Transcripts for Episode 149

These transcripts were generated by robots, not writers.

Paul: Cancer or whatever. Illness is personal, right? And there’s a part that you don’t want to share with some people. And there was a big part of that for me as I was going through treatment, and part of that was based on growing up that needed to have this Persona of everything is fine. But it was so important to have people who I knew who were like me and to be able to talk with and have those conversations because most people did not understand the challenges I was going through at the same time. So, yes, it was at the start, it was scary to reach out and say, hey, I’ve got somebody. I need help. It’s hard to do, but once you are, that may be the hardest part, is saying I need help.

Stacy: Welcome. I’m so excited to get to share this week’s guest with you and have a conversation about his life journey, his relationship with his daughter, his book that he’s written, and also to have a really important conversation about your health and wellness.

Stacy: I’m recording this on the back of a health scare myself and that’s really kind of shaken me up and realized that, oh, remind me that at the end of the day, we actually don’t have any control over our own bodies and not to take our health for granted and that when you have something that you’re concerned about, to go and take care of it and get it checked out. So we are going to get to talk about that today. And we’re also going to get to hear from a guest who has done some pretty amazing things in life, had some pretty epic adventures, and has overcome a lot. So let me introduce you to this week’s guest. Paul Weigel is a father, a six time Ironman triathlete, a college professor and consultant, and a self described professional dabbler.

Stacy: A lover of the outdoors and hiking, he spent much of his life in the Pacific Northwest, finishing countless races and climbing many mountains, including Mount Rainier, Mount St. Helens, and Mount Adams. Now living in Arizona, he is exploring different ventures while checking things off his must do list with regularity. But his real passion and his real inspiration is creating unforgettable memories with his daughter. So, Paul, welcome. I’m so glad to be here with you.

Paul: Thank you, Stacy. It’s really great to be here today. Thank you.

Stacy: You had a series of hardships in your life, and that really started from when you were very small and continued into adulthood. I’d love to hear a little bit about that backstory and how things changed when your daughter was born.

Paul: Yeah. Well, first, thank you for having me on today, Stacy. And it’s interesting, you know, when we’re going through our different experiences in life, you don’t necessarily know about them as hardships until you start looking back. When I was growing up, I certainly had what I thought was a normal life. I had a roof over my head, I had food on the table, but I didn’t necessarily have a lot of love and support out of my family growing up. Both my parents are psychologists, and with them both being psychologists, I know there have been so many times people have said, my parents, did they ever ask me, how did that make you feel?

Paul: And I never necessarily got that statement, but I certainly felt a lot more like a patient with my parents versus an actual kit that there were a lot of times I felt when I’d be talking with them that my situations or my issues were being analyzed and having, being justified that way. At the same time, my dad was an incredibly high achieving person who had huge expectations for me. And there was this expectation that we are always needing to be perfect and be doing the absolute right things, be wearing the right clothes, having this really big Persona on the outside that made everything look great, even though on the inside things were really fragile and horrible. That was life for a while, and that was the world that I was used to when I was starting to figure out my role as an individual.

Paul: And growing up, when I went off to college and I started learning about love and my own identity. Unfortunately, my college sweetheart accidentally overdosed. And when you’re trying to figure out who you are and somebody you love and care for at such a level just disappears unexpectedly in such a horrible situation. It was just mind altering. And the stability of a world that I thought I knew was gone. And that lasted for ten plus years of trying to understand love and life and hope and so anything. I was very lucky to be living in Seattle afterward. And I worked hard and I played hard during the.com times, as you mentioned, I was able to climb some phenomenal mountains and do some incredible races. But my body broke down on me in my thirties.

Paul: I ended up having my first tip replaced and then ended up a little bit later having my second one. But my life really changed. Where you talked about those moments in life was when my daughter was born. I waited a long time. I met her mom when were in her late thirties and we had our daughter when were 40. But all of the sudden, to have something that meant something, a person who I could love and devote all my time and energy to, was just a spectacular thing. And we’ve had an incredible bond always and forever. And now she’s 14, I get to see her almost every day and appreciate that, even to this day.

Stacy: I love that I have an eleven year old and so a daughter and also a nine year old son. I can really resonate with that feeling of just like the world just completely changes in just this moment and now you have this little person that depends on you and they’re so helpless and now you’re charged with bringing them up into the world. There’s a new purpose.
Paul: Oh, absolutely. The purpose of any priorities that you had beforehand certainly changed, or at least changed for me immediately. And she was born, and the very first night she was born, her mom wasn’t quite ready to have milk for her yet. And we had originally insisted we are not going to do formula. And so Natalie wasn’t quite able to go to sleep. So I ended up walking around the hospital room floor, I think for almost 8 hours with my hand fitting in an impromptu binky and my finger had gotten all wrinkled up like a raisin. I think I walked over 13 miles that night, the very first night, and just was captivated by her in a way that certainly I’ve never let go.

Stacy: Of that’s so special. It’s those bonds that you make in those moments. I know that we’re going to talk about her more as we continue this conversation, but I’d love to anchor into your late thirties and early forties and a little backstory, I don’t think that, you know, about me before this conversation. And some of our listeners may not realize as well, you know, we’re a very athletic family. I have a husband who is 41, and he is like an ultra athlete doing these epic gravel races in Portugal. He just won a race by an hour over like a twelve or 13 hours race. He’s a very intense athlete. And so when I heard your story, it really struck me because, you know, he’s 41. You were 43 when.

Stacy: When everything kind of shifted for you, health wise, and you realize that you were really sick. And I think it’s, you know, anybody who has ever pursued top fitness and health and kind of pushes their body to become the best version of the machine it can be, I think can understand, or if they love somebody who does that, they can understand how jarring that must be in that moment to be this top performing athlete, to be out pushing your body, doing all these epic adventures. And then at 43, everything really shifted for you. So tell us a little bit about what happened and also maybe some of the signs that were there before you got this diagnosis, for sure.

Paul: Yeah, well, I would say I was athletic, Stacy, but I certainly was not at the level your husband is, that I was much more at the back of the pack when. When I did so many of my different activities. I was, boy, as I said earlier, when I was living in the Pacific Northwest, I was able to climb Mount Rainier and Mount St. Helens and Mount Adams. I found that I just loved running for a long time and being able to get out. And I’m a bigger guy. I’ve always weighed around 200 pounds.

Paul: And for me to be doing these races next to these sticks, and they’d be weighing 140 pounds, and I’d be keeping up with them, and they, I know I saw so many times where they’d look over and they’d be shaking their head of, how can this guy be doing this next to them? So that was incredibly neat. But when I turned 43, I was diagnosed with colorectal cancer. And the cancerous tumor I had was about the size of my fist, right at the junction of my rectum and my colon. It was as a stage three cancer.

Paul: It meant that not only did I have a large tumor, but that I had cancer that hadn’t necessarily spread all throughout my body, but it had certainly spread to my lymph nodes and that I was almost 100% blocked, which means that you really can’t go to the bathroom so I had to be put on a liquid diet. But the ironic part was I had symptoms probably for five years. So some of the best times and the best, the most athletic I ever was, I very likely had cancer during that time. We talked, whether we’re athletes or not, I think we know our bodies a certain amount and whether and somehow things change. You know, I remember thinking in my mid to late thirties, all of a sudden, my diet changed and foods that I normally could count on, all of a sudden, I couldn’t.

Paul: I mean, I was a guy. I was a typical guy, and pizza was my favorite food in the whole wide world. And all of a sudden, one day, I love pizza, but no longer. Pizza no longer loved me, that I was always all of a sudden, just really uncomfortable. And I talked with doctors, and they said, oh, it’s probably lactose intolerance, or your body’s just built up an allergy, or things going on with that, I kind of blew that off. And then as things continued and I shifted a little bit in my running career, and my athletic career, I mentioned that I had to have some hip surgery. At the same time. When I was doing that, I moved a little bit more into the triathlon world. So I was riding a bike and doing other things.

Paul: About that time, I started having some blood either in my stool or in the toilet when I went to the bathroom. And so I’ve lost. I’ve had this issue where my digestion system isn’t working that doctors kind of ignored a little bit. And then I have a second pretty big symptom of blood. And once again, doctor, even though I talked with doctors about it, they kind of disregarded it because I was healthy. I was a triathlete. I was doing these things. Oh, and it was, the likelihood of me being sick was really small in their minds, even though if you had put together the symptoms, they were really serious. It was only after I was taking an airplane flight between Chicago and Seattle that basically my GI system got 100% blocked. During the flight, I could feel my stomach expanding.

Paul: I think it expanded two or three inches just with gas, and that I’m not sure if they would have diverted the flight, but I was really close to asking them to because I was really almost to the point of needing medical help. But it was only after I had some severe issues going of not only the GI issues, not only the blood, the pain, but then I started losing weight dramatically. And it was at that point that we had all those symptoms together that I finally saw a specialist who gave me a colonoscopy. And that’s when we found out I got sick. So it is ironic that here I was trying to be proactive some about my health, and it wasn’t being recognized or heated.

Stacy: You know, I think the more that I navigate the medical system, the older I get. I just find again and again, whether it’s my own health or it’s my children or actually my husband, often, like, you have to push for the testing or you have to be your own advocate. And I think, you know, also I come from multiple generations of doctors, a couple generations of surgeons, and I think, you know, I think this experience, both being a person in the medical system as a patient, but then having this in my family, you both see the human side of the doctor and the fallibility of the doctor, but then you also experience this, you know, this.

Stacy: I think, you know, growing up, my grandpa was my doctor, and so it was a very different experience for me to go to the doctor and to be taken care of and to be listened to and heard and taken seriously when he passed away. And I started having to go into the regular medical system without this, you know, MD that I could just go to whenever that whole experience suddenly changed. And I almost have to be, like, on, not in a fighting way, but on the offensive of, like, coming in and being like, no, I’m not. Well, these are happening. Are you sure that I don’t need this test? Can you tell me why? And not every doctor loves that, but I just had an experience with my daughter, actually, last weekend in the ER, where they were wanting to send us home.

Stacy: And I pushed for a blood test. And sure enough, she had a bacterial walking pneumoniae, and that wouldn’t have been diagnosed if I hadn’t had insisted because I knew something was wrong with her. And that’s something that I think people can really take from your story, plus all that specificity of your symptoms. I hope somebody listening to this is like, oh, my goodness, I need to get into the doctor. If you could talk to yourself now at the beginning of this and some of those early appointments, or you could coach yourself, what would you have coached yourself to do in those moments in those doctor’s offices?

Paul: That is a great question, and it’s one that I’ve asked myself a whole bunch, what could I have changed, and how could I have made the outcome earlier different? One of the lessons that I’ve learned over time is that doctors are just practicing medicine. And I find it funny that we say they’re practicing because they’re learning all the time, right. That the data they have in front of them continues to evolve and to change. And certainly within the United States, it is a numbers game and a math game with so many physicians, especially at the primary care level, that they have got five minutes. They’re listening to some of the symptoms you share and their mind, they are ticking back and forth and figuring out major categories and also assuming, based on your age, what is most likely to be happening.

Paul: You talked about your daughter of there’s a 97% chance it’s not a bacterial infection. So the doctors follow down that path and it’s an easy check off and solution because that’s what is there in front of them and is right almost all the time. And that certainly was the case for me, looking back. Looking back and thinking about the things individually. I mean, I jokingly said before as we started, I was a boy, and so I just assumed my diet was causing a lot of issues. I’m sure it wasn’t not just pizza, but it was some of the chips I was eating and probably a few too many beers and a bad sleep cycle as well. But it was looking at the totality part that I really missed, rather than look and say, wow, what are the things going on with my body?

Paul: And it doesn’t matter if you’re a superstar athlete or if you’re just a regular person when something starts going wrong with your body and it just is kind of there, you know, I now look back, kind of even thinking about some of our discussion. There were times that I was just incredibly fatigued, and I thought I must just be so tired because I’ve got, at this point, it was an 18 month old or a two year old, and to just kind of look at that independently. But had I taken the time to say, wow, I’ve got these symptoms that not just one part, but my body’s just not quite working right, and I need to have more discussion.

Paul: But at the same time, some of the things, especially I look back on when I had blood in the toilet when I would go to the bathroom, and I remember being so specific on a couple of the doctor’s appointments where they would say, any issues going on, and I would write blood. And I was almost embarrassed to be writing it because, I mean, especially with stuff dealing with your colon, especially with dealing with stuff further down underneath your clothes. It’s embarrassing. You don’t want to have those hard conversations. You don’t want to be poked and prodded in certain places. You don’t want to be poked and prodded at all, let alone anywhere else. Right. I remember just being relieved at their, oh, this can’t be anything. And just blocking it off.

Paul: But then looking back at the many conversations I had later and all the different other symptoms that were going on that I didn’t realize, like one of them. Stacy, it is so weird. I had lots of dreams. I had weird dreams that I would go to the bathroom in my sleep. I mean, who has a dream about going to the bathroom? Right after I had my tumor removed, all of a sudden, I realized that I had a sensation just a little bit underneath my belly button, which was where my tumor was, which was causing a sensation that I needed to go to the bathroom. Now, did I realize it? Yeah. Did I realize it at the time while I was awake? No. But later on, it was a, holy cow.

Paul: My body was telling me something, or I knew something was just wrong, and I had not been courageous enough to talk with my doctor. Besides just, oh, it’s okay. I mean, shoot at when I started having symptoms at 38, if I had really pushed. I mean, my diet changed dramatically, and had I said, no, this isn’t right, and I really think we need to look more into this, my treatment and the care I would have gotten would have been dramatically different. And, okay, if I had cancer and diagnosed at 38, they would have gone in. They would have taken it out. I probably would have been said and done. Treatment would have been said and done versus the year plus of treatment, let alone the nine years of evaluation I would have afterwards.

Stacy: You know, one of the things that. That made me think about, as you’re sharing this, and this is something, I have a child who has a lot of medical issues and has, since he was very little, I always keep notes, and I bring my notes in with me when I’m meeting with the doctor for every single visit, because I’ve found that if I. One to your point, maybe there’s something, this isn’t so much with my kids, but with me, that is uncomfortable or embarrassing. That’s maybe not like you’re not excited to volunteer that information, but then that other piece is just like, your memory as a human is not great, and you’re in the moment, and they’re doing their thing. I wonder, is that something that you think would have been useful for you in those moments, to be documenting and bringing that in?

Paul: Oh, absolutely. And I do more of that, but it’s ironic, as you’re talking through, that I was at an appointment this last week for an issue with my foot, because I’ve overdone it. But it was only as I was talking with the physician. She started leading down questions based on what her assumptions were, and I started giving her answers, and she was like, oh, fascinating. But she was deliberately leading my questions in a way to get to the answer that she wanted versus me. And I actually heard myself at the time saying, oh, yeah, very well, could be the shoes that I had. And I was almost parroting what she said to me versus, okay, I’m in for an issue. How long has this really been happening? What are my symptoms? How would I describe them?

Paul: Are there those times that things have been better or worse? And if I had that catalog of things, I would have had a much more valuable discussion versus. Versus where we ended up. So absolutely, to be able, we only get one body. And now I’ve had a lot of duct tape and superglue and baling wire holding this body together. But to be proactive with that so you don’t get lost. And some of those key details don’t just disappear are beyond important.

Stacy: For sure, there’s so much value in just this conversation about health. But I’d love to move into your cancer journey and how your daughter, you know, this beautiful relationship with your daughter that started with that early morning pacing the hospital, how your relationship with her was really kind of the thing that saved you and got you through that. Can you tell us a little bit about that?

Paul: Yeah, I just, like, I light up, and it is difficult for me not to get teary every time I talk about how important my kid is to me, how important Natalie is to me. As I mentioned at the start of our conversation, I didn’t have a great relationship with my parents. It felt pretty disconnected, and that amplified as I grew up. So to finally have a sense of love and just total devotion to somebody was just so incredible. And I had thought I had found that with her mom, and we had this wonderful experience where we had gotten. We met, we got married, we then had a kid, all within a few years. But just that bond that I had with Natalie just immediately, it’s overwhelming, obviously doesn’t even begin to describe it. When I got diagnosed with cancer, here I was.

Paul: Natalie had just turned three. I think she was, like, maybe a month into being three. And when my doctor identified the tumor, he first, he didn’t say, you have cancer. He said, you have a mass, you have a growth. He did everything he could to avoid saying the word cancer because he didn’t want to be the one wanted me to go to an oncologist and figure that out. But my first thought was, oh, my God, I’m going to die. And I was scared about the parts of my life that I wasn’t going to experience, but more, I was scared about the parts of my daughter’s life that I wasn’t going to experience that. Was I going to be able to see her go to kindergarten?

Paul: Was I going to be able to see her high school graduation, go to prom, go to college, figure out her own life, have her own kids and see and experience that? And that wasn’t acceptable to me. And so there was just for me, where I would have said honestly, before she was born, if I had been told I had this devastating disease, of course I would have thought, but I would have fought an entirely different level with an entirely different purpose, that I needed to survive for her, but then I also needed to thrive for her. And that became so much of a mantra. And it is so great with my book. It’s called Iron dad, and Iron dad means so many different things. I mean, there’s a level two of it. It’s strong and it’s powerful and it’s reflective. It really is.

Paul: Yes, it’s reflective of being an Ironman triathlete, but it’s reflective of that connection that she and I have always had and that to be able to be there. And when she was two and a half, I was able. I did a little sprint triathlon. And she saw me while I was out there and she asked me why I was running in my underwear. And that was a little confusing for her. I. And it was a super small race, and most of the time you’re not allowed to bring your kids across. But unlike your husband, I was in the way back, way, way back of the course, and there were only, like, ten or 15 of us still left out there. And I came across the corner and here’s this little two year old. And she wanted to run with me.

Paul: And I was like, okay, there’s nobody here. It’ll be okay. And we start running and we’re like ten paces in, and the five people who are still at the finish line start clapping, and she just busts out into tears and screams, out, uppy, uppy. And reaches out. And so I picked her up and I was able to cross the finish line. And we’ve got some just beautiful photos of that. But that then became this vision and this image I wanted to have moving ahead, that I was going to beat cancer. I was going to get through the treatment and all the different hurdles associated with that, but I really wanted to have this memory for both of us, of me finishing an ironman. I’d done one in the past. And to have a photo and actually, you can see it is. Yep. Right.

Paul: The one that’s right. I’m messing it up, but the one that’s right over on my shoulder, that I was able to hold her and just have that moment of. To show her that I wasn’t a quitter. To show her that if you really do imagine the impossible, the incredible can come true. And to know that we had something that would forever define my legacy.

Stacy: There’s so much richness to that experience that you had with her, and it’s so beautiful that you had this. This person to draw strength from and motivation from. You know, not everybody has that in their own lives or their own journeys. What. What can you kind of pull from her and what she’s taught you that could help a listener today that maybe doesn’t have that same source that. That you had?

Paul: That is a valuable, complex question, Stacy. And one that I. I kind of struggle. I struggle with, and I think we all worked on kind of finding that inspiration and that power. Natalie’s mom and I, once I finished treatment, we decided that, well, cancer can bring you together, or cancer can kind of separate you apart. And the stress and things associated with that, we realized that our marriage probably wasn’t in a spot to continue. And so that part and that relationship evolved. But whether it’s a child or somebody or something, that life is incredibly valuable. And even when it’s beyond spectacular and beyond where, you’re like, this is so miserable. I can’t possibly imagine doing this. There are those little lights and there are those little glimmers that come from places you never expect, that continue forever. I was up in Seattle.

Paul: I now live in Phoenix, Arizona, and I had my treatment up in Seattle, Washington. I was up in Seattle this last week doing some interviews, and I had the chance to go back onto the campus of Seattle cancer care alliance, ride treatment. And I still know people who are there, and I still am in contact with my oncologist and my radiologist. Here we are eleven years later, and made a point to be able to go by and say hello, and my oncologist still pronounces my name wrong, but we still have this close, personal relationship. Now. I call her Gabby, and I call my radiologist Edward, but they still. They’re very formal. And this is how it is, right? She was like, hello, mister Weigel. And I was like, oh, for goodness sake. But we had this relationship and this.

Paul: I mean, certainly different, but we had a connection where they knew more about me and I knew a little bit more about them. As I have continued down this journey. The number of connections and the number of people I have been able to know, feel, and understand their pain, that has been a valuable piece for me, too. It’s a blessing and a curse with technology nowadays that we can get a lot of information that’s scary. But there are also so many people out there who’ve gone through similar things, who’ve gone through many of the same hurdles that can be great resources and great friends and great family members.

Paul: I think about some of the groups I’m now associated with where they will do anything they can to make trips, to talk, to hang out, to share in that experience, because you may not feel you’ve got it individually, but there is a. There is a village out there that can help take care of you for sure.

Stacy: I think that’s such an important message, and sometimes it does require kind of reaching out and seeking out that community, that village, that thing to draw strength.

Paul: And it’s hard, you know, state, I’m just going to. Sorry to interrupt you there for a second, but it is so hard and so scary. I know that was a part for me especially. I mean, cancer or whatever illness is personal, right? And there’s a part that you don’t want to show, share with some people, and there was a big part of that for me as I was going through treatment, and part of that was based on growing up that needed to have this Persona of everything is fine. But it was so important to have people who I knew who were like me and to be able to talk with and have those conversations, because most people did not understand the challenges I was going through at the same time.

Paul: So, yes, it was at the start, it was scary to reach out and say, hey, I’ve got somebody, I need help. It’s hard to do, but once you are, that may be the hardest part, is saying, I need help. I’ve still got not only the physicians, but two very close friends, Ryan and Fran, who both were cancer survivors as well. Both had done some very crazy physical character things similar to me, and we talk. Ryan and I probably talk via text once a week, and Fran and I were on the phone last month. So it’s just one of those. It becomes a family, it becomes a brotherhood to.

Stacy: What you were sharing got me also thinking about how books can actually provide that feeling as well, of not being alone, of feeling seen and understood. And I got to hear a little bit before we hit record about the reasoning that you wrote this book. So I’d love for you to share that. But the other layer I’d like to add to the question of what inspired you to write this, what is, you know, as you went through the journey of writing this book, what was that like, and what obstacles did you face in the writing process and how did you overcome those?

Paul: The writing of the book was so not what I thought it was going to be, and it is still interesting and humbling now when people say, oh, you’re a published author. And I think I just wrote a book, I wrote my story. But then in looking back, it was a long, very hard journey, and not one that I thought the outcome was so different. When I was going through treatment, I had a blog. It was really important for me at the time to. It was before social God is extreme. And so much of the aspect we have online where people were just starting to dip into it. But I had a blog on Caring Bridge, which is basically a site where people can talk about their health.

Paul: I would try and give status updates because I thought it was important that people understand the experience I went through, hopefully so that they would either not be afraid to have some of these conversations, but just as much to know the experience so that if they went through it, they would know what to expect. So I started with this blog, but when I finished my initial treatment, for a long time, I just didn’t want to really be thinking about being a cancer patient. I didn’t want to broadcast it. I didn’t want to have that. And I was still being checked and evaluated for. It ended up being nine years before I ended up getting my total cancer free card, which is a long time to be a cancer patient, especially because it’s a long time regardless.

Paul: But for me, some of what would happen is they would say, things are looking great. We don’t have any concerns except for there’s a little shadow over here, or except for there’s this little polyp. You had one more polyp again, or we got a weird reflection off one of your artificial hips. So there was always the. I was waiting for the shoe to drop. So ultimately, I just kind of needed to put my story on a shelf and not deal with it for a long time. And literally I had a printout of my blog and it was in a nice box and I had it on a shelf. But after I finally was given my cancer free card, as I call it. At the same time, Natalie was becoming a teenager and starting to ask different questions.

Paul: And as she was starting to ask the questions, I thought I needed to take my blog and start putting it into some context so she understood my experience, but also how important she was through all that. Because at the time when I started and I really looked at my blog, it was about fighting cancer. And I originally had my draft. It was called Cancer Blake, because I had seen some advertisement. I never saw it again, but it said, I stared cancer in the eye and cancer blanked. And for me, that was just an incredibly powerful thought of when you’ve got something so overwhelming that what do you do? You just look at it straight down and you make sure it’s not going to win. And so I had that with the philosophy.

Paul: But then I just started writing my story, and people said, well, why did you have the. Why did you have the strength to do things that a certain way you did? I said, I don’t know. I just did it. And they said, that’s not a good enough answer and it’s not going to work. So I started trying to give context to what my life was like before and then experiences that I had after. And it became so apparent as I was going through my life story of how impactful my daughter was for it. And so my book, which started as cancer blinked very quickly, became this devotional to really explain to her and to others of the power of love, the power of perseverance, and. And that wonderful connection we’ve had. I just started.

Paul: What I would do as I was going through my book writing process was I would wake up in the morning, I would say, what is a thought or a memory I had of my life? And I would take part of a day, and I would just start writing out, what was that experience? And then that would be kind of sit there as a chapter, and then I would continue to be adding chapters. And as I went, all of a sudden, I started seeing some amazing themes that were carried through not only about her, but about fighting and about being the best person. I was also really blessed. I had a friend of mine, Mary Dujinsky. She was going through her own battle with cancer, and she and I would schedule weekly meetings.

Paul: And as part of our weekly meetings, I ended up starting to write chapters quickly for her, trying to give her more aspects and insight to my story, because I wanted to give her a distraction from her own life and the things that she was facing and ultimately, it really came down to. I was trying to view each chapter as a gift to her, but really it came down to that. Her involvement was a gift to me, and were able to get about 95% of the way through the book, unfortunately, before she passed away. But it was this ongoing process just to get the book done. But then this next level has been this constant evolution of to have finished a draft of a book, and then we talked about looking at her health and trying to do the right things.

Paul: American Cancer Society recently came out with stats that colon cancer is going up dramatically, and we don’t necessarily know why. And here I’ve written this book talking about my experience and talking about some of the challenges. So this book that was really meant to be a story for my daughter to see all of a sudden has gotten momentum where people say, oh, colon cancer is important. It’s now the number one leading cause of cancer deaths for men. It’s surpassed prostate cancer. It’s the number two leading cancer cause of deaths for women. And the percentage of people who get colorectal cancer increases by at least 1% a year. And that’s unacceptable.

Paul: So what started as this little book devoted to her that went through iterations and has now become a wonderful message of hope and perseverance and love, that is really need to be sharing such.

Stacy: A beautiful story of your book and how it came to fruition. I did see your dedication to your friend in the beginning of the book and can tell you had a really special relationship. Paul. I feel like we could go in so many different directions, and I could keep asking you questions all afternoon, but I would like to just ask a final question, which is, what are you most excited about right now? And where can people find follow along with you and get your book?

Paul: So what am I excited about right now? I’m excited about life every day, and I’m excited about seeing. And ultimately, I love. I have a great kid, Natalie. And to see her growing up and to be learning from her, I think that was one of the things you said early on. What are the lessons learned? I see so much of how her life has developed that I now learn from in terms of relationships and being happy and enjoying a better world than I did growing up. So that is a part for me that I’m just so excited about, is now looking through life through a different filter and to be able to think about life in an exciting, different way.

Paul: Certainly so much of the work I’m doing on telling my story and where I now have people reach out to me saying that they’ve been screened and they’ve gotten tested and they’ve either learned they’ve abated an illness or that they’re just fine. That is really exciting to me now to be able to hear those success stories. I do have one more. I’m hoping it’s one more long distance race in me. I’ve got Ironman California scheduled in October. I have no idea how I was able to pull enough six months after chemotherapy because it’s a hard race to do. So. That is part of the journey, too, in terms of where people can learn more about the book and learn more about my story, colorectal cancer awareness, etcetera. People can go to irondadbook.com. That’s irondadbook, allone, word.com, and it’s available on all online retailers.

Stacy: Paul, thank you so much for this. We’ll be sure to leave links to or leave a link for your website in the show notes. I really appreciate you joining me today and sharing your story and also raising awareness.

Paul: Thank you. I really appreciate it. It’s been great being on with you today.
Stacy: And thank you to you, our listeners and viewers for joining us. I hope that this conversation did what it needed to do for you today. Whether it inspired you on the book writing journey or with Paul’s story or to go to that doctor’s appointment that you’ve been putting off, I hope you got what you needed out of today’s conversation. As always, I want to thank Rita Domingues for her wonderful production of this fine podcast. She is the reason all of these things happen, and I am so grateful. And if you enjoyed our conversation, I would be deeply grateful if you would take a moment to rate and leave a review for this show. It helps more people find us and join us on this journey of living lives that are beyond better. And I will be back with you before you know it.