second. "Why didn't his doctor prescribe that?" She was quiet for a long time. "Because we don't prescribe supplements. And the version that works isn't a prescription." I went to CVS the next day. I stood in that aisle for forty minutes. Milk thistle. Liver detox tea. Dandelion root capsules. "Liver cleanse" 30-day program. Generic NAC capsules — $14.99, 600mg, the cheap stuff. I bought the cheap NAC. Took it for two weeks. No changes to my numbers. I started researching and what I found made me throw the bottle in the trash. Standard dry powder NAC capsules absorb so poorly that most of what you swallow degrades before it reaches meaningful levels in the bloodstream. A compromised liver cannot absorb a dry powder capsule properly before the compound is excreted. Most of what you pay for never makes it where it needs to go. NAC needs to be suspended in a fat-based carrier to reach the bloodstream at therapeutic levels. That's why the hospital used IV NAC and not NAC capsules when Robert's liver was shutting down. The right compound in the wrong format does not arrive. And without NAD+ alongside it — without restoring the cellular fuel that powers the repair process — even restored glutathione cannot fully do its job. Both systems were depleted. Both needed addressing at the same time. The cheap NAC capsule from CVS addressed neither properly. I was furious. I'm still furious. About a week later I was reading a thread on Facebook — one of those liver health groups, full of people like Robert was, "elevated enzymes" people, "borderline NAFLD" people — and a woman posted something that stopped me cold. She said her husband had been told to quit drinking at 58. He quit. His numbers barely moved for six months — sound familiar? — and then he found a formula that combined NAC and NAD+ precursors suspended in MCT oil so both compounds actually reached the bloodstream. His ALT went from 191 to 41 in ten weeks. Without going back to drinking. Without doing anything else different. I read that post six times. I started looking into what she described. And what I found is that there are two things a serious liver support has to address simultaneously or it is a waste of your money. NAC — N-Acetyl Cysteine — the same compound the ICU was putting into Robert's IV at the end. Not a vitamin. The direct precursor to glutathione. The raw material the liver needs to rebuild its primary detox molecule from the inside out. Not protection from outside the cell. Restoration from within it. NAD+ precursors — which restore the cellular energy that powers every repair process. When NAD+ is restored, the enzymes that break down toxic byproducts can run at full capacity again. The cells that are supposed to clear damage finally have the fuel to do their job. Without it, even restored glutathione has no power source behind it. Both compounds. Both depletions. Addressed simultaneously. And the delivery format is everything. Standard dry powder NAC capsules degrade in a compromised gut before arriving at meaningful levels. The right compound in the wrong format does not arrive. That is why the cheap CVS bottle did nothing. That is why the hospital used IV administration and not capsules when a liver is in crisis. The Vital Labs suspends both NAC and NAD+ precursors in coconut MCT oil — a fat-based carrier that allows both compounds to reach the bloodstream at therapeutic levels instead of degrading in the gut. Clinical dose of NAC. NAD+ precursors alongside it. Both systems addressed together. In a format that actually gets through. I went through every product I had looked at in CVS. Not one addressed both compounds. Not one used MCT oil suspension. Not one gave the liver what it was actually running out of. That is when I found The Vital Labs NAC600 + NAD. I almost didn't order it. After the CVS aisle. After the milk thistle. After Robert. After everything. But I had a brother who was still drinking like Robert used to drink. I had a son-in-law with "borderline" fatty liver. I had myself. I ordered it. My brother. Came back from a routine appointment with an ALT of 168. Didn't know what to do. I sent him a bottle. I didn't ask. I just sent it. Wrote a note that said "If you don't take this every day I will never speak to you again, Frank, I mean it." He took it. He kept drinking — he wouldn't quit, he's stubborn the way Robert was stubborn — but he took it every morning. He went back to his doctor four weeks ago for a follow-up. ALT: 32. Down from 168. In ten weeks. He hadn't stopped drinking. He hadn't changed his diet. He hadn't started exercising. The only thing he changed was the two softgels he took in the morning. He called me crying. My brother. 57 years old. Crying on the phone like a kid. He said: "Susan, I think Robert died because nobody told him about this." I had to hang up. Then there's my son-in-law. 44, two kids, "borderline fatty liver" at his last physical. Started taking it six weeks ago. He says his afternoon energy is back. He says the dull ache he'd been feeling under his right rib for two years — the one his doctor said was "probably nothing" — is gone. My neighbor Karen. Her husband died of cirrhosis four months before Robert. Two widows on the same street. She started taking it two days after I told her. She says it's the first time since he died that she doesn't feel like she's waiting for a phone call. I told my sister. I told Robert's brother. I told the women in my book club. I told the guys at Robert's old poker game when I went to drop off a casserole. I'm not a doctor. I'm not a scientist. I'm not selling anything and I don't get a penny from any of this. I'm a 59-year-old widow sitting in my dead husband's chair at 2 in the morning because I can't sleep and I can't stop thinking about my brother and whether he's going to end up where Robert ended up. Here's what I know because I lived it: Quitting drinking stops the damage. It does not refill what has been depleted. It does not restore what is already gone. Milk thistle protects cells. It does not rebuild the glutathione those cells run on. It does not restore the NAD+ that powers the repair process. Dry powder NAC capsules degrade in a compromised gut before reaching the bloodstream at meaningful levels. MCT oil suspension bypasses this. Robert gave up everything he loved for 103 days and it didn't save him because nobody told him what was actually running out underneath the numbers. Nobody gave him the two compounds his liver had been running without for years. Nobody restored the glutathione. Nobody addressed the NAD+ decline. I wish someone had told us before June 28th, 2024. Before the routine physical. Before the bourbon down the sink. Before the 103 days of seltzer water with lime. Before October 19th at 4:17 AM. I can't go back. Robert can't come back. His Norlan glass is still on the shelf and it's going to stay there. But you can still go forward. Your husband can. Your brother can. You can. Not protecting. Restoring. That is the line that finally made it click for me. The Vital Labs NAC600 + NAD. Clinical dose of NAC suspended in coconut MCT oil so it actually reaches the bloodstream. NAD+ precursors alongside it because both depletions needed addressing at the same time. Two softgels every morning. Sixty-day money-back guarantee — if your numbers don't move, every dollar comes back, no questions asked. I want you to read everything on their page. Not for me. For whoever you'd leave behind. → https://thevitallabs.com/pages/7-reasons-why Robert used to say: "You can't unring the bell, but you can stop ringing it." You can stop ringing it. — Susan Bennett, age 59, Springfield, IL PS: The Norlan glass is still on the shelf. I still can't move it. Every morning I walk past it and for one second I forget. For one second I think he's about to come down the stairs and tell me he's going for a walk before work. He's not. $63,000 in hospital bills. $11,200 for the funeral. 103 days of him giving up everything he loved for nothing. And a formula that costs less than his Tuesday night poker buy-in — a formula that addresses what 103 days of quitting and months of milk thistle never once touched. NAC in MCT oil so it reaches the bloodstream. NAD+ precursors alongside it because the liver needs both to restore itself and nobody was giving him either. Please. Don't end up here. Don't let someone you love end up here. → https://thevitallabs.com/nac600-nad PPS: I don't work for The Vital Labs. I don't get a penny from this. I'm writing this at 2:14 AM because I can't sleep and Robert's side of the bed is cold and my brother is 57 and stubborn and I'm scared every time the phone rings. Share this with anyone you love who drinks. Even a little. Even "responsibly." Even if they already quit. Please.