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11. How Does Knowledge Bias Our Way of Thinking & Grieving?- With Juancho Daccach
76 Plays5 years ago
Juancho Daccach takes us on a journey of his own experience with grief, after the death of his best friend to cancer.
He wore many hats during this journey; medical hat, friend and coach. His process of becoming a Coach in Emotional Intelligence and Work Related Stress Disorder, has played a huge part in his own grief journey and now helping others.
(Some explicit language)
Contact Juancho Daccach on LinkedIn
Music: www.rinaldisound.net
Editing: Carlos Andres Londono
Get in touch with Kendra to be a guest or to receive grief coaching www.griefgratitudeandthegrayinbetween.com
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Transcript
Seeking Help During Grief
00:00:02
Speaker
One of the biggest things during grief is understanding when you can do it on your own or understanding when you need help. Asking for help, having insight does not make you weak, makes you strong in the sense of accepting and moving forward and wanting to get better.
Insight in Psychiatry
00:00:21
Speaker
In psychiatry, that's called insight. And when you have insight and you want to get better, that is the first phase of recovery.
Podcast Introduction
00:00:34
Speaker
Hello and welcome to Grief, Gratitude, and the Gray in Between podcast. This podcast is about exploring the grief that occurs at different times in our lives in which we have had major changes and transitions that literally shake us to the core and make us experience grief.
00:00:57
Speaker
I created this podcast for people to feel a little less hopeless and alone in their own grief process as they hear the stories of others who have had similar journeys.
A Longtime Friendship
00:01:09
Speaker
I'm Kendra Rinaldi, your host. Now, let's dive right in to today's episode.
00:01:20
Speaker
Welcome to today's episode. I'm so excited because I actually have a longtime friend. I have known our guest for, oh my gosh, it's a little scary to say how long I've known him because it's going to basically let you all know how old we are.
00:01:38
Speaker
We've known each other for approximately 30 years, but funny enough, we probably haven't seen each other in at least 20 or more, so 25 or so, but we've known each other for that long. So I have on this podcast today my friend, Wancho Dakash. Wancho, hello, my friend. Hey, Kendra, this is awesome. Thank you for having me.
00:02:03
Speaker
I'm so happy you're on.
Cali, Colombia Memories
00:02:05
Speaker
Now to the listeners, Juancho and I both grew up in Colombia, Cali, Colombia, and we've known each other about, yeah, since we were probably like, what, teenagers, right? Like in the parties and stuff, even though we went in different schools. Yeah. It's, it's, um, I don't know if you mentioned to your listeners how great of a dancer you are. So, um, when we went out on our parties in our schools, when we were kids,
00:02:33
Speaker
A lot of people used to fight for the best dancers and you know Kendra was one of the ones that uh that was very very heavily fought for because she is a great dancer so don't mean to put you on your spot on your own podcast but um
00:02:46
Speaker
Yeah, that is a true. So we know each other since we're what, 10, 11, 12, maybe along those lines? Yeah, maybe around 14 or so. But yeah, the funny thing is that I was going to say about you, that if somebody needs somebody to be the life of the party, Huancho is your person.
Spreading Joy in Hardships
00:03:03
Speaker
Huancho, this is something about you that I remember very clearly, is that you are somebody that walks into a room and
00:03:11
Speaker
automatically lights it up with your smile, with your energy. And you are also someone that's everybody's friend. Everybody is Juan Chiu's friend, or at least we all think we are your friend. Let me put it that way. Oh, man. You're giving me goosebumps right now. We're not even like a minute in. That is my lifetime goal, you know, making people comfortable around me and happy around me, transmitting joy and happiness, even though
00:03:40
Speaker
you know, we have hard moments in life. So by you telling me this, it's just, it brings, it brings so many feels right now. So thank you for that. I still try to do the same. It gets harder with the days and years. And, but yeah, that's, that was, that was my mission. Sometimes it was seen as a, as a clownish kind of guy, but I was just doing my part to make people laugh.
00:04:06
Speaker
And you definitely, you have that impact in my life for sure. I know exactly your personality.
Medical Advice Across Distance
00:04:11
Speaker
And that's why I know that even though I have not seen you in so many years, I can still think of you fondly and be able to reach out, make a phone call. Even when I had, you know, some medical things, I wanted to kind of just go over something with you with my shoulder. I was like, Wancho, would you mind looking at my MRI things or whatever?
00:04:29
Speaker
Yeah, definitely. So I just felt that connection even though we had not talked. So thank you. And you are a dad of two beautiful girls and a husband to one. And your journey from Cali, Colombia ended up landing you here in the States at this moment. So we're kind of going to go into this loop and we're going to go into the journey and start with the hardest probably question
00:04:57
Speaker
right now, right to the core of what this podcast is about, which is in the topic of grief.
Grieving a Friend's Loss
00:05:05
Speaker
So we want to talk about the loss of your friend, Gustavo, and somebody that I knew as well, and ripping the band-aid. Are you ready for that?
00:05:21
Speaker
Oh, I'm ready. And if you thought I was the life of the party, I got my energy from him. So now you know, it's everything contextualized right now. You are feeding off of his energy. Okay. So we're going to talk a little bit about this experience because some of the interviews I've had, people have shared about the death of a parent, the death of a sibling.
00:05:46
Speaker
And one of the things that sometimes we don't talk about is how much even just the death of a friend can impact our lives because really friends are the family we choose. And I know for sure that goose and that's short for Gustavo was that to you. So I am going to let you go ahead and start sharing a little bit about your relationship and the dynamics of what happened to Gustavo. Sure.
00:06:16
Speaker
You're completely right, Kendra. I mean, friends are the family you choose, but Gustavo was not just a friend. He was that special kind of brother, your same age brother. Now, to put people in context, I grew up in a family. I mean, I don't have anything to complain about. My dad and mom
00:06:36
Speaker
had my brother and my sister two years apart, but then there was a big gap of 12 years and I was born. So when they were out in college and they both came here to the US, I was kind of left as an only child growing up. I mean, I knew I had a brother and a sister, but there wasn't that close-aged brother-sister relationship. I had grew up more like having two sets of parents. And that being said,
00:07:06
Speaker
my relationships with a couple of friends became brotherly in a sense of having that person there that you could treat as a brother.
Colombian School System's Impact
00:07:17
Speaker
And that is not something that you're allowed to choose because it takes two to tangle, right? You have to find that other person that sees you the same way.
00:07:30
Speaker
And you don't go around when you're a little kid choosing who your best friend is going to be. You kind of talk to everybody about who your best friend is, but if they don't see you as their best friend, then it's a one-sided relationship and that doesn't work. With Gustavo, it was different because when we grew up, maybe to
00:07:55
Speaker
to have the audience understand, our school system is what they know here as a private school. And you go into school when you're five and you leave when you're 17. And you are with your class from five years old to 17 under the same building. You don't change buildings and people like you do here in the US. It's a private school where you go 14 years of your life.
00:08:23
Speaker
So when we were growing up, I mean, we were in different classrooms. We knew each other, but there's a picture we have when we were five years old and.
00:08:32
Speaker
That's kindergarten, right? Kindergarten, I guess. That's kindergarten. In our school, because it was from a British origin, we have like nursery and then kindergarten. I know your school was American based, so it's a little bit different, but still it was the same system of one private school under the same roof. You grow up with the same 50, 60 people for 14 years.
00:08:54
Speaker
You know, and that's not only the horizontal way of seeing it. You also have friends from years above you and years below you. So that creates kind of a vertical type of friendship. So you're really related to a lot of people from your school. To actually have one person that you could relate to, it takes time. It's not immediate. So it took a while for us to become the friends we came to be before he passed. We graduated high school.
00:09:24
Speaker
being best friends. And yes, I am 45 and I still trust and believe in the concept of being best friends. I actually said that in the funeral. People laughed at me because I still said at 40 something, that time was 30 ish close to 40, that I have a best friend. But I felt this being a best friend
00:09:51
Speaker
back in the day. And we graduated high school as best friends. And one of the things that happened in high school that can prove to you that there were no kind of jealousy, but just celebration of each other's triumphs, apart from me celebrating his awesome hairdo and look, we got
00:10:15
Speaker
in the forefront, both Ustawa and me to be the head boy of the class, which is in American terms, I don't want to say the prom king, right? But it was more than an academic type social level. And I was chosen by the teachers instead of him. And there was not an inch of jealousy or resentment
00:10:42
Speaker
He laughed, he congratulated me and life went on and that was just awesome. And when I got picked, I shared it with him and he was genuinely happy. So those are signs that you are actually meeting somebody that's going to be there for you to celebrate your wins.
00:11:05
Speaker
And regardless if you beat them, they're still going to celebrate them. So that was giving me perspective on this is what I want to do with people. I want to celebrate their wins without any type of resentment. Even though I may lose or have lost to them, I will congratulate them. So Gustavo taught me that very, very, very early on. Then we went to the army and in the army, we got split.
00:11:36
Speaker
He went and stayed in the battalion.
00:11:39
Speaker
locally, and we got put in buses and sent to Bogotá, which is Colombia's capital.
Army Experiences and Growth
00:11:45
Speaker
I mean, I missed him, but he was not... It was to each his own, right? He was surviving in Cali, and we were surviving with what we needed to do in Bogotá. I was in the Presidential Guard, and he was in Cali's Battalion, which was more of a country-type warfare army base. But we did talk- And this is during the time that still-
00:12:09
Speaker
Sorry. And this is during the time in Colombia that was really, really critical time in our country. So this is not just... Let me put people into perspective. What they saw on Narcos, on Netflix, we saw in the news because it was happening right in front of our eyes. Now I know that I'm about two years older than you Kendra. I think you graduated in 94. I graduated in 92.
00:12:36
Speaker
And when I graduated in 92, this was a whole Pablo Escobar in his own little mansion jail thing.
00:12:44
Speaker
that is portrayed perfectly in the, one of the narco sessions on Netflix. So when I saw that actually one of our, and one of our friends collaborated, one of our friends is one of the directors of that show. So we, one of my cousins, one of my cousins did that and he did a great job. Uh, wait, are these your cousin and these your cousin? Oh, you see, I'm here saying, Oh, that's awesome.
00:13:10
Speaker
Awesome. Okay. Sorry. Totally segway. Love it. No worries. But yeah, when we were in the army, this was happening. So it was to each his own, right? And when I came to Cali for vacation or whenever I had leave, obviously we connected and we were like, okay, what are we going to do? Where are we going to go? Where are we going to party? But this was like a weekend or a week tops.
00:13:34
Speaker
And this was happening from July 92 to December 92. And if you recall, Kendra, I was a very good friend of a friend of yours that graduated with you at that time.
00:13:53
Speaker
Yep. So at that time, my go-to friend, because he lived one floor above me in the building that I live, was not Gustavo. He was in the army. He was in his own thing. I had another friend at that time, which was younger and I kind of felt like a big brother type of relationship, which I really enjoyed until that relationship moved on. But when I got to the final stages of my army's first six months,
00:14:21
Speaker
This is where we started to do anything that we could to get sent to the Sinai Peninsula in Egypt. To each his own again, survival. How am I gonna go to the Sinai? And I have to be honest, I was a little bit selfish because again, I'm gonna repeat this to each his own. How am I gonna get there? If others get there, that's on them. And Gustavo, he was in Cali. So I was kind of telling him
00:14:48
Speaker
on the sidelines very, very, very weakly what I was doing because I wanted to get on that list. I was, you know, I was in a position with what I was doing in the battalion in the presidential guard.
00:15:02
Speaker
that, again, with my family connections, put us in a position where we could actually apply to go and get the English test. We got the English test, I got on the list, and then I got one of the best scores, so I was on the list to go to the Sinai. And then I remember telling Gustavo, I got on the list. And you know what? He said, congratulations. I hope you have fun.
00:15:30
Speaker
Uh, you take care and we'll talk whenever we talk again, not an inch of jealousy, not an inch of nothingness, but just happiness for me. And I've always questioned myself if that would have been the other way around. I probably wouldn't have felt that way because that's me. I would have potentially been a little bit resentful or kind of pissed off to the fact that he didn't help me get there. But again, when I got in.
00:16:00
Speaker
and I traveled there, I still was thinking of ways of getting him to the Sinai, even though the flight had already left. But here comes the silver lining. As soon as I get to the Sinai, or not as soon as I get there, we get moved from the battalion we were to a special other building where all the people that are going to fly to the Sinai get the pre-training before you fly out.
00:16:29
Speaker
And we got sent there, and this was around the late December timeframe of 1992, because we left January 3rd. And we were there. And I start hearing that two weeks from the day we leave, there's another flight that goes out.
00:16:52
Speaker
And I start questioning, wait, hold on, what do you mean there's another flight that goes out? Yeah, every contingent leaves into sets of people. The first flight, and two weeks later, the second flight. And I go, okay, first person I think of is Gustav. There's a chance, yeah, there's a chance.
00:17:14
Speaker
Exactly and because we had the conversation was kind of over because I had been on the list He hadn't been on the list. He had accepted it. He had moved on So I remember when I found out about that second flight calling Gustavo and saying You know what? There is a second flight in two weeks. I don't know what you're gonna do But you're gonna get on that plane start moving whenever you need to move, but you're getting on that plane
00:17:43
Speaker
So I traveled out and we didn't, again, no internet, no cellular phones, nothing. So I kind of told him that when I flew out to Kali for that December 31st party, New Year's party, like my last New Year's party before I left the Sinai, I didn't see Gustavo.
00:18:07
Speaker
He wasn't on leave. They didn't give him a chance to leave. He had to be in his battalion on December 31st for New Year's. So I got there on the 31st. I went to the party and on January 2nd, first flight, I was back in Bogota. On the 3rd, I was out moving out to the Sinai Peninsula. So starting to adapt to that was running in parallel to
00:18:37
Speaker
confirming to Gustavo that there was gonna be a second flight. And as soon as I got there and I asked and they confirmed it, we used to do something called a call check. Call check in the rotary phones that we used to have, you were able to dial directly, but if it passed a minute, you'd get charged. You could talk up to 59 seconds.
00:19:06
Speaker
and not get charged. So we were calling
00:19:10
Speaker
and speaking really fast and somebody else was timing is like, hang up, hang up. It's like, I'll call you later, call you later. And we, and we hung up and we called again, all of this hiding from our senior management army wise, our generals and our captains. And because we were found, we, you know, we would have gotten some type of punishment. So I was able to get on the phone with Gustavo for, I think it was two of those calls.
00:19:37
Speaker
And I would just kind of went all commando on him. And I said, listen to me. This is me. And he got all happy. I said, no, shut up. Listen to me. There is a second flight confirmed leaving X day at X time. Hold on. Hold on. I'll call you back. I'll call you back. And I hung up. I called him back. He was like, listen, I can't call you back again. There is a second flight. You better get on that plane. Do it. Just do it. Come on. Just do it. I got to hang up. Sorry, Michael. Kind of like went on for 15 days, 16 days. And then I, um, you know, the second, the second, um,
00:20:06
Speaker
The second trip was coming in. So, you know, my question was, I will get his name on the list. And I got friends with one of the commanders there that had the list. And there he was in the list. So that was a breath of fresh air. By that time, my position in the Sinai was the force photographer.
00:20:32
Speaker
So I was there when the bus arrived and I remember he stuck his head out the window, gave me an okay sign with a thumbs up sign and I snapped that picture. I just focused on that smile and I just took that picture. And to this day I remember the joy and happiness and the hug we gave each other when he got down to that bus. Because this was gonna be eight months
00:21:01
Speaker
that were going to be so much easier because he was there. So we became brothers and when we came back, it all changed because I was going to go to Georgia and he was going to go to one of the most well-known universities in our country. And the majority of friends that were from Bogota that were in the army with us,
00:21:28
Speaker
went with him to the same program of industrial engineering.
00:21:33
Speaker
Me, on the other hand, now is my time to be alone, but this was something I was looking for since I was a kid. Remember my brother and sister, they came to the States. And ever since I saw them, I've always wanted to come to the States to get my degree here. And so my time had
Friendship Despite Separation
00:21:48
Speaker
come. So I was ready. I was going to miss him, yes, but I was ready to come to the US, go to the University of Georgia, get my biochemistry major with genetics minor.
00:21:59
Speaker
and it started from there. We would see each other every time I went back. My Georgia experience was only a year. I didn't finish college here because I was out of country, out of state, and it was just
00:22:14
Speaker
very expensive and I wanted and I wanted to change to med school so I went back to Colombia after a year in Georgia and I started med school so we started living in Bogota he did his stuff I did mine we met at parties
00:22:29
Speaker
We met at my place we had very a lot of friends in common we went to a lot of parties together we party together okay, so we're gonna we've Established the type of relationship you guys had which is one that I love being able to go on memory lane with you and be able to and
00:22:50
Speaker
not my memory lane, your memory lane and be able to live that with you and be able to get that feeling of that relationship you guys had. I can see all those emotions and that bond of that friendship of how you guys developed with going through so many different aspects of your life. Then who got married first? Because that's a huge thing. Who got married first?
00:23:16
Speaker
oh remember who's the emotional guy who wanted to get married ever since he was 10 me okay so here's but yeah i'm curious here's a here's a thing
00:23:27
Speaker
We're missing a big chunk of stuff back in the style. I'm going to have to do people to make sure. Get comfortable. Get comfortable. You're going to have to listen to this and edit whatever you want. I love it. For me, it's like a movie. So I love to hear the whole story. So whoever's listening to it is going on this ride with us. So go ahead. So this is so funny because as I told you, he decided to move to Cali.
00:23:53
Speaker
and start and continue his business with his brothers. It was a framing company, a custom frame company. And he started working full blown from Cali. And I stayed in Bogota because I was still my med school. So it was me going to Cali and him being in Cali. And this is where we just became, even with that distance in between every time I landed in Cali, he actually
00:24:24
Speaker
told my parents that he was picking me up. And he did, and he was waiting for me in the airport. And going to the airport in Cali is not a fun thing to do. It just takes forever. But he said, I'll pick you up, and then we will go and do this. And we will go and- Let's go to Panchito. After I pick you up, let's go to Panchito. Yeah, we'll take a stroll, which in Spanish is called Borondo, right? El Borondo. And he was like, I'll pick you up, and then we'll take a Borondo. We'll take a stroll.
00:24:53
Speaker
got home about 2 a.m. And then at 8 a.m. the next day it's like okay what are we doing now and then what are we doing now and then what are we doing now we became that kind of if you can picture the Tom and Jerry big dog and like Spike and and the bigger dog
00:25:14
Speaker
That was us, right? Those two dogs, right? What are we gonna do? What are we gonna do? What are we gonna do? And we started, you know, partying and having fun. And he got a group of girls and he said, you want to come out? It's like, sure. And we started going out and then we went out this way and that way. And all of a sudden, I, again, the emotional guy, dated somebody that was in med school as well, was also from her hometown, but was in med school in the city that I was in.
00:25:43
Speaker
And I just remember when I dated her for the first time, our first date, I called Gusta when I said, this is it. I'm getting married. So I made the mistake of going into that relationship in fifth gear. But I knew that I had found the one. And and I called him.
00:26:08
Speaker
remember on December when I dropped her off at her house I called him and I said I found the one and he asked me who is that and I told him her name is this and she's red-headed and she's got freckles and he knew me I was all of my life I have felt for
00:26:25
Speaker
the red heads, freckled, green eyes. My wife now is none of the above but freckles. But that's a different story. So I fell deeply in love with this woman and went back
00:26:41
Speaker
It's an understatement to say I fell deeply in love because I was just, I don't want to say obsessed, but just that was it. That's a click. This is a person I'm going to have kids and spend my life with. And obviously she became friends with Gustavo and we started going out together. Gustavo didn't ever settle with somebody, but he had periods of going out with girlfriends for a long time. And he had a couple of those, but him getting married,
00:27:10
Speaker
that was never going to happen. Um, so at five years in my relationship with this person, this red headed, um, she breaks up with me and that took me down a dark, dark path. Um, and I'm talking medication, psychiatrist, deep depression,
00:27:39
Speaker
because all the castles that I had built up in the clouds were all of a sudden struck down and I hit the floor hard. Okay, I want to stop you there. I want to stop you there.
Grief in Relationships and Expectations
00:27:52
Speaker
Now looking back, could you see that as one of your first major grief experiences in your life? Hell yes. Hell yes. And people sometimes don't realize and they're like, oh, come on, move on.
00:28:07
Speaker
She wasn't for you, but people don't understand that it's not only about the time that you put into a relationship, but what you just said about the fact that you had all these expectations and all these ideas already in your mind, you're completely ripping that from underneath you and they're gone. It's like everything is just gone of what you've envisioned this to be. And it's so valid to see that as grief and really
00:28:35
Speaker
Now, of course, now we're adults and now we know a lot about other things of emotions and stuff. But looking back, then you can know why it was you were so distraught because you were grieving. So every time your life changes drastically from something that is potentially unexpected, you experience the five stages, the five Kubler-Ross stages of grief.
00:28:59
Speaker
It is very hard to get to the David Kesser sixth, right? The meaning of this, because you're so not into wanting to know why the hell this is happening to you, because it takes a while. But every time your life shifts,
00:29:15
Speaker
you experience grief. And I came from a medical program that's very heavy on psychiatry.
Medical Insight into Grief
00:29:22
Speaker
So I knew what grief was and the stages. And I knew... Did you know in that moment you were feeling that, that you knew you were grieving? Yes, of course. I knew that I was very close to a deep depression because I clicked every item in the box.
00:29:39
Speaker
I started losing weight. I started getting funky ideas in my head. And at that time, another friend of mine told me, OK, you need help. And that's when I said when I saw my mom crying. That's when I said, OK, I do need help. And I started getting help. How did Gustavo cope with this? He was very relaxed in a sense of snap out of it, man. It's like, come on.
00:30:06
Speaker
So that was his attitude of life. It's just like, just get on with it, man. And I take my hats off to people that are able to get to acceptance really quick.
00:30:20
Speaker
You know, they don't go through the denial, anger, bargaining or sadness. They just like take it. Fine. This is what I needed or whatever. And they go to acceptance and they move on. And that was Gustavo. At least until, you know, at least up to that point. That's why we were so different because I dwelled in
00:30:40
Speaker
A lot of the early stages, the emotions that are attached to every phase of grief, he moved. He didn't even get to denial. He was just like, okay, this happened to me moving on. And I was like, how the heck do you do that?
00:30:56
Speaker
Right? Honestly, if I can jump, I have to actually jump into this part because I don't think that the five stages or six or what necessarily fit into everybody, into everybody's experience.
00:31:11
Speaker
So there's different ways of grieving and sometimes there's no, not a particular order. Uh, so it just kind of changes. So it's good as a framework and for some people that may be that way, but for those that don't experience it that way, then sometimes can be a little confusing, but like, wait, I'm not, I'm not experiencing it in these steps. So, and I've asked myself is how does knowledge bias you in the way of thinking? You see, I knew the phases of grief.
00:31:41
Speaker
You were trying to analyze everything. You were trying to analyze your emotions. You were sacrificing yourself. When you have knowledge in your head and something happens, you can go in a couple of ways, right? You either overanalyze and overthink.
00:32:00
Speaker
You either try to find a solution based on what you know, and this is all preventive thinking that you're taught in medicine. You have all this knowledge in your head for whenever whatever patient comes in through the door, you need to go to your data files and say, okay, this person is experiencing A, B, and C, therefore it might be A, B, and C disease. So whenever that thing is in your brain and something is happening to you,
00:32:26
Speaker
you automatically start thinking, oh, I may have this. Oh, the phases of grief. This might be this, this, this. Oh, I need to do this. But if you don't have the knowledge, like Gustavo potentially didn't have it because he didn't study medicine. He didn't care what grief was. He was more of a cavalier type of whatever happens to me, I'll take it, turn around and face the other way and move along, which I had before I had the knowledge.
00:32:50
Speaker
And that's something that think separates the world into two people, two groups of people. The people that know what grief is and the people that don't know what grief is and don't care what grief is. And by not knowing, they kind of feel that it's something that they have to take, at least from our culture. We have to be strong about things and move on. There's no room for emotions.
00:33:19
Speaker
And me being the emotional type, that's when I started questioning, if I'm going to be this type and I'm not going to be able to change to the other type, not by far, how can I start training my emotions to cope with them and dominate them before they dominate me? So enter all the emotional intelligence stuff. But that is kind of a next level conversation where right now in the middle of me breaking up,
00:33:44
Speaker
going down a rabbit hole of despair, experiencing grief, experiencing grief stage by stage. I mean, come on, there was denial. There was anger. I started bargaining with her. Then came the sadness and just, I mean, it sunk me down and acceptance came late in the game. But retrospectively, I can tell you that acceptance was achieved with therapy.
00:34:14
Speaker
It wasn't something that was easy for me to do by myself. I had to ask for help and one of the biggest things during grief is understanding when you can do it on your own or understanding when you need help. Asking for help, having insight does not make you weak, makes you strong in the sense of accepting
00:34:38
Speaker
and moving forward and wanting to get better in psychiatry. That's called insight. And when you have insight and you want to get better, that is the first phase of recovery.
00:34:51
Speaker
People that sink into depressions and deep sadness don't have that will to get better. I had the will to get better even though I was suffering enormously. And one of the things that guided me was that my best friend couldn't care less. He was cavalier. I mean, he couldn't care less, not what I was feeling, but he didn't give it the emotional importance that I was giving him. So I was seeing somebody that was able to, you know,
00:35:18
Speaker
stop it and move forward. And I still know a lot of people that are not emotional at all. And I kind of envy them or sometimes I want to be like them, but I kind of understood that I'm not like them. And then I saw my mom, she was suffering, seeing me suffer. So those were the type of signals that I was taking in to say, you need to do something about it. And that's when I started getting help. And that's when I started evolving into acceptance.
Love and Personal Growth
00:35:46
Speaker
And on the side, I met the person, this is after six months of therapy, I met the person that is now my wife and that helped because I knew from my mistakes that I had entered this relationship in fifth gear. Now I knew what to do.
00:36:06
Speaker
and I started seeing life in a completely different format. I met a peer. I met somebody that I could relate to eye to eye. She was younger than me, but I wasn't a big brother, little sister type of relationship of overprotection that I had with redheaded girl, right? She was six years younger than me. So I had that kind of overprotective
00:36:29
Speaker
a way of handling that relationship. This was a person that was self-sufficient. She was working already. She was doing her stuff. She didn't care if I was there or I was not there in her life. We took this in first gear. We went on easy. We tried to see how things were going to turn out. And here we are a long time afterwards, two kids living in Indiana.
00:36:57
Speaker
So apparently we clicked and it worked and retrospectively I can talk about this, but she met me while I was coming out of this big, big depression and deep sadness. And she thought that I was going to dump her to go back to the redhead. Well, that never happened. Part of my strategy of getting better was to go to Peru and do the Inca trail. So I went by myself to Peru for 20 some days and I hike Peru by myself.
00:37:25
Speaker
I had just met my wife, the person that's my wife now, and I told her straight off the bat, this is who I am. I'm coming out of a relationship and I'm going to Peru for 20 days. Take it or leave it kind of negotiation. This was me being cavalier again, gaining that self support. And again, that happened, that worked well. Gustavo came into the mix immediately because he was my best friend. So he had to approve.
00:37:55
Speaker
He had to meet her and they, you know, clicked immediately. Clicked to a point that, again, to your initial question, which it took me 40 minutes to answer, obviously I got married first. And Gustavo did not get married until he was deep into his diagnosis, which I'm assuming we're going to get to in a while, but I got married first. He was my best man.
00:38:22
Speaker
and it was just a no-brainer. We had had so much fun, the three of us, and at that time he was going steady, the steadier, the steadiest I've seen him go and in Bogota as well, so he had moved back to Bogota and we were kind of, you know, living this
Brotherly Bonds
00:38:42
Speaker
dream. He even dated my wife's best friend so for
00:38:47
Speaker
like four or five months, it was two best friends with two best friends. That was like heaven. That didn't work. Right. But it was just it was just like, this is what was meant to be all along. You know, and he every time he came to Bogota that he either had a argument with his girlfriend or everything. He came to our apartment. We were now you know, we already had our own apartment and we had a room that we call him the Gustavo room because that was where he stayed.
00:39:16
Speaker
And yeah, and he was you know, he was he was my brother and then his diagnosis and all that stuff came in so let's talk about that because and I know that it It's been let's see. I'm gonna calculate because you will know exactly but I'm gonna see if I remember the year that he passed away 2013
Gustavo's Cancer Journey
00:39:42
Speaker
January 2013. Is that correct? January 3rd. His diagnosis, so his cancer diagnosis was how many years prior to him passing and he was married already when he was diagnosed, correct? No. No, no, no. He wasn't? Oh, oh. No.
00:40:07
Speaker
As I was in one of my stages of orthopedics, and arthroplasty, which is a replacement of hips and knees, I started learning about, at that time, what was coaching. And people at that time didn't know what coaching was, and they kind of related it to sports. And I was seen as the oddball. What is this arthroplasty surgeon doing with coaching?
00:40:33
Speaker
And I just fell in love with his philosophy once I understood it. And I went deep into coaching. And I wanted to do health coaching. So I needed to do personal coaching first. And this was all before I went to Barcelona.
00:40:55
Speaker
I needed to do personal coaching or life coaching first so I can get certified in health coaching that, coincidentally enough, was going to be given in Barcelona while I was going to be there for at least for one year. We ended up saying two. But the thing is, when I was doing my coaching stuff, getting ready to fly to Barcelona, that's when we opened up a restaurant in Cali.
00:41:26
Speaker
And in the opening of that restaurant, Gustavo put me on the side and says, hey, I'm having this pain in my lower right quadrant. And again, remember what I told you? When somebody tells you something, you immediately go to the five diagnosis that they could be. This was very, very
00:41:48
Speaker
in line with an appendicitis. And I knew it, not even, you know, I just put it, I just did a small test and pushed it. And when I let go, it hurt. When he walked, it hurt. He hadn't had a fever, but he had kind of a nausea. So I said, man, this is like appendicitis. You should go get it checked. And I was in the middle of, you know, the turmoil of opening a restaurant and doing this with your partners and this and that.
00:42:14
Speaker
And his pain came to a point where he actually did go to the ER. And then the next day when I called and said, hey, what happened? And he was actually at this time dating this person that would eventually be his wife. He told me, no, they told me it was an indigestion and to go home. And I said, that's weird. And I still, sorry, I still, it's okay.
00:42:44
Speaker
I still feel I could have done more. This is not something that I talk too much about because I have a tendency to carry my mistakes for a long time. I should have insisted of him going
00:43:03
Speaker
to the ER again and get properly tested. But I didn't because- If you were your own life coach, yeah. If you were in your own life coach, you would right now know that, it's interesting as a life coach, you'd probably say, yeah, you can't hold on to that, right? But yeah, looking, yeah, but- That coaching helped me before you could help others, right? So I still think that I could have potentially insisted more
00:43:33
Speaker
But coincidentally, his pain went away. And now I mean, now I know why it went away. But but if you are suspecting appendicitis, and you go to an ER where experienced or at least you hope experienced doctors are going to do whatever they need to do to give you diagnosis, and then all of a sudden with whatever they did, the pain goes away, you automatically assume that this is over.
00:44:03
Speaker
It was an appendicitis, definitely, but it was due to something else. So kind of life went by, right? He was fine. I was fine. We were doing our stuff. I was living in, you know, I was getting ready to go to Barcelona and he was doing his own thing and his pain came back.
00:44:30
Speaker
How long is that after? How long after the first time? Maybe a couple of months, two or three months. But his pain was different. It was more diffuse in his abdomen. So he went in and at this time they did some additional testing and they found things that shouldn't have been there. And they found that the appendix was kind of burst, had burst and
00:45:00
Speaker
there's a very low percentage of people that have appendicitis that come back from the pathologist saying that what you had in your appendix was a tumor or was cancer. Man, it's like all the rings of the Swiss cheese aligning. So it was a case that Gustavo wasn't that small percentage of people that had appendicitis.
00:45:27
Speaker
that did not get the appendix taken out like it should have. And what happened was that the appendix was causing pressure pop and the tumor cells left and seated in his abdomen. Appendical cancer is so rare, there's no specific treatment for it.
00:45:50
Speaker
The chemotherapy and radiotherapy that you receive is aimed at cells from the large intestine, but the appendix doesn't have the same cells. Again, they have not developed something specifically for the appendix because one is too rare and two, because there's an indication that if you come in and you suspect appendicitis, you have to take it out. That didn't happen.
00:46:20
Speaker
Started going to doctors now that they found that there was something weird Then he you know now we know what it was. It was a carcinoma from the appendix again once I hear a medical term my mind goes to my database and I knew this was not good and I took that hard because again
00:46:46
Speaker
Every time your life changes, it's a grief process.
Navigating Complex Emotions
00:46:50
Speaker
So I started going into denial. I remember this clearly saying this can't be happened. This just can't be it. I mean, this is not the way he's going to go. I mean, come on. Really? Again, denial then mixed with anger and anger
00:47:11
Speaker
was at the ER that didn't diagnose what they had to diagnose, that they didn't treat the way they needed to treat. And it was, again, just me being heartbroken and pissed off. Our other friend at that time was also an MD. He now lives in Indianapolis. He was close to him as we were all kind of three at that time very close, but I've always felt it would start being like a brother.
00:47:40
Speaker
and he told me the diagnosis. I went into my database of internet of PubMed and I know how to read articles that are sound epidemiologically that I can make a decision on. That's what they teach us. You need to make a decision and you need to put that in front of a lawyer in a court of law
00:48:04
Speaker
you need to tell them that this article is valid because X, Y, and Z. So I started digging on his diagnosis. What was a prognosis? And what were we dealing with here? And it was not good. It was a 60% survivorship at five years with a very aggressive treatment that, again, was rare because the disease was rare. And we started talking.
00:48:34
Speaker
again, Gustavo, very positive. Again, I take my hat off because he had this diagnosis and he was taking it on as, again, skipping all the faces of grief. He was going to acceptance and then meaning. He was going to, okay, if this means I need to do this, this, and this, then I'll do it. Let's get on with it. Let's continue with life. And he continued working on what he was working. He was now with what
00:48:59
Speaker
who was going to become his wife, getting a real estate agency moving. He was in the mix, he was doing, he was moving and he was suffering from a bad ass tumor that was spread now all over his abdomen. And he was in pain, but he was taking it in and he was going at it and he was not letting that stop him. So the time came
00:49:27
Speaker
for the surgeon that was going to operate on him to tell him what they were going to do. And before that, you know, we had had a conversation and thanks to my, what I had learned from coaching, I was realistic, but optimistic. I told him what he had and what I thought was going to happen.
00:49:54
Speaker
Um, but then I did tell him that I thought that it was going to be okay. Um, maybe not lying, but putting my positive part on it, right? Defying the statistics. Um, and he, he believed it. It's like, yeah, yeah, yeah. So I told him because again, that was a moment in my life where I switched my focus of coaching and its purpose to a company.
00:50:24
Speaker
people or families whose life changes because of a diagnosis. That's when I had my nirvana in where I wanted to go with my coaching. It wasn't rehab of my surgical patients anymore, even though that was there because I was going to dedicate myself to doing that. But it was a click in my mind and saying, there's a gap between
00:50:52
Speaker
the moment you're being told what you have and the next steps, whatever those steps are. So I decide to go with his fiance, one of his brothers, his mom, to talk to the surgeon and his assistant. This doctor just very quickly and very triumphantly told him what they were gonna do. And he was really fast in explaining. And I was going,
00:51:22
Speaker
internally going, holy crap, this is a massive surgery. So I went back and studied the surgery and it was ridiculous. And he was then telling us, yeah, it usually goes around between 10 and 20 hours, 10 and 20 hours per surgery. That's ridiculous. But again,
00:51:46
Speaker
We were taking it and Gustavo was taking it the best. His mom was affected, his brother was affected, his fiance was affected. And here I am sitting saying, shit, this not only affects you as a person,
00:52:02
Speaker
This affects your love life. This affects your sexual life. This affects your family life. This affects your business life. And there's nobody there to accompany you in the process where your life is changed by a diagnosis. And that's where I said, this is where my coaching needs to go. And this is my first case. So I started applying what I had learned initially and being ready
00:52:31
Speaker
to undergo this process with my best friend and his family. So fortunately enough, the surgery would be done in the hospital that I was doing my fellowship in. And that was very, very fortunate. What a blessing. Yeah, what a blessing. Because that is when I felt, OK, how am I going to make this different for them and for him?
00:53:01
Speaker
And I decided to talk to them. I remember getting in the car after we received all that information and seeing them talk, seeing them and hearing them talk, seeing them because facial expressions for me is a passion and body language is a passion. So when I say seeing them talk, I was analyzing
00:53:22
Speaker
their facial expressions, and the anguish, and everybody was taking it in so many different ways. But then I looked at Gustavo, and he had a big ass smile on his face. And he was going like, yeah, don't worry, we'll get through this, yada, yada, yada. And I was going, how the hell do you do it? Because I knew that this was going to kill him. And it was just, OK, how am I going to make whatever time we have left work?
00:53:51
Speaker
I could have gone and told him that. But again, part of the process is being optimistic. So I was with him positively along the way. And I came back to Bogota. He stayed in Cali. We kept on talking until the day of the surgery. But then before the surgery, before he decided to actually undergo the surgery, he calls me up. This is so funny. He says,
00:54:17
Speaker
I've been studying and I think I'm going to go to Jalisco in Mexico to get some coffee enemas. And I go, wait, what? And he goes, yep, I've been studying. There's this institute in Mexico that cures cancer by applying coffee enemas. And I go, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait a minute. Right. Don't don't jump the boat right now.
00:54:46
Speaker
let me do my medical digging and I'll get back to you. And whatever decision you take, I'll support it. I could have gone ballistic on him right then and just gone completely, completely impulsive and told him, hell no, you're not doing this. But coaching helped me to take it, accept it, don't act upon it while you're hot.
00:55:16
Speaker
but let it sink, ask for time, and then potentially get back to him with my medical thought on it. But letting him know that whatever decision he would take, I would support him. Because a coach does not tell the other person what to do, he accompanies them to find options and they have to decide.
00:55:40
Speaker
but I knew it was in the first stage. So obviously I got my computer on, started looking at this institute, went into their cases, looked at literature, and there were a case report of two or three cases in which it had worked. None of those three or four cases were the type of tumor that he had. So we got on a call, and I remember having this call, and I said, okay, I did my thing. I even called the institute in Mexico.
00:56:09
Speaker
and asked them if they had any cases on this specific tumor and they said no. So I called Gustavo and I gave him my information. I told him the prognosis from the literature, the 60% survival rate of five years, if he undergoes surgery. But then I told him, I wouldn't know what your survivorship would be with the enema strategy, which makes it
00:56:36
Speaker
more unpredictable, which gets to the uncertainty unknown bucket. And now I know that that uncertainty unknown bucket route that he didn't take could potentially have caused more stress.
00:56:52
Speaker
Because even though I accept all types of medicine, what I don't like, it's when they're not founded by data and that whenever they fail, they come to Westernized medicine seeking for help when it could potentially be too late. And I let him know that. I said,
00:57:09
Speaker
If you go to this thing in Mexico and it doesn't work, it may be too late for Western medicine to help. If you go to the Western side of things and do the surgery that the doctor explained, you have a 60% chance of living five years. We hung up. I'm assuming he discussed it with his fiance and his family. And he called me about a week after and said, I've taken the decision of going into surgery. The surgery is going to be this day.
00:57:39
Speaker
yada yada yada, and we're already working to get it. So I said, I didn't want to say anything, but I congratulate you. And I that that's what I would have done. Empathy right there. Another pillar of emotional intelligence. I don't know what would have happened if he would have told me he was going to go to Mexico. I try not to think about it too much. But I would have supported him.
00:58:04
Speaker
Um, because that's what you do. Um, but anyway, and you learned that from him because that's what he would do every time you would have an accomplishment. So it's something you definitely even learned from him. Okay. So then, um, so he has a surgery and then, uh, so the surgery, hold on, we can't, I mean, the surgery was 14 hours long. Yeah. Yeah. This is the same doctor that had explained the, is this the same doctor that had explained it all? He had a lot of experience here in the U S.
00:58:34
Speaker
And he, I was able to, shoot, I've forgotten about this. Because I was working in the hospital in Bogota, the surgeon that had the most cases of that in Colombia worked, I mean, we operated in the same OR. So it was coincidental that those two doctors, because of what they did, knew each other, but they hadn't really connected. So I was able to connect them and have them both operate on him.
00:59:01
Speaker
So I had the doctor that lives in the U.S. that is Colombian, but has experience, operate with the guy from Colombia in the hospital that would open all the procedural pathways to get that surgery done and get all settled in Bogota in the same hospital that I was working in the ER as an orthopedic trauma surgeon at the time. Well, I was no coincidence. Yeah, that's no coincidence. It's like, yeah, meant to be for sure. Yeah. So I mean, and remember, in coaching, things happen.
00:59:31
Speaker
Not because of something, but for something. And I was understanding where we were going, right? So what was I going to do? So I knew that I was going to be in that hospital. I mean, I was going to be in that surgery, uh, coming in and out to talk to the family that I had nothing to do. They asked me if I wanted to be in the surgery and I said, no, this is not my area. I just want to be able to go in and go out and inform the family because this is going to take a while.
01:00:00
Speaker
and I'll be that guy. Two, I moved to the hospital, but they didn't let me stay all nights because it didn't work for my work in my shift in the ER. So I bargained being every other night in the ER so I could be with him
01:00:21
Speaker
the time he was in the hospital.
Support During Surgery
01:00:24
Speaker
The nights that I wasn't on call, I was still in the hospital until I was able to go home, take a shower, eat something, and then come back. But those two weeks that he stayed in the hospital, I was there every other night sleeping in the hospital.
01:00:40
Speaker
And there are a lot of funny stories, believe it or not, there are a lot of funny stories. Sounds like a conundrum, but there are funny stories. No, because that's another way that sometimes we deal, a lot of us, certain types of personalities, we deal with hard times with humor. And I mean, that's what you got. That is what you have at that moment in time. And remember, these were kind of coined in my head when you told me that I was the life of the party. Well, I needed to be the life of the party here, being realistic, optimistic, and being that segue between the medical world and the family.
01:01:10
Speaker
That was my job, right? Now, surgery day came and Gustavo got very attached to a version of the Virgin Mary. He got very deep into religion. Something that I respect, but I was not at that time deeply a believer.
01:01:37
Speaker
It was, you know, I just let it be. Part of coaching that you learn is that you don't enforce what's right or wrong. You accept and you accompany. If they believe in prayer, if they believe in the Virgin, then so be it. And they took a four foot Virgin statue of the Virgin that apparently tours around the world. They were able to get it for the day of his surgery.
01:02:07
Speaker
And I have a picture of him holding the Virgin the day of his surgery. He was wearing a lilac shirt, jeans, had a big smile from ear to ear. And I was with my, you know, my medical outfit, robe and everything. And we took a picture there with the Virgin. Said goodbye to his family. He got into surgery, laughing all the way in. Not an inch of nervousness until the time came to put him under.
01:02:35
Speaker
And I held his hand until he fell asleep And he I remind I remember him thanking me for being there and I told him you know all the way so he was put under I had asked for the
01:02:50
Speaker
You know, I worked at those ORs. I know the people. And part of the benefits of being an MD is that if you have a family member or friend that are sick, is who would you choose from each area to treat your family based on what you've seen, right? So I knew who I wanted to give him the anesthesia. I knew who I wanted it to be there for this and that. And we were able to gather that team. Now, this surgery,
01:03:19
Speaker
It's divided into three parts. The first part is that obviously you open up and you see all the seeding of the tumor and you have to scrape it manually. And when I say scrape it is literally you grab a scalpel and you start scraping the tumor from the organs. And that also involves disconnecting some of the internal pipes and connecting them elsewhere so you can actually move and get all the tumor out as much as you can.
01:03:48
Speaker
So during that, I was coming in and out and forming. I was going in, staying for 30 minutes, coming out 15 minutes, getting back in another 15 minutes. And then again, the cycle repeats itself. I did that for 14 hours. And I'm privileged enough to say that I knew Gustavo from inside and out.
01:04:13
Speaker
And this one's not figuratively speaking like you've done with it. This one's really... Oh no, this is literally. Literally. And we used to joke around that afterwards, obviously. And all of a sudden, in one of those me coming back into the OR, I see people kind of rushing. And I kind of looked over and I see people kind of moving really fast in the OR.
01:04:41
Speaker
So I hurried up and I changed and I went in and what happened? I see this massive amount of pooling of blood happening. Oh my gosh. And it's like, oh shit, they hit an artery. Well, yes, they had hit the hepatic artery, which is a massive flow of blood and you could literally die, exsanguinate and die.
01:05:02
Speaker
happens to be that the transplant surgeon, which is not normally in the hospital unless called for, was walking outside of the surgical area as this was happening. And we kind of dragged him in.
01:05:22
Speaker
I mean, this is ridiculous and coincident. The timing. He was like right there. We grabbed him. He came in and whatever the other two guys that are also surgeons but are not as specific in, you know, reconnecting arteries like a transplant surgeon, right? This guy came in and in 30 seconds put a finger in and did the sutures. That was it. He saved his life in the surgery.
01:05:51
Speaker
And then it was like, okay, nothing had happened, moving on. So the first section of scraping the tumor, that was done with the little hiccup there in the middle that almost killed him. But that was, you know, people were asking for blood now because he had lost a lot of blood, et cetera, et cetera. But I asked the anesthesiologist, is he going to be fine? He was going to be fine. So what do I do next? I get out, talk to the family, told them what has happened, told them what had happened, told them, and obviously their first reaction was, this is a miracle.
01:06:21
Speaker
Yeah. Right. This is a miracle. This is God. This is a virgin. And I said, call it what you want. I'll take it. And I started, I started becoming somewhat of a believer then of some type of force that was, you know, kind of beyond what you knew in the tech in the medical world. So next section is
01:06:44
Speaker
For those of you that saw Ghostbusters, you remember that ectoplasmic fluid, that green neon stuff? Well, isn't he... Is that... Wait, is that the blob? No, is that the blob? No, that wasn't... Yeah, okay, okay, okay. Yeah, so that green neonic fluid, just... The second phase is dumping buckets.
01:07:04
Speaker
of that green stuff inside of Gustavo's body to burn whatever is left of tumor cells and mix with your hand all the intestines for about two hours until everything is so... Okay, you are talking in such a way. You are still able... Okay, this is what's amazing me right now because you're still able to... Are you envisioning this? Well, I'm envisioning it and I'm kind of getting a little bit like it's emotional a little bit for me because
01:07:33
Speaker
I am not in the medical field. So for me to hear you talking still kind of a little bit, I could see that you were able to remove yourself to some extent of the emotional component because you had your medical hat on. Exactly. Because how you're explaining it now is with your medical hat on and not a friend hat on. So right now it's kind of taking a little bit of that adjustment as you were saying that.
01:07:59
Speaker
And that's one thing that I've seen in me whenever I switch on my medical. I don't care who it is, but it is me full frontal doing what I need to do to save that person. So I had to disconnect that the fact that my brother was on the table, I had to disconnect from the emotional field. When it comes to medicine, that is the only area that I can disconnect from emotions because that is my mission. That is what I choose to do. And sometimes
01:08:29
Speaker
People don't understand because they know me for a long time.
01:08:32
Speaker
They kind of say, where did Juan Cho go? He's like, oh, listen, when I'm in medical stuff, this is me taking charge and this is me. So at that moment in time, my mission was to be me when I came out and talk to the family, but being my medical me inside and not getting affected without seeing. So I was able to go through all this 14 hours and then they closed them up. They took him to the ICU.
01:09:03
Speaker
And I said that I was going to stay that night with him sitting down next to him in the ICU. And it was funny because they had told me, you got to be careful because he's going to expel a lot of that radioactive fluid. And you can get hit by that radioactive fluid that he is going to be evaporating because he had two hours of radioactive fluid in his abdomen.
01:09:28
Speaker
And I said, no, I can take it. I am going to sit here and I'm going to be the guy that's going to stay all night with him just in case he needed something. There were dozens of nurses, dozens of doctors, but I had to be there. I felt the calling to be there. And I was glad I did because he woke up and I was there. And obviously he couldn't talk because he was still intubated and he started signaling for a pen and paper.
01:09:58
Speaker
I still have that paper. That one I do have. And he started, you know, very shakenly writing something. He started writing, and this is going to be in Spanish, but he started writing the letter G
01:10:16
Speaker
And then he kind of dribbled something else. And I was trying to go like, you know, when, like in those games, oh, you know, guessing game, kind of. And I was going G this G that. And I said, gracias, which is thank you. And I said, Oh man, I stopped there and I go, Oh, you're thanking me. Don't worry about it. Don't worry about it. And he got it. He slapped me in the arm. And he's like, no, I'm not thanking you. And he was writing, actually the word got a got hole.
01:10:42
Speaker
which was that he had a block of saliva in his throat that was feeling uncomfortable. And my reaction when I saw that is like, really? You got to be kidding me, man. I stayed forward. I thought you were thanking me. And now you say, come on. So I called the nurse and said, oh, this guy needs to be aspiration, this and that and whatever. But I still have that paper.
01:11:05
Speaker
And that was the word. And I still have a paper, which, by the way, that word is so gross. It's like, it's a movie. It's a movie. Right. It's gross. Yeah. Right. But the word is like just the word itself is like, you know. Yeah. So anyway, so, you know, that came to be, I remember that
01:11:30
Speaker
His mom wanted to bring in, well, he wanted me. The next thing he wrote is that he wanted to see the statue of the Virgin that was standing. They let the statue of the Virgin in his cubicle in the ICU. During surgery or during weight recovery? In the ICU, yeah. So he wrote that he wanted to kiss the Virgin. So I leaned over that big heavy Virgin figure that has toured around the world, very famous.
01:11:57
Speaker
Right. And I, and I, and I let him in and he kissed the, the, the Virgin on the forehead and then I put it back and you know, things came to be, uh, like at 2 AM in the morning, I started feeling like a dry sense, you know, dryness of my throat and started feeling funny. Like I was getting like high and I was going like, okay, what's going on with me? And then I realized, Oh shoot, that radioactive stuff that I'm breathing.
01:12:21
Speaker
So I went back to my dormitory and slept there, woke up the next morning. And when I came back to see Gustavo, her mom was crying. And I go, shit. It's like, what happened? It's like, no, I went in and I saw the glitter of the Virgin on his forehead. And and I go, you know, I was going to tell her, yeah, he kissed her last night.
01:12:46
Speaker
And I just said, you know, yeah, he kissed her last night, but, and she interrupted me and said, but it was her that dropped the glitter on her face, on his face. This is going to be okay. So again.
01:12:59
Speaker
Any other person could have stopped her and said, oh, come on, what the hell are you talking about? What are you believing in? This is nonsense or voodoo or witchcraft or, you know, whatever. But no, you just got to let it be. That's what it's getting them strong to face whatever's happening. And, you know, and it happened and he left the hospital a couple of weeks later and he was awesome.
Balancing Life Changes
01:13:27
Speaker
He was just ridiculously awesome. Then life happened and I went to Barcelona and I talked to him and I said, you're in a position right now that you can handle yourself. You are with your fiance still and I'm not going to Barcelona. I'm still going to Barcelona because there have been people kind of questioning if I was still going to go live in Barcelona.
01:13:54
Speaker
And it made me doubt myself as a friend and as a brother, should I be staying there? And I said, no, I'm going to make this decision. And if something happens, I'll come back. I was already married. I left with my wife. We went for Barcelona for a year. And then we received the news that he had a date for his wedding. And I told him, sorry, we can't go. It's just too far, too expensive.
01:14:25
Speaker
We can't go. So congratulations. I really hope that you have a, you know, she's a one. We, we know her, et cetera, et cetera. We hung up. And the first thing I told him and I is we're going to go to Columbia and surprise. And, uh, she goes, wait, wait, what? Because we didn't have the budget to do that. We didn't have, I said, we'll, we'll figure it out. We'll ask for a loan, but we have to be in his way. And I knew why.
01:14:51
Speaker
because he was not going to get married again. I mean, this was it. And he was doing great. He was doing fine. Trust me. Medically, this was about three years in after his surgery, somewhat along those lines. So we decided to come from Barcelona and surprise him. Cali in a house in El Saladito, which is kind of the countryside, which are hills, like a country house. And it had a second floor. So we got in.
01:15:21
Speaker
And we went up and he came in with his fiance that knew that we were coming. He didn't know. So when we were in that second floor and he walked in, I just yelled to him, what's up, man? In that accent. And there are pictures of him looking up and just covering his mouth and not understanding what was happening. Oh, man. Sorry. In shock. Yeah. Yeah. Sorry.
01:15:50
Speaker
Seeing his genuine happiness of seeing that's there and us having the blessing and will and money to be able to be there with him at that moment, it was just bliss right there.
01:16:10
Speaker
It was just a great moment of time. And then we flew back to Barcelona. And then we decided to stay an extra year just because we had decided to start our own family and we wanted to give our daughter the European passport, et cetera. And about the time that we were coming back, his tumor started to
Acceptance and Meaning in Illness
01:16:30
Speaker
come back. And that was right about the four-year time frame after his surgery.
01:16:38
Speaker
It started coming back and it started obstructing and it started growing and he underwent a second surgery that was minor. I wasn't there for that one, but that he came out well. Then it came back and then I knew where this was going. And again, my medical hat was overseeing all of this. So I was able to cope with this, but I was suffering in silence. I didn't go into
01:17:07
Speaker
the denial, anger, bargaining, sadness and acceptance, I kind of, coming full circle, took his approach. It was interesting because when I put on my medical hat, I go into acceptance immediately. And then I manage that sixth David Kesser meaning of it all. And I asked myself, okay, what do I need to do? And when this was coming along,
01:17:32
Speaker
and knew that it was going to come to an end eventually with all these obstructions and all of these things. I mean, we had a conversation with the family. We had a conversation with the mom and kind of ask them what were their thoughts and they knew. And the oncologist started saying, if the pain gets to a point where we have to get him into the clinic, we will. And that happened a couple of times.
01:17:59
Speaker
Then I came, I mean, this was all after I'd come back from Barcelona, I was living in Cali. And coincidentally enough, we came back from Barcelona on August of 2012. You're 20, is this the 20 year, is this 20 year high school reunion at that point? Yeah, so we came, we came August 2012.
01:18:29
Speaker
And I was still in a midst of understanding if I was gonna get the job that I am working on currently, which is with a big corporation here in the US. And I flew to the States and then I came back because it was gonna be two years working remote. I started doing that, but I was living in Cali.
01:18:55
Speaker
I told my wife I want to live in those sets of apartments to be close to Gustav because I told his wife I need an apartment in that building so I can be next to you guys. So and this was you know the time where Gustavo was again completely changed and as you were saying we had our 20-year high school reunion that December and I picked him up with a driver and
01:19:25
Speaker
I took him there and obviously all of our friends already knew from me what the status was. All of our army friends knew from me. I became the person that was communicating everything.
01:19:41
Speaker
And Facebook kind of reminds me of things I used to write or left surgery today because I did this today. When I see those, again, it's immediate how my medical mind oversees and overtakes my emotional mind. They put me in that position where I had a mission, was to be strong, was to inform, and was to keep people informed of what was happening so they could be at ease.
01:20:09
Speaker
And we went to that party back in 2012, December. We went to the party. I think he drank, even though he couldn't. Nobody said anything. It's like, yeah, go ahead, have a drink. We don't care.
01:20:24
Speaker
Can I ask you when you see when the Facebook reminders come up of that? I mean I have in my head I have that picture in my head of You posting with your group of friends and me seeing it on Facebook of you guys's reunion That's why I remember is because of the Facebook post you did I believe was he wearing like a yellow shirt or something? I don't know like why a yellow shirt is coming up in my head, but scarf. Yeah Okay
01:20:54
Speaker
the tracheostomy. When you see those images, you were talking about when you see the posts of you talking about the medical component, how your medical brain comes on, more of the technical. In this conversation, there's the emotion that has come up in bringing up some of these memories. When Facebook comes up with things like this, like the reunion or things like that,
01:21:23
Speaker
Is in that in those moments the medical hat is off are you is that like when the motions come? You know what? I mean? Like are those the type of memories that bring that sense of again kind of feeling that that loss I Understand my question. Yeah, I understand your question perfectly and it's a very hard question because I I I
01:21:48
Speaker
Even though I feel a sense of joy transporting myself to that moment in time, I'm still a little bit angry with one, him not getting the treatment that he should have. And that's 99%. And that 1% that I've been able to leave it at 1% is maybe me not pushing further
01:22:14
Speaker
to maybe get more stuff done even though his pain had left. So what I feel is, even though I have sufficient emotional intelligence to not let those emotions overcome, I feel, in a majority of extent, a little bit of anger. But I'm not going to lie to you. I'm still sad. Even though I've accepted it,
01:22:45
Speaker
It's a mixture of sadness and anger in a sense that now that I have a settled life, something that I fought for and wanted, I wish I could share so much with him and I wish I could call him like I used to to ask him for advice.
01:23:13
Speaker
and have him slap me in the face with his ways of just taking on life. I just, I don't know what I feel. I just hope that he would be here. So when I see those pictures and I see him happy, it makes me happy, but then it automatically goes to, man, I wish so many things have happened since then. I mean, we're coming close to the tenure mark.
01:23:42
Speaker
that is, I wish I had you for you to share. And the last image, I mean, the party went on and I took him home and there's, I know you know this, but our fourth meal in Cali when we go out partying, it's a place where you get masurka de granar. It's this corn with cheese and bacon.
01:24:10
Speaker
Yeah, that was, uh, that was the fourth. That was our waffle house. That was our eye hop, right? Is going to this place to get this corn. And I remember him telling me, even though he couldn't eat, we kind of, kind of knew that it was going to be potentially his last time eating that cheesy corn. So we stopped and we ate it. And then I found out from the driver.
01:24:40
Speaker
He told him, this is my last meal outside of the hospital. And he didn't tell me that. He told the driver. Yeah, he told the driver. He knew. Oh my gosh. He knew because he was in pain and he wanted to go to that reunion because he knew it was going to be his last December, his last meeting with friends. And I cherish those pictures dearly because
01:25:09
Speaker
You see me in those pictures smiling. I was smiling because he was smiling, even though deep down inside, I knew what he was feeling. I knew that it was going to be his last December, right? And then, you know, I dropped him off at his house. And then the next day, the next day, no, the day after that, he admitted himself into the hospital because of pain. And it was very quick from then that we're talking about
01:25:34
Speaker
Oh wait, no, no, hold on. No, no, no, no. Then came December 24th, which is contrary to how they celebrate here in the US. We have a big dinner, Christmas Eve dinner. And Gustavo had been coming to our house for years and years. I mean, this is not only me that
01:25:57
Speaker
is a friend or brother with Gustavo. He was like a son to my mom and dad. He was like a brother to my brother. We have pictures of him playing the maracas while I was playing the congas and my dad was playing some other instrument. You telling me I was the life of the party? You should have seen him. I mean, he came into my house with my family, older people from Mediterranean descent.
01:26:27
Speaker
And he would make them laugh and jump and dance and just be the life of the party. And that 24th, he came in. I still have pictures of him, that 24th. And that is the last and potentially first picture I have of him with my daughter, Nadine. And it was both of us.
01:27:02
Speaker
I just felt so proud and happy that he was able to hold her. And I've kept telling them that that's their Uncle Goose and they believe it. And even my youngest one that never met him knows who he is and who he was.
01:27:27
Speaker
But that was the first and last picture that I have of him and there's a nice story afterwards on it too.
Final Moments and Farewell
01:27:34
Speaker
After the 24th of December, 25th came in on the 26th of December, he admitted himself in the hospital with pain and it went down really fast and I knew this was it. It's just a matter of when. So again, I kept on going to the hospital every day. Again, medical hat, accepting what this is,
01:27:54
Speaker
being strong for me and for my daughter and for my wife and for my family and for his family, being the rock that he would have been if it was different. And I knew what was going to happen. My medical hat allows me to control my emotions in a way that not having the medical hat doesn't.
01:28:18
Speaker
We were there, I talked to the oncologist. She told me that this was end stage. She was so obstructed that there was nothing else they could do. Then when he was in so much pain and they couldn't do anything else, they sedated him. And then they left him a little bit without sedation so he could be conscious and basically say goodbye. So that day, January 2nd,
01:28:48
Speaker
I went there and remember, I'm not the religious type, but I have a prayer that I say once in a while. And again, I had become somewhat of a believer after all of this experience. And I asked his mom that was very religious and his wife, I asked him if I could lead them in prayer. And they were like, wait, what? I said, yeah, I have this prayer that I've been saying for a couple of years now.
01:29:18
Speaker
that I truly believe in, and I want to do it with you." And they said, well, yes. So we held hands with Gustavo, with his fiance, with his mom. And I said the prayer so fast, kind of when I was a little kid that he said things fast, so it would happen fast, right?
01:29:45
Speaker
And everybody looked at me and said, that was a great prayer, but why were you going so fast? And I said, I don't know. And when I was saying, I don't know, I felt Gustavo's head on my shoulder. And this is the first time in our life that he had leaned on my shoulder. And that's when I heard him say, can't do this anymore.
01:30:16
Speaker
I was kind of saying I give up. That broke me in half and I just put my arm around him knowing that it was it, right? This was the last time I was going to see him. This was really happening.
01:30:40
Speaker
My medical hat just burned up and I kept as strong as I could while he was leaning on my shoulder, telling me that he was in pain, that he was hurting, but he wanted it to be over with when I felt so bad, I couldn't do anything about it. So I know that moment,
01:31:07
Speaker
went away for a little while there. And we started talking again, but that moment stuck in my head and heart for ages. And then came the moment where I had to say goodbye and leave because the hospital visit time, even though I was a doctor, was over and I had to give them privacy. Family time. And even though I've always felt as part of their family, I was not their family. So I respected that. And that is part of learning
01:31:36
Speaker
when you're coaching and when you're embedded in this is when, where are your boundaries and when to stop. And even though I wanted to stay there, I knew that it was time for them to be as a family. So I, I left and he was so tired that he couldn't even talk. So I asked him, can you please send Nadina kiss?
01:32:05
Speaker
The last image I have of him is him blowing me a kiss and giving me a thumbs up that you would understand it's so traditional of us from where we're from, like everything's gonna be okay. Then I left and I called his brother and I said, just call me when it happens. And I left and I remember crying all the way
01:32:35
Speaker
my house going in and my daughter was six months old so she understood but my wife understood and my parents were very empathetic with me they knew what I was going through and I went to bed that night at 3 a.m. I felt the phone and you know July what January 3rd 3 am and I saw how it was caller ID my first word was
01:33:04
Speaker
happened and they go yep he's gone so I got dressed and I went back and his body was still there and I helped him and you know went down to the morgue with the body again being an MD allowed me to illuminate myself and this I can't thank you enough this
01:33:31
Speaker
This understanding of me doctor and me not doctor has been incredible. So I really thank you. I kissed his forehead. I didn't care. That's always amazed me, right? How you can put death aside and the feeling still remains even though the body is not- The spirit's no longer there.
01:34:01
Speaker
Right? Alive. And I took him down to the morgue. I cried at the morgue and then I went with his brother to get clothing for him and to get all the funeral arrangements. That was my mission there. To go and buy the coffin. We even laughed because
01:34:29
Speaker
When we were choosing the coffin, there was this neon purple one with silver linings. Were you about to get that one? I looked with his brother. I looked with his twin. Which one? Which one? Yes. Because I'm trying. Okay. And then Santiago came in. Both of them came in and we looked at each other. We just laughed, saying,
01:34:50
Speaker
Should should we do it? It's like no Should we should yeah, he would want to finish with a party and like yeah, like you would you knew that that would enjoy that He would enjoy it like that would have humored him. Oh, you also at the same time. We're kind of joking You just died and we were and it was him making us laugh Yeah, because I think if you can envision this coffin it had purple
01:35:20
Speaker
purple and silver kind of color and we would just laugh because we opened it up and the insides were all shiny and silver and then we said no. So we pick Pimping. We would be pimping. That's exactly the word. The purple is the pimping purple. And then we got a conventional wooden one and then we left the clothes there then all the body was arranged and set and came to all the
01:35:49
Speaker
Protocols that we do down in Columbia, which is different than the US. It's not a party down there It's uh, it's really a moment viewing a viewing. There's a viewing. Yeah, yeah viewing and grief and so We were there in the funeral home. I was there 24 Hours or 23 hours and you know helping the family as much as I could and
01:36:15
Speaker
People were actually giving me conglances as well and hugging me because they knew my relationship then. Then a funeral came and there's a mass that I organized for him, church service. I got some violins and I got some songs and then I said some words. That is where I said that people can make fun of me at 40 or at 39 at that time or whatever hole I was saying that I have a best friend.
01:36:44
Speaker
And I still say it today because that's not a childish concept. It's such a deep concept. And when you lose your best friend, you're losing more than a family member. You're losing a family member that's also your best friend.
01:37:04
Speaker
And, uh, you know, it's something that you've built. It's a, it's a connection because it's something you've built. It's a trust that you have to develop, which is really different than what happens with family. And it wasn't a given, right? Correct. It's worked. So there's a very different, uh, Demented dynamic in that friendship and those bonds that are created really deep. Yeah. You know, one other thing is that with friendship, you can choose to terminate it anytime.
01:37:34
Speaker
Whatever reason and you choose not to because of what you feel you can't Stop being a brother or a sister no matter how much you discuss and not like each other You're still bonded by blood. But with friendship, it's different. It's you you have that ass we went to the cemetery and after the church service and everything and
01:37:59
Speaker
Last image I have of him is him going down. They opened a casket when he was going down and I still see him with the clothes that we chose for him. We all hugged there.
Coping with Loss
01:38:11
Speaker
We took a picture with our army friends that were the ones that actually went to the funeral to the actual dropping of the body. And life went on from there.
01:38:24
Speaker
When I say life went off of theirs, now it's my time to enter the real grief. I didn't deny it because I lived through it. I was still angry that it had happened the way it did.
01:38:40
Speaker
I didn't find any use in bargaining anything because it was already done for. And just came to sadness and getting to acceptance. Yeah, those steps were different for you because at the same time, this was not sudden. This was something you had a time lapse to be able to process in that process from the moment of diagnosis. And that's the thing that happens.
01:39:04
Speaker
with any of us that have had loved ones who have passed away from an illness, is that there's a different length of time than when something happens suddenly. Because it really starts in the moment of diagnosis and all that process. But then it goes in cycles because sometimes there's hope, right? So after surgery, when he had the surgery, there was a moment of hope that it comes back in decline.
01:39:27
Speaker
So it goes in all these waves and so yeah, it could jump around. But you already also had the tools at that moment, which were really different than when you had the big major breakup that basically took you down. You already had different tools.
01:39:46
Speaker
to be able to help you, you had all these emotional intelligence tools that you had. You had the aspect of the knowledge of grief that helped you understand at least what was happening. That made, I'm assuming, a huge part in your process of grief then that was very different to that other experience you had prior in your lifetime. Yeah, I want to say yes, right? Because I don't have other ways of finding out. I mean, the information was already embedded in my head.
01:40:17
Speaker
So I came to a point again, having insight to use all that information and help me. Um, if I had been alone, I may have potentially gone a different route of acceptance, but I had a wife and a daughter and a baby. I had to be
Spiritual Connections
01:40:35
Speaker
well for, I had a new job and then I ended moving into the same apartment. I mean, the same building that.
01:40:46
Speaker
he was going to live in eventually. So we were in the same building complex, but he wasn't there anymore. It was his wife, now widow, and her daughter with from another marriage. And it was rough me going to not that we became the closest of friends with her. It was like,
01:41:13
Speaker
I've sucked up so much that I really, at this moment in time, need to breathe a little bit, understand that he's gone, but be there for her and for their family as much as I can. And, you know, things came and went and we still talk to the same day. We're still very close friends, but obviously there's a distance. I realized that, you know, even though I was very friendly with his cousins, his brothers,
01:41:43
Speaker
his widow. We're still friends. We still love each other that much. We don't talk as much now. But the person that I see Gustavo in the most is his female cousin, Laura. And that came as a revelation a couple of years ago. And she's from your school. And I told her a couple of years ago, and I kind of came full frontal and said, it's you. She goes, what?
01:42:12
Speaker
It's you. I just had that revelation. It's like you are the closest person from a, you know, connection with Gustavo. And I hadn't seen that. It's just, you know, I'm a huge fan of Bob Marley. And now that I'm watching legacy, which is something that is put on by his eight kids. No, you always say this is the kid that resembles him most. Well, I kind of thought that it was going to be his other cousin.
01:42:39
Speaker
because we had partied so much together or one of his brothers because they're his brothers, they were his brothers. But it was Laodan, I told her a couple of years ago and she actually made a kind of a bracelet with a medallion that says, goose forever. And I have it hung up to a picture of the Virgin. And that story is awesome because when Gustavo passed, I had a vision and call it what you want.
01:43:08
Speaker
I had it. It's yours. It's your journey. You call it what it is and it's your experience. Exactly. I felt it, right? There are two things that happened. One was kind of a little bit wacky and crazy, but I feel presences sometimes.
01:43:33
Speaker
Nadine, my daughter at that time was very young, but she had grown up to be a two, three-year-old kid. And my wife walks into her room and she's standing kind of pointing at the window and laughing. And remember this, Gustavo Nadine, when he was six months old,
01:44:01
Speaker
And my wife asked, what are you laughing about? It's like, that's what she said. And my wife just went blank. And in that same apartment building, that's where I had a vision when I came into what I used to use as my home office of him sitting in the chair that I'm sitting in right now. Same chair. I had a vision of him sitting in this chair going in Spanish,
01:44:26
Speaker
This is a great chair, man. This is a great chair. This is an awesome chair. I want to get, because he spoke like this. I want to get a chair. Maybe I get two, maybe three. I think I should get three of these chairs. How can I order three of these chairs? And I saw him saying that, and then he started saying, but you know what you're missing? You know what you're missing? You know what you're missing? I know what you're missing. I know what you're missing. You're missing a picture of the Virgin, man. A picture of the Virgin. A picture of the Virgin will look so awesome. That's what you're missing. And then the vision went away, and I communicated that to his mom a couple of days afterwards. And I told her,
01:44:55
Speaker
I had this vision and explained it to her and then she came back and gave me a framed picture of the Virgin. And we have that hung on all the places we have lived in a strategical position in our house that would oversee my daughters and us as a protective measure.
01:45:22
Speaker
Another funny story, well not funny, but cool story is we went to, this was maybe a year or two ago, we usually go to a beach in Michigan in St. Joseph. I live in Indiana, so that's our beach over Lake Michigan. And there's always kind of this county fair where they bring all this art and stuff. And we were walking down the lines of the art that's exhibited there.
01:45:52
Speaker
I saw this red heart made of ceramic and something clicked with that red heart, but I said, yeah, it's just a red heart. And I kept on walking, but that red heart never left my mind for whatever reason. So we walked all the way to the end of the line and I kept telling my wife, why is that red heart calling me? I mean, I literally feel that red heart wants me to buy it. I don't know.
01:46:19
Speaker
Why? And he said, we'll get it. And I go, no, I don't think so. So I kept on walking by. We passed it again. I saw it. And then I went back and said, you know what? I'm going to get it. If I don't get it, I'm going to just go crazy. So I bought the heart. And it was kind of a necklace with a heart dangling. It was just full ceramic heart, red, red, red, bright red. And I brought it home. And days went by. And I forgot about the heart. Then, all of a sudden, I went to the Virgin's
01:46:49
Speaker
picture right there dead dead center was the heart within the laurels that the Virgin has and it was bright red and I immediately went ballistically
01:47:08
Speaker
out of breath, saying, Holy S. You've already cast, I'm already having to put an explicit on this one. So feel free to just say whatever you feel you need to share. So don't worry about it. I just went, I just, you know, I just went right in front of a virgin's pictures and holy shit.
01:47:28
Speaker
this was you. You were calling me, Gustavo was calling me to get that part. It's been so interesting to hear this whole journey of you. Sorry, go ahead and finish, but I want to say that your journey of listening to the skeptic, the science brain to now being able to
01:47:51
Speaker
uh, acknowledge the power of faith and embrace something that was so special for your best friend and make that also be that connection that you have, not only to him, but also probably just to source, you know, itself too, like, you know, like that you now also have kind of bonded with that same connection that he had to the, to the Virgin that you related.
01:48:13
Speaker
to connecting
From Skepticism to Faith
01:48:14
Speaker
with him, but also of having faith. And this is just me, like in my, this is the least what I've perceived in this conversation. And it's just beautiful to see that journey of
01:48:29
Speaker
Yeah, just the science brain and then the and then the faith brain, you know, the faith, you know, coming out as well. So thank you for taking us on that journey. And it's thank you. I need to thank you because all of this works, you know, whenever when all this happened, it just felt that people potentially would get bored of listening to that. But this has come at a great moment in time in the middle of a pandemic.
01:48:58
Speaker
to actually vent out all of that that was still there. And it's probably going to continue to resurface in different ways because that's what grief has not been and we know that and it's just part of it and we just learn how to live with it and know that we grow and as we grow and we start
01:49:19
Speaker
uh having more tools to how to be able to manage the different aspects of grief that come up they just seem different you know it just kind of changes with us so um thank you for sharing that and also thank you for uh now being somebody i mean you've already been doing that for a while but now you
01:49:40
Speaker
certified so tell us a little bit about how it is just the Certifications and how you also now with your coaching because I want to make sure if if if you want me to share in the show notes of how people can reach you If they want any coaching or and listen to any of your talks and emotional intelligence So if you want to just briefly share about that and I'll make sure to put that in the show notes Sure, so so really
01:50:10
Speaker
The easiest way to find me is through LinkedIn. And it's J-U-A-N-C-H-O-D-A-C-C-A-C-H-1-2.
01:50:21
Speaker
because it's related to what I do. So that's the easiest way. And all my credentials are there and what I've done and everything. The journey started as me trying to be different from an orthopedic standpoint. So I decided to get certified in coaching. I found out what that was. I got a certified agency that would actually grant you the certificate of being a coach.
01:50:48
Speaker
And their program was you have to do personal coaching, life coaching, marketing for coaches, and business coaching before I could do health coaching, kind of a 101, 102. So I did the 101 in Bogota for 10 days, fully submersive. And then I went to Barcelona and for four days I did the health coaching part.
01:51:12
Speaker
While I was doing that, I fell in love with the concept of emotional intelligence and I started digging, how could I get certified in emotional intelligence? I took a virtual course in certification and the real name was emotional intelligence and work-related stress disorder, also known as burnout from a university in Granada, Spain. One thing I do tell people is that
01:51:36
Speaker
Doesn't matter how many courses of emotional intelligence I've taken. I'm still not emotionally intelligent. It's a process. It's a marathon. It's not a sprint.
01:51:50
Speaker
That's that's where I have taken it now with my new job. I just do whatever I can ad hoc But I'm open to helping people out in many ways Thank you so much. And then that's that's the beautiful journey that all those tools helped you even for your own journey and your own grief and your own experience and in life and now you're
01:52:13
Speaker
turning around and helping others as well in that journey. And thank
Closing Reflections
01:52:19
Speaker
you so much for, again, for sharing and so vulnerably and so raw and real. And I know that the listeners will be able to take a lot from this as I have as well. So thank you, my friend, for going on this ride. You're very welcome. And thank you and really, really
01:52:42
Speaker
Really thank you for trusting me and giving you this talk and opening up to your audience. I reversed that. Thank you for trusting me to have this as a space to open up. So thank you.
01:52:58
Speaker
Thank you again so much for choosing to listen today. I hope that you can take away a few nuggets from today's episode that can bring you comfort in your times of grief. If so, it would mean so much to me if you would rate and comment on this episode. And if you feel inspired in some way to share it with someone who may need to hear this, please do so.
01:53:27
Speaker
Also, if you or someone you know has a story of grief and gratitude that should be shared so that others can be inspired as well, please reach out to me. And thanks once again for tuning into Grief Gratitude and the Gray in Between podcast. Have a beautiful day.