12:05 And so you find out you have cancer. Emotionally what are you thinking at the time how are you processing 12:19 In my in the back of my mind it was really what I’ll say it was an oh [ __ ] moment like it really was just “I have cancer” those words and at the time my ex-wife was flying back home so I had to relay the information via text or phone and and so I had several friends come and visit me in the hospital and the initial thought was that I had pancreatic cancer because my pancreas was swollen as well 13:42 I would say that I didn’t really break down until I finally had the plan and it was my birthday they wanted to do the surgery on my birthday which is January 30th 14:06 So they pushed it off and did it a week later so I was able to celebrate my birthday with a big group of friends we went bowling and went to a Mexican restaurant and had Tequila and you know it was just it was just one of these parties but I stood up in front of all my friends there’s probably 30 people that showed up and I broke down in tears and I said I’m scared I don’t know how this is going to go I’m thankful that you’re here with me. I appreciate your love and support but I’m really scared right now and that’s kind of the first time that I broke down about the whole thing really and I had this opportunity in public in front of all my friends 15:21 I had immense support from my friends. I had lost both my parents so I didn’t have parents so it was really that core group of people that that all took the time to come and be with me and they were all crying, I’m crying, they’re crying, everyone’s crying and support was coming from all over the country from my friends from college, from elementary school so I believe there is an incredible power in absorbing that kind of energy whatever it is and I pulled that energy into myself and and used it and I think it helped heal or helped defend off bad things that potentially could have made things worse 18:06 This surgery they wanted done pretty quickly and I had three separate opinions – the opinions were from different hospitals – some one wanted to do chemo and radiation first and then go to surgery the other two wanted to do surgery first and then chemo and radiation so I had to make a decision and the only reason I chose Stanford was because there was another uh hospital that had a similar protocol and my father and uncle both went to Stanford and got their masters and PhDs in electrical engineering there and I always wanted to go to Stanford but I could never get in so I said I’m going to Stanford and I’m going to go in through the hospital so it was my joke and my way of lightening things up 19:12 When you get to stage three it means it is spread  through the walls and spread and almost spread to different organs but not quite fully because mine was in the lymph nodes as well so I had I think 15 lymph nodes that they had to scrape out since they were impacted 19:37 So they they took it so they ended up taking out my entire stomach, my spleen, half my pancreas, a third of my esophagus, and so the surgery ended up being much more major than they initially planned but the the stage three part just means that it has it’s spread further and that they have to really go in aggressively and and make sure it doesn’t get through your lymphatic system and and go to other organs but it fortunately was only through the walls it and it wasn’t through to other organs 20:42 So I didn’t know how my eating would be impacted. I did have one individual that I had met through and we had started Gastric Cancer Foundation which was a separate foundation. I had met JP Gallagher and he had had the same surgeon the same oncologist the same age as me and I was just three months behind him so he was the only person who kind of gave me any insight into what I’d be experiencing but he only had a three-month runway ahead of me to give me and he seemed to be doing pretty well which was very promising except for the fact that he said the gas that he had was death defying. He said you know he was doing all right. You know, he showed me his scars and he was able to eat certain things and I used him as sort of my guiding light at first of course until he died later 22:27 So I woke up out of the surgery and I think it was a seven or eight hour surgery and I was in the ICU and I had a couple friends around with me that were in there, the few that were able to visit and I started to kind of lose consciousness go in and out of consciousness and the young nurse who’d only been working there for three months, she noticed something was very wrong so they brought in the doctor on call right then and that doctor said no this stuff is normal this gunk shooting out of his nose is normal, this feeling is normal and she said this is not normal so with with what I’m seeing with him he’s falling really fast so she called a Code Blue so I didn’t know what a Code Blue was at the time but clearly the room gets everyone goes out of the room; Code Blue blares over the microphone and all doctors come in and they reassess the situation and the assessment at the time was that I needed to be reopened and go back into another surgery so that’s what happened 23:56 So then they knock me out again and I went into surgery and I woke up about a week later 24:50 Then finally when I came out of it at the end I was strapped to the bed with my ankles and my arm and my head and I have a 24-hour nurse sitting next to me and I’m asking what’s going on and she asked, you’re not going to try to break out are you? And I go no because I had tried to tear everything out while I was unconscious I guess and so they unhooked me and said yeah you’ve been out for a week and you know they just had to reseal everything and we’re just hoping that that connection holds 25:59 If I can share one experience that was actually quite overwhelming in that next day or so I had a client that showed up and I was completely unprepared to see a client in the state that I was in. I just had come out. I had the nose tube. I was overwhelmed with what happened to me. I was like I don’t know what’s going on and this is an Indian gentleman and he comes in and he sees me and I look at him and it was like a piece of my outside life that had come in that I wasn’t prepared to see and I just started breaking down in tears 26:43 And he comes over me he doesn’t say a thing. He just comes over to me. He puts his hand on my forehead and holds it there and we just breathe and I just try to calm and I breathe and I just breathe and after a couple minutes he goes and he sits down and I look at him and I ask “What did you do, what did you do? And he goes, “Nothing, I just was there with you, present with you” and I felt like he just pulled away all that anxiety in a moment 27:36 Wow that is a beautiful moment of humanity and and I would reflect you know you had parents they weren’t there for you but in that moment you had a connection to something which was the human experience coming through in in a bit of divine so so thank you for sharing 28:12 So I was given copious amounts of pain meds and through the whole process and I had never been, whatever you want to call it, a pain pill popper. I never really took medications you know. Yes, I drink alcohol and but I did not medicate like that. Now I’m trying to get food in me, I’m prepping for chemo and radiation that is just around the corner and they have to wait till my incisions heal somewhat 28:46 They’d had to crack my ribs to get in so I had broken bones and to take everything out so the healing process took six weeks or so if not more just to ease the pain somewhat. But in that process i was also given whatever pain meds they wanted. I mean I had fentanyl, oxycontin, oxycodone, you know codeine, percocet. Whatever. I had it all and I didn’t realize how hard and how that whole addiction thing can be another problem in the whole journey of recovering from these deadly diseases 29:34 For the next four months I had to prep and try to gain as much weight as possible which was impossible before I started my chemo and chemo was back at Stanford 29:45 I was at home basically just trying to get through my days and nights in intense discomfort and go to Stanford one day a week hooked up to the IVs for five or six hours 30:01 I received chemotherapy oxaliplatin and 5-FU and then I would go home and take these huge horse pills called Xeloda (capecitabine) for rest of the week and I did that for maybe eight weeks and then in the middle of that we crossed over with starting radiation. Radiation was a whole other issue where you know I had to go locally and get into this chamber thing where I would lie down and get zapped once a day, five days a week for six to eight weeks. That was what took me down basically. I handled the chemo better than I handled the radiation but the nausea, and the weight loss – I got down to 95 pounds at this point so going from the surgery where I lost weight and now going through the chemo and the radiation now we’re talking six seven months later and I’m six one, and 95 pounds 31:07 I just couldn’t take much more so on my last day of radiation I went into the doctor crying and said I can do it but I don’t know how much more I can handle and he said we’re done. That’s it. He goes you made it 90% of the way but you made it way further than I thought you would make it so congratulations and so we ended it that day and that was that was my last radiation treatment and then I had about a month of dry heaving and recovery from just the burning inside – you know they burned me I guess so now I’ve got three tattoos little dots. I’m tattooed up with these you know these little dots where they radiated and now I’m trying to gain weight but I’m in such pain that my pain pill use is accelerating and that’s becoming the next problem in my life 32:32 I think what helped me through was I didn’t know how bad it was going to get. I didn’t have any research. I just kept on doing each step that I could take it and I’m like this is terrible, this is painful, oh my god this like when is this going to end? But then when it accumulates over months not just you know a couple days, I get to the point where like all right they’re still doing this. I cannot wait to pass out at night because I don’t want to be awake and waking up in the morning is the same cycle of pain and nausea and vomiting and not being able to eat. Each day was like I’m getting through my days but I don’t know like how many more of these days I can do and so it was it was literally just holding on for dear life and trying to look for the little bits of progress. You know I might look back and I wouldn’t see a difference from day to day but I might see you know a week ago I was dry heaving all day every day and now it’s just a couple times a day and I would look at that progress that I was making and that’s kind of what made me feel I was going in the right direction because I really only fell off and had a handful of step back moments through that recovery process but generally speaking if I looked at it it, there was improvement and that’s what kind of kept me going is I didn’t have those days where, you know like okay we’re back to step zero or we’re gonna have to redo chemo 34:03 Like if they would have said we’re gonna have to go back and redo chemo that would have been a much harder blow for me to handle but I was seeing that I was getting through these steps 34:13 We can deal with a lot of pain you know we really can. I do not like pain. I’m pretty weak when it comes to it 34:21 People say that I’m very strong when it comes to it but I cannot stand, I would do whatever possible to avoid it so I mean in my nausea periods I got my medical marijuana card and I ate edibles and that was the only thing that fixed me 35:16 I was getting whatever I wanted for the pain and its probably not a good thing when it comes to these things, especially opiates like oxycontin because I guess it’s heroin or like heroin. They got a hold of me; they got completely ahold of me and so much so that the detox off of that was almost worse than the other stuff that I went through