Too Soon to Abandon Ship

Jay Setchell grew up on a working farm where nothing came free — up before sunrise mixing powdered milk to feed calves, sorting eggs by lantern for the candling plant, learning that time is money and a job left half-done isn’t done. That foundation of urgency and responsibility is the thread through everything that followed: the Marine Corps, a string of businesses, and a life that kept testing him.

And it tested him hard. Jay has died more than once, survived more than 70 surgeries, and broken his neck at 31 in a drowning accident that left him, by every medical prediction, paralyzed for good. He walked anyway — for seventeen years on braces and a cane — before three rare spinal conditions eventually put him in a power wheelchair. Through all of it he leans on faith, family, and a refusal to quit, telling Jeanne plainly that the day he decides he can’t move is the day he stops moving. It’s mind over matter, and he means it literally.

The conversation ranges from the death of small-town farm life to grief he says he’ll never fully make peace with, to the moment he teared up imagining walking again. It lands on hope: a national business going international, eight-year-old twins to raise, another book taking shape, and a note from an 88-year-old reader now planning her 95th birthday. Then the signature Two Truths & A Lie — where one of Jay’s three headlines is a whopper you won’t see coming.