Cacao Research Institute

My Father Started Saying "I'm Fine" in a Voice I Didn't Believe. It Took Me a Year to Listen. This is about my father, Tom. He's 74. He lives in a small house on the edge of a town in upstate New York, about three hours from where I live with my wife and our two kids outside Boston. My mother died seven years ago. My father stayed in the house they'd lived in for forty-three years. He wanted to. He still does. He's that kind of man. He's quiet. He's steady. He's the man his neighbors call when something needs to be fixed and they don't want to bother their kids. He does everything right. That's the part of this that took me so long to see. My name is Michael. I'm 44. I work in operations at a hospital, not on the clinical side, so I want to be clear: I don't have any clinical training. I'm someone who sits in a windowless office and works on spreadsheets. My father and I talk on the phone almost every day. It was a Tuesday night last fall. I called him around 7 PM the way I usually do. He picked up on the second ring. "Hey, kid." "Hey, Dad. How was your day?" "It was fine." That's where this story starts. He said it the way he always said it. I almost didn't notice. But there was something underneath the word. A kind of carefulness, like he was placing the word down on a table instead of saying it. I asked: "Dad, are you okay? You sound a little tired." "Oh, I'm fine. Long day." I let it go. For about a year before that call, my dad had been doing everything right. He went to his annual check-up every year. Bloodwork clean. Cholesterol where his specialist wanted it. Not on a single thing daily. He walked twenty minutes every morning, in any weather. He ate the same simple meals he'd been eating for fifty years. He slept seven and a half hours a night. He went to church on Sundays, played cards with three friends on Thursdays, and had his brother over for lunch on Mondays. By every box on a standard intake form, he was a model 73-year-old man. And he'd been telling me, in a voice I almost couldn't hear, that he didn't feel like himself. The thing that finally got me to act was a small thing. It was May. I drove up to see him for a weekend. Saturday morning, we were at his kitchen table drinking coffee, and he got up to refill my cup. He stood up from the chair and put both hands on the table to push himself up. I'd never seen him do that before. He didn't notice he'd done it. I sat there looking at the chair he'd just gotten out of and felt something inside me click into place. This was the man who had taught me to fish at five years old by carrying me through a creek on his shoulders for an hour. This was the man who had reframed the entire roof of our garage by himself at 60. He was bracing the table to stand up at 74. And he was telling himself, and his specialist was telling him, that this was just getting older. I waited until he sat back down. I said: "Dad. I want to come with you to your next appointment. I don't think 'it's just getting older' is the whole story." He looked at me for a long time. Then he said: "Okay, Mike. Whatever you think." The "okay" was so quick that I knew he'd been waiting for someone to say it. I called the office Monday morning. The appointment was three weeks out. I drove up the night before and slept in my old bedroom and drove him to the appointment on a Thursday morning. The specialist who has been seeing him for seven years is a kind man. Not a bad clinician. He came in. He pulled up the chart. He said: "Tom, your numbers look good. Same as last year." He started to wrap up. I said: "Can I ask you to slow down for a second?" He looked at me. I said: "My dad has been telling me for a year that he doesn't feel like himself. He's exhausted by six PM. He's bracing the kitchen table to stand up. His hands have been cold for two winters. His numbers are good and he's doing everything right and he's still going somewhere quieter than he used to be. Can we look at what might be underneath that?" He paused. I think it was the first time he had actually heard my dad. He said: "Okay. Let's do that." He spent the next forty-five minutes with us. He ordered a wider workup than usual. He also looked at something he hadn't looked at in years. Circulation to the smaller vessels at the ends of him, and a blood viscosity panel. He didn't rush a single question. The results came back two weeks later. Mostly fine. Vitamin D a little low. Blood viscosity on the higher end of normal for his age, though not in any range his specialist would treat for. He called my dad and said: "Tom. Some of what you're describing is the gradual slowdown that happens in the seventies. The body doesn't make energy as efficiently. Circulation to the smallest vessels, the hands, the feet, the smallest vessels of the brain, also doesn't move the way it used to. There's no standard treatment for that. There's a foundation to build." He talked about four things. Movement, sleep, sunlight, and a thoughtful approach to what my father was putting in his body. He said: "If you want to add one thoughtful supplemental thing to support that, I won't argue with it. Just call the office first if you have something specific in mind." He said: "And Michael, thank you for coming in. Your father is lucky to have you." I drove home thinking about what he'd said. The foundation. I started driving up two weekends a month instead of one. I started calling my dad in the mornings at 7:30 to make sure he was up for his walk. I called his brother Frank and asked if he could stay for the afternoon on Mondays instead of just lunch. I called his card buddy Eleanor and asked if my dad could come over for coffee on the weeks when cards wasn't meeting. Small things. But he started telling me about them on the phone, in a voice that had a little more of him in it. About a month into that, I was at the hospital cafeteria getting lunch. A guy I'd been on a project committee with the year before was in line behind me. His name is Carl. He's about ten years older than me, in the operations office, different team. I asked how his summer had been. He said: "Good. Quiet. My dad had a rough stretch this spring, but he's been turning back around." I asked what had been going on. He said: "He'd been telling all of us he was fine for about two years. Doing everything right, eating well, walking, the whole thing. Just exhausted by six and couldn't figure out why. His specialist kept saying his numbers were good. Eventually I went into an appointment with him. We built a foundation together. Sleep, movement, social time, and one thoughtful thing the specialist approved of." I asked what the thoughtful thing was. He said: "An enzyme called nattokinase. The brand is MAÏA. Comes from a traditional Japanese fermented food. His specialist was comfortable with it. He's been taking it for about six months. Says it's part of what's been helping. Not the whole thing. Part of it." We got to the register. We went back to our offices. That evening I thought about that conversation on the train. Carl had described my father almost word for word. I emailed him the next morning. He sent me the brand. That weekend I did some reading. Nattokinase has been studied for over forty years. It comes from a traditional Japanese fermented soy food called natto. The communities that have eaten natto for generations have some of the lowest rates of cardiovascular issues in the world. Here is how I came to understand what it actually does. Your blood has a built-in balance. A balance between clotting and clearing. When you have microscopic damage anywhere in your circulation, including the inside walls of your blood vessels, your body uses a protein called fibrin to seal the spot. Fibrin is a mesh. A patch. When the damage is healed, your body uses an enzyme called plasmin to break the fibrin back down and clear it away. That process is happening inside your vessels every day. Fibrin in. Fibrin out. When the system works, your blood stays smooth. It flows easily. The smallest vessels at the ends of you keep getting the fuel they need. After 50, plasmin activity drops. By the seventies, it can be down significantly. Fibrin starts accumulating faster than the body can clear it. The blood thickens. It moves a little slower through the same pipes. The smallest vessels at the ends of you get a little less. Cold hands at 6am on the back porch. Heaviness on a walk that used to be easy. An exhaustion by 6 PM that wasn't there at 65. Nattokinase mimics and supports plasmin. It supports the body's natural fibrin-clearing activity. It supports healthy blood viscosity already within the normal range. It supports healthy circulation. It works alongside everything else, not instead of anything. That's what made me comfortable thinking about it for my father. Before I ordered anything, I called my father's office. I told the nurse exactly what I was thinking. The brand. The dose. The fact that my dad takes no daily routine, just a multivitamin and a vitamin D supplement. She called me back the next day. The specialist said it was a sensible thing to add. No interactions to worry about with anything my dad was on. He mentioned that nattokinase affects clotting at the gentle, supportive end, and as long as my father wasn't on a blood thinner, which he wasn't, he was comfortable. He said to have my dad mention it at his next appointment so it would get in the chart. I ordered the bottle. I drove up that weekend. I sat at his kitchen table and told him the truth. Carl. Carl's father. Calling the office. I told him I wanted to put two capsules on the saucer next to his coffee every morning, and have him take them with his first sip of water. He said: "Mike. Okay. Yes." The next morning he called me at 8. He said: "I took them. Tasted like vitamins." I laughed. He laughed. It was a real laugh. I hadn't heard one from him in a long time. I'm not going to tell you he was different in seventeen minutes. But over the next couple of months, things started to shift. The first was the kitchen table. Six weeks in I was up at the house and he stood up from his chair without putting his hands down. He didn't notice. I noticed. The second was his hands. He mentioned on a Sunday call that he'd been outside on his back porch at 6am that day, the time when his hands had always felt cold the longest, and they had been warm the whole time. He said it like he was telling me about the weather. I sat at my own kitchen table in Boston and put the phone down for a second. The third was the phone calls. The "I'm fine" voice started disappearing. He'd answer and tell me about his day. What he'd made for dinner. What his brother had said at lunch on Monday. He was actually telling me about his day. The fourth was the card game. He mentioned in August that he'd stayed for two hours after the game on Thursday to help one of the other guys with a piece of fence on his property. He'd brought a toolbox over the next day to finish it. That's my dad. That's the man who shows up with a toolbox. He'd been gone for over a year and he was back. At his next appointment, his bloodwork was the same. His blood viscosity had moved down a touch. Still in normal range. Just a little better than it had been. His specialist didn't change anything. He asked my dad how he'd been feeling. My dad told him. The mornings. The walks. The card game. The fence. The warm hands at 6am. He mentioned the nattokinase. Same brand. Same dose. Every morning. The specialist nodded. He said: "Tom. Whatever combination of things you and your son have been doing, keep doing it. The foundation is working." He looked at me. He said: "Michael, this is what advocacy looks like. Keep it up." I sat in the parking lot afterward and didn't say anything for a while. I want to be careful about what I'm claiming. I don't know how much of my dad's coming back is the walks. I don't know how much is Uncle Frank on Mondays. I don't know how much is Eleanor and the coffee. I don't know how much is the calls every morning. I don't know how much is the nattokinase. It's probably all of it together. What I can tell you is what I did. I stopped accepting "I'm fine" when it didn't sound like fine. I walked into the appointment with him. I asked the specialist to look underneath the numbers that looked good. I listened when he said the answer wasn't something he could prescribe but a foundation. I helped my dad build the foundation, slowly, with the people who already loved him. I called the office before I added anything new to his morning. I waited for the call back. When they said it was a sensible thing to add, I ordered the bottle. My dad wasn't on any daily routine to come off of. He didn't change anything the specialist had recommended. He added one thing to what he was already doing, alongside everything else we changed together. Talk to your father's specialist or pharmacist before adding any new supplement, especially if he's on a blood thinner. That one phone call is what made me comfortable. It's what I'd tell anyone else to do first. The brand I added to my father's morning is MAÏA Nattokinase. https://www.buymaia.com/shocking-discovery-nattokinase-plaque 5,000 fibrinolytic units per dose, low-temperature processed, third-party tested every batch. Two capsules with a glass of water in the morning. That's the whole thing. P.S. I emailed Carl a couple of weeks ago to tell him about my dad. He wrote back and said: "Sons who walk into the appointment are the reason a lot of dads come back. Tell your dad hi from me and mine both." I read that email twice. There's a quiet brotherhood among the sons who finally stop accepting "I'm fine." I didn't know I was joining it until I'd already joined. P.P.S. MAÏA offers a 30-day money-back guarantee. If you're not satisfied for any reason, every penny back. No questions asked. I think that's a sensible policy for a supplement. It gives you time to actually see whether it does anything. I'd give it a few weeks at minimum. Bodies are different. Some people notice something within the first week or two. Others take longer. https://www.buymaia.com/shocking-discovery-nattokinase-plaque