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THE DOCTOR AND THE DJ
Join Johnjay, the charismatic host of the top-rated Johnjay and Rich show on iHeartRadio, and his trusted doctor Dr. Carrie Bordinko as they delve into the fascinating world of alternative medicine.
In this podcast, Johnjay asks the questions we've all been curious about
Why do some people seem to have found the fountain of youth?
Is Big Medicine really trying to keep us sick?
What's the truth about stem cells, mushrooms, ketamine, and more?
Dr. Carrie provides science-backed insights, helping to separate fact from fiction.
Along the way, they talk to well-known celebrities who seem to know the secret to health and fitness, award-winning doctors, mental health experts, and more.
Tune in as the DJ and the doctor challenge conventional wisdom and explore the possibilities of alternative medicine.
THE DOCTOR AND THE DJ
Transformative Resilience: The Healing Power of Dogs and Human Connection
How do we overcome life’s toughest challenges? Join Zach Skow of Marley’s Mutts as he shares inspiring stories of resilience and redemption. From Cora Rose, a double amputee dog turned cherished companion, to Hooch, a therapy dog who triumphed over severe injuries, discover the transformative power of love and second chances.
We also explore Zach’s personal journey through addiction recovery, the healing role of loyal canine companions, and the courage to embrace hope and self-acceptance. Plus, learn about the Positive Change Program, a groundbreaking initiative combining dog rescue with inmate rehabilitation, now expanding to Arizona.
This episode is a heartfelt celebration of perseverance, compassion, and the unbreakable bond between humans and animals.
so we are here today with zach scow from marley's mutts. But before we get into you, zach, how about we talk about cora?
Speaker 2:let's do it. What's her story? What's her story? We're here with zach scow of the cora rose fan club. Um, so cora rose is a double amputee.
Speaker 2:Prior to her I had another double amputee, her name was noel, and noel came to us with bilateral fractures of her front legs, which is a kind of common injury when you've been hit by a car. We tried to save her legs, couldn't save her legs, had to amputate them to save her life. Up to that point it was not a viable injury. So you'd be euthanized if you had that injury and you came into a shelter. We didn't amputate the front legs of dogs. It was considered like kind of cruel and unusual. So when Noel you know her predecessor went through that and did it successfully and learned how to walk on her back legs, learned how to use a cart and was successfully adopted, a whole bunch of rescues and shelters who were having bilateral fractures come in, started to contact us. So so Noel got, noel got adopted and Cora came in three weeks later. Oh wow. So the shelter in Madera. We had shelters in Los Angeles. All these people were sending us dogs who may need a bilateral amputation.
Speaker 2:So Cora had broken legs, shattered pelvis, broken back and was just in bad shape. She had been casted on both of her front legs for like two months at this shelter Hadn't been set, hadn't been treated properly. So when we took the one cast off, you know it was in worse than bad shape. So she had a basically terminal bone infection that had already crept up a good portion of her elbow. So we had to amputate that leg immediately. We tried to save the other one. That was not possible. So we ended up having to do the same surgery with her.
Speaker 2:So, believe it or not, the, the, the most significant injury, which is the losing of the legs, was not her biggest issue. Uh, her pelvis was broken in like eight places and when your pelvis is broken you can't really peeing's hard, eating's hard, walking's hard, sleeping's hard, like you can't do anything. So, um, it was quite horrific. It was. It was quite um a shock to the, to the eyes, to the systems, to your conscience, just to be looking at a dog that has a scar all the way across his chest and going through what she was going through. So in the beginning, with her in particular, I thought, man, did we do the right thing? Like?
Speaker 1:was this?
Speaker 2:was this you had to thought about putting her down yeah, I mean we not only we thought about putting her down, the the lead veterinary technician of the hospital would not sit in the surgery because they believed it was cruel and unusual that amputating a dog, those dogs should just be euthanized, right? Um, ironically enough, that same veterinary technician, about two years later, when we had brought another dog in, walked me out to the car and said hey, I just want to let you know I was that tech that wouldn't sit in on the surgery. I just want to tell you that I'm sorry and I think what you're doing is great. And she, by that point, now worked on three of our double front leg amputated dogs.
Speaker 1:We had a big one.
Speaker 2:We had a German Shepherd double front leg amputee so he had a bilateral avulsion. So he had a bilateral avulsion. The nerves in his shoulders had popped out from being ejected out of a pickup truck. So when you land, if you are a dog in the back of a pickup truck and you flop out into the street, your legs will splay out really quickly and that process will rip the nerves out. So he had these palsied legs and so we've had the whole spectrum small dogs, big dogs. Well, how?
Speaker 1:did it go from her to the surgery? Do you keeping her?
Speaker 2:Well, I had. Yeah, what happened was Cora, you know, cora's predecessor. I'd had her for six months. I really fell in love with her. She got adopted, which was great. But Cora came in after. Her process was just a little more laborious. You know, we were that much more attached to her because her, her recovery was very difficult. I had little ones come home at the same time, so my, my daughters were born at the same time, around the same time. So her whole, she integrated into our family very, very easily and she just got better and better. In the beginning she couldn't do anything. She couldn't stand up to eat, she couldn't walk.
Speaker 1:She but now she's like a normal dog, just doesn't have front legs.
Speaker 2:So I mean it just goes to show what you can accomplish when you apply yourself a little bit every day to getting better. Right, just every day. She'd apply herself a little bit better to getting better and she would get out of her comfort zone. Always, you know, she was always trying to do things that she shouldn't be able to do. How old is she now? She's probably 11. She was four when she came to us. She was a street dog too, so, um, she looks like a princess now, you know. But she it's funny because I say that because she looks like a princess she looks like some, you know, like royalties dog, but she's a street dog from modesto, like she will rip open a trash bag in two seconds. She has like no manners. She's a complete violator of privacy, like she's always scavenging love and food.
Speaker 3:That is her ML in life. Well, I mean the reality watching her. You know, take it up, take all the love in. Here is she is a princess now.
Speaker 2:Oh yeah.
Speaker 1:She's become one.
Speaker 3:Well, you know Carrie.
Speaker 1:She's my doctor and she has a rescue dog from our foundation.
Speaker 2:Nice. Yeah, jeremy Shepard, beautiful dog. So when you have problems with John, do you just like take it out on them?
Speaker 3:I love that dog.
Speaker 1:That dog was like a skinny thing right Now, how much does your dog weigh?
Speaker 3:Yeah, he was 40 pounds less than he is now. So he was around 70, I think, at the rescue.
Speaker 2:But you've got to know what I'm talking about when we adopt out dogs to friends. I've adopted hundreds of dogs out of people that I know, and every once in a while you'll run into someone and be like hey, you remember that dog I got from you, and they'll start complaining about what the dog doesn't do. Actually, no, the truth is well.
Speaker 3:I make comments about it only because he is spoiled. Rotten, actually tell john jay all the time you know we did, we weren't looking for the dog. He kind of called us, caught us off guard. Hey, can you help us out? You know? We we need to replace this dog and we're like, oh, we're not really looking for a dog right this second.
Speaker 1:But honestly I tell we say all the time how thankful we are. And don't you like make this? I mean this dog. I made this dog.
Speaker 3:This dog's a princess, her dog's a king I have a 26 pound turkey right now thawing out in the fridge that I have to cook him tomorrow night. So yeah, he's a little spoiled.
Speaker 2:It's not quite Thanksgiving, but nice, no, no, he doesn't wait, that's just his October turkey.
Speaker 1:Well, that's his October this week, turkey. Where does he sleep and how does he get up in the morning?
Speaker 3:He gets up in the morning, he gets four raw eggs. Look at this.
Speaker 2:Well, she digs her, makes her bed with her non-existent front legs.
Speaker 1:That aren't there. Oh, she's trying to dig her bed. Yeah, she's making her comfy bed.
Speaker 2:Oh wow, Isn't that the greatest.
Speaker 3:That is the greatest.
Speaker 2:She does it every night before we go to bed Not at our house, oddly enough, but in hotel room beds. She always does this.
Speaker 1:She'll always make it like she thinks she's instinctually needing her bed phantom limb yeah, she's needing her bed, so she literally doesn't know she's missing legs oh, she knows.
Speaker 2:I mean she knows especially to you know, um, the way she introduces herself to other dogs and even to people. She's she's very I don't want to say she's a back of the pack, like that kind of submissive. But she acknowledges that she's got an injury to almost every dog. So dogs greet each other by by sniffing, by investigating one another. And how she moves herself upside down to like give herself completely. She always like exposes herself to new dogs to basically have them notice.
Speaker 2:You know what kind of impediment she's got. She does it like right off the bat and almost all dogs even you know, because my home was filled with reactive pit bulls, king corso's, mastiffs I had prior to her, believe it or not, I had just a litany of very large troubled dogs for like a decade. So she's a huge departure from the normal type of dogs that I have. But for whatever reason, with a lot of those dogs she has this, this aura about her and the way she presents herself and the way she's kind of like adapted to her injury. She is like ubiquitously accepted. I've never seen a dog not accept her, which is kind of rare. Also with poodles they tend to perk the attention of a lot of dogs because they're poofy, she's got colored hair, things like that, but for whatever reason, she's very um, everybody finds her, brings out the softer side.
Speaker 3:She does, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1:Which is not Ranger's pretty aggressive, which is not?
Speaker 3:Ranger at all, Right Well his name's Ranger.
Speaker 2:What are you going to expect?
Speaker 3:Well, his name wasn't Ranger, it was Boo Bunny when at the shelter at Love Pup. But yeah, it didn't quite fit the whole personality of that dog, so he's he's.
Speaker 2:From Boo Bunny.
Speaker 3:From Boo Bunny to Ranger.
Speaker 2:He's a badass.
Speaker 3:He is a badass 110-pound German shepherd with attitude.
Speaker 2:Was that like a whole personality transition? Did you have to explain to him? You're like all right, none more of this little Boo Bunny shit.
Speaker 3:You know, he fell right in line really quickly, which was good. It didn't take a lot of education.
Speaker 2:Mommy needs protecting. I don't need a Boo Bunny.
Speaker 1:I need aanger, who's capable of violence. Let's jump, let's start, let's shift gears and get to your story. Like I, I remember I had you on my radio show.
Speaker 2:Well, can we just finish with her really quick more with her.
Speaker 3:Yeah, of course there's more. What else? What? Because, first off, it sounds to me like you've completely changed the mindset of veterinarians all over the country.
Speaker 2:Well, yeah, to understand that there's been a number of um, and I know your wife will attest to this because it's probably one of the things that really brought her into our organization. But we've always prided ourselves in trying to provide opportunities to dogs who don't have them, who would otherwise be cast aside. He came into the shelter, his tongue was cut out, ears were cut off and this was an injury that nobody had seen. You know how do you deal with a dog with no tongue, like tortured or there was a mistake?
Speaker 2:Yeah, like it was a fight, maybe it could have been cut out, could have been fought up, but his ears had been definitely cut off just rudimentarily with like a.
Speaker 2:He was a big french mastiff. He came into kern county animal services and beautiful dog. He had pneumonia at the time and when I went in to meet him I had no idea, I didn't pick up that he was missing a tongue. Nobody did so. We rescued him, took him right to the vet and the vet called me a couple hours later and said um, she was like in tears and this was a tough gal. And she said um, hey, you know, we went to intubate this boy, you know, and move his tongue aside to tape the intubation tube in, and there's no tongue. And we're like, what do you mean? There's no tongue, he's like it's severed at the epiglottis, like at the base of his throat. So when you have a dog like that, a huge dog, he's brachycephalic, so you know, underbite, um, they can't regulate their body temperature, they can't drink, they can't eat. So all of a sudden we have this dog who's terribly skinny he's obviously been losing weight ever since he's been at the shelter. Um, they didn't understand why he wasn't eating or what his problems were. And so all of a sudden we're going oh boy, what are we going to do with this dog? You know, and he was such a special boy like so he teetered on the precipice of euthanasia or rescue there for a few days.
Speaker 2:They put a esophageal feeding tube in his neck and he started to come around. And he started to come around and we kept him at the veterinary hospital for a while. We got him a bailey's chair, which is for dogs, with mega esophagus which helps them sit upright so that gravity will help food go down their throat. And within a couple of weeks we dialed in this process of feeding him. We were able to take out his esophageal feeding tube, which was giving him food and water. He started to drink out of a mop bucket in the hospital that was deep, almost like a horse like, because you can't lick he.
Speaker 2:So we would create this suction effect and all of a sudden we've got this viable, tongueless dog who is eating out of our hands. So we would basically scoop in soaked dry food into our hands with water and pour it down the back of his throat. And we did that his whole life. For nine years or 10 years. We cared for him. He learned how to drink, like I said, relatively quickly. We learned how to feed him, of which there was a couple methods. We would do protein balls, but usually dry food just out of our hands, and he's a hundred pound French Mastiff with no ears and no tongue and you're sticking your hand on his throat to feed him. But he was just an absolutely incredible dog.
Speaker 2:So that was the first injury where we kind of convinced the veterinary community and the rescue community that this is a viable injury and, of course, right after that, tons of people started reaching out. We've got a dog with partially missing tongue, fully missing tongue and we've had, I think, five or six of them since then and Hooch went on to become a therapy dog. He lived an illustrious career, hero, dog of the year in 2016 and just an incredibly special dog. My dad really bonded him in the end, and so that was one of the first examples that taught us. Hey, you know, let's look at this a little bit differently. And so Cora is kind of along that line where we could have euthanized her. We wanted to try and give it a shot, and because we did, we could have euthanized her. We wanted to try and give it a shot and because we did, it's now considered a more viable injury that can be treated as opposed to euthanized.
Speaker 1:So people come to you still every day. Can you take this dog? Can you take this dog? Yeah, how do you say no?
Speaker 2:Uh, cause it's tough with those injuries Any kind of dog. Yeah.
Speaker 1:For.
Speaker 2:Oh any out constantly and you know I'm, if you're anything like me, you're a bit of a people pleaser and you want to make people happy and it's, and you don't want suffering, you know? Um, yeah, it's one of the hardest when they get a hold of me.
Speaker 1:That's when it's hard. I like to push them off to my wife, push them off to some of the people in the staff that have no problem saying no exactly that way it's, you know. You know what I mean. Or if they message me on instagram, I like to ignore them as much as I can. I have like a theory that if, if I ignore them and if they get through to me three different times, then I'm like I gotta get this dog in here. They tried other places and they're back.
Speaker 2:Let me bring it in you know, but so there's cora so cora's and where how we've developed her since she's been with me for six years. We've taken her into our miracle mut program. So we have a big therapy education program with about 30 dog teams. So these are certified therapy teams that we send out throughout the community. We have a contract with Dignity Health, with Adventist Health. We have like 100 nonprofit partners. So adults, handicapped daycare, schools for autistic children, like everywhere that the human-animal bond could be important or could affect change, we try to bring our dogs.
Speaker 1:That's nuts, man. Weren't you just also at the White House or doing something we were in?
Speaker 2:2018 for the First Step Act. That was the first criminal justice reform passed in several decades. For our positive change program yeah.
Speaker 1:Okay, let's get to you, and then I want to jump around these different programs, okay. So when I first talked to you I was like eight years ago or so my wife's been a fan of yours for 10 years and we finally connected on the radio show and I remember you talking about how you got into this, but it started because you lived here.
Speaker 2:Yeah, you lived here yeah, rock bottom was lived here. Yeah, rock bottom was Arizona. Baby Rock bottom.
Speaker 1:What was rock bottom for you? What happened?
Speaker 2:Rock bottom was kind of a combination of things. I mean, your rock bottom is like a trajectory right, so I definitely began it in Tucson on Miracle Mile, baby Jeez.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 2:That was you know.
Speaker 3:What year was that?
Speaker 2:That was 1999. Yeah, that was where that was. You know what year is that? That was 1999. Okay, yeah, 1999, 2000, 2001. That was when I got into, you know, cocaine and crack and making crack and selling. You know you get caught up with certain people and I didn't have any money and I was failing out of schools. I'd become an alcoholic at that point and so kind of that began my hard drug kind of spiral. But then when I was up here in Phoenix I was working at the Improv in Tempe, which was a great place to work as an alcoholic and junkie.
Speaker 2:Because, you know, working at a comedy club is interesting because it's, you know, you're open from 4 until like 2 in the morning, 2.30 in the morning. Everybody's on that same schedule. Everybody are college students and kind of hip party folks. So it was a, it was a special place to work.
Speaker 2:But, um, by that point I was drinking 24 hours a day. I needed to drink 24 hours a day. I was using with whatever other money that I had or I could scrounge and, um, my body was just failing. You know, I was getting scrounge and my body was just failing. You know I was getting. I was having little issues here and there, but it was obvious to me that something was going to happen. You know, about 2006, 2007, I started to have just physical anomalies that I couldn't explain. I moved back to California end of 2007.
Speaker 2:And then I immediately went into liver failure. I started, well, I didn't realize I was going into liver failure. I knew something was. I didn't realize I was going into liver failure. I knew something was acutely happening to me that was not good, but I didn't realize it was liver failure because I wouldn't go to a hospital. So I started to turn yellow.
Speaker 2:I started to get huge swollen I looked nine months pregnant, started to lose my coherence because I had ammonia, you know, building up on my brain. So I started to not realize where I was at, have these and sometimes you're not aware that you're having those moments. So you have to have someone. Someone will look at you and be like, are you, are you okay? And you won't be aware that you just have this lapse in being present. You know, when you have ammonia buildup on your brain, because your liver is not filtering it out of your system, it it almost makes you, uh, you know, half half here, half not, um, so I stayed.
Speaker 2:You know I was having issues with blood coming out of the wrong places regularly and I knew when that the first time that happened is when I got scared, you know. And then that just happened every night or every day and you just start to think that, well, I'm just going to sweep this under the rug, like everything. I was so terrified to go to the hospital because I knew they were going to tell me it was related to my alcohol and drug use and having to confront that that would have been the end of me. People don't necessarily realize how inexorably connected you are to your alcohol or your drugs, I couldn't exist without it. Period, it was impossible for me to think about existing without alcohol or drugs.
Speaker 3:So you had more fear of that being taken away than the fact that you were bleeding out of abnormal places.
Speaker 2:Oh, definitely Because I couldn't cope with when I was not, you know, going the physical. The withdrawals that I would have from alcohol were terrible and you know those would happen immediately if I didn't drink. There's a couple times I tried to make it a day without drinking. I'd go into withdrawals by like 2 am is that a genetic thing, carrie?
Speaker 1:or is that because?
Speaker 3:well, yeah, partially it is actually genetic. I don't know if you have any other family members or have a family history of any type of addiction problems, but we, you know people say well is because the family members they would live through an addiction problem, or is it's really more genetic than you think? Not everybody will have the same reaction to drug and alcohol. People will use the same amounts that you used and never talk about liver failure in their entire life. But some bodies are not set up to handle that load. Well, I was drinking.
Speaker 2:You know, my grandfather died of liver failure when he was 41.
Speaker 3:It's a marvelous story.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I became connected to him in my recovery, which is very interesting. But I mean, I drank. The thing about alcoholism, you know, I drank every day from probably junior year, senior year of high school on. I started to drink. I drank every night, I started to drink every day, all day, from 2003 until I got sick in 2008, and you know, in the in the last years I was drinking like a box of wine a day. I couldn't afford anything. So, box of a box of franzia 799 back then you're getting five liters of astronaut wine in a bag, inside of a box that you can pour it around with you, and so it was not like I was drinking a 12-pack, I was drinking eight or nine bottles of wine a day.
Speaker 1:It's so weird to hear that from you, because when I look at you right now, you look extremely healthy.
Speaker 2:You would never know. That was where you were at one point and I needed it. The chasing, that fix as an alcoholic, I needed it. You know I, I, um, I was so convinced that I was. I've always struggled with worth worthlessness, you know. But when you're in the spirals of of alcoholism, that worthlessness is is inescapable, you know. And I was even more worthless without it. You know I, uh, so much of my personality, so much of my sociability, so much of my just general fear of my surroundings was controlled by alcohol, you know I would.
Speaker 2:Alcohol helped me get to a point where I felt like everybody else. You know, I had this low grade like simmering anxiety and like malaise that I just couldn't, couldn't get away from. But alcohol would kind of feel like it would let me breathe, like I could exist without it being such a terrible time. To exist, like just being alive was difficult. You know, just being in my own skin and trying to be contented in me, with me, coexisting with me, was really, really challenging. And when you're traipsing around those dark corners of your mind, sometimes alcohol is the only thing that keeps you, like within the lines, feeling more sane. And when I didn't have alcohol or drugs. I felt absolutely insane. You know, the craziest I've ever been is when I don't have alcohol or drugs.
Speaker 1:You know um how long have you been sober right?
Speaker 2:now just had 16 man wow 16 years 16 fucking years wow 16. I couldn't do 16 minutes without, without a drink, you know so. So take us there?
Speaker 1:how did you so you? You have liver failure.
Speaker 3:You obviously went to the hospital at some point yeah, so um you must have had friends around you that said, look, we've got to take oh boy.
Speaker 2:Well, at that point I was wearing long sleeve clothes to cover up all the yellow and the bruising, because you bruise real easily when you're in liver failure. My eyes were totally yellow, my skin was like yellowish gray, so I would tan, I would sit outside and try to make myself not look yeah, and I wouldn't be around people. And then finally my dad, you know, really got onto it, knew there was things, because he would hear me in the bathroom and so I went to the doctor, did all my tests, was real nervous about it, and then I went in and she called me back to her office this nurse and I had known her from like the streets and do her daughter, and she said, uh, she sat me down and she grabbed my hand and she started to pet, pet my hand and she was like you know, honey, and she started to get like emotional, you know know. She said you're in liver failure and you need to go to a hospital.
Speaker 2:And I was like what do you mean? She's like you know, you're dying and you this could you know, this could kill you and you need to go to a hospital right now and we can transfer you or you can go on your own, but you need to go to a hospital right now and you know, I heard that and like I remember the wave. I remember like every ounce of blood and possibilities and hope, and like everything draining out of my body and just going. Oh well, there it is, dude, I'm dead, like I'm dead because I can't do this, I can't do life without alcohol, and I'm dead because I'm apparently they're telling me I'm going to die, yeah.
Speaker 2:And I tried to convince her. Like nah, I've just been on one for like a week. She's like that's not how liver tests work, you know, you're not just like on a bender that's flared up your liver, like. So I uh went home and lied. I didn't even I couldn't. You know, my dad wasn't with me at the hospital, so I just went home and and lied and told him I was. I told him no hard liquor, you know, just wine, just bullshit him because again, I couldn't, I'd never been in recovery, I'd never been to a program, I'd never been without alcohol or drugs, like there was no way, I didn't have the tools to address this. So I hid it for a little while longer and then, you know, I really started to bleed like badly and I did some research and one of the ways you die from liver failure is esophageal varices.
Speaker 3:It's a miserable death. Yeah, I've witnessed that. People need to understand that.
Speaker 2:It is the most miserable thing you could ever imagine.
Speaker 3:It is the most miserable death you could ever imagine.
Speaker 2:Esophageal varices occur when your liver is not accepting all of this blood and bile that's being pumped through your hepatic duct. So because it can't get through the duct, it gets this portal hypertension, this high blood pressure. So it essentially goes around your liver and it puts undue pressure on the veins in your esophagus, the arteries in your esophagus. They literally blow up and they will burst and then you bleed out orally.
Speaker 3:Yeah, trajectory bleeding.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's the worst thing.
Speaker 3:I had a sponsor. You've been in the room.
Speaker 2:Oh yeah, me too. I had a sponsee who went through it and they brought in a crash cart to solder to burn his veins shut. So this is happening, while I'm talking to him, he goes into an episode with his family present. And, yeah, they brought in a crash cart worked on him and then soldered his veins closed in his throat cauterized him, sorry, yeah
Speaker 2:thanks, right in front of you, yeah, yeah I was in the don't really have any time you're, you've got seconds to you're like, arterially it is as much blood as you can imagine it will hit walls 15 so did that make an impact on you when you saw that?
Speaker 2:well, this was. That was after I got sober, but when it started happening to me, I was having these, these like perforations, these agitations. So I wasn't arterially bleeding, I was having like bits of blood and they were trying to figure out. They did endoscopies and found out that I was swollen, but it hadn't. You know, my varices were there but they hadn't, and you could see them on the outside. You could see. You know these, see, you know these. They look like cords, blue cords, coming down the throat and uh, yeah, so they were pretty convinced that I could be. Uh, my varices weren't going to burst, even though I was agitating them so much. Um, but, uh, I I finally came to with my dad, you know, and explained to him what I was experiencing physically.
Speaker 2:Um, explained to him what had happened and he took me to the hospital and they checked me in for long-term care. It was at Bakersfield Memorial Hospital. They don't do liver transplant there. I went into withdrawal, you know, alcohol withdrawal, and my kidneys crashed.
Speaker 2:I don't remember like the first four or five days, but I remember Sitting with my dad in the hospital room. I remember the doctor coming in with his team and I remember them just very matter-of-factly, telling my dad he needs a liver transplant or he's going to die. And unfortunately he's not going to get a liver transplant. He's got 90 or less days to live and we're going to try to keep him comfortable. We're going to do what we can to try to address your liver. We're going to give you frozen plasma transfusions so I had tons of those to try to bring my numbers down so that they could do a proper biopsy.
Speaker 2:When your liver is failing that badly, your blood is so thin that it won't clot. So if I get cut, if I have any sort of a, you just bleed and they can't use blood stoppers because you have other complications. Just bleed and they can't use blood stoppers because you have other complications. So like it's a really um, it's a really tumultuous diagnosis because there's some. And then also when your liver fails, your kidney, your pancreas, your gallbladder, like everything how are you here?
Speaker 1:right now. Yeah, like what happened? Did you get?
Speaker 3:a liver transplant. There had to be, so there had to be a better purpose yeah, so um, I mean talk about it.
Speaker 2:So the only thing they could really do to help me outside of these plasma transfusions which were the worst, because it was frozen. So you just freeze your ass off and you're already so sensitive when you're in liver failure to temperature, like you get so cold and they would tap my it's called paracentesis, so they cut a hole in my back and they would drain my. It's called paracentesis, so they cut a hole in my back and they would drain my stomach Because you're just filled with liters and liters and it's so painful I can't tell you how painful having all this shit built up in your abdominal, so your abdominal cavity just fills with blood and bile Because it's not being processed by your liver, so it just leaks into your abdominal cavity and it pokes out.
Speaker 3:And you do look pregnant. They look nine months pregnant cavity and it pokes out and you do look pregnant, they look more pregnant than pregnant.
Speaker 2:Wow, I still have, you know, stretch marks all over the both of my sides from from that and uh, yeah, I mean essentially they. What they said is, if we can't bring your numbers down, if we can't, you know, get your, your billy rubin, your ast, your lt, all these different metrics down. You know, this is just what it's going to be like. And when you become become sick enough, you know, or when insurance refuses to pay for you, we'll send you home on hospice, you know, because you can't, you need six months of sobriety to qualify for a transplant period. You cannot get into a transplant program. There's only seven hospitals in California that do liver transplant and I was not at one of them.
Speaker 2:So it was hopeless, man, to be honest. There was just no hope. You know, I had some friends coming and visiting me. I don't think people really knew overall how bad it was back then. You know what kind of shape I was in. But the first real sense of hope and I got addicted to Dilaudid immediately, like you want to. Yeah, I'm going to have a whole. Well, I was whole what was the addict?
Speaker 3:switch to the next addiction that's part of the problem is, you know we have to use drugs like benzodiazepines to get you off alcohol, but then you become addicted to the benzodiazepine feeling, and that's the challenge is helping them break the addiction cycle which is much bigger than just coming off the drug du jour. Yeah, 100.
Speaker 2:I mean I got into, uh, I got in there, went through withdrawals, you know, and when I kind of came to they were looking at the pain chart on the wall the smiley face, the straight face, the frowny face and then the crying frowny face.
Speaker 3:You were the crying.
Speaker 2:Crying frowny face all day long, baby that means. Dilaudid and morphine every four hours and you know it, just like how Cora wants to eat dinner right now. You know exactly when your time's coming up, which nurse to bitch at and complain to. Within like a week or two weeks, I was a danger to myself and others in the hospital, so I had a babysitter attached to me who had to do everything with me.
Speaker 2:This has got to be a movie at some point, and it babysitter attached to me, who had to do everything with me, and this has got to be a movie at some point and uh, it was wild man.
Speaker 1:So what happened? How do you did you? Where do they think?
Speaker 2:where I'm sitting in my hospital room and my dad is an engineer, so all he is thinking about is not losing his son and he's there every day. Right, my mom wasn't there, I didn't have that have. My dad was my dude and he still is like. That dude rode with me throughout it all. He's driving an hour and a half to get to the hospital every morning. Um, and I come, come to my room and there's three dudes in there tattooed with like they look like mormons like short sleeve dress up shirts with ties, yeah, and like, what is what is all this?
Speaker 2:and uh, it was an aa meeting. It was an hni meeting for alcoholics, anonymous. They came to my hospital room to have a meeting of my first meeting of aa. Right, I'm going, holy shit, this is interesting. But uh, the guy that was in there had gotten through liver failure in prison and my dad is only hearing all this data. That is, your son's gonna die, your son's gonna die, your son's gonna die. And here's this dude. He went through hepatitis C, liver failure, which is a different type of liver failure, but nonetheless liver failure. So here's this dude. Looks like a million bucks, went through it in prison. I'm in a real hospital, not prison, you know.
Speaker 2:Maybe I've got hope, and so that was a real catalyst to get my dad motivated to try to figure this out. And he just never gave up. Man Again, he's an engineer with like a tactful strategic, never say die, we're going to figure this out. Like mentality. He's not exuberant like that, but he's very focused and like engineering minded, you know. And so he just was going to find a way to get me a transplant. That was his just goal. Is he? My son is going to have a liver transplant. We're going to get this for him, we're going to figure it out.
Speaker 2:And a couple of weeks later, this nurse that we were working with through my insurance, she was at UCLA, one of the hospitals that did transplant, and she connected me with the transplant team at Cedars and they had an opportunity for me to come basically apply for the transplant program. But I had to be there, you know, and so we found, had this opportunity. My dad says we're going, we're going to do it, we're taking you to cedar. And I was born at cedars, you know, in 1997, I mean 1979, and uh, so we go to pull everything out.
Speaker 2:Doctors are going you can't fucking leave here, you know you're, you're extremely fragile, like you could die on the drive down there. You can't leave, leave this hospital. My dad's like fuck you, we're leaving, you know. And he, so they bring the legal people down to sign me out against doctor's orders, a stack of paperwork he's got to sign, pull the shit out of me. And we sped down the two and a half hours to Cedar, sinai, and we met with Dr Tram Tran and her transplant team and they admitted me into the program and they said um, look, this is like really, really really close, call um, but if we keep you here you're gonna die. Um, so we're gonna send you home and we're gonna take you off almost all of your medication. Um, we're gonna send you home to the care of your dad and your dogs and stay close to an emergency room because you're gonna need it. You know so. And my dad's going what the fuck are you talking about? We're gonna do what? Why?
Speaker 3:did they say if, if we keep you here, you're gonna die. What was their thought process?
Speaker 2:the thought process was I was addicted to drugs, I was failing you were addicted to dilaudid at this point if you graphed my. I've been there for five and a half weeks, so if you graph my progress, I got sicker every day. I was the hospital. I got sicker and sicker, and sicker and sicker. Quality of the food was terrible. The amount of things they were putting in my body was, and they were trying to treat my depression. They were trying to treat my insomnia. They're trying to treat my pain.
Speaker 3:They're trying to treat my liver All drug based.
Speaker 2:Trying to treat my kidneys all with pills, get another medication All which are done through the filtering systems of your body, which of mine, were failing. So you're going to put more and more shit through my system that my body can't process.
Speaker 1:Poor dad man. Well, your dad must've been going through to see his son going through this. It's unbelievable. So at what point? Like, when I look at you here in front of me, you look like an extremely healthy guy. So where, when, did things turn around?
Speaker 2:Only on the outside.
Speaker 1:When did someone go? We got a liver for you. Is that what happened?
Speaker 2:No, it's not what happened. Sorry, it takes a long time, it's just a process. So I got admitted to the program. So I'm officially a transplant patient. So if I can stay alive for six months and not drink or use, they'll get me a liver transplant. They send me home. I go through withdrawals immediately, which was terrible. So I convinced my dad to take me for shots of dope at the hospital A couple of times. I fooled him to you know. Just keep me going.
Speaker 3:Yeah, so now we're going for through narcotic withdrawal.
Speaker 2:Oh yeah, it was terrible, it was the worst. Um, if I didn't have my, my pit bull, marley, with me, like I was so suicidal but I could barely move when I was going through that Cause it was so fragile physically and these were terrible withdrawals. I mean, when I was going through that because it was so fragile physically and these were terrible withdrawals, I mean, you know, tremoring uncontrollably, seeing things, hearing things, blood coming down my walls, it was, I was.
Speaker 3:It's like a Stephen King movie.
Speaker 2:It was and I just had my I remember my hand just on his chest, like his solar, just like feeling his chest, and he was so confident and so sturdy and so present, and so there that I just remember, and I was just shaking, I just remember going like, just holding him, just going fuck me, Let me get through this, you know, and um, and then after that, you know, when I got through, that there was then it was suicide, because I had couldn't put my mind anything productive. It's just, I'm a waste, waste of space. I'm doing this to my dad, I'm doing this to myself, I'm not going to live anyway. This is all a waste.
Speaker 2:Um, and sometimes, when you have like, when you feel like all of your agency is gone from, from life, you know, sometimes all you can do is like take your life, you know, is like remove yourself from the equation. When you, when there's nothing I could practically do to like help myself, I, I couldn't walk at the time, I was so ill and uh, so I would just sit up there, you know, with my dad's gun and and, uh, and just you know, rack bullets in, put bullets, take them out, rack them in, pop the clip out, pop it in think about where I was going to go. Um, think about how, you know, just like, I spent several days just like spiraling through that process and you know, it wasn't until it was about a few weeks after getting out of the hospital and I had a really terrible moment in bed. You know, you lose control of your bowels very regularly because you're on this medicine.
Speaker 3:Medication that does that.
Speaker 2:Oh, and you lose and lactose they're the worst.
Speaker 2:So they just make you, you know, lose yourself. And, um, I gotten up out of bed to try to clean myself off and, uh, you know, I walked by the mirror in my bathroom, the downstairs bathroom, and you know this is wild to think about, but, but I passed by this full length mirror and I looked myself in the mirror and you know, it was completely yellow. I looked like I was 80. My belly was so big and it's just varicose veins, this huge belly, my belly button's herniated, you know, it's sticking out. I'm rail thin because I've been in the hospital for a month and a half, so my muscles have atrophied. I'm completely purple and yellow and my eyes were all sunk into my head and and I looked at myself in the mirror and I just went, oh, it is real fluorescent light bulbs and I didn't recognize, like, any of what I was looking at, you know, and I remember sticking my like nose up to the mirror and looking at my eyes trying to figure out, like, is that me, is that fucking me, you know, and I just like, oh, my God, this is. I can't believe this is where we are, you know, and I just started sobbing, just like you know, this is the most pathetic thing in the world. I can't believe you've done this to yourself. You know, know, this is the most pathetic thing in the world. I can't believe you've done this to yourself. You know, this is what you do when you're left to your own devices. This is like well done, scowl. Look what you've done to yourself. You know, and just never a lower moment of, especially as, like a, we all have a certain level of vanity to ourselves to like see yourself in such a deplorable state and then kind of like looking like death. You know meaning, like you just kind of know you're not going to be around. It's a surreal feeling, you know.
Speaker 2:And uh, you know I looked over at my dogs and they're all sitting by the toilet because I spent a lot of time there, and they're all looking up at me like nothing's wrong. You know, like we're going to be okay and like not only do they see me in there, but they see like a future for me, that they recognize that I'm still in there, that even though I don't see myself, I don't recognize my morality, my who. I am physically, who I am morally, who I am spiritually what the fuck am I? I don't, I don't see myself anymore. I'm looking at somebody who I don't recognize anymore. But my dog still saw me and they saw me. I saw, right through all these physical problems and everything I was going through, and they kind of acknowledge just who I was, that I was standing in front of them, that I was going to be okay, that we were going to be okay, you know. And I got to thinking about what would happen, you know, if I wasn't around for them.
Speaker 2:And, uh, I didn't go back to sleep that night, we just stayed up and I tried to journal. I just remember writing and writing, and writing, and writing, and writing and writing that night. And then, as the sun started to come up, I thought to myself my handwriting is terrible and my spelling is dog shit, I'm going to die next week. Someone's going to find this, they're going to go. Boy, he really was a dumbass. Look at this handwriting and this spelling.
Speaker 2:But I took a picture of the sunrise that morning and then that next day was like the first day of the rest of our lives, like me and the dogs, just committed to like, rigorously committed to trying to get better, like every moment of every day was spent trying to get better and we just started by walking, like just walking, and I couldn't walk barely at all like down the driveway and back like a few dozen feet and I would walk around, kind of the you know the property. And every day I started to get a little bit better and I changed everything that went in my body. You know only vegetables, grilled vegetables, clean protein sources, no complex carbohydrates, no sugars, started making smoothies, basically vegetable smoothies, and trying to eat clean and um, the process was like rapid. I started to get better, like immediately, and I got off all every drug I was taking. So I was on 17 medications when I got transferred and within the first like month of getting out of the hospital, I was on 17 different medicines and none of them were really medicines. They were all in some way, shape or form killing me or not doing me any positives.
Speaker 2:And as soon as I, you know, really cut down, when it went into my body and started to move, started to move my body, started to replenish my body, things started to get better. And at that point I'm going to Cedars every two days and then it's, then it was like every week for testing. You know I was having liver MRIs and CTs and all kinds of stuff, and you know, it was about after the first month or two, certainly by November, because I got out of the hospital September 8th, 2008. And by Thanksgiving I was really starting to look different, like my jaundice was going away. I actually went to Thanksgiving dinner, like with my family. People were surprised to see me, um, and it just never stopped. I just kept getting better and better and better and the whole time I'm trying to, you know, survive for transplant, if I can get six months so and I'm going to meetings, constantly going to meetings twice a day.
Speaker 2:I made my home at in recovery. My every thing I have in life is owed to recovery. Every single thing I have, without exception, is due to, you know, working a program a thousand percent. You know, there is no other way, there would have been no other way for me to find, you know, salvation or happiness or sobriety. The fellowship, the structure of the fellowship, the acceptance inherent within those programs was like, was critical for me, if you could graph my self-esteem on a chart, just from cause. I needed to practice. I needed to practice living sober. I had no fucking idea how to live. I couldn't drive sober. I had driven intoxicated my whole life, wildly intoxicated I mean I was. I would gen genuinely have these panic sensations just driving because I couldn't. You know, I was so used to being sedated and the program really gave me a place to practice being a human and practice interactions with females and interactions with men.
Speaker 2:And then I got to bring my dogs around and you know, I started fostering dogs about a month into the process for organizations that I had worked for in the past. So like about a month and a half, two months after getting out of the hospital. You know, we had three foster dogs, then that went to five and six and we had a litter of puppies and then those would get adopted. And so all of this time I spent worrying about myself, my inadequacies, my insecurities. I spent on the dogs, I spent on walking them, creating structure for them. I would write their biographies, I would take their pictures and I'd always write their. Their biographies were always like ludicrous. It was always like prison stories because they come from the shelter, so it would be like cookie. You know, black lab blah, blah, blah. I was incarcerated for disorderly conduct or peeing in public or streaking or just dumb dog stories that were completely fabricated and I put them up all over stores all through town, so like several dozen stores. And so I'd go in and I was the yellow dog rescue dude who had a rottweiler pit bull who was trying to find dogs homes.
Speaker 2:And I was working for a couple different organizations. You know, you know fostering and, and it just kept building momentum and they didn't do big dogs where we were, but I was fostering all the big dogs and we started to have success because of these dumb ass posters that I was doing and everybody kept saying, well, you just got to keep doing this. I'm like, all right, let's keep doing it. And again, all my attention that had previously been put on myself my own shit, my ego, my, this, my that was put into service. I spent very little time thinking about myself. It was thinking about my brothers and sisters in the program, thinking about my dogs and thinking about being creative with how I market these dogs and being creative with how I train these dogs. So all of a sudden now I'm engaged in creativity and things that I didn't really have in life. I wasn't a very creative person.
Speaker 1:And all the time you're doing this, your liver is healing itself.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I'm just getting better and better every week.
Speaker 1:So you're literally sitting here in front of us without a liver transplant. Yeah, your liver healed itself.
Speaker 2:Well I have. So I went in for my six month review at Cedars to be, you know, kind of determined eligible. And you know, in order to get a transplant your MELD score has to be essentially above 17 for a particular period of time. Your MELD score is your model for end-stage liver disease score. That score is based on bilirubin, albumin, est, alt, all of these factors that spit out your creatinine, that spit out a figure. My score was 26,. So I was plenty eligible.
Speaker 2:But by the time I had six months sober it had dropped down. I was no longer transplant eligible and my numbers were continuing to improve. So I had, you know, I was end stage for, I think, five years and then I became stage three fibrosis in like six years ago or maybe a little bit longer. So my body continues to, my liver continues to regress in terms of its cirrhosis, and I know this is complicated and we're getting kind of technical. But cirrhosis is scarring of the liver. You're not supposed to get better, you know you're. You're supposed to kind of like maintain. It doesn't improve, it doesn't heal. But if you're, if you're young enough, if you take good enough care of yourself, if you really change what goes into your body, your liver can heal.
Speaker 3:It can regenerate. It's one of the few organs that can actually heal itself. But I think age was on your side, definitely. Sure, yeah, I was 28 when I got sick.
Speaker 1:Have you done stuff like hyperbaric chambers and all that stuff?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I do hyperbaric chambers with Dr Amen for my brain health, so that's one thing I've been working on with him.
Speaker 3:I do yes, Daniel Eamon.
Speaker 2:Yeah, he's awesome man, so he has your site on Hyperbaric.
Speaker 1:Chambers. He does, she's got Hyperbaric Chambers.
Speaker 2:He does.
Speaker 3:Yeah, he sends clients to us from California.
Speaker 2:We started working with Hyperbaric.
Speaker 3:Chambers on a burned litter of puppies that we had with Dr Grossman, who pioneered the oh, I know, grossman.
Speaker 2:TLA. He's in Southern Cal. Well, his son, yeah, peter Grossman, dr A Richard Grossman was the pioneer of the Grossman burn centers, the infamous, like world-renowned, grossman burn centers. He was in the Navy and he pioneered a lot of that technology because they use it for the wobbles when you are going underneath water and come back up you know you can lose the bends or the wobbles, whatever.
Speaker 2:I just make that up. Um, yes, we, we use those with some some burned puppies that we were able to save their lives. They had skin grafts and the whole nine yard. He treated them at west hills hospital as a human hospital.
Speaker 3:Okay, he treated these dogs that I think he's the one that treated jay leno. Yeah, yeah, yeah he passed away um.
Speaker 1:Dr richard grossman passed away about uh seven or eight years ago, but his son's still very, very but you were doing hyperbaric for brain health Because I would assume it would help with everything, wouldn't it?
Speaker 3:It helps with the liver regeneration as well. But yeah, one of the toxicities we haven't talked about with the alcoholism is the deterioration of the brain cells. Yeah, that comes along with it.
Speaker 1:How often do you do hyperbaric, I feel it how often as I can.
Speaker 2:It's in Encino, so it's hard for me to get to, but I love it. The hyperbaric process is really wonderful because you're in there for an hour, you can choose to meditate, you can choose to breathe, and if you do, it's quite nice. You don't. It might be psychosomatic, but you feel like you're you know.
Speaker 3:Getting that deep inspiration?
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, yeah, I enjoy it. It's nice to be locked in a tube with no distractions.
Speaker 3:No one can get to you. I think it's what John Jay and I both say At her place you can go 90 minutes, you can go.
Speaker 1:I mean it's fantastic, Get a tan too, and they'll have a TV on the outside so you can watch TV while you're in there if you want, or you can just go to sleep, yeah that's right. So how incredible program. Marley's Mutts and the prison program. And I mean it's what. Would just just different splinter cells have grown as you?
Speaker 2:Yeah, man. Well, I mean, first of all, it's wonderful to be here, like you know, to have people like your wife and yourself, to have other people root on rescuers. You know we have such an odd culture and to have you guys root me on like you have over the years has really meant a lot. Um, I pull for you guys too, you know, and and so thank you for the, for the encouragement and the motivation, and um, that's really what. What got it going was my community was like hey, you ought to do this. I was like what?
Speaker 1:like start a dog rescue but, like your, rescue marley's mutts. Is it your own facility?
Speaker 2:it's not in your house no, no, so it started out just in in the house in the garage. It took over our house took over the garage, took over the house we had puppies and dogs in the laundry room.
Speaker 1:All the kids everywhere, dogs they were. It was. It was out of control and it was ruining our house ruining houses, probably ruining relationships.
Speaker 2:It was tough, man. Um yeah, it's somewhat addictive because you know you're trying, you know you're trying to address suffering, you're trying to address lives and it's hard not to be all in it's hard not to go, you know, neck deep into the process and try to save them all you know Right. But yeah, it just started out slow like that. It started out with a handful of rescue dogs. I was making those posters, putting them up all over town.
Speaker 1:But when I got released from the transplant requirements, all of a sudden I'm, I'm alive, you know.
Speaker 2:So it's like, well shit, what am I going to do? You're here for a reason, bro, yeah, but I don't have a degree, I you know, I don't have any skills, I don't have anything. What do I have to bring to this world? You know, um, but I had shown over the last six months that I could do this, um, that I could be creative with their marketing, that I could talk to people, that I could kind of exemplify what rescue was. And yeah, it was just really the veterinary hospital and the local pet store. They were like you need to start your own company. And I was like does the IRS let like drunks come? Am I allowed to do that?
Speaker 1:You know, when you think about where you started and where you said you were like you were going to die and then cut to 2018, you're at the White House.
Speaker 3:That was wild Right.
Speaker 1:I mean, that's a six.
Speaker 3:It's so inspirational.
Speaker 1:How has Hollywood not done a movie? Or have they talked to you, because I know you've got friends in Hollywood?
Speaker 2:Yeah, no, no one's ever talked to me about them. I mean, people have touched on Because I have so many students from prison that I'm very close to who have their own miraculous stories of recovery. Brian James is one of them. I'm meeting him in Tucson tomorrow. He gets in tonight. He was a juvenile lifer who did 29 years and the last chunk of his years was in our program and you know he adopted his dog out of prison and his story is just marvelous. So are so many of our trainers that come from the prison program. So are so many of our trainers that come from the prison program.
Speaker 2:But to wrap a bow around how Marley's Mutz was created is really just. Why I wanted to thank you is because it's just grassroots community organizing. It's just people saying they believe in me and saying, hey, you ought to do this, and encouraging me and me saying, well, fuck, because it wouldn't have come from me. Even with the self-esteem I had developed, I still wasn't gutsy enough to think I could, and I for sure thought the IRS was going to find like some way to shit on whatever I was trying to develop. And I went and talked to a lawyer and the lawyer was like no, no, no, this is possible. I'm like, are you sure, cause they're going to figure me out and they're going to, they're going to deny this. There's no way they're going to allow it. So, for the first like six months as a DBA, as like a doing business as, and applied for our nonprofit status in the process. So we've been a company since 2009,. Been a nonprofit since 2010.
Speaker 2:And yeah, it was really remarkable. My community just kept encouraging me to do what we were doing. The veterinary office gave me a kennel at the veterinarians to like deal with strays. We had some Boy Scouts build some kennels up at the house. We started to develop a foster network based on these posters. So real quickly I had a couple of dozen fosters and Marley, my Rottweiler Pitbull, was so incredible at like pack symbiosis. He could really keep the balanced feel of a pack. He really knew how to address insecure dogs, really knew how to level out more kind of dominant dogs, and so Marley's Mutts was born. There was also no. There were like purebred rescues back then, so many of them. There was no like mutt rescues and we all had mutts, so like it's called Marley's Mutts.
Speaker 1:So Marley's Mutts was born. You know, I keep thinking about like taking this podcast and sending it to some producer in Hollywood listening to your story.
Speaker 3:Please do Well, because think of the inspiration that we've just talked about in just a few short minutes. I mean the message that's come out from this, and so many lives could be impacted in a much broader way if the story got out.
Speaker 2:Boy. I think about deaths of despair and the number of liver. I don't remember the exact number, but during COVID the number of liver failures and deaths of despair related to alcohol is wild.
Speaker 1:Wild. Your story could inspire and change the lives of millions of people. I mean you're here for a reason too. I mean that's crazy.
Speaker 2:There are forces of our, there are sociocultural forces at work that do not really want to address alcohol and like what it means to our society, thoroughly, like even the Well, I would say that's a big stance of Dr Amen.
Speaker 3:We brought up his name earlier. He's really come out and taken over the last two years and he's been shunned by the medical community for his stance on alcoholism and that one glass is too much.
Speaker 1:And he's a real believer in it and he's just got a lot of data to support that yeah, so are you 100 healthy now, or you still have?
Speaker 2:for the most part. Yeah, so I have stage three fibrosis, I have advanced liver disease, but um, and what that could, how that could manifest, is is cancerous nodules, growths. So I go in every six months for transplant review, essentially to make sure.
Speaker 3:can stem cells help him? Yes, I was going to say we should. We always talk stem cells on literally every podcast.
Speaker 2:I can't help it but.
Speaker 3:I know it's hard not to, but absolutely, with stage 3 fibrosis it could be a true benefit.
Speaker 1:Yeah, Wow, we go down to Mexico, her and I.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I've been a big fan. I did some research and I started learning about that a couple years ago.
Speaker 3:I was actually thinking more about the Health Symposium with all the national biohackers in Cabo.
Speaker 1:He would be an amazing guest from that standpoint don't you think you want to come to Cabo with us in January?
Speaker 2:Are you kidding me? Is that a real question, you know?
Speaker 1:who, gary Brekka, is you ever follow that?
Speaker 2:guy Him.
Speaker 1:It's us two, him and a couple other people. Yeah, we're going to have a Pompa Pompa and Josh X, recca and Dude, we're going to Josh X.
Speaker 3:Axe, josh Axe, josh Axe. Yeah, I would love to. We're going to have a combo and we'll those stem cells all the time. I mean for people who are doing all the things right. They have the most uptake right they get the most benefit and he's already doing all that. He's walking the walk he needs to. He's living a very balanced life. He's avoiding substances in all forms. He's putting only pure foods into his body.
Speaker 2:He's the perfect candidate for let me ask you a question. So one of the most preposterous things about having liver failure. You know all of the only instruction I got from a medical professional.
Speaker 3:I'm not going to be shocked with whatever you tell me.
Speaker 2:What I could do to advocate for myself is don't eat any salt, that's it. So I was in acute kidney liver failure, kidneys, gallbladder, pancreas, pancreatitis for like a year was limit your salt intake. Yeah, that was it nothing about fruits and vegetables.
Speaker 2:Nothing about fiber fiber was very important. I I found at least. Again, it might be my own delusions, but I I overloaded on fiber the whole time. I was in in early recovery and I felt like, from an absorption standpoint, like I got so much better when I increased the fiber in my diet and when I cut out you know nonsensical carbohydrates. Everything started to get better so quickly.
Speaker 3:Right. No one ever talked to you about the fact that if you did hyperbarics even at that time, once you became medically stable, of course, but, hyperbarics could help take those viable cells that were still viable within the liver and amplify and help heal that. So no, I mean doctors in the medical community. They're not really set up, or even, I have to say, they're not even trained appropriately to talk outside of the pharmaceutical world.
Speaker 2:That's the problem they can give you pills. Yeah, she's different, I mean it's. It's bizarre to me that there hasn't been a step back approach to evaluating some of these protocols and saying, all right, let's. This human being has a a body filtering problem.
Speaker 3:Let's look at his body filtering and let's understand how we can enhance or help him filter in a different way or detoxify pancreatitis or no? That's gone. Nope, I haven't had that's a side effect of the pressure systems within the liver itself. So the kidney, the pancreas, they're all trying to handle that overflow pressure. So once he starts to drop down on that fibrosis score, then those organs aren't stressed.
Speaker 2:The pain you really are. I wasn't fibbing when I needed the cry face pain amount. The reason you're in so much pain is your belly is so filled. There's so much. It's like 10 liters of liquid in your stomach, in your belly, and the pressure that puts on all your internal organs is so painful and like lateral g's when you're in a car, like taking a corner, and you have all that. It's so painful. So they're relieving all that pressure and taking those liters. They're taking like the paracentesis, three or four liters out of my stomach.
Speaker 3:The the problem is, as you already know because you went through it is it just reaccumulates. It's a temporary fix for a week, a couple of days, whatever how often someone can stick a needle in your back. They're just pulling it off and it comes right back within hours.
Speaker 1:What do you think when you hear his story of being that he recovered naturally?
Speaker 3:I think it's a story you almost never hear as a physician I mean, we don't have these stories, we don't have these happy endings right we, we, we talk to people every day in the icu units in the er and we see them come in and we do exactly what he said. Okay, I want you to prepare yourself, get your family around, get your friends in when you start making plans, because you're not going to survive this. That's the normal road that we go down and for a big reason that you already pointed out because the tools we give you in your tool chest to survive aren't very good. From our medical community, we just throw pills at people, pills, procedures. So I'm not when I hear it. As a doctor who's been practicing almost 20 years, I've never heard this story before wow, dude, I've seen.
Speaker 2:You know, I've been in the transplant program for 16 years now and there's a lot of people that I know that have died almost all of them, to be honest.
Speaker 3:Yeah, that's the problem, that's the reality.
Speaker 2:And I have known a few people who have gotten better, who were younger, who were in some form of end stage failure. But yeah, it's very rare, it's very rare.
Speaker 1:And look at you in shape you got tattoos.
Speaker 2:You had a freaking cool dog, a successful dog rescue.
Speaker 1:A couple. You had a freaking cool dog a successful dog rescue, a couple of kids. Yeah, you were freaking at the white house. You're like doing all you're changing the world and now this story's got to get out. I mean, I thought we're going to talk to you mostly about the dog rescue, but your health which is great because we have a doctor here telling you I mean it's, it's incredible boy.
Speaker 2:I mean, if I, if there's anything from my story that I could impact the world with, it would be, um, the pattern of care that I was given, how to address the pattern of care for other people who are in liver failure Because again you're told, just as a matter of fact, you have end stage. It's not stage four, it's the end. This is the end for you.
Speaker 3:You're either going to get a liver transplant or you're going to die.
Speaker 2:And they don't, um, very clearly adjust, radically adjusting what went into my body and how I moved my body was the key to success, and to not address either of those variables when trying to to come up with a satisfactory equation to treat someone's health is just mind boggling to me. I mean, how, why would we not look at the larger spectrum of treatment and, um, I don't know, it's it's frustrating larger spectrum of treatment and I don't know it's, it's frustrating.
Speaker 3:Well, I mean to get and to go down that road. We get into a very political situation of how the system is funded and what is really promoted within the medical system. So, you have to step outside the box, and you did that on your own. Unfortunately, not everybody has the wherewithal to know what they need to do and get that information.
Speaker 1:What's your dad like now? What? What is your? Have you ever had a moment with your dad like dad? Look at me now, like he saw you.
Speaker 3:He's got to say I'm so proud of there's got to be like is he pardoned?
Speaker 1:is he involved with more of these?
Speaker 2:my dad is my best friend. I don't. I wouldn't. Maybe I wouldn't characterize our relationship as best friend because he's so much of a dad and he didn't grow up with a dad. My dad's dad died of liver failure when he was 41. We never talked.
Speaker 2:I might as well go into this real quick because I think you'll like it. So I didn't know my grandfather. His name was Kermit. He died in 1961. My dad was 14.
Speaker 2:He was in World War II, deployed twice different areas. He was re-enlisted, went back to Korea. I do have a bunch of pictures of him in bars all over the world. Every picture he's in a bar with Korean girls or with everyone and I. The way I was taught about him was to not ask about him. We don't talk about Kermit, don't bring him up. I never heard anything about him my whole life other than you know the the here or there, something terrible.
Speaker 2:And so I get out of the hospital. I'm desperately dying of liver failure. You know, I'm really having a hard time. And I was in the bedroom in the closet going through some things and I found my grandmother found a bunch of boxes from from when she passed away in 2003. I opened one of the shoe boxes and on the top of it is this 24 hour a day book, this little recovery book. I recognized it because I had one from going to meetings. I'd been going to meet. I had to go to meetings. I had to go to recovery meetings per Cedars-Sinai to qualify for the liver transplant. So a lot of people who are embarrassed about being on court cards in A meetings I don't want a fucking who are embarrassed about being on court cards in a meetings.
Speaker 2:I'm gonna fucking liver transplant card. That's when you're low, um. So I'm having to go to meetings. I'm starting to learn the process, although all I wanted recovery for was a liver transplant. When I went into my first meeting of of uh alcoholics anonymous, I just raised my hand in the beginning of it and asked to speak to the. I need to speak to the president of this chapter because I need a liver transplant. You guys need to help me facilitate. And they're like hey, buddy, you know we don't have a. Well, let me have the vice president. We don't have. We have a secretary. Would you like to talk to the secretary? I was like sure. So they just kind of like pushed me off and let this delusional dude and liver failure like, but they kept me coming back and so, anyways, back to the.
Speaker 2:So I opened this box, find this book. I open it and there's my grandfather's Social Security card in it, kermit Alden, scow. And it's got a piece of paper that says 730, cadillac. It says Friedman. On it, it's got some numbers and then it's marked. It's got a ribbon, it's marked. You know, there's a date marked. So I bring it out to my dad and I was like, holy shit, dad, check this out. I, you know, I found your grandpa's recovery book and my dad had no idea his dad was in recovery. He just knew he died an alcoholic of liver failure by himself. So I bring it out there. I passed to my dad and he goes. He's starting to flip through it and my dad doesn't really get emotional, you know. And he goes, goes. I'll be damned, I'll be damned, I go what he goes. It's marked july 3rd, I go. What's july 3rd? He goes. That's the day he died. So my grandfather who was dying of liver failure trying to make a difference read.
Speaker 2:The last time he opened this book was the day he died of liver failure. Fast forward many decades. I'm opening this book in liver failure, looking for a prayer.
Speaker 2:Jeez man and it's my favorite possession. I should have brought it with me. So I bring it to a meeting that night and it's pretty interesting. So the five numbers were his sponsor's phone number. Friedman was his sponsor, that's what that name meant. 730 Cadillac is the men's stag meeting on Cadillac street in downtown Los Angeles. So my sponsor knew like everything that was on this piece of paper and uh, yeah, it's been like one of my. It was my first like God shot, my first connection to to some sort of like communication and you know it was really special, really really special about this and this is so important when it comes to recovery is being led to a God of my understanding. Having permission to engage in a relationship with a God of my understanding was so important.
Speaker 2:I grew up, my grandfather was a communist. I never went to church, never been to church One day in my life. I was militantly agnostic, borderline atheist, started an atheist club in high school to basically battle the religious club and just take them down, debate after debate. So I was very inclined to not be religious. Right, and what alcohol?
Speaker 2:What a program of recovery really did for me was introduce me to the idea of finding a God of my understanding, not Jesus, not Vishnu, not Buddha, a God of my understanding that incorporates everything in this world, that is my creator, my source, whatever, but something that is not me, first of all, you know, a God that is not me and and a God that is, you know, really focused on, on, on service and connection and um, I didn't know what that meant in the beginning, you know, again, I was kind of like I'm not a God guy. I didn't like the word God, you know, forget about all the principles associated with religion. But once I, once I found that book, you know, I started to pray to my grandfather. I started to just try to close my eyes and try to communicate with something greater than myself, just as a practice, just to communicate, get out of this transom and into something else, and it was the. It was the best thing that's ever happened to me in my spiritual development is is kind of locating a source, energy, and um, communing with that energy, if that makes sense, and having the permission to elaborate on what god means to me, what a god of my understanding means to me, and having that develop in my life has been probably the central aspect to my sustained sobriety is knowing that I have a God of my understanding in my life, active in my life, that I can tune into, that I can connect with, that I can use to help aid me in that aching loneliness that has always traveled with me. You know what I mean and that's what I think some people don't allow themselves to get out of.
Speaker 2:Recovery is God doesn't mean Jesus, it doesn't mean religiosity, it doesn't mean dogma, it doesn't mean all of these things. God means a source, energy, you know, or whatever you want it to mean, but it can be such a powerful connection and such a entertaining and interesting connection to develop throughout your life. You know I love going to church now. You know I love practicing spiritual connection. These were I couldn't sit still for five seconds much less like pray, you know.
Speaker 1:so um, that's one of the things you're you're like a miracle. Absolutely is. I feel like Cora and you have got some serious connections.
Speaker 2:I'm going to lop off an arm soon, just to make it like you know what I mean.
Speaker 1:That'd be great if you could do it on the podcast, yeah, or?
Speaker 2:maybe just a pinky, something that's not totally necessary Listen, man.
Speaker 1:thanks for stopping down. It was a great story. Can we talk about one more thing before we wrap? Is that okay?
Speaker 2:Not like all of you, don't have something to do in life.
Speaker 1:Just got to go to bed and wake up at 3 am.
Speaker 2:So the reason we're here is, you know, we're bringing the Positive Change Program to Arizona, so we spent all day out here at the Correctional Complex in Buckeye. You know we've been running prison programs in.
Speaker 1:California for the last nine years. Uh, prison programs in california for the last nine years. Shout out to that warden, by the way, shout out, baby.
Speaker 2:The warden was a listener, so I'm in the car and I let the warden, so he's the warden of all eight prisons and I let him know I'm doing he goes, he goes, the john jay and I was like number one with prisoners yeah, and he said that, um, he used to have um employees get in trouble for sitting in the parking lot because they had to finish John Jay segments and didn't want to like miss a special morning segment.
Speaker 2:So he'd have to like holler at people, for they're all John Jay fans. They've been riding or dying for decades. Buddy Grateful, yeah, thank you. So yeah, we're the state legislature. Thanks to you know, some some movers and shakers within the arizona government have approved a decent chunk of money for prison programming related to to dogs. So we're bringing our rescue dog rehabilitation program, our comprehensive inmate canine training program, to arizona. We hope, hope to get it started by january. We were out there touring all day. Today, we'll be working with, you know, maricopa day. Today We'll be working with, you know, maricopa County Animal Services. We'll be working with One Love. We'll be working with really as many organizations as possible once we get off the ground, because we hope to grow it and I'm just super excited, man, we have 27 formerly incarcerated dog trainers working in California and in the pet industry.
Speaker 1:So they come to the prison and they bring dogs and they teach the prisoners how to work with the dogs and vice versa, the dogs it's a little bit more elaborate than that.
Speaker 2:So the dogs will come from the euthanasia list. Typically our process is young large dogs. Young large dogs are most euthanized because they lack the skills to get adopted and stay adopted. And when a dog is big it's more of a liability adopted and stay adopted, and when a dog is big it's more of a liability and all of these different things Right? So the idea was when I started it was we just need more fosters. We need more foster homes. We can save more lives. We didn't have a ranch at that time so we were just just working with fosters.
Speaker 2:So we we went into California city correctional facility was our first spot and, um, we've never stopped. Since we've been at eight facilities. We've had boys and girls juvenile programs, the first of their kind juvenile program where you have euthanasia list. Dogs come from the shelter, they live in prison for three months. We're going in every week with professional dog trainers to teach the structure, the whole curriculum, which is quite elaborate. We have homework, presentations, all kinds of different things and the goal being to again get the dog adopted and stay adopted and then help provide opportunity to our students to join the pet industry when they get out of prison and it's been radically successful and it brings down the violence on the yard.
Speaker 2:We're in almost exclusively maximum security prison, so we have come in to teach programs on prisons where there aren't programs, because they're high security. It's very difficult to get programming into high security facilities. A lot of organizations won't work in high security facilities, so we really pride ourselves in being able to like come in with the dogs, bring the energy, bring the violence down, bring the hope up. You know, lower drug use. That's another thing that dogs do.
Speaker 2:Man Maybe we do that in podcast too from cabo is the correlation between dogs and recovery. You know, because dogs are a mirror, if you the whole, one of the central principles of positive change is that whatever energy you're feeling, whatever you're experiencing, you're transmitting that through the leash. So you need to truly check in with yourself. Check in with yourself, breathe, check in with yourself, breathe into yourself, breathe into your belly, not into your chest. You know, really process what you're experiencing, because if you're not responsible for that energy, you're going to transmit it to your dog and you're going to throw your dog off, and in doing that, that's really like the first step to awareness of any kind and so I'm really really excited. I think we could, we could make how can people?
Speaker 1:people can't get involved, or do they donate?
Speaker 2:like oh yeah, you can donate at marley's muttsorg. You know, you can find us on social media at marley's mutts, at positive change.
Speaker 1:It's p-a-w-s-i-t-i-d it's on on the marley's mutt instagram. You have all the links on there yeah, yeah, we do well if you ever need us love pop or my radio show to help promote, are you?
Speaker 2:kidding me. I would love to have you guys around. You know we we're looking for as many partners as possible, especially you know we're going to be. I'm gonna see you in tucson right, I'll be there saturday hell yeah, buddy or friday, one of those two, that's outstanding.
Speaker 2:That's really cool man thanks for doing that, um, yeah, so I think, um, you know, the animal shelter, sheltering system in America is abysmal. It sort of exists in the shadowy, dark crevices of our you know, as does the prison system. Right, you have these cultural black eyes that are really negative, karmic forces within our society, and we have a real opportunity to combine those two to make them much better to make them exponentially better and just what we've seen in the last bunch of years running our program, to see how many guys have gotten out and successfully transitioned into the pet industry.
Speaker 2:How many you know we've graduated 600 or 700 dogs. You know 1200, 1300 inmates, and our students are marvelous, man, these guys have so much potential. So, yeah, you know 1200, 1300 inmates, um, and our students are are marvelous, man, these guys have so much potential. So, yeah, you know, I, I, um, I, as with you man, there's, there's just something energetically and like karmically about how we treat man's best friend. We, we have, um, we treat man's best friend like they're our worst enemy and we've not done anything comprehensive to address that, whether at the municipal, state or federal level. And we have some real opportunities to make change and there's just no more excuses anymore. You know there are a lot of good solutions in this world. Positive change is one of them and I think one of the ways we're going to limit we're going to involve communities that have typically, like, created the animal welfare problem is by initiatives like positive change.
Speaker 2:You know the animal welfare problem is by initiatives like positive change. You know, because the reality is like we've blamed the animal welfare problem on, like certain disenfranchised communities. Well, it's this community or that community that creates all the problems. All the dogs are coming from here, coming from there and by working with positive change. You know, most of our trainers are people of color, gang members of color, you know. So they're going back to their communities, to Compton, to Chula Vista, to all these places, to bring everything that they've learned into their communities. They're being employed in the pet industry in their communities. So they're bringing all this, these new ideas um into their community about animal welfare, about sheltering, about best practices for how to be a pet parent, you know. So I'm excited to see where we can take this and I certainly appreciate your help, man Of course man.
Speaker 1:Well, thanks for coming, man.
Speaker 2:Yeah, you know, you've never not returned a text message, not answered a phone call. Thanks, either you're getting less popular or no. I really appreciate it, man. You've always been like you know. One of the things about you that I think people should know is like you're that energy that is you.
Speaker 1:Oh, thanks.
Speaker 2:And a lot of people you know turn on that energy when things are on and then you know it goes somewhere else.
Speaker 1:But that's you, man. Thank you man, Thanks man, Bye.