Surviving a Life-Changing Injury: Gay’s Big Adventure | The Big Leap EP#83

I had basically nothing to do but do a lot of internal therapy work. I wasn't going anywhere, that's for sure. I accumulated a stack of learnings which I want to share with you. It brought up some very early primal things from the earliest days of my existence. I started out my career as an opioid taker at age 78. You know, I think pain is not something to be resisted. You know, it's to be opened up to and dialogue.

Well, welcome to Gay's Big Fall Big Leap Adventure. Gay has some big news about something that just happened. It is a giant learning experience, and if you deal with.

Having an imprint that commands and controls you that you aren't even aware of, which is kind of a weird thing to bring it up there that way, you are going to learn so much in this episode. And also if you are concerned about your own mortality or losing mobility, you are going to learn a ton in this episode. You're going to learn a fantastic healing journey that Gay has been on.

Gay. Well, I did. I had a big adventure a couple of months ago and I've learned so much from it and I.

In so many ways, I can't imagine any other way I could have learned it. So I'm very grateful, even though the experience was painful, that I had it and I'm getting what I've got out of it so far. And I'm still in the middle of a bunch of learnings about it, but this is where things are as of now.

All right, so if you want to hear a fantastic hero's journey of grace and growth, you're in the right place at the right time. This episode of the Big Leap podcast. Let's get going.

Well, Gay, it's been a while since we recorded because you have had a, we'll say an unfortunate adventure. Can you explain what happened and what's been going on for the past, oh, I don't know, several weeks?

Well, it's actually to the day, about.

Eight weeks since I had my big adventure. Well, to set a context, I'm 78 and I have, in my 78 years, never really broken a bone or had any kind of major illness or anything like that, and have spent very little time around hospitals and blessedly, very little time around the medical industrial complex. So with that in background, I went out two months ago on a rainy day to change my pool cover and my swimming pool, which I've done a thousand times. But on this particular occasion, due to the rain, the edge of the thing was wet and I slipped and Went right down on my knee on concrete.

And broke my femur, my thigh bone, in five places. And it was in every way the worst pain I've ever felt in my life. As a matter of fact, Katie and I still talk about it because from the moment it happened, the only thing I could do was, was flop over on my back and just bellow at the top of my lungs. And so I'm out there screaming. And Katie came running out and she said, you know, what can I do? And I said, no, this is 91 1. Because when I look down at my leg.

Stretched out on the ground, if I moved my knee, my bottom part of my leg wouldn't go with it. It just lay there, you know, I thought, oh, my God.

Anyway, so we got 91 1. And they were really fast. They were over here. I live in a small town. Yeah. Which is full of rich people. And so the services are really good.

So.

The. The whole gang was here within about five minutes. And so they. They stabilized me and then took me off to the trauma center in Ventura, which is about 20 miles down at the coast from where I live up in Ojai. And it was just really pretty much all I could handle to stay in my body during that. And so finally we got down there and they couldn't give me any pain medication or anything until they got down there for legal purposes. And so. But we got down to the trauma center and fairly quickly they loaded me up with pain relievers. Two of them in particular, Fentanyl and Dilaudid.

Oh, those are lovely.

Yeah, yeah, right. And so I started out my career as an opioid taker at age 78. But those two drugs knocked the pain out and. And I basically stayed in that spaced out state for 24 hours until they could get me into the surgical rotation. And I happened to get there on a day where a whole bunch of people had trauma. So they had us kind of lined up one after the other. And I finally got in about three or four in the afternoon, and I had two hours of surgery and with a woman, a doctor named Dr. Argot. And she was really terrific.

And I've continued to see her for follow ups and everything, but I really liked her. So they put me into surgery and then ran a rod down the center of my thigh bone, a steel rod or titanium, I guess, and then loaded me up with five different bolts and screws that screwed my thigh bone back together. And then I was immobilized in a. Not a cast, but.

A brace. I think they they would call it with this wraparound kind of things. But anyway, I couldn't move my leg thankfully. And so I stayed that way basically for days and days and days. I was in the trauma center for two weeks basically before I could do anything with my leg. And I've never really laid up.

That long for any purpose really. So anyway, I've accumulated a stack of learnings which I want to share with you. But first I just wanted to lay out the picture of what happened. So I was in the trauma center for two weeks, pretty much on my back with my brace on. And then I was moved over to the, to a rehab center when I got well enough to be able to put some weight on my leg and bend my knee a little bit. And so I was moved over to what's called the continuing care center, which is a rehab center that's associated with the hospital up here in Ojai. But it's a 24 hour day thing. I live there for seven more days and.

I had many, many learnings which I'll detail for you. But a lot of them have to do with putting somebody who's never really stopped in my life making me stop for three weeks. And it really put me up against a whole bunch of different learnings which I'm, I'm glad I learned them, but let me just finish the story. So yeah, after three weeks of basic being, I was going to say incarcerated, but basically inpatient, I was able to move over to my house here, which is about a mile away from the rehab center. And I, Katie, hired in my own nurses and caretakers, 24 hour a day caretakers and that kind of thing, so I could get out of the hospital, the hospital basically, because I just wasn't getting any better in there. I, I couldn't get any sleep in there. I, I was. They don't have any doors between the rooms over there for some strange reason. And my roommate who was down at the other end of the room was both deaf and.

And had a lot of issues and was, would often scream out, help me, help me, help me. Yeah, 24 hours a day. And I would come awake, you know, and so I think I got sleep at night and I was going frantic just staying in there. So Katie moved me over here, bless her heart. And I've been very happily rehabbing here for the last few weeks now. I don't need the 24 hour a day care anymore. So they all cleared out about, I think about two weeks ago. So it's just me and Katz and Katie. Now and I'm, I'm getting about on a walker. Yeah. And so I've got about like where I can put about 75% weight down on my right leg now. And so I, I can see the glimmer of a possibility that I might be able to walk on two legs again. So I'm just kind of, that's my next thing I'm holding out for. But so that's on the physical level, but where I couldn't have designed a better curriculum for late life learning than this one. For one thing.

It brought up some very early primal things from the earliest days of my existence. And.

I, I didn't really, I, you know, if I'd thought it through as a psychologist, I could have probably said, yeah, it would do that. But I never had thought of that internally until all of a sudden I found myself doing these things which were inexplicable except in terms of some early life birth related things. Katie kept saying I, that I apologized for everything, like, oh, honey, I'm really, really sorry I did this to you, you know, and, and she kept calling my attention to that and saying, hey, Don, you know, We've been together 44 years now. This is, this is what I'm doing. You don't need to apologize for this. I'm not like doing you a favor or anything. And what I realized is it took me back to my.

Being born in a very inconvenient way for my mother, where I was a tremendous burden on her and you could almost say I ruined her life because her life took off in a whole different direction once I was born. Because during my, her pregnancy with me, my father died and sort of left her with 300 bucks and kicked her out of her role of being a happy housewife for the seven year old and about to have a new baby to a, a widow with no job, no money. And fortunately my grandmother and grandfather lived next door. And so they kind of took me over and so that really saved my life, I think. But in terms of the imprint, I realized that I had this real deep imprint of being an inconvenience and not feeling like I deserved to be there and that I was taking up everybody's time and I was taking them away from things they'd rather be doing. And so in listening to some of those things, I would say to Katie, you know, look, oh darling, I really, I know you could be doing. And here you are having to do. I. After she caught me doing that about half a dozen times, I realized that I had this Old imprint that I was working my way out of. And the imprint is, you know, like I don't deserve to be here. And so I really spent a lot of time hanging out with that and loving that and honoring that and understanding where that came from and understanding the actual impact on my mother's life. And so I had basically nothing to do but do a lot of internal therapy work because I, I wasn't going anywhere, that's for sure. And.

For the first three weeks I couldn't really eat or sleep either, which because of what they were trying to feed me in the hospital. Finally Katie started importing some better food and brought it over every day. But for the first week or week and a half, I, I lost about 10 or 20 pounds because I can see it.

Yeah, you look much thinner for sure.

Yeah, I've gained some of it back now, but through repeated doses of ice cream every afternoon. But then I, anyway, I lost a lot of weight and I also.

Couldn'T really sleep because of the noise over there. And even with my noise canceling earphones on at night, it didn't cancel out the noise of the other patients and everything. Being in a trauma unit, people tend to yell and scream and one night I was up all night with a woman who checked in who was, not only had broken her leg or something, but she was also trying to hustle them for opioids. And so I had to go through listening to the whole litany of everything from I'm going to sue you if you don't give me some fentanyl, to.

You know, offering sexual favors to the personnel there in term, you know, like that kind of thing, like she was just tripping out her unconscious. And so anyway, that's my hospital adventure in actual healing. Things are going along great. I, my PT physical therapy person tells me I'm doing better than I ought to be doing for a guy my age. But I tell her, you just don't know anything about 78 year old guys. Now. You know you're only 35.

Yeah, yeah.

What do you know, kid? Yep. Oh man.

Well, I had.

Along the way when I heard that you had had the fall.

I think trying to think what had happened. But I found out very quickly and I was reaching out to Katie, of course, and you and I were having some dialogue. So you were definitely tripping balls, as the old saying goes. I remember that you're high as a kite. But when you started and I was scared, I was like, oh man.

I.

Was scared in a lot of ways because it's like.

Oh man. First, you know, I, you know, my, one of my saddest thoughts is like, what happens if I lose gay? You know, you're one of my favorite people ever and I have such a deep love and respect for you and I just enjoy collaborating and creating with you. So I went to this selfish fear, place of loss and I experienced all that. I was very, very emotional for four.

Days.

And I didn't know what to say to Katie, you know, because like, how do you console? And.

I don't know her mechanism for like whether she grieves or she goes into fix it mode or like I don't know her modalities well enough to know where she goes. And I didn't know where I could offer either solace or support because I'm very much like, I ask when I need help and I expect people to ask when they want help from me. And I don't know always how to serve. That's my own stuff that goes back to whatever my imprint is. So it's like I was wrestling with a different kind of anxiety and fear and emotion and.

And so that's where I went to. And then when, when we were dialoguing and exchanging videos, etc, I remember something that really hit me hard is when you told me that during your initial PT you said it was some of the most painful experience of your life. And I believe you said you had passed out twice during that. So just talk a little bit about like you are working hard to get well fast and you're very committed to getting back on your feet and doing the hard work to the level and degree that it created so much pain that you'd pass out. So can you talk a little bit about what that experience and what those learnings were about your discipline, deliberation, your willingness to endure incredible pain?

Well, you know, I go to a gym three days a week and so I, I voluntarily submit to and have for many years. I've been doing it for maybe 10 or 12 years now. And so.

You know, I think pain is not something to be resisted. You know, it's to be opened up to and dialogued with. And that kind of thing.

That level of pain that I had with the knee, with the leg, with my, you know, especially with my pt. The first couple of times I would try to do it and then it was like my body had some kind of shut off mechanism where I would start getting spacey and then I would begin to pass out and have to sit back down and that kept happening. Actually it happened more Than a couple of times. I would say it probably happened, gosh, more like a dozen times over several days. And I think part of that was, you know, maybe my body has some kind of natural shutoff mechanism or maybe all of our bodies do that, take us out of consciousness when things get too intense. But I think part of it also may have been just a physical thing where I spent so much time lying down on my back that when I tried to get my body working in an upright position, it didn't quite know how to do that. And so I think that was a factor. Also interestingly enough, once I got out of the hospital and got back over here that, to my house, that problem stopped happening. I haven't really had the light headed thing since then. And I'm back at the gym now. I take my walker to the gym and kind of do my hop, skip and a jump walk around to the different stations. But I work mostly on upper body stuff these days and I've been back at the, the gym now for three or four sessions. And it feels incredibly good to get a buzz in my body, you know, just from the joy of pumping some iron and, and doing something that's not automatically painful.

I don't have much pain right now as long as I stay off my right leg. I still take a couple of Tylenol now and then, especially in the middle of the night if I, yeah, my, sometimes I'll turn over in a certain way at night and it'll trigger my knee and so I'll take a couple of Advil. But boy, I'll tell you. Back to the fentanyl Dilaudid thing.

This.

Gets a little gross here. But I had heard that opioids make you constipated. I mean that's just one of the things that opium addicts talk about. But I learned the hard way for about six days that the combination of fentanyl and Dilaudid, it was like.

Brick inside me and.

You know, talking about, you know, finally when that problem resolved itself in the middle of the night with some little nurse standing by cheering me on, I, I felt like I'd gone to heaven and, and seen the face of God. It reminded me of Martin Luther King. I don't know if you remember this or not, but he happened to be sitting on the toilet when he worked out one of the central premises of Protestantism versus Catholicism.

I don't know the story.

Oh yeah, well, he was trying to work out the problem of his. Is it faith that gets us to heaven or is it good Works.

So his. His leaning was toward good works. But I like to think that he was sitting on the toilet and maybe he got a little bit of grace in there, too, you know, in addition to the effort involved. And so that helped. Helped him work out his theory. But.

That'S among the most crackpot theories I have. So you don't need to ever have me surface an even more crackpot theory to you, because that's the biggest one that I know of, that all of Western civilization, religion, and everything hangs on a toilet event.

I'll just take one tiny distraction. So when I had my surgery for colorectal cancer, I remember telling the doctor before they put me under, if I got to wake up and you gotta basically gut me and I have to have a bag, don't wake me up, was what I told him on the way down, which was a coward's way out. But it was like the thought of being stuck with a colostomy bag my whole life. And I can remember from the time you have surgery until your bowel starts to work again. Plus, same thing. I was on a lot of Dilaudid, a lot of opiates.

And. Same thing constipated. So my first poop was like a miracle and a celebration, you know, because I didn't know if my parts would ever work again. That's the first thing you learn. And you can't. Like, your colon's a very dumb organ, so it just doesn't know what's going on. And I only have half of mine. Half. Half a colon, half a rectum. So it. To this day, I have a very unpredictable. Like, I have to really manage myself to have a normal life, and I fortunately do. But it still doesn't know what's going on half the time, and it's very unpredictable. So I. I can relate to how incredibly. Like, I. I used to tell people after I had the surgery, if you have to choose between your dick or your butthole, I guarantee you're going to choose a functional butthole over a functional dick. That's. And no man wants to face that. But I'm telling you, I got to live in both worlds, and I know what's what. So it's like. It's a very humbling experience, my friend. A very humbling experience.

I can only imagine. Well, God bless us both. We got the message. I hope you learned as much from yours as I learned from mine.

Unbelievable.

Yeah, well, it has a way of. It's very humbling and very sobering, you know, because you get to look at the very basics of my life. And one of the things that's just been such a joy, though, has been to watch Katie.

Watch her do all of these things, but not do them out of obligation, you know. Yeah. Because she loves me and cares about me, and there hasn't been a trace of any kind of victimhood on her part or anything like that. And I was so concerned about that for the first few days. You know, I was so apologetic and, oh, my God, you know, I'm sorry, sorry, sorry. But it's been days now, or maybe even weeks since I've done the whole apology thing. And I feel really happy about that because it honors her as someone who is choosing her experience 100% as I'm choosing mine. 100%.

Yes. He.

Okay, so let's. I. There. I can live with that as well. That's something for Vivian and me where she. She basically lived with.

You know, I always say, I thank God it was me, not my son or my wife. Right. So imagine it's harder for the. The other spouse than it is for the person going. My opinion. And just watching someone you love go through the same level of pain is just unimaginable. So I think for you, when you look at this, how do you feel as a coach and a therapist, you can take these learnings and lessons and apply them to someone else's life. How can the empathy, compassion, experience transfer to your ability to understand and guide someone through different life experiences?

One thing that I. That I've already used, I'm. I'm back to work, so to speak. Yeah, yeah, Podcasts. And I'm about to give a virtual keynote here in a week or two. And so I've been at it again, and one thing that. That I've really learned is, like, take a little snippet of everyday behavior, like me saying, oh, I'm sorry to Katie. And that one little snippet, if you take it and think of it as like the kite at the end of a string, and you ride the string all the way back to what's caused that, you can go back to the very earliest moments of life. And so any little thing like that can be an E ticket to ride back in and look at the early formative moments of your life and make some changes there, make some redecisions there, that can have a powerful effect on your life today. So the fact that within, you know, right away, after breaking a bone, suddenly I've tripped into an old birth pattern, you know, apologizing to people that I broke My bone, You know, how weird is that? And so. But it just came right out of my mouth. And so that's been a huge learning. And also, you know, one of my old mentors in Graduate School 50 years ago used to say.

You can never speed a client up. You can slow them down, but you can't make them go faster than they want to go because they will always have some kind of resistance if you're pushing them too hard, in other words. And I really learned that, that there's a way in which I can be absolutely okay with people going at the speed they need to go at and at the same time be a whole body cheerleader for them, going as fast as they can. And so that's a. That's a strange little dance. But I feel like I've learned more about that through this whole thigh bone thing.

That's.

That's good.

That's good.

And how about.

Mortality questions? How has this affected your.

Feelings, views, experience.

Love and lust for life.

Versus.

Just feeling.

Experiencing potential incapacitation, you know, a loss of mobility and movement? Like, what went on there for you?

That's a great question. Because one of the. One of the things that happened is immediately I started replaying, like my grandmother, you know, everybody said she was doing great until she broke her hip.

Yeah, I know.

It was just on out, you know, and then I had another person that. That happened to who said basically the same thing. Not with a hip, but.

Until he had this minor heart attack. Everything was going great. And then from then on, everything was just downhill. So that really started replaying in my mind particularly. I'd never known anybody that I know of that broke their femur, but I certainly known of a bunch of people that broke their hips. And because it's a common.

In my age group, it's an extremely common thing to have happen because you can break a hip pretty easily by falling to one side. Yeah, I had an even worse version where I went straight down on it and broke it in five places. Yeah. What's called. I learned a new word. It's called a comminuted fracture. If there's a whole bunch of different pieces. That's comminuted. Yeah. And whole new word. So I have a classic example of that. And. Oh, I forgot I had a little bit of a setback a couple of weeks ago because one of the screws started coming out and I had to go back to the surgeon and they had to do another little surgical intervention where they had to fix that and actually fixed it by taking it all the way out. And I didn't realize the thing is about 3 inches long. It just blew my mind when they took it out.

Our son Zach had that. He was born with one of his feet turned in, both of them, actually. And they actually did a surgery where they actually cut the whole femur and turn it. And then. And he started complaining of pain. And we're like, ah, it's whatever. And it turned out one of the screws had unscrewed itself and was pressing into his muscle. Irritating.

Yeah.

So you could just imagine with every movement, it's, this is horrible pain. And.

Well, I don't have to imagine it because that's what happened to me two weeks ago. Yeah.

The body doesn't like foreign objects shoved in it. That's the, that's the lesson.

I know. And I could actually see this one pushing up against the skin.

It really encouraged me not to bang it on anything. But anyway, that's all fixed now, and I apologize if I've freaked out anybody in the audience who are going through trauma right now. But back to the main learning. This whole feeling of, of being here, I think, has really increased. You know, I'm a longtime meditator. I've got 50 years of meditation under my belt and under my head, and I, So I'm, I'm used to open, spacious kind of.

Things in my life. You know, I don't feel like I have a lot of stress in my life and that kind of thing. So this has been kind of a sharp reminder of what pain can be about and what pain can do. And I actually, now I've started just sitting out in the backyard, especially on sunny days. And I've never been one to sit in the sun, even though I grew up in Florida. Yeah, I usually have a, A library tan. You know, I, I, I say I'm the whitest white guy in my neighborhood, and.

My trainer makes fun of my white legs when I come in.

Sometimes so angelic in all the wrong ways.

Yeah. So I've started actually getting some sun on my limbs. You know.

I have a golfer's ten where my forearms are real.

Tan and my head is real tan from playing golf, but that's about it. But now I'm beginning to get, for the first time in my life, a little bit of a tan. And I'm kind of liking this new California boy aspect of myself. And who knew? Maybe you'll see me with a surfboard down at the beach.

Oh, yeah, that. I like that. I like that. That the thought of that's great. And, and the vitamin D doesn't hurt either.

No, vitamin D is good. I'm getting all that free vitamin D I'm soaking up out there. And I'm also on every type of supplement. I'll bet.

Everybody has a remedy and I've taken the I can't take them all, but I've kind of skimmed off the essence of the essence. And so but I have a counter in there because everybody's brought me by their favorite healing remedies that I could probably take care of the whole town of Ojai. But and, and if you're listening to these words and have the urge to send me something, please don't. I'm doing great for supplements.

That's back when I I was diagnosed, I had cancer. I was getting every magic potion known to man. And of course one of the problems when you're we produced tons and tons of books and I had a big online platform and there was, for whatever reason, probably 30% of my audience were healers of some nature, whether they're legitimate doctors or woo woo doctors. And the amount of unwelcome, unrequested free advice and products was overwhelming to say the least. And if I would have listened to other people, I'd be dead now because, you know, there's so many wackadiddle magnetic doodads coming your way and whatever. Not that I'm not that I don't believe in some woo woo. Right. I like feathers, crystals, fuzzy bunnies. Right.

But and also I want to honor the art impulse too, because that's a genuine beautiful thing. And yes, even if I can't take all the pills and everything, I honor that that fact. People are thinking that way and appreciate important.

I right now I'm kind of focused. My big goal, pt wise is to actually start putting 100 weight on my right leg. And so I feel like I'm maybe still a couple of weeks away from doing that. Just realistically, I'm actually going to see my PT person tomorrow for my next workup, so I'll have more to say about that later. But right now the current status is I'm still on my walker, but I'm back to functioning pretty much autonomously except for things where I need some help getting out of a door or a car or something like that. Right, Right.

Well, I have one more question for you, which is aside from getting back to weight, getting back in shape, getting your body back to where it was or better, have you been inspired to.

Create any new projects, write any books stories add to the platform or use this as creative inspiration. Like, what kind of birth do you believe you're giving or will give to as a result of this?

Well, that's a great question, because I've been spending a lot of time thinking about that. It hasn't led directly to any new writing. And here's a kind of a practical reason. I have two books in the pipeline at one publisher and another book in the pipeline. I have two novels in the pipeline over here, and I have a big nonfiction book over at another publisher. So I've got stuff in the pipeline. And I've been sort of deliberately not wanting to put anything more into the pipeline right now until things move on through. And so that's happening. One of the books will be out first part of the year. But anyway, I've been doing a lot of sketching and.

Not even. I wouldn't call it thinking so much as just wondering. And one of the things that I got clear on is I'm not sure I want to write any more books. I want to do some other projects before I start writing another book. I know. You know, it's. It's such a familiar way of expression for me that I want to see if I can ride my way through all this to find some other kind of expression. Not sure what that's going to be. Maybe it's poetry, maybe it's video, maybe it's a movie script. I'm not sure yet. Or maybe it's none of that. It just has to do with something else. But one thing. I just have a feeling it's not going to look like anything I've done before. And that feels really good to me. I feel like I'm in a state of rebirth. But I don't know exactly what the product is or what. What even what dimension of life the product is going to take place on. Whatever. My main commitment is to keep learning and to avoid anything that even looks like boredom or thinking I know anything or anything like that, you know, that I. I want to avoid any kind of static places. I'm. I'm really in a time of opening up to more and more direct flow of communication from the creative source of things in the universe. And I want to just kind of surf on the edge of that for a while.

So.

That'S. That is great. I think I'm going to save a reflection for our next episode. And this is a good teaser about.

Changing mediums, because I have some thoughts about that. But it'll be in a better package somewhere else. So I love that. I think that's, that is a form of, of new bir and rebirth and also that willingness to reinvent as a result. It's like trying on a new set of limbs in a, in a way, if I were going to kind of create a metaphoric relationship. So I, I love the idea of stepping out. So if you think of that as a new big leap for you, which is switching up the medium and creating a new form of self expression, that's a good place for us to finish this episode. And I love that for you. I like that idea of. Because the moment you said I don't want to write for a while, I'm like, oh, geez, what? You know, again, my fear side is like, wow, where's he going to go from here? Because I used to say this, this is like a horrible thing to relate to. But again, it's just like my old trauma kicked in. So my dad's body is still alive, his brain's been off for a couple of years and it's just horrible to watch him as he's in this retirement, not doing anything. And he was always this incredibly productive guy. And I always said the day he can't play guitar is the day he's done. And I can remember the week when he couldn't tune it anymore and he couldn't play because he couldn't talk and he couldn't remember and he would just sit and like play the same verse and started over and he started. His hands didn't work and his brain was off and like music is one of the last things to go because even a good friend of mine whose mother was in her over 100, she could still play the piano even when she couldn't talk anymore. There was that muscle brain memory or some sort of sequential activation that kicked in. And again, I had this fear when I heard you say that. Just for a moment I'm like, oh, what? What's going on? So again, I don't want to make this about me, but it's, it's interesting how observing how much trauma I've got associated with this fear of loss and fear of collaboration, you know, because it's so much a part of our life, it's so much of your life and who we are as individuals that.

Really.

I have a lot of emotions stacked up around that, so.

Well, I appreciate that very much. Oh, and just to one more thought, I realized I hadn't quite finished my thought about mortality.

Ah.

In the, in the middle of all of this, while I was still in the hospital.

My 86 year old brother Mike, who's my only sibling, has had Parkinson's for a couple of years and he took a turn for the worse when I was in the hospital and he died. He went into hospice and died. Yeah, about the time I came back over here to my house. And so that was a whole other thing that took me down into another. Yeah. Space because, you know, I in grieving for him and thinking of him and being with him and everything, it brought up a whole other set of issues and frankly also that relate to my own mortality because I started thinking, oh, he's 86, I'm 78, that means I've got eight more years. But that's just my mind talking. Yeah, yeah, get hit by a bus tomorrow, you know, and so.

But it did start, start me thinking about what life is going to look like around here with me not here. And it's a good question to ask, you know, because I remember once.

Listening to the Dalai Lama, who was 58 at the time, saying he was beginning to. He didn't expect to die for several more decades, but he was beginning to prepare for his death. Yes. And so I think it's a good idea for all of us to, no matter what we're doing in life, to think about what our exit plans are.

I agree. I think that's, you know, going back. It's 11 years now since I had cancer and I genuinely.

Prepared, anticipated and did everything I could.

And I don't fear death.

But I have noticed that I have a different level of.

Dread that I hadn't prepared for. Maybe that be the only way I can because I'm really processing it. It's sort of a new.

Experience.

I've been feeling associated with it because I have. Most of my friends are older than me. The people I spend the most time with, you know, you're one of them. And so I, I spent a little more time thinking about it than I think most people my age do. I'm 57 now, so yeah, we've got about 20 years between us approximately. So yeah, I, I've learned a lot watching you and just thinking about this conversation. So I'm glad we finally got to have it and I'm glad we didn't get in any great detail about it. So it was raw and fresh as well. So do you have any, any other final thoughts? And I didn't also say I'm so sorry about your brother. Katie did let me know that when it happened and again I was like, I don't know what to say in those situations.

Yeah, well, I feel it. I appreciate it. Well, I can't tell you anything more right now. We maybe have to do a whole other episode when I get a bit little further along in the healing process here because I've got a ways to go. But for now I feel complete.

Well, it's great to have you back to here. I've been looking forward to this moment. I know when we were talking about when the next time is, it didn't seem like it could happen fast enough. But.

I'm glad we've we got to do it when we did it and I think we will just end this episode with what a great relief. I love learning through your experiences. I always feel like.

You can pass along so much wisdom and I'm positive someone out there, this is reaching them at exactly the right time as well. And maybe the way I'll leave it is if you have some comments, some feedback, head on over to bigleappodcast.com send us a message or as usual, leave a comment, share your experience or share this with someone who you know can benefit from experiencing some trauma, some transition, and dealing with some of life's biggest issues, which is.

You know, being immobilized and feeling that sense of, of losing some control and also depending on someone and being able to go through a big healing process that you might not have expected and it wouldn't have happened any other way.

I feel really grateful for the experience.

I don't know any other way I would have gotten to some of these things. So.

I'm a work in progress at present. I'll keep everybody posted.

You get the Grace Award of the day, the week, the podcast, or the year, depending on how you like look at it. So great job, Gay. Thanks so much for another great episode.

Thanks.