Speaker 1: This is me eater podcast coming at you shirtless, severely
Speaker 1: bug bitten in my case, underwear listening don't eat podcast.
Speaker 1: You can't predict anything. Oh um, you know, I even't
Speaker 1: want to talk about And you guys appreciate this because
Speaker 1: you you both garden we had, okay, I was growing pumpkins, okay,
Speaker 1: and I put the pumpkins I grew. I was growing
Speaker 1: like in my garden closest to the road and started
Speaker 1: getting some like good head size pumpkins. And one day
Speaker 1: I come out and one of them has been twisted off,
Speaker 1: clearly twisted off the vine and it's gone okay, And
Speaker 1: I'm like looking at like trying to figure out. And
Speaker 1: I used to have, like we raised pat raccoons when
Speaker 1: I was a kid, and I know like what a
Speaker 1: raccoon is a capable of. And I was like, could
Speaker 1: they really get because we got him, you know, and
Speaker 1: could they really get like a pumpkin off and then
Speaker 1: also get it away where I can't find it. I
Speaker 1: come out the next day and my other pumpkin has
Speaker 1: been cut with a freaking knife. Mhm. So at this point,
Speaker 1: I know, like this is not you know, like I've
Speaker 1: seen raccoons do crazy stuff, but like real knives is
Speaker 1: not right, and I and I and I'm guilty, Like
Speaker 1: you know, you hear about police profiling. I profile in
Speaker 1: my head who that is that's doing it, and I'm like,
Speaker 1: that is an adolescent male pumpkin snatcher. And I even
Speaker 1: tell my neighbors I'm gonna catch him and I will
Speaker 1: cut his hands off. So I'm out and I'm trying
Speaker 1: to bring up a trail cam right to get some
Speaker 1: to get a picture because ever molescent the pumpkin patch
Speaker 1: and I'm talking to neighbors about it, and I'm like
Speaker 1: being so slide that I don't want to my trail
Speaker 1: came out in the daylight, thinking that he's so such
Speaker 1: a sly burglar that he noticed. Right, So it's getting
Speaker 1: dusk and the kind of thing about, you know, it's
Speaker 1: time to have the trail cam ready, and my phone rings.
Speaker 1: Is the neighbor He's like, there's a little old lady
Speaker 1: out in your garden. And by the time I get
Speaker 1: out there, she's gone. But I go down the road
Speaker 1: and they tell me where she's had it, and I
Speaker 1: catch her down the road and I'm like, ma'am, ma'am,
Speaker 1: and it's dark out, you know, like you just in
Speaker 1: my garden, uh, stealing pumpkins. Not me, honey, I really
Speaker 1: you're like you're telling me you weren't just over my
Speaker 1: house getting pumpkins. Just walks off, but nothing to say
Speaker 1: to me about it. Well, not long after that, the
Speaker 1: green beans start coming in and I opened my garage
Speaker 1: door and I just see some legs squirting across in
Speaker 1: front of the door at the doors rights up, and
Speaker 1: I followed down the road and she's walking on her
Speaker 1: all the big handful of big handful of green beans.
Speaker 1: And then I don't even say it, because now I'm like,
Speaker 1: I'm not even say anything to her. The other day
Speaker 1: I'm on the phone, not the other day. A little
Speaker 1: while ago. I'm on the phone. I look out the
Speaker 1: window and now it's perfectly daylight, and she's out harvested carrots.
Speaker 1: So I yelled down, and the kids are like they
Speaker 1: call it comfort thief lady. And I yelled down, like
Speaker 1: she's out there right now, take carrots. And someone yells
Speaker 1: out the door like, ma'am, we'd appreciate if you would
Speaker 1: just ask if you need some vegetables. She looks up
Speaker 1: at the door, takes those carrots, throws him on the
Speaker 1: ground and walks off down the road. No way, just blatant, wow, blatant,
Speaker 1: like like vegetable thievery. I wonder she has like some
Speaker 1: some type of Alzheimer's and she thinks it's the patch. Yes,
Speaker 1: she thinks it's the pea patch, and I yeah, I
Speaker 1: think she may wake up the morning be like why
Speaker 1: is there a green pumpkin in the kitchen? But yeah,
Speaker 1: so so that's why I've been trying to teach. I've
Speaker 1: been trying to instruct my kids. I'll tell him, it's
Speaker 1: it's like you get in the hard stuff to explain,
Speaker 1: you know sometimes old people and I'm like really struggling
Speaker 1: for a way to put it, and this is not
Speaker 1: the best way to put it, but like sometimes old
Speaker 1: people will become more like they'll become like kids kind
Speaker 1: of just in some like bad stab It's sort of
Speaker 1: trying to explain it to a four year old and
Speaker 1: the seven year old was like, yeah, but kids don't
Speaker 1: get the walk around the middle of the night. I'm okay,
Speaker 1: it's like a different kind of kid. Yeah. Um So,
Speaker 1: Eduardo Garcia, uh, how can you explain the electrical charge?
Speaker 1: You were struck by like in an involved like whatever
Speaker 1: way is best to explain it. Yeah, so what I
Speaker 1: know about it? And you know you'll have to forgive
Speaker 1: me that too many people's amazement, I um, you know,
Speaker 1: my enthusiasm was really curbed to dig into too many
Speaker 1: of the details. I think, Um, you know, two thousand eleven,
Speaker 1: I was suffered an electrical injury that nearly took my life,
Speaker 1: you know, October nine and October October two eleven, and
Speaker 1: I get, you know, to get to your question though,
Speaker 1: is that I was so immersed in survival for so
Speaker 1: long posts that that day that by the time I
Speaker 1: finally found my feet months down the road and twenty
Speaker 1: one surgeries later, I just didn't you know, maybe it's
Speaker 1: a like a cocktail mix of denial and then just uh,
Speaker 1: you know, lack of interest to go revisit that moment
Speaker 1: that I that I I just I wanted. I didn't
Speaker 1: needed that many details about what it was. But what
Speaker 1: I can't say is that it's back up and tell
Speaker 1: the story what happened. So I was trying to start
Speaker 1: out with a tilting details. So so, um, you can't
Speaker 1: cut me off. I get too long winded because I
Speaker 1: like to. I like to spin spin a story, but um, yeah,
Speaker 1: well the short of it is that I, you know,
Speaker 1: i'd been h I've been working in the yachting industry
Speaker 1: as a chef for ten years, and starting two thousand
Speaker 1: and ten, I had basically decided I was going to
Speaker 1: leave yachting um and try to get back to southwest
Speaker 1: Montana near the Bowsman area where I'm from, where I
Speaker 1: was raised, and I was gonna start a food brand,
Speaker 1: started a food company called Montana Max, which I did,
Speaker 1: and I was going to start filming a cooking show
Speaker 1: for television and I was going to call it Active Ingredients,
Speaker 1: and um, you know, so I had a I had
Speaker 1: a like a pilot for the show I had, you know,
Speaker 1: I was ripped by William Morrison Endeavor as talent had
Speaker 1: a production team at a Denver Citizen Pictures UM that
Speaker 1: was going to pitch this show, and the Food Network
Speaker 1: wanted first right of refusal, you know, to basically sign
Speaker 1: the show. And uh, life was good. Life was good.
Speaker 1: No longer working on the yacht. I was home in Montana,
Speaker 1: just finished it. But you like working on the yachts
Speaker 1: though for for ten years, but you can only sleep
Speaker 1: in a bed half the size of this table for
Speaker 1: so long, you know, um, just traveling your ass. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you know. And I was thirty. I wanted to have
Speaker 1: a family, and I wanted to move home, and and
Speaker 1: and just get back to a mountain, a western rocky
Speaker 1: mountain way of life. You were thinking about having a family. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I don't know that. Yeah, at thirty, I didn't have
Speaker 1: a girl yet. But you know, um, and and so
Speaker 1: I find myself home for two thousand eleven, I just
Speaker 1: left the yacht and I'm working hard on in Montana,
Speaker 1: mex with with with you know, my business partners and
Speaker 1: co founders and um. Because your father's from Mexico. Dad,
Speaker 1: Dad's from Mexico, from the Yucatan Cancun area. You ever
Speaker 1: been down there many times here in February. So he's
Speaker 1: from East Lads, which is that little island right off.
Speaker 1: I know that island. We're going out to a different island.
Speaker 1: But yeah, well yeah, I spent a shipload of time
Speaker 1: down there. Yeah. So Dad is a fifth generation um
Speaker 1: lobster and shark fisherman and cheek lettle so like from
Speaker 1: his dad's side, what cheek a farmers, So they like
Speaker 1: basically no, it is low gum, but it's how it happens. Yeah,
Speaker 1: machete cheek lay trees, so like like saping in Upper
Speaker 1: New England, they're bleeding trees for their gum. Is there right, Yeah, totally,
Speaker 1: but I don't know. Sometimes kind of surprised. I'm glad
Speaker 1: I could bring it to this table, you know, real quick.
Speaker 1: When I got out of school, when I got out
Speaker 1: of regular college, we are went down there number of times.
Speaker 1: Sometimes we find the cancoon and go south and just
Speaker 1: sleep on sleep on the beaches. Yeah. Fish yeah, fish, bone,
Speaker 1: fish and all kinds of stuff. That's that's kind of
Speaker 1: fell in love with that place. Man, it's a long time.
Speaker 1: But now we're talking about back in the late nineties. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I know that's super pretty area. You know that side
Speaker 1: note and nat realist and if we digressed too far,
Speaker 1: but um, that area the Yucatan Peninsula and what's now
Speaker 1: called sort of like the Riviera of the Yucatan Riviera. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's back in like the late sixties and the Mexican
Speaker 1: government was basically you know, throwing darts at a board
Speaker 1: and looking for their next Acapulco. You know, that was
Speaker 1: kind of in its heyday, and they knew or just
Speaker 1: coming into it, and they knew, you know, like we
Speaker 1: maybe ten years out, what's the next destination place in Mexico,
Speaker 1: And so they chose can Kun and Cancun at the
Speaker 1: time was oil wells, oil wells and palm plantations for
Speaker 1: palm oil, right and uh and in fishing villages. That
Speaker 1: was it, you know, I mean it was so remote
Speaker 1: that you know, my dad and I may have shared
Speaker 1: the story when when we cooked on did that meat
Speaker 1: Eater show like two years ago with you, but um,
Speaker 1: you know, my dad was so you know that they
Speaker 1: would have this life where they would live in the estuaries,
Speaker 1: the Mangrove estuaries of of that peninsula, and you know,
Speaker 1: there's no noise, there's no air traffic, there was no airport.
Speaker 1: You could hear a fish jump, you know in the
Speaker 1: lagoon and know what fish it was. It's just that
Speaker 1: was the lifestyle down there. But um, anyway, that that's
Speaker 1: how Cancun became kind of MTV sen of frogs. God, man,
Speaker 1: if I could go back to time and find whoever
Speaker 1: that guy had that idea, oh my gosh, and just
Speaker 1: not like do anything real bad to him, but just
Speaker 1: so some interrupted him at the moment he would have
Speaker 1: had the idea, Oh yeah, they, I mean they my dad,
Speaker 1: you know they they have deer down there they have
Speaker 1: called which are pheasant, like a pheasant of the um turkeys,
Speaker 1: whole thing. But alright, so back in Montana anyway, back
Speaker 1: in Montana, getting after a food brand, UM, pitching a
Speaker 1: TV show, UM, had big plans, big plans. Yeah, I
Speaker 1: mean basically I just left crazy successful yachting career a
Speaker 1: decade and I should have, you know, I just not
Speaker 1: should have. I could have stuck with that, and that
Speaker 1: would have been a career, retired, you know, another ten years.
Speaker 1: And um, look you can make money private scheffing. Well
Speaker 1: you don't have any expenses because you're living on the
Speaker 1: boat and you have someone buying your Q tips and
Speaker 1: everything else, you know, Um, so you can put it
Speaker 1: all away and and friends you put it into whatever. Um. Anyway,
Speaker 1: So a longtime friend, this is how I got to
Speaker 1: this injury as a longtime friend asked if I would
Speaker 1: cater his wedding into September. September in New Mexico. I said, great,
Speaker 1: it's from Montana, and he wanted Elk on the menu.
Speaker 1: So perfect. I'll hunt, I'll hunt the elk. I'll do
Speaker 1: get a beat tag in an a tag and I'll like,
Speaker 1: you know, bring down all the all the good steak
Speaker 1: meat I can and make a many here we go.
Speaker 1: And I ended up having handed of course, you know,
Speaker 1: not getting an elk. So I had to borrow it
Speaker 1: from all kinds of friends and family and got enough elk,
Speaker 1: pulled off the wedding, got home like the twenty nine September,
Speaker 1: and now I was like committed, I need to shoot.
Speaker 1: I need a harvest to elk to pay all my
Speaker 1: buddies back their backstraps and whatever else. And so there
Speaker 1: I was. And so on the morning of October nine,
Speaker 1: I've been hunting hard looking for elk and m the
Speaker 1: opening day. No, it's archery season still. Yeah, So archery
Speaker 1: you know, goes to like the fourteenth usually, and so
Speaker 1: I'm in the talent archery the ruts like high gear.
Speaker 1: It's amazing. It's the time you want to be out
Speaker 1: in Montana, you know. And uh, And that morning I
Speaker 1: had a herd bull nice six by with about thirty
Speaker 1: cows pass at I don't even know forty yards and
Speaker 1: the cows were bogging quick and the bull I kept
Speaker 1: couch or chirping, so I got that. I at least
Speaker 1: got the bull to stop. And I'm at full draw
Speaker 1: looking at this bowl, and I'm thinking, no, I borrowed
Speaker 1: a two year old cow off my buddy, and I'm
Speaker 1: gonna return a two year old cat like I'm gonna
Speaker 1: return to the same type of meat give or take, right,
Speaker 1: not a stringy herd bowl. Most people in the right
Speaker 1: minds would not pass up a thirty yard quartering away
Speaker 1: broadside shot at a milk at a bull out right. Um,
Speaker 1: So I let it go, and I it's like nine am.
Speaker 1: Now I'm thinking, you know what, I'm gonna go to
Speaker 1: this other spot. I'm gonna go down the road now.
Speaker 1: And then so I parked my car at the trailhead
Speaker 1: and ended up three miles up kind of right where
Speaker 1: the stage foothills meets kind of high alpine dug for
Speaker 1: a timber and um, yeah, I came across what looked
Speaker 1: to me like a fifty gallon oil drum cut in half,
Speaker 1: you know, and um, inside it, I saw, um what
Speaker 1: I noticed was like some claws and black fur. And
Speaker 1: this is in the middle of a tight drainage with
Speaker 1: tall grass and stage and you know if you yeah, okay,
Speaker 1: I gotta stop you. Yeah, because I'm an introduced the thing.
Speaker 1: Now there I realized I haven't had made this clear. Um,
Speaker 1: I've seen this place because there's a new documentary are
Speaker 1: called Charge Yes, which is your life story framed around
Speaker 1: this freak injury, in your recovery from this freak injury. Right,
Speaker 1: So I've seen this place because you visited a couple
Speaker 1: of times in the movie. Yeah. Yeah, Uh what what
Speaker 1: landownership is this? Public land? Public land? That's I never understood. Okay,
Speaker 1: so no, no, pick it back. But I kept looking
Speaker 1: at it being like, so it's miles from the road
Speaker 1: from the trail, Yeah, it's three miles in. This is
Speaker 1: good because we're getting back to the original question, which
Speaker 1: was was it so um public land? Yeah, it's right
Speaker 1: on the Yellstone National Park border public land. Um. You
Speaker 1: know it's super hot spot for elk hunting, especially in
Speaker 1: the rut because you know, the tactic is the bugle
Speaker 1: amo out of the park, you know, getting across the line,
Speaker 1: super bear rich zone. So you know, um kind of
Speaker 1: your your head's turned. Yeah, you know this is down
Speaker 1: in Beatty gulch and and anyone that's ever heard the
Speaker 1: word beatty gulch for southwest Montana Region three, you're like, oh, yeah,
Speaker 1: you know, every year there's someone some calling for a
Speaker 1: bear situation, and so my head is turned on. So
Speaker 1: when I see this, um, this can two things I
Speaker 1: think of. I'm thinking it's old mining so that the
Speaker 1: town of Old Rich an old mining camp. So I
Speaker 1: grew up in that area. Grew up in Corwood Springs
Speaker 1: like a mile down the road, so all of the
Speaker 1: hills around there littered with old mining debris sheep can ups.
Speaker 1: So it's not uncommon to being the Racking Mountain West
Speaker 1: and see an old enameled bowl or an old cast
Speaker 1: iron stove or right, so yeah, man, like yeah crazy
Speaker 1: stuff or like heavy equipment that was obviously driven in
Speaker 1: but now the roads are gone and you kind of wonder,
Speaker 1: like how they got it in there, but you realize
Speaker 1: it's just right. It's been collecting to brief a hundred
Speaker 1: fifty years. And or a container for assault block for
Speaker 1: Kali's you know, And so that's what I think. So
Speaker 1: I immediately think that's what it is. And and then um,
Speaker 1: and then I see the claus and I'm and I'm
Speaker 1: I'm hunting. You know, I have my gear on me,
Speaker 1: and I pulled out a knife basically just to pop
Speaker 1: a clar two off right, go home, Because there's a
Speaker 1: what looks to be an inverted barrel, an open top
Speaker 1: barrel coming out of the ground. Yeah, and in the
Speaker 1: middle of nowhere like like corrugated sort of metal appearance. No,
Speaker 1: that's what you see in the film because that's what
Speaker 1: they protected it with. So think of just a rusty
Speaker 1: old oil drum bear and and to say dead bear.
Speaker 1: So remember People Magazine didn't write about this, and they
Speaker 1: were like, and Garcia, I have a baby bear. And
Speaker 1: then I had always hate mails like why would you
Speaker 1: stab a baby bear? Like it may it sound like
Speaker 1: I killed this bund like I killed this bear. So
Speaker 1: let's let's just make this. Let's just make this really
Speaker 1: clear that this is the kind of story, this is
Speaker 1: the kind of start with enough complexity that I wouldn't
Speaker 1: let People Magazine even come kind of close to this.
Speaker 1: You know, I believe I'm in many mistakes in the
Speaker 1: post aftermath of my injury, but um, stay out of
Speaker 1: the baby. You're talking to some jack guys who never
Speaker 1: really as in a bear or a barrel in their Yeah,
Speaker 1: and he's not even writing anything down. You're like, all right,
Speaker 1: where's your imagination going with this, mamory. Remember what the
Speaker 1: barrel is again? You know? So it was it's actually
Speaker 1: this So when I say baby bear, now, this is
Speaker 1: good to know when I say it. Now, I'm six
Speaker 1: years later, so I have all the facts now. But
Speaker 1: at the moment, all I know is that there's you know,
Speaker 1: there's like basically four little two inch claws but in
Speaker 1: the damn barrel, inside this barrel, and there's and there's
Speaker 1: like a you know, a little mess of for, like
Speaker 1: a two pay you know, there's a scrap of for
Speaker 1: and a claw you know, sitting in his Like there's
Speaker 1: a hundred pound animal in this barrel. It was was desated.
Speaker 1: It was mummified, man, totally mummified. Right. So I'm like,
Speaker 1: I know the damn story, but I didn't know. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and you never told me otherwise. I just I guess
Speaker 1: you just jumped to the idea that it's a full on,
Speaker 1: it's dead freaking bear yesterday. Yeah. Well, and and here's
Speaker 1: this is this is an opportunity that I relish because
Speaker 1: most interviews like People magazine or whatever else. You've got
Speaker 1: a sound bite, and and you don't have time. No
Speaker 1: one wants to hear your description of what this bears.
Speaker 1: They want to know how hard life's bend sense then,
Speaker 1: and what are you doing? And all these things? So yeah,
Speaker 1: so you know, I want to know about the bear. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you're looking at like a handful of fur, some dry, twisted,
Speaker 1: sinewed skin and like a few claws. So I pull
Speaker 1: a knife out of my right off my right hip.
Speaker 1: I put it in my left hand, and you haven't
Speaker 1: touched it with your right You haven't touched it yet. No,
Speaker 1: And I'm going in with both hands and just that's it.
Speaker 1: Major major warmth on the back of my head, super
Speaker 1: high frequency orchestration going on in my in my mind,
Speaker 1: you know, within my brain sound and uh and then
Speaker 1: curtain craw, just black. That's that's my memory of the injury.
Speaker 1: It should have been just dead is dead. Should have
Speaker 1: been just dead is dead. Yeah, And if you all
Speaker 1: took a nap underneath the tree, you'd wake up and
Speaker 1: you see the sky and you see tree tops. And
Speaker 1: that's my next memory, followed then by the sound of
Speaker 1: gravel under my feet. So what happens, what we know,
Speaker 1: and no one else is with me. So this is
Speaker 1: just what I can remember, is that I clearly woke up,
Speaker 1: my eyes opened, I got up. I left all my
Speaker 1: stuff there. I left my phone, I left my keys,
Speaker 1: I left everything, and I got up to my feet.
Speaker 1: And then I wake up on this road, walking downhill,
Speaker 1: and I remember hearing my boots on gravel. I remember
Speaker 1: hearing a western metal chirp, and I start to see
Speaker 1: the valley floor in front of me heaving and kind
Speaker 1: of coming into focus. And it's at that point that
Speaker 1: I start putting back the peace, you know. I start like,
Speaker 1: where am I? What am I? What am I doing?
Speaker 1: And then I recall I'm hunting, or I was hunting today.
Speaker 1: I recall I parked at Beaty Gulch. I recall I
Speaker 1: saw this thing. And then it just happens quick like,
Speaker 1: oh yeah, I reached out. It was gonna take a claw. God,
Speaker 1: I heard like a noise and heat, and and then
Speaker 1: I like, look, and I noticed that my left hand
Speaker 1: is just crutched up against my torso and my hand
Speaker 1: is super black, totally burnt, and I have um, you know,
Speaker 1: you can see sinew and bone and really kind of gnarly.
Speaker 1: It looks like just a charred the handles holding the knife,
Speaker 1: it looks like a chart turkey foot. The other hand
Speaker 1: just has sort of a black, you know, blowout scar
Speaker 1: on top of it, and otherwise it's not messed with.
Speaker 1: And I realized, because you don't know what you're you
Speaker 1: had no idea that you had just scorched no chest
Speaker 1: down and burnt your All I can see is my
Speaker 1: two hands, you know. And then I so then I
Speaker 1: then I get it. I'm like, all right, I mean,
Speaker 1: I'm thirty years old. I've heard enough stories out there
Speaker 1: in the world, like I got electrocuted. I am walking
Speaker 1: to save my life right now, and um and and
Speaker 1: and and and as I so, then I take note
Speaker 1: of that, and then i'll and then I shift. So
Speaker 1: I'm like, then I like fully present Lucid as Lucis
Speaker 1: I can be. I'm like, I am wanting to save
Speaker 1: my life. I am mortally wounded right now, like I am,
Speaker 1: I am headed for help. I have and and I
Speaker 1: realized that in my right hand, I have bear spray
Speaker 1: out of its holster in my hand. That's like a
Speaker 1: phenomenal thing. Just like understand that I had in leaving
Speaker 1: the scene. I had already like started going downhill to help,
Speaker 1: and I pulled bear spray out because somehow in my
Speaker 1: state of unconsciousness, remembered I'm in a bear rich environment.
Speaker 1: So I have bear spray in my hand ready to go,
Speaker 1: and that's how I by myself. I make a sling
Speaker 1: for my left hand out of the two elk calls
Speaker 1: at dangling around my neck and I started walking and
Speaker 1: I remember I hit the valley floor. Two miles later,
Speaker 1: I see a buck antelope, which I remember seeing on
Speaker 1: the way up, you know, And so it's coming back
Speaker 1: to me, like, oh, I know where I'm at, and
Speaker 1: that you know, I ended up finding the cabin in
Speaker 1: the valley floor. There's a guy working on his cabin,
Speaker 1: and um, he called the local. What do you think
Speaker 1: when he saw you? Because you were a meth that's
Speaker 1: how bad you were. So I saw the footage that
Speaker 1: you guys had from that you're girl, you know, like
Speaker 1: I gotta show all this amazing footage of like just
Speaker 1: very disturbing footage of severely injured person. But like what
Speaker 1: did the guy think when you showed up? I gotta
Speaker 1: show you a whole blown out of your head. I
Speaker 1: gotta show you the footage of the m T S check.
Speaker 1: You know, I just said, looked like a Halloween story.
Speaker 1: Um he called sat me down. Um. Paramedics showed up
Speaker 1: three of them at a gardener you know, and then
Speaker 1: they were like they knew they were moving to say
Speaker 1: this guy's life. I got a back yup now because
Speaker 1: I'm still so curious about this source. I know when
Speaker 1: the grand and the grand scheme things doesn't matter, but
Speaker 1: it have to know, okay, like what you had to
Speaker 1: later learn, like what was it? Right? Oh yeah, so
Speaker 1: here we go. So I want to cover that before
Speaker 1: we keep moving along because I think I just I
Speaker 1: don't want people to get because it's just so strange. Right.
Speaker 1: So Malcolm Forbes, yea yeah, four five right. Um. I
Speaker 1: had a cabin up at the top of Beaty Gulch
Speaker 1: and they brought power to that cabman via the road
Speaker 1: when they dug the road and they buried a line.
Speaker 1: At one point the road takes a big dog leg
Speaker 1: out and instead of rolling cable on that dog leg,
Speaker 1: they just shot straight up this little gully to the
Speaker 1: next switch back and has some kind of easement to
Speaker 1: do this on public land. They must have and and
Speaker 1: it was back in the sixties. And on the rollout,
Speaker 1: on the rollout when they're going up this drainage, they
Speaker 1: ran out of cable. They brought in a new spool
Speaker 1: and they spliced it. Instead of bearing the splice, they
Speaker 1: just put a can on it. And at some point
Speaker 1: there was yeah, I just put a can on the
Speaker 1: two tails, right, and maybe as junction you know, basically
Speaker 1: was a junction box the Yeah, so this was feeding
Speaker 1: or actually feeding a Yeah, there was like there's likes
Speaker 1: going to a home. Mm hmm. Yeah. And the lid
Speaker 1: was secure. That's important. Everyone needs another lid was secured.
Speaker 1: It had three locks on all three sides. And um,
Speaker 1: you know, the welds for the tabs that had the
Speaker 1: holes through it to keep the lid attached to the
Speaker 1: container had started to become compromised over time. And you know,
Speaker 1: and then now we get to a sort of like
Speaker 1: a place where via an n D A I think
Speaker 1: I'm allowed to continue to say that, Um, you know,
Speaker 1: the locks the tabs became compromised, and then one broke,
Speaker 1: and then another broke, and then maybe a bison rubbed
Speaker 1: its ass on it one day or sloughing snow down
Speaker 1: the hill started to move it over time, and then
Speaker 1: of course lid fell off and it just remained exposed,
Speaker 1: and it gathered dirt in grass and maybe a sage
Speaker 1: bush grew next to and I mean it just became
Speaker 1: engulfed in the drainage. Got you know. Yeah, one last
Speaker 1: question about this, is it your belief that the bear,
Speaker 1: I mean a bear got electrocuted in there? Man? You know, like,
Speaker 1: did the bear die because of that power? Who knows?
Speaker 1: I mean, it could have been dropped in there by something.
Speaker 1: You might get. Yeah, I probably did. They probably died,
Speaker 1: probably bit into it or something. I mean, I've heard
Speaker 1: so since then, I've you know, we've researched into similar
Speaker 1: bizarre instances. And you know, a note to all you
Speaker 1: outdoorsmen out there that they're gonna listen to this is
Speaker 1: that if you come across a pile of dead animals
Speaker 1: in the middle of the woods, don't touch them, like,
Speaker 1: don't poke it with a knife. You know, um that
Speaker 1: you know, it could be one animal that dug into
Speaker 1: a power source because there's vibration and frequency coming out
Speaker 1: of it, and they pick up on that or whatever,
Speaker 1: and that animal dies and another animal comes to feed
Speaker 1: on that animal and it dies, and you know that's
Speaker 1: definitely happened. Are you familiar with libraria tar pits? Yeah,
Speaker 1: look up listeners if you're just the cascading series of
Speaker 1: events that it kind of almost reminds me. It reminds
Speaker 1: me that the librat tar fits because bret tarpets are
Speaker 1: these like places seen tarpets that would trap animals, and
Speaker 1: over the tens and tens of thousands of years, they trapped,
Speaker 1: you know, dozens of mammoths, hundreds of dire wolves, short
Speaker 1: faced bears, saber tooth cats, And when you look at
Speaker 1: all the stuff that's come out of there, uh, you're like,
Speaker 1: how could these like be that like, how could they
Speaker 1: have caught that much stuff? But something I remember reading
Speaker 1: that one what they call one interaction per decade would
Speaker 1: account for it. And what they described was a baby
Speaker 1: mammoth walks out, get stuck in the tar, A sabre
Speaker 1: tooth cat comes out, the scavenge, the carcass gets stuck
Speaker 1: in the tar, A bird lands the scavenge, the saber
Speaker 1: tooth get stuck on the tar, stretched out over tens
Speaker 1: and tens and tens of thousands of years. You have
Speaker 1: this bizarre collection. Well, we're gonna so there was there
Speaker 1: was an interaction going on. Well, the power sorts the
Speaker 1: buck stops here for this scenario because I didn't die.
Speaker 1: That was not added to the evolutionary tar pit of
Speaker 1: electrical injuries in the woods. And uh and that's that
Speaker 1: that actually is. There's a like kind of anecdotal side
Speaker 1: note here is that part of the film charged not
Speaker 1: even part of the sole purpose of this documentary and
Speaker 1: I and we'll probably get to this later, is to
Speaker 1: serve as some type of of beacon or educational or
Speaker 1: moving factor so that others, others do not befall the
Speaker 1: same type of scenario that I did. You know, the movie,
Speaker 1: but the movie does weigh Sure, the movie does way
Speaker 1: more than that. But it does make you aware of
Speaker 1: it does make you weary of the idea sort of
Speaker 1: my dismay and surprise about the accident. I think UM
Speaker 1: helps explain this. It does make you wear that, like
Speaker 1: you have the stuff in your head that you think
Speaker 1: can go wrong, and then there's the things that you
Speaker 1: never imagined, Oh, that you would never ever ever imagine.
Speaker 1: I was I was, you know the time when when
Speaker 1: I reached out to take that cloth. I was already
Speaker 1: a mile up the hill in my mind stocking and
Speaker 1: elk I was like cloth. You know, it was supposed
Speaker 1: to be that quick. And had I not had a
Speaker 1: knife in my left hand, most likely you know, it
Speaker 1: may have not Ben's app that day, that knife, so
Speaker 1: that that the the the electrical joel came through my
Speaker 1: left hand, which is what was this is a hand
Speaker 1: holding the knife and then entered into my body and
Speaker 1: exited in nine different places on my legs, on my torso,
Speaker 1: through my scalp, and then and then here on my
Speaker 1: other hand. So this was an exit wound through my
Speaker 1: right hand, not an entrance wound. Can you can you
Speaker 1: walk us through your injury? Yeah, and then that when
Speaker 1: I get to the really trippy part, that like kind
Speaker 1: of bowils my mind as the cancer element is otherworldly.
Speaker 1: But the injuries from the injury injury, so the electricity
Speaker 1: entered through the knife that became the conduit that created
Speaker 1: the arc or you know that, and that knife hit
Speaker 1: metal or just hit the bear. No, I don't even
Speaker 1: think i'd made it. I don't even think i'd made
Speaker 1: it down to the bear right, So that the can
Speaker 1: maybe it's twenty as tall, and I go leaning in
Speaker 1: and and I'm again, I don't know, but my belief
Speaker 1: is that I never even made it to the claw.
Speaker 1: And at some point that metal in my hand, everything
Speaker 1: else is charged in this barrel right, and at some
Speaker 1: point that new metal caught, you know, became a conduit
Speaker 1: for an electrical jump that went into that knife and
Speaker 1: then came out through. So it basically goes into my
Speaker 1: left hand comes out, my left elbow comes out, my
Speaker 1: left torso comes out, my left thigh comes out, my
Speaker 1: right groin comes out, my right elbow comes out, my
Speaker 1: right hand and comes out twice on my scalp, like
Speaker 1: nine not give it, take nine major exit wounds. And
Speaker 1: what happened at your ribs exit wound? Yeah? Exit? Would
Speaker 1: the size of a head? Did the exit wound like
Speaker 1: you know, well the size of yeah? No. So the
Speaker 1: thing is, when when you look at the initial wounds site,
Speaker 1: it's it's fairly small. It's like the size of a
Speaker 1: large honeydew melon. But once the doctors started debreeding, which
Speaker 1: is removing the dead tissue from my body, where it's
Speaker 1: just like black, it grows twofold. You know, they have
Speaker 1: to dig back to live you know, live live tissue,
Speaker 1: live bone. So I had so I might, I mean
Speaker 1: that was probably that was one of my most extensive
Speaker 1: injuries was my left torso is um. Basically I lost
Speaker 1: half of my pectoral all of my obliques on the
Speaker 1: left side, and uh for like two inch sections of rib.
Speaker 1: It's like, right now, you know that's there's no ribs there.
Speaker 1: I remember one of the Oh my god, Yeah, he's
Speaker 1: showing us the lack of he's demonstrated in my shirt.
Speaker 1: We only got to your arm yet, But which is
Speaker 1: I have to imagine the main part of this to you, um,
Speaker 1: losing an arm. Yeah, in the movie when the doctor
Speaker 1: says to you, he's talking about what the surgery they're
Speaker 1: gonna do just on the one wound on your rib cage,
Speaker 1: and your girlfriend's filming this interaction with your doctor and
Speaker 1: he's kind of giving you like a basic what to expect.
Speaker 1: For instance, you'll never do a pull up again, like
Speaker 1: struck you Yeah, because you've always been like a fit
Speaker 1: I would say, like a fitness freak, but like you're
Speaker 1: a fitness guy. Yeah, was athletic. You can tell that
Speaker 1: that it is in the movie, you kind of see
Speaker 1: this moment where you're obviously like your whole life has
Speaker 1: changed anyways, but I see this moment where you're kind
Speaker 1: of like just that little detail makes you see I
Speaker 1: was like like wait, like a week in like and
Speaker 1: he's like, no, man, like for good, they'll never do
Speaker 1: a pull up again. It was, and that's because they
Speaker 1: were taking my It's called a muscle, it's called a
Speaker 1: muscle flap. So basically, with all that muscle being removed
Speaker 1: from my left torso your left of the very muscle
Speaker 1: is part of your armor. It's part of your body's
Speaker 1: armor for the vitals you know as well. It doesn't
Speaker 1: just serve as this mobility tool. It's armor. And and
Speaker 1: so with with bones being removed, with all this tissue
Speaker 1: being gone, um, the doctors have to find a way
Speaker 1: to cover that up and and and protect the side
Speaker 1: of the body again. So you know, the latissimus is
Speaker 1: not a vital muscle to overall life like. It is
Speaker 1: there for locomotion. So they basically remove the latissmus. That's
Speaker 1: that big muscle that runs from your shoulders down to
Speaker 1: your hip. It's kind of shaped like a v, you know,
Speaker 1: and they removed it from my hip they brought out
Speaker 1: of my of. They brought it out and then they
Speaker 1: flipped it and attached it over to my left torso right.
Speaker 1: And so that's why I basically the alati. If anyone
Speaker 1: doesn't pull up, you're using your shoulders and your arms
Speaker 1: and your core, which is mostly these huge latisimus Dorset
Speaker 1: muscles and so on. The doctor's like, you won't ever,
Speaker 1: you know, you won't do a pull up again. He
Speaker 1: was just speaking from learned experience that you're losing the
Speaker 1: majority of your pull power. And well it was no,
Speaker 1: he wasn't. You know. Two years later I was at
Speaker 1: my prostiticians because damn, you're like a pull up. Yeah,
Speaker 1: he throws a pull up bar up on the on
Speaker 1: the door and and you know, probably a cheater pull up,
Speaker 1: got my chin barely there, and you know, and I
Speaker 1: don't do pull I don't do pull ups anymore, just
Speaker 1: you know, because usually it's my my prosthetic. It's the
Speaker 1: material that makes it my prosthetic that breaks, you know,
Speaker 1: because a hundred seventy pounds hanging on it. But what's
Speaker 1: interesting to note is that for anyone that for anyone
Speaker 1: that goes through a major transformation, of their of their
Speaker 1: physical body in any which way, um is that the
Speaker 1: body is so is made, it is redundant. It's like
Speaker 1: redundancy in place. So if you lose one muscle there
Speaker 1: there is, the body's gonna find a way to have
Speaker 1: all the other mini muscles or underlying muscles that really
Speaker 1: are there to support those will start to grow and
Speaker 1: pull weight. You know. So right now when I'm hiking,
Speaker 1: so I'm missing a major chunk of my left quadr sep,
Speaker 1: a huge majority of the muscles on my left side,
Speaker 1: and I don't feel weaker on my left side. Now
Speaker 1: six years later, when I'm hiking an elkout, I feel
Speaker 1: like fatigued, like anyone else does, you know, And but
Speaker 1: I think it's because, um, all the little muscles they
Speaker 1: fill in, they come back in, you know, they start
Speaker 1: working out more. So walk us through how things went
Speaker 1: with your arm, um, like kind of how that decision
Speaker 1: making process you say in the movie, how you've decided
Speaker 1: to Yeah, yeah, this was it actually a decision. Yeah
Speaker 1: it was. It was a decision. So, um, I think
Speaker 1: I had been in the hospital for six days at
Speaker 1: that point. And if anyone's ever been in a like
Speaker 1: a high school locker room. It stinks and it it kind
Speaker 1: of started to smell like that. It started to smell
Speaker 1: like foot and just yeah, there was basically decay. Is
Speaker 1: that they had debreeded the the most of my body,
Speaker 1: but with you know, I had asked it like I
Speaker 1: was basically begging with the world, and you know, I
Speaker 1: was like praying to people I've never prayed to before.
Speaker 1: I was basically throwing every hail marry I could out
Speaker 1: at the universe, like, don't take my left hand, because
Speaker 1: could any could you guys imagine losing your left hand,
Speaker 1: Like how could you? You know you can't you know,
Speaker 1: you don't know. It's funny because it's like, uh, because
Speaker 1: of the nature um because sort of like how the
Speaker 1: last couple of wars that we've been involved and have
Speaker 1: played out with improvised explosive devices, we see more of it.
Speaker 1: Oh my god, you out well. I imagine people. I
Speaker 1: imagine people see you and assume you're a soldier. They're like,
Speaker 1: oh you you you were you lost your arm in Felujah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's probably like well, it's it's usually you get like
Speaker 1: you get like the nod and maybe like the two
Speaker 1: fingered like like veteran. I'm like, yeah, outdoors, so in
Speaker 1: that way, yeah, so in that way, No, I can't
Speaker 1: imagine losing my limb. But there's so many guys in
Speaker 1: our that are roughly in our generation that they are
Speaker 1: dealing with that because of like they're becoming such a Yeah,
Speaker 1: and I don't see more common injury. But just like
Speaker 1: we've had thirteen years of I mean, I can explos
Speaker 1: exposed these kind of explosions, it seemed to have a
Speaker 1: propensity to pull people's limbs off. I can speak all
Speaker 1: day too as to how I've benefited by by by
Speaker 1: the mass influx of amputees coming back from the war,
Speaker 1: because the government obviously is gonna pour a ton of
Speaker 1: money into taking care of people when they come back,
Speaker 1: and so the government has been huge behind new technologies.
Speaker 1: But in in regards to blue in my hand, basically
Speaker 1: the doctor said, look, we've removed the majority of the
Speaker 1: dead tissue and on your hand and there, and what
Speaker 1: you've got left is it is basically, um, you're gonna
Speaker 1: have to lose your pinkie and basically the like three
Speaker 1: out of the four top fingers and you'll be left
Speaker 1: with your pointer finger in your thumb in a hand
Speaker 1: that kind of runs down the middle of the back
Speaker 1: of your hand to your wrist. So you'll be left
Speaker 1: with kind of like a like a pistol looking you know,
Speaker 1: hand and and and he's saying, guaranteed the pistols good
Speaker 1: working pistol. Well, he's saying like he's saying, like you
Speaker 1: should you'll be able to have some movement in your
Speaker 1: pointer finger in your thumb, but you're losing all the
Speaker 1: rest of your fingers. And he says, so you'll have
Speaker 1: you'll have a semi functional left hand. Um, But he said,
Speaker 1: what concerns me is that we we believe that they're
Speaker 1: what you smell in the room is an infection in
Speaker 1: your hand and in your forarm. And that is at
Speaker 1: the moment, from like the middle heart of my left
Speaker 1: form to my heart is less than eighteen inches and
Speaker 1: that isn't it is not going to take long for
Speaker 1: a bacteria to run up to your heart. And our
Speaker 1: concern is great that um, that you've survived the electrical
Speaker 1: injury miraculously somehow, and yet we are highly we we
Speaker 1: are we there was a very high risk that the
Speaker 1: bacterial infection in your form could kill you. If it
Speaker 1: gets your heart. And it was like that was on
Speaker 1: a Sunday afternoon, and I'll never forget. I just said, like,
Speaker 1: bring me to the table, take it off right now.
Speaker 1: And they're like whoa, whoa, wa whoa the surgeons and
Speaker 1: at last we can do this is tomorrow, you know.
Speaker 1: So I was ready to tell you the second they
Speaker 1: said the bacterial infection in your left hand could kill you.
Speaker 1: I was like, then take it off, because you know, I,
Speaker 1: as you know, somehow survived the electrical injury itself. I'm
Speaker 1: not screwing around with infections and other things. You know.
Speaker 1: It's the weird thing you just mentioned that. Remember I
Speaker 1: remember striking me is um you talk about eighteen inch
Speaker 1: distance off your your arm. Remember I had a pick
Speaker 1: line in one time, and when I went to have
Speaker 1: it removed and I was expect I was just kind
Speaker 1: of I don't know why I was expected, like giant hose. Yeah.
Speaker 1: When they pull it out, I'm like, you know that's
Speaker 1: saying like when you get hurt, people like, oh, it's
Speaker 1: a long way from your heart, because like, no, it's
Speaker 1: not a long way from your heart. No. They put
Speaker 1: a little line just like yeah, right there, you somehow
Speaker 1: think of it as being like sort of more isolated
Speaker 1: and protective as they pull out this little seven inch
Speaker 1: holes and like that's all that's all it takes to
Speaker 1: get from my arm to my heart. I can feel
Speaker 1: where I'm missing ribs. I can put my fingers under
Speaker 1: those ribs when I'm working hard, and I'm basically like
Speaker 1: an inch from my heart. Yeah. So when I go
Speaker 1: when I when I do high intensity sport, whether it's
Speaker 1: horseback riding or triathlon biking or snow billing or snowboarding,
Speaker 1: I wear a uh, it's basically my triathlon jersey, like
Speaker 1: a tight spandex jersey with vel grow and then a
Speaker 1: kind of like a kevlar plate that goes against that
Speaker 1: belt grow to protect against that hole in my chest
Speaker 1: right now, you against impact. So so it's just big enough.
Speaker 1: Your ribs aren't doing the job war well most of
Speaker 1: them are, but there's there's a hole in my rib
Speaker 1: cage size of a grape fruit. And so the plate
Speaker 1: is like just over the size of a great fruit,
Speaker 1: so that if it gets hit, it's gonna spread weight
Speaker 1: to where the ribs are. Yeah, and I've called off
Speaker 1: recreational events where I I forget it you know, I
Speaker 1: forget to bring my vest, and you know, and my girlfriend,
Speaker 1: now you know, she knows remind me like you're on
Speaker 1: horseback riding with ben Masters, bring your vest, you know,
Speaker 1: and if I forget it, I just won't go in ya.
Speaker 1: So when you broke up from the surgery, and right, like,
Speaker 1: how what that feel like? You know, um, six years later,
Speaker 1: it's kind of a let down. But you know, I
Speaker 1: can only speak generally to what coming out of anesthesias
Speaker 1: feels like because I had twenty one surgeries. Coming out
Speaker 1: of the surgery that removed my hand, you know, it
Speaker 1: was not significantly different than the agree that I had
Speaker 1: my ribs are moved on or my scalp surgery, but
Speaker 1: also your arms gone right. But it's interesting so going
Speaker 1: into the surgery to remove my arm, I didn't really
Speaker 1: have an arm anyway. I just had a bandage. Club
Speaker 1: could feel it. Yeah, I was. I was loaded on
Speaker 1: on medicine. I was totally maxed out on pain meds.
Speaker 1: And you know, I was like really in this point
Speaker 1: of stage as I was like the first week, I
Speaker 1: was still in this super tentative to place where um,
Speaker 1: you know, I could live or die basically, and so
Speaker 1: coming out of surgery might to me, I didn't even
Speaker 1: get look at it. For the first day or two.
Speaker 1: It was still just this bandaged left side and then
Speaker 1: being just the you know, twisted individual that I am
Speaker 1: and a chef, you know. The first time I saw it,
Speaker 1: I was like, oh, man, it looks like shank bone.
Speaker 1: You know, I can see the marrow in there and
Speaker 1: I can see yeah, and it was like, you know,
Speaker 1: and that and that is honestly, honestly a lot of folks,
Speaker 1: believe you know, would would assume him rightfully, so that
Speaker 1: that it was super traumatic for me to like see
Speaker 1: my missing hand, you know, form with out of hand
Speaker 1: attach it for the first time. But for me, I
Speaker 1: was I was fascinated by being able to see all
Speaker 1: of my muscle groups open and see bone and you know,
Speaker 1: and I'm met it out so I'm semi comfortable, and
Speaker 1: so for me it was it was actually it took
Speaker 1: my mind off of things to follow, follow the movements
Speaker 1: of the nurses and the team cleaning after you, and
Speaker 1: to have a chance to have the inside view of
Speaker 1: my body. It was kind of cool. Honestly looking back
Speaker 1: on it now, How how loose it were you for
Speaker 1: all this, I mean, considering the medications, right, there's there's
Speaker 1: an accumulative, accumulative effect of all that stuff. I'm sure, yeah,
Speaker 1: I think, Um, I I was. I was mostly present.
Speaker 1: There's a lot I don't recall because of the cumulative
Speaker 1: effect of the fog as you want to call it.
Speaker 1: But um, yeah, like just I mean just sort of
Speaker 1: like a probably a persistent sort of shock, yeah, and
Speaker 1: then being doped up and being doped up. But you know, I,
Speaker 1: you know, I I remember we took you know, and
Speaker 1: I'm grateful too. This is another thing. It's too as
Speaker 1: I had a support team like no other. You know,
Speaker 1: my ex girlfriend Jenny Jayne, who's my business partner, she
Speaker 1: flew back from the UK and uh and took photos
Speaker 1: and video the whole time we were in hospital. I
Speaker 1: want to get to that because I don't understand that. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and so you know, so for me, um, I was
Speaker 1: kind of felt like it was a busy time period.
Speaker 1: You know. It was like you know, you're going from
Speaker 1: one bandage dressing to PT to surgery too. There wasn't
Speaker 1: a ton of downtime that I was awake for that
Speaker 1: we weren't doing something and and part of that I've
Speaker 1: always loved photography, so I have a lot of photos
Speaker 1: that are pretty intense. You know that, um kind of
Speaker 1: helped take my mind off of things. I was like,
Speaker 1: we were you know, yeah, it made made it kind
Speaker 1: of interesting in a sense. Well I imagine too that
Speaker 1: it doesn't take many minutes or maybe you know, I
Speaker 1: don't know, maybe it's a couple of hours until the
Speaker 1: thought repeats itself of well, thank god, at least I'm here,
Speaker 1: and I'm thinking, oh, yeah, no, that's a that's it,
Speaker 1: that's it. That is a good point. And I, um,
Speaker 1: I actually don't think I got back to Steve's point
Speaker 1: to that either, which was how was it to wake
Speaker 1: up not have your hand? And I think it was
Speaker 1: three weeks in where we're watching a movie and and
Speaker 1: Jen's probably in my hospital bed and I'm on her
Speaker 1: right side, she's on my left and we're watching a
Speaker 1: movie on the laptop and I'm never in this and
Speaker 1: this is the moment where I first remember having an
Speaker 1: emotional breakdown, and um, you know, with my left hand,
Speaker 1: I was kind of you know, you're sitting next to
Speaker 1: your honey at home, where are your hands? You know?
Speaker 1: One't you we don't answer that question. But one of
Speaker 1: your hands is you know, probably on her on her
Speaker 1: knee or on her shoulder or on her hand. You know,
Speaker 1: you're hanging out. And so my hand, my left hand
Speaker 1: was on Jen's knee and We're watching a movie and
Speaker 1: at one point I go to give it a squeeze,
Speaker 1: and then I kind of look over and I realized
Speaker 1: that I'm my left hand is on her knee, and
Speaker 1: I'm hanging out with her, and yet there's an a
Speaker 1: left hand. Yeah, and you know, I'm moving my muscles
Speaker 1: and I'm kind of like doing this, you know, and uh,
Speaker 1: and I just broke down because you know, of course
Speaker 1: my body still remembered a left hand, had been for
Speaker 1: thirty years. And it took a year, you know, six
Speaker 1: months to a year for me to really come to
Speaker 1: terms psychologically with the fact that I don't have a
Speaker 1: left hand. Like right now, I wearing a prosthetic cook
Speaker 1: And if I if I take this hook off in
Speaker 1: the second I just took that off, I now im unilateral.
Speaker 1: I'm like one handed in my mind, whereas the second
Speaker 1: I put this hook back in, I'm bilateral again because
Speaker 1: I got I got two hands to do stuff. With
Speaker 1: because the mind uh you know, the so for me,
Speaker 1: it was it was really like a few weeks in
Speaker 1: where I actually had a moment of loss for my limb,
Speaker 1: but not after the not right after the fact. Yeah,
Speaker 1: those isn't a pretty impactful part of the movie. Not
Speaker 1: the most impactful part of me, but a pretty impactful
Speaker 1: part of the movies. Leaving the hospital, Yeah, because it
Speaker 1: season then like all of a sudden, Then once you're outside,
Speaker 1: it seems like you kind of are That's like one
Speaker 1: of the moments when you it sort of seems to
Speaker 1: hit you. Yeah. Also, now you've been to this like
Speaker 1: little sanctuary and all of ASO. Now they're like, oh,
Speaker 1: you can go home now, And you're walking outside without
Speaker 1: your nursing staff, without the pharmacy next door, without your surgeons.
Speaker 1: You basically you've been incubated. You've been knocked down to
Speaker 1: this place where you are vulnerable and and being built
Speaker 1: up from the ground up again. And then you walk
Speaker 1: outside and you're discharged, and all of a sudden, you
Speaker 1: gotta park your own car again and you gotta drive again.
Speaker 1: And you know, of course I still had my family
Speaker 1: and everyone there, but um, you know, I mean in Jenny,
Speaker 1: you know, bless your heart, you know, take care of
Speaker 1: hours to un bandage me, get me in a shower,
Speaker 1: take me at a shower, and bandage me back up again,
Speaker 1: you know. We I mean, wound care was still intensive.
Speaker 1: It would take four hours to kind of just get
Speaker 1: me ready for the day. So here's what I forgot
Speaker 1: to check in on. How in the world, So you
Speaker 1: coincidentally at the same time happened to have testicular cancer
Speaker 1: that has spread up your spine and don't don't know
Speaker 1: about it, right, yeah, and they find it through all
Speaker 1: this other stuff. So on top of that, you're in
Speaker 1: there doing like chemo. So I hadn't done chemo yet,
Speaker 1: but so right, so when so that what the film,
Speaker 1: what you don't see in the film, and what you know,
Speaker 1: what's interesting to me is that in two thousand seven,
Speaker 1: I'm working on the yacht and I'm in Sancho Pe
Speaker 1: in the south of France, and I feel this pain
Speaker 1: in my growin, kind of like pulled muscle, and I
Speaker 1: remember just mentioning to the captain, I gotta go see
Speaker 1: a doctor, you know. And I don't bitch about really
Speaker 1: anything high threshold for pain, and um, there's a doctor
Speaker 1: on board who's a guest at the time, and he's like, oh,
Speaker 1: we'll just have Dr So and so give you check
Speaker 1: check up, you know, like okay, doctor gives me a
Speaker 1: quick evail, kind of checks the boys out down there,
Speaker 1: and he's like, you know, how many hours a day?
Speaker 1: You working like money for like months in a row.
Speaker 1: And he says, tell the boss to give you a
Speaker 1: day off and take an anti inflammatory. You're probably just
Speaker 1: working too hard and standing on your feet. And that's
Speaker 1: what every young mid twenty male wants to hear. You
Speaker 1: know that we don't want to go to the hospital
Speaker 1: or go get checked out. We're invincible, looking for a
Speaker 1: reason to not take it undred percent we are. And
Speaker 1: uh and so that was two thousand seven. So fast
Speaker 1: forward to my injury in two thousand eleven and I
Speaker 1: come out of a surgery where because of one of
Speaker 1: my exit wounds basically being in my sack. Okay, um,
Speaker 1: they removed my left testy and um. And so I'm
Speaker 1: told this when I come out of surgery. This this
Speaker 1: is kind of like this is like just a twisted
Speaker 1: fact of coming out of a surgery is you don't
Speaker 1: really know what happened in surgery until you wake up
Speaker 1: again and and you're getting told, oh, well we took
Speaker 1: this off, but we're able to keep this. And you know,
Speaker 1: so you're getting of getting the shakedown of how it
Speaker 1: went because they're doing they're doing play by play. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean they don't they don't know what they're getting into.
Speaker 1: You sign a waiver every time you're going to surgery
Speaker 1: that basically said, I recognize that I may not live
Speaker 1: through this, and the hospitals are not you know, um,
Speaker 1: you know, legally bound by what may happen. And then
Speaker 1: you obviously give some power of attorney so that if
Speaker 1: they need to make a game day call, someone can
Speaker 1: do that for you while you're on the table. And
Speaker 1: so Jenny, you handed it over to your ex girlfriend, Yeah,
Speaker 1: because she was the one that was there every day.
Speaker 1: She was like boom on my side, you know. So
Speaker 1: it's like you make a call for you while you've
Speaker 1: got siblings, parents who who who were there. But as
Speaker 1: my mom says, you know and my brother, you know,
Speaker 1: like they're can only be one captain of the ship.
Speaker 1: And if Jen's going to be, if she's already been
Speaker 1: by this guy's side for five years, she's sleeping next
Speaker 1: to that bed every day. And we were all in
Speaker 1: the peripheral every day here. Everyone else was in Salt
Speaker 1: Lake too, but it was like Jen next to the bed.
Speaker 1: So um, and she's able to make like end of
Speaker 1: life decisions for you and she and but and and
Speaker 1: to be fair, yes she was, but she's also you know,
Speaker 1: she's living with my family. My family is in the
Speaker 1: room too, and then going home. But you know, she's know,
Speaker 1: and on the I'm not suggesting that I would think that, like, oh,
Speaker 1: I shouldn't do this because she might pull a dirty drink.
Speaker 1: And but just like it strikes me as it's it's unusual.
Speaker 1: Well and because Steve's referred to Steve is referring to
Speaker 1: that she's my ex girlfriend. Right, she's not my girl,
Speaker 1: but he has becoming kind of like we we end.
Speaker 1: When the accident happened, she was an ex girlfriend. Correct. Yeah,
Speaker 1: she had just flown home to the UK, yeah a
Speaker 1: week before. Um yeah yeah. And so I come out
Speaker 1: of surgery and they're like, and the doctors say, this
Speaker 1: went well, that went well, this went well. I couldn't
Speaker 1: save your left testical, you know. Audio Rest in peace, buddy,
Speaker 1: and uh and in that moment, I recall that many
Speaker 1: years before I had had a pain in my you know,
Speaker 1: in in my in my in my sack, and you know,
Speaker 1: in some swelling, and I was kind of told to
Speaker 1: take an IVY prof and it never did anything about it.
Speaker 1: So I just casually mentioned this to the nurse, who
Speaker 1: then mentions it to the surgeon. And so like the
Speaker 1: first of a little red flag goes up, and the
Speaker 1: surgeon puts in an order that a tissue sample from
Speaker 1: the test that had been taken out a few hours
Speaker 1: before gets into the lab and that comes back positive
Speaker 1: for test acure cancer. Oh man, really, so that's how
Speaker 1: that was found. And you don't have roomed in the movie.
Speaker 1: It's not room for that, and there's not room for that,
Speaker 1: and so that's but that's how it was. We did,
Speaker 1: like a biopsy on an electrocuted test. Yeah, so so
Speaker 1: and so then we biopsy the heck out of you know,
Speaker 1: like we we so then we the you know, there's
Speaker 1: a full blown attack on all of the CT scans
Speaker 1: that had already happened over the prior week or two,
Speaker 1: and they're looking now like what did we miss? Is
Speaker 1: there something here that we're missing? You know, and they
Speaker 1: see this mass that's on my left spine and my
Speaker 1: lower abdomen just above my groin, and it's immediately flagged
Speaker 1: as a second stage tumor coming up from the test
Speaker 1: to cool um cancerous make me physically like physically, we
Speaker 1: biopsy the heck out of that. But in every biopsy
Speaker 1: test comes back negative. Okay, But the thing with the
Speaker 1: biopsy is, imagine you have an apple and then you
Speaker 1: have a holo core biopsy needle. How many times do
Speaker 1: you have to stick that apple to get full coverage?
Speaker 1: About a million? This is not gonna happen. So we
Speaker 1: boobpously like six times, let's say, and they all come
Speaker 1: back negative, and all my tumor really in my blood
Speaker 1: work comes back negative. But the doctors feel via what
Speaker 1: they can see an imagery that there is an and there,
Speaker 1: and so the YouTube you want to see Utah, the
Speaker 1: university has a Huntsman Cancer Clinic there, so they have
Speaker 1: a major oncology team. So they have an oncologist on
Speaker 1: this now, and they basically decide that there is a
Speaker 1: room reason enough for concern that this is a second
Speaker 1: stage tumor um and that even though all of my
Speaker 1: readings are coming back negative. They highly recommend that I
Speaker 1: go into a very aggressive round a chemotherapy to just
Speaker 1: make sure there's nothing in me anywhere. Um and I
Speaker 1: and and I'm still in the middle of surgeries. So
Speaker 1: now all of my surgeries. You can't go into chemotherapy
Speaker 1: with open wounds. So now they basically put surgical band
Speaker 1: aids on these wounds that are in recovery, like my scalp,
Speaker 1: you know, So they basically they take skin and they
Speaker 1: put it on my skull to close that up, and
Speaker 1: they put everything on hold so that I can go
Speaker 1: home to Bozeman and do three months of intense chemotherapy.
Speaker 1: That's a that's another part of the movie. Just something
Speaker 1: that you always here do a chemo therapy that hair
Speaker 1: falls off, but in the movie you're able to. One
Speaker 1: day you realize it's loose, and someone's filming this and
Speaker 1: you're able to just kind of go and pull all
Speaker 1: of the hair off your head. Yeah. I started cheming.
Speaker 1: I mean like I started chemo like late January, early Jeane, no,
Speaker 1: early early February, and I'm white tail shed hunting, and
Speaker 1: I started to notice, you know, like my hand going
Speaker 1: through my head while sweating and uh. And when I
Speaker 1: say to white tail shed hunting, I'm like sick as
Speaker 1: a dog and chemotherapy. So my goal is to get
Speaker 1: outside once a day for a hundred yards to maybe
Speaker 1: a rip flat river bottom walk with no weight on
Speaker 1: my back, just to be outside. And I started noticing
Speaker 1: that my hands coming back with hair on it, you know.
Speaker 1: And and um, yeah, I remember one day just kind
Speaker 1: of like messing with my hair, noting it. And I
Speaker 1: was determined that I would be the one percent that
Speaker 1: whose hair doesn't fall out, because it happens like a
Speaker 1: few small percentage of people do not lose their hair
Speaker 1: and chemotherapy and uh and yeah. And so when it did, um, yeah,
Speaker 1: I was at home and we felt you know, Jen
Speaker 1: and I just put a camera on a tripod and
Speaker 1: um and just yeah, I went after it as a
Speaker 1: very rab part in the film for a lot of
Speaker 1: people that are watching. Um, I mean I've sat in
Speaker 1: a lot of screenings in theaters, and that's a very
Speaker 1: raw heart. Cancers all over our society and there's almost
Speaker 1: no one out there that's not touched by cancer somehow
Speaker 1: through their family or friends or personally. And seeing yeah,
Speaker 1: I don't think anyone's ever seen cancer patient pull their
Speaker 1: hair out, and so's it just it is, It's it's
Speaker 1: really arresting. I think that's question. Through all that, did
Speaker 1: they ever say, oh, yeah, we we did have a
Speaker 1: test result came back then positive on his scroll, but yeah,
Speaker 1: no on the testicle that was removed that was positive.
Speaker 1: So none of the biopsies and none of the blood
Speaker 1: working to this date, knock on would somewhere. Um, I
Speaker 1: go for a check up every six months and I'm
Speaker 1: still negative. I still test, you know, like I'm clean,
Speaker 1: you know at the moment um, So I think, are
Speaker 1: you getting at So what's up with the masks? Right?
Speaker 1: What's up with the mass? So? Man, we we kept
Speaker 1: our eyeball on that for and we still do. But
Speaker 1: we kept our eyeball on that heavy for two and
Speaker 1: a half years. And my oncologist now in Boza, Montana
Speaker 1: feel is that. And I was pushed heavily to have
Speaker 1: it removed, which is a very dicey surgery because it's
Speaker 1: right near your spine with some significant, um the significantly
Speaker 1: undesirable side effects that are unavoidable for that surgery, which
Speaker 1: I will spare listeners. Um, and and I kind of
Speaker 1: just said, look, I I don't need to gamble here.
Speaker 1: But unless you're telling me that this mass is gonna
Speaker 1: kill me, I don't want to have this removed. You know,
Speaker 1: like I'm happy to just watch it, seriously watch it,
Speaker 1: but I don't want to go into the knife again
Speaker 1: and and deal with these you know, side effects and whatnot.
Speaker 1: And so we didn't have it removed. And um and
Speaker 1: the on college my oncollegies now believes it's an overactive
Speaker 1: limpho seal. So it's basically it's a limp node and
Speaker 1: fill with some emphatic drainage. And and we watch it
Speaker 1: every six months. I get a CT scan and we
Speaker 1: watch it and it kind of hasn't really grown, and
Speaker 1: sometimes it will shrink or change shapes, and you know,
Speaker 1: just we're watching it. So I feel like I got
Speaker 1: this little thing I get to keep tabs on. Now
Speaker 1: here's a part of the movie I don't understand. I
Speaker 1: don't think. I don't feel like it goes adequately addressed.
Speaker 1: And it wouldn't be because it's almost like fourth wall.
Speaker 1: It's a fourth wall issue. I'll explain that. Um. So
Speaker 1: when we'll say break in the fourth wall, it is
Speaker 1: kind of a production term where you imagine that you're
Speaker 1: filming a room. Um, I'm telling you the listeners this
Speaker 1: not not EDWARDO. But you're filming a room, right, and
Speaker 1: you can always see three room three walls of the
Speaker 1: room because the fourth walls is where the camera's sitting.
Speaker 1: So in productions, say like to break the fourth wall
Speaker 1: is to sort of acknowledge the presence of of the
Speaker 1: fact that there's some level of artifice here and that
Speaker 1: this is being filmed. Right, So watch the movie. You're
Speaker 1: just sort of engrossed and all the stuff that's going on.
Speaker 1: But let's say we break the fourth Wallman, how in
Speaker 1: the world, Why in the world, or how did it
Speaker 1: come up within days of this injury when you still
Speaker 1: don't even know if you're gonna live or die. You
Speaker 1: guys that your your ex girlfriend comes and you guys
Speaker 1: come to a decision just to start filming it. Mhm
Speaker 1: Like what was that conversation? Yeah, um, great question. And um,
Speaker 1: that's the that the result of filming hold on, I'm
Speaker 1: getting side check. The reason why we have so much
Speaker 1: footage from the hospital in the moment is that we
Speaker 1: had just finished wrapping up filming. Allen eleven this pilot
Speaker 1: for this TV show. Right, So I already had a
Speaker 1: DSLR camera and a light kit and lenses and we
Speaker 1: knew how to use it and filming four K or
Speaker 1: whatever else. And um, and and Jen is a creative.
Speaker 1: So Jen actually was the original mind behind Hey, Ed,
Speaker 1: you should have this TV show? And she storyboarded out
Speaker 1: and she taught herself, you know, how does the TV
Speaker 1: show happen? And she you know, grew up put it
Speaker 1: on paper. So she's a screenwriter also. And so when
Speaker 1: she was flying over, she says that she had she
Speaker 1: told her best friend the UK when she was flying over.
Speaker 1: You know, We've already been documenting Ed's life for two
Speaker 1: years for this TV show. I'm going to keep documenting it.
Speaker 1: You know, she coming to help. You were coming to
Speaker 1: film you help. She's coming to help. She's coming out
Speaker 1: of love a because that was it just struck me
Speaker 1: as so I I actually couldn't like, um, it was
Speaker 1: so the to you what I had to work to
Speaker 1: break free from that question. Yeah. So and so so
Speaker 1: my friend Sam drove my truck down with our camera
Speaker 1: and the production team that I was working with. Of course,
Speaker 1: I mean I had people business partners from everywhere and
Speaker 1: friends from everyonere flying in to see me. I mean,
Speaker 1: this guy's like I'm almost dying, right. So obviously the
Speaker 1: company M working with on this television show, they fly
Speaker 1: in and they brought a tripod and they brought like
Speaker 1: a small handheld light and things. Um, because we're filming
Speaker 1: a TV show, and the TV show is not morphing
Speaker 1: all of a sudden into this hospital show. But I
Speaker 1: think what we were thinking, or what Jen was thinking,
Speaker 1: was we need to document this, like and you know,
Speaker 1: we need to document this, and had we really publicized
Speaker 1: that to the hospital, we probably wouldn't have got permission.
Speaker 1: So it was Jen with the handheld DSLR and just
Speaker 1: we're just filming this, so we have it. We're filming
Speaker 1: because even at one point I think it nerves even
Speaker 1: why are you're filming all this? Because I was I
Speaker 1: was filming on my phone and and um and Jen.
Speaker 1: You know, part of Jen's reasoning too, is that so
Speaker 1: when I wake up and I'm missing a testicle and
Speaker 1: whatever else, you know, there's sort of when I come
Speaker 1: out of this this fog and this traumatic sort of
Speaker 1: place where I may not be fully present, that I
Speaker 1: would have I can go through hours of footage and
Speaker 1: see what the condition I was in, see how it
Speaker 1: could be like a coping mechanism. That yeah, that that
Speaker 1: that's it, you know, said eventually, I don't want to
Speaker 1: get to like production talk here, but instead of go
Speaker 1: and get releases from all these people, right right. So
Speaker 1: that's three years later, three years later, and I mean,
Speaker 1: that's its whole own fascinating story. But um, you know,
Speaker 1: I it wasn't until two thousand and fourteen that the
Speaker 1: conversation really started to come around via friends that are
Speaker 1: in production and via gen and via family and you know,
Speaker 1: like how you should tell the story, you know, And
Speaker 1: I had no interest, had zero interests in telling the story. Um.
Speaker 1: And and it was actually the surgeon on call that
Speaker 1: saved my life, Dr Stephen Morris, who to me, he
Speaker 1: basically impressed upon me that um in fewer words, and
Speaker 1: I kind of took his words and extracted what I found.
Speaker 1: What I thought he was trying to tell me was
Speaker 1: that I lose a lot of patients. I lose a
Speaker 1: lot of people because they give up. And this is
Speaker 1: three years post Okay, so my hair has grown in
Speaker 1: and I'm standing and I'm walking and I'm back to
Speaker 1: work and looking healthy, and and he's he's like, your
Speaker 1: your your your recovery at WARDO is phenomenal, the way
Speaker 1: you've recovered, and the fact that you are not sharing
Speaker 1: this with others is like selfish almost, like you know,
Speaker 1: you have a human obligation to society to help those
Speaker 1: around you, and you are sitting on a really really
Speaker 1: kind of high high high opportunities, this quality opportunity to
Speaker 1: help others by just saying, this is what recovery can
Speaker 1: look like if all these parts come together, which is
Speaker 1: not just about EDWARDO. It's about if your if your
Speaker 1: community comes together, if if your family comes together, if
Speaker 1: if all the pieces come together. You know, um, if
Speaker 1: the patient, you know, even if you're splinted, you know,
Speaker 1: even if you can't move is there's many times when
Speaker 1: I couldn't move my arms, I couldn't do anything but
Speaker 1: move my eyes. But even as the patient of the
Speaker 1: patient resumes responsibility to bring in as much fire and
Speaker 1: stoke that so the nurse and operating team knows that
Speaker 1: patient is fighting. We're fighting with that patient. And I
Speaker 1: think that's what he was trying to task me and
Speaker 1: challenge me with it's like you should be helping others
Speaker 1: with this. Well that that's what the the movie ultimately
Speaker 1: is about recovery and family and the people that you
Speaker 1: keep around you and how you maintain yourself in life
Speaker 1: under hardship. We focus a lot here on on details
Speaker 1: of the injury, but that's just a small fraction of
Speaker 1: the movie, and it really becomes pretty heavily focused on
Speaker 1: the sort of a reevaluation of the relationship between you
Speaker 1: and your father, and also trying to make sense out
Speaker 1: of a really complex relationship with a woman that you
Speaker 1: are in love with and she's in love with you,
Speaker 1: and you go through some thing like this together but
Speaker 1: still there's this nagging sense that you're not together. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's it's touching the thing that struggling most. And the
Speaker 1: movie moved me to tears because at the point I'm
Speaker 1: sure it does a lot of people. Eduardo goes to
Speaker 1: high school to talk to some kids about um, just
Speaker 1: how to cope and and and be together and how
Speaker 1: to treat other human beings. I think is maybe one
Speaker 1: way to putting it. And you're saying that here, here
Speaker 1: I am now and this has happened to me that
Speaker 1: I have this kind of incredible story. And and you
Speaker 1: go on TV and you've been on all kinds of
Speaker 1: news shows and morning shows talking about it, and it's
Speaker 1: like all about you, but you're saying, it's really not
Speaker 1: um about you, it's about other people. And at the
Speaker 1: end of this talking kid comes the kids suffering, suffering
Speaker 1: bad and his brother has been injured by a firework
Speaker 1: and you like the way that you each new mm
Speaker 1: hmm was impactful, like what he's going through. Yeah, when
Speaker 1: when one survivor looks at another survivor, you almost don't
Speaker 1: have to say a word. It was amazing. It's an
Speaker 1: amazing moment, like an amazing moment that that have captured
Speaker 1: to be captured on film. You know, that school had
Speaker 1: been going through a major rash of suicides, like many
Speaker 1: in our country right now, and um, you know in
Speaker 1: our high school youth, um, which is something that I
Speaker 1: don't understand fully. And so the high school asked if
Speaker 1: I would share my story and you know, how do
Speaker 1: you say? And I stressed about that talk. How do
Speaker 1: you how do you feel forty five minutes of conversation
Speaker 1: with two thousand high school students that you know, I
Speaker 1: have my niece and nephew were in that school, and
Speaker 1: I'm thinking, like, I mean, I love him the pieces
Speaker 1: and they love uncle, but you know, oftentimes they don't
Speaker 1: want to give me more in the second it's the
Speaker 1: most cynical age, no, And you know, and I and
Speaker 1: in high school was not my glamoury years. You know
Speaker 1: then you know, I was getting kicked out of every
Speaker 1: school ever went to. So you got, That's what I
Speaker 1: was equally impressed with the connection with the I can't
Speaker 1: remember if that was the next kid or the kid
Speaker 1: prior to the one that had the brother with the injury,
Speaker 1: but the other kid that just really related with you
Speaker 1: having like a rough upbringing and not rough upbringing, but
Speaker 1: just rough earlier years where you got into trouble and whatnot.
Speaker 1: And you could tell he was probably sort of like
Speaker 1: probably not getting straight a's, having a rough go at
Speaker 1: it and just being able to relate it was good.
Speaker 1: Was so we we did a We had a Q
Speaker 1: and A after It's the funniest thing. As I released
Speaker 1: the assembly two thousand kids like talk was over, um,
Speaker 1: good night, you know, I'm out and uh, and I
Speaker 1: forgot that we had a Q and A, you know,
Speaker 1: like we had already just held hands and everything, and
Speaker 1: I forgot that we had a Q and A. One
Speaker 1: of the student bodies that was running the assembly was
Speaker 1: like mr Garcia, Mr Garcia, the Q and A, and
Speaker 1: I grabbed the mic and I was like yo, and
Speaker 1: just yelled and arrested everyone in their tracks. I was like,
Speaker 1: sit down, we're not done yet. And I just told them, like,
Speaker 1: we're done. And so we do a Q and A.
Speaker 1: And think about this, like, high schools are really really
Speaker 1: really challenging time in any young adults life, and think
Speaker 1: about getting up on a mic and sharing anything with
Speaker 1: your entire student body. And so it's like an auction,
Speaker 1: you know. When as soon as I was like there's
Speaker 1: a mic here, we're gonna do a Q and A,
Speaker 1: I know there's some questions out in the room. Who's
Speaker 1: gonna go first? And it was like an auction. I
Speaker 1: was just like looking for anyone to scratch their nose
Speaker 1: or flinch, and I was gonna call on them. And
Speaker 1: so some kid flinches. Not called on him, and he
Speaker 1: was brave enough to get all the way up all
Speaker 1: across the auditorium and get to the mic. And his
Speaker 1: question was where can I eat your food? You know,
Speaker 1: and uh, but it broke the ice. It broke the ice,
Speaker 1: and all of a sudden, we have a line of
Speaker 1: kids and we did a thirty minute Q and A
Speaker 1: and we had to end the seconds. That's all. We
Speaker 1: ended the session with twenty kids still standing behind the mic. Um.
Speaker 1: But you know, and you know that talks. So that's
Speaker 1: and that's what I'm doing. That's my focus for two
Speaker 1: thousand and eighteen, and you know, in like onward for
Speaker 1: many years, is to bring my life experience via I'm
Speaker 1: so grateful, man, I'm so grateful that there's a film
Speaker 1: like this out there that takes my story and objectively
Speaker 1: puts it out there in a way that almost anybody
Speaker 1: from any walk of life, at any age can reflect
Speaker 1: upon their own lives with. Yes, it's told through my
Speaker 1: story and it's told through my shitty day, but it
Speaker 1: raises um, it raises emotions, and it raises challenges that
Speaker 1: every single one of us experiences. And no one's immune
Speaker 1: to grief and loss and you know, wrongdoings and forgiveness
Speaker 1: and love. You know, we all we all experience that.
Speaker 1: So um. You know, I you know, I have great hopes.
Speaker 1: I have super high hopes for this part of my
Speaker 1: life coming forward, you know, is to um, let this
Speaker 1: film be its own, its own thing, you know, and
Speaker 1: I didn't make the film. We gotta go. That's important
Speaker 1: time to stand for you know, everyone listening, is that
Speaker 1: I signed this sweet little piece of paper that's actually
Speaker 1: quite short, and it just called it's Life Life Story
Speaker 1: Rights Release. And you know you have the opportunity to
Speaker 1: list an made by the director and producer Philip Philip
Speaker 1: bar b Yeah, so the director is Phil bar Boo
Speaker 1: who also U recently finished an award winning feature length
Speaker 1: documentary called Unbranded, which everyone should check out. And um,
Speaker 1: but but you know, when you sign your life Story
Speaker 1: Rights away, you can list. I don't want to talk
Speaker 1: about the fact that I had to testicular cancer. I
Speaker 1: don't want to talk about that I'm from emigrant Montana, like,
Speaker 1: and I left it blank. I didn't put anything down
Speaker 1: because for me, you know, I could have put I
Speaker 1: don't want to talk about the fact that I was
Speaker 1: a lying, cheating asshole to my ex girlfriend. But um,
Speaker 1: for me, look, I'm looking for healing in this too,
Speaker 1: Like I need to get something out of this process,
Speaker 1: out of this film and beyond my interest in helping
Speaker 1: others by sharing what recovery looks like via my story.
Speaker 1: I'm also still to this day right here with you guys,
Speaker 1: like I am still going through like the aftermath of
Speaker 1: a super traumatic event that I'm still trying to make
Speaker 1: like right in my mind. That that's touched on well
Speaker 1: towards the end of the movie, like you're you're you're
Speaker 1: out of it, not not not of it mentally, but
Speaker 1: you you kind of your your future is sort of clear.
Speaker 1: I'm starting to find like where my new purpose is
Speaker 1: going to be. And and you're with your father, right,
Speaker 1: you know, and and it comes up, it comes up
Speaker 1: that like, yeah, that the it all this that all
Speaker 1: this optimism that you have and the sort of uplifting
Speaker 1: nature of this and the way you're spinning this to
Speaker 1: other people, not spinning the way, the portion of it
Speaker 1: that you're choosing to share with other people and the
Speaker 1: parts of it that you're picking out to have it
Speaker 1: be that this is what you want your legacy and
Speaker 1: story to be, Like that underneath it is there's a
Speaker 1: sadness that's there. Yeah, and you your your father sees
Speaker 1: it and you admit to it, and you guys talk
Speaker 1: about it, and it's something that like I think it's
Speaker 1: it's an important part to bring up because you could
Speaker 1: look at someone and someone who's doing their best to
Speaker 1: put all this in a good light, just like the transparency,
Speaker 1: the acknowledgement of of your faults, how you want this
Speaker 1: to be, how you want people to discuss you and
Speaker 1: perceive you that when you see someone who's just kicking
Speaker 1: ass in dire circumstances, it's not that they're different than
Speaker 1: you are and they're just immune to feelings of self
Speaker 1: doubt and in me into feelings of depression. It's because
Speaker 1: probably what's happening is that person is making a day
Speaker 1: to day conscious decision two to be like, there's the
Speaker 1: parts of this that I'm gonna be that I'm going
Speaker 1: to focus on and talk about, and there's the parts
Speaker 1: of this that I'm going to deal with internally, and
Speaker 1: that probably becomes a tremendous burden for someone and and
Speaker 1: and you and in all fairs, you kind of allow
Speaker 1: it to come out in the movie that yes, there
Speaker 1: is like a there's there's a sadness down in here
Speaker 1: that I'm not gonna deny. But it's not going to
Speaker 1: be the part that I hold out to other people. Well,
Speaker 1: it says, it's it's it's a part that I didn't
Speaker 1: even know, Like I'm moving a mile a minute. Just
Speaker 1: my way of life, my way of my natural way
Speaker 1: of being is just to move forward quickly through things.
Speaker 1: And I it wasn't until halfway through the six last
Speaker 1: six years of recovery that I started to hear from
Speaker 1: a gal I was dating, or from a friend, you know,
Speaker 1: like hey, you're kind of dick man, or hey, you
Speaker 1: know you you talk about being happy and positive all
Speaker 1: the time, but I don't think I see that, you know.
Speaker 1: So I started to actually go to my closest friends
Speaker 1: and say, hey, you know, I would love to hear
Speaker 1: from you. What do you see in me that's challenging
Speaker 1: to you? What what in me is something I could
Speaker 1: get rid of and be better off without, you know?
Speaker 1: And I started to assess, you know, this this gal
Speaker 1: I was dating, it was like, you talked about being happy,
Speaker 1: but you don't look so happy, man, you don't sound
Speaker 1: so happy. And I started to think, like, really, am
Speaker 1: I not happy? You know? And and but was it
Speaker 1: an anger? No? You know, I think I think what
Speaker 1: I don't know if I do something that was already
Speaker 1: there was something that was laid over everything else because
Speaker 1: of the injury. I think I think I hadn't done
Speaker 1: the emotional work like it was. It was easy to
Speaker 1: figure out how to hike again. It was easy to
Speaker 1: figure out how to get on a bike or fly
Speaker 1: fish relatives. I'll do respect anyone out there who's trying
Speaker 1: to get back on the pony. Right. For me, the
Speaker 1: the coal's easiest part to get back into. But the
Speaker 1: emotional part I was. Honestly, this injury probably started pulling
Speaker 1: up emotional baggage from you know, somewhere earlier in life. Also,
Speaker 1: it started pulling out everything, you know, not having a dad,
Speaker 1: from the age of two weeks old, through like all
Speaker 1: kinds of things. So, you know, I think what the
Speaker 1: film teaches us through my story is that you know,
Speaker 1: every experience positive, hold on, just move positive or negative aside.
Speaker 1: Let's not associate those words with an experience. Every experience
Speaker 1: is a circumstance by which we can really make it
Speaker 1: what we want, right Like we have veterans. We have veterans,
Speaker 1: and everyday people's coming through trauma and being wrapped in
Speaker 1: bubble rap when they come out of trauma, like, here's
Speaker 1: your meds, here's your help, here's your this almost being
Speaker 1: encouraged not to get strong again, whereas I kind of
Speaker 1: feel and please, this is all due respect to anyone
Speaker 1: going through tough stuff. I'm just speaking about. What I
Speaker 1: know is that I think we're forged by fire. I
Speaker 1: think that if we survive something intense, by my mind,
Speaker 1: we should be stronger after that via the experience, via
Speaker 1: the learned sensorial, physical, chemical experience of all of it.
Speaker 1: We should be just this stronger human being that now
Speaker 1: has experience with trauma. So the next time we experience it,
Speaker 1: because we we are going to that. It's a bitter
Speaker 1: sweet life we live. So the next time it happens,
Speaker 1: we will if we've embraced it, if we've learned from it,
Speaker 1: if we've used it to make to to really add
Speaker 1: on to our experience in life. I think that we
Speaker 1: will be able to address the next event in our
Speaker 1: life with just you know, as a more adaptable human being.
Speaker 1: If we're not crutched by meds, if we're not clouded
Speaker 1: by meds, if we're not kind of brought back into
Speaker 1: society as oh, you're an amputee, let me give you
Speaker 1: a HARKing sticker for your review mirror. Of course someone
Speaker 1: may really need that and they should use it. Do
Speaker 1: you get where I'm going with? So, you know, for me,
Speaker 1: I understand by me, it's like I just had to
Speaker 1: hear you say it because I can't. I don't have
Speaker 1: anything comfarable. No, it was like, well, it's like I
Speaker 1: was LK hunting three days ago, and um, you know,
Speaker 1: guy got a great bowl, buddy of mine, and we're
Speaker 1: less than a quarter mile from the truck. But of
Speaker 1: course the last quarter mile is you know, down this steep,
Speaker 1: nasty hill with chopstick deadfall everywhere, and we're dragging this
Speaker 1: caped head out. He's got the high and everything ways
Speaker 1: double what it should, you know, and we're dragging it out,
Speaker 1: and um my buddy calls for a break. So we
Speaker 1: break and he's like man, he's like, he's like, man,
Speaker 1: we switched sides. Man, my hand is killing me, Like
Speaker 1: my arm is killing me. Like look over this guy,
Speaker 1: and I like, lift up my hook and my right hand.
Speaker 1: I'm like, you're gonna call you're gonna say that to
Speaker 1: a guy we want hand? Your hands killing you, you know,
Speaker 1: And so I think, look for me, this film was
Speaker 1: not made by me. This was made by an objective
Speaker 1: team of talented storytellers. Phil Baraboo and his whole team
Speaker 1: took three eighty six hours of footage and they brought
Speaker 1: that down to an eight hour assembly of selected imagery
Speaker 1: that they felt was strong, and then from that they
Speaker 1: brought it down to, you know, the two hour version,
Speaker 1: which was the first thing I got to see. So
Speaker 1: I didn't even touch any of this until it was
Speaker 1: at two hours. And now it's an eighty six minute
Speaker 1: film that is out there in the public, which just
Speaker 1: released two weeks ago, and I didn't make a single
Speaker 1: edit on it. I didn't make one change to any
Speaker 1: of it, because for me, part of my healing is
Speaker 1: to say to the outside world, which is the director
Speaker 1: and his team, he knows the message I wanted. He
Speaker 1: knows that I was really hell bent on it being
Speaker 1: this root like recovery tool for others and um and
Speaker 1: he kept that in mind. But I was interested in
Speaker 1: seeing what does one else see in my story. I
Speaker 1: don't want this to be EDWARDO on the mountaintop saying
Speaker 1: like this is me, everybody. I wanted it to be
Speaker 1: those guys looking in and then pulling out through their life.
Speaker 1: So and I think it's it's a beautiful film for
Speaker 1: that reason that it's it's this more general human peace.
Speaker 1: You know, it's called Charged. The Eduardo Darcias story just released.
Speaker 1: That's insane too, you know, that's insane. I'm flying on
Speaker 1: Delta back from New York City last week and someone
Speaker 1: I'm wearing the shirt and it says it says Charged, EDWARDO.
Speaker 1: Garcia's story, and the guy checks me and he's like, welcome,
Speaker 1: you know, like, have a good fight, Mr Garcia. What's
Speaker 1: what's the Charged? And then I get to say, oh,
Speaker 1: this is documentary film. I don't even have says about me.
Speaker 1: I can say, oh, it's a killer documentary. It's on
Speaker 1: Amazon iTunes and basically everywhere else that you download your films.
Speaker 1: Go watch it. That's all I get say, you know,
Speaker 1: which is surreal. Yeah, I think everyone should check it out.
Speaker 1: So that's where it's at Amazon, Amazon iTunes and all
Speaker 1: the other subscription based platforms that are out there for
Speaker 1: digital download. Um and obviously you can go to charge
Speaker 1: film dot com, which is our website which has a
Speaker 1: lot of the you know, more of our bios and
Speaker 1: story um, and obviously about the film team. Um, you know,
Speaker 1: and uh yeah, you know, we'll see, we'll see what's
Speaker 1: next the next time we have yann, I want to
Speaker 1: do an episode called Hunting with a Hook. Let's do it.
Speaker 1: And have you explained all that? You mean, how I
Speaker 1: can still hide off and still you still skin out
Speaker 1: your bowl, hunt your rifle? Hunt? Well, this has better
Speaker 1: purchase than your hands on a slippery high, is my guest.
Speaker 1: You just poke a hole, and you know how you
Speaker 1: have like a meat gaff, you know, but just have
Speaker 1: like meat gaff that's kind of like a meat gaff.
Speaker 1: Just poke a little hole in the hide. You can
Speaker 1: self arresting, you know, you get a knife on there,
Speaker 1: and you know, you know, you probably all for rest.
Speaker 1: And then I point out to that you had a
Speaker 1: stainless steel anvil, Yeah, installed on there for crushing walnuts
Speaker 1: and flat and garlic and whatnot. Yeah, well that that
Speaker 1: that actually came around because I busted a pot. I
Speaker 1: slammed a hole through the bottom of my carbon fiber socket,
Speaker 1: which is basically the prosthesis, you know, shell that goes
Speaker 1: over my form. I was pounding steaks with a ranching
Speaker 1: buddy fiberglass stakes for an electric pen. I didn't touch
Speaker 1: the like yeah you know, so yeah, and you know,
Speaker 1: but the thing is that it's it's it's great to
Speaker 1: have a left hand back, which is my hook. However,
Speaker 1: you know, we we can't. We we cope, we figure
Speaker 1: it out, you know. Um, I I wrap those little
Speaker 1: hot hand warmer pads to it because there's so much
Speaker 1: metal on this that this just sucks the cold in.
Speaker 1: It gets cold. Yeah. Man, when I get when I
Speaker 1: you know, if I if I've been out all day
Speaker 1: and I It'll take hours for that form to warm
Speaker 1: up for sure. Just feel it traveling up your arm. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: Before we I got one last question for you. Before
Speaker 1: we started, we were talking about the rapidly evolving UM
Speaker 1: language we use, ah, you know, just in in uh
Speaker 1: terms of political correctness and other things, and just like
Speaker 1: how we describe people, what what sorts of things ring
Speaker 1: true and not true to you terms amputee handicap I
Speaker 1: mean yeah, I mean I think if someone some you know,
Speaker 1: if if if if I if I overheard or directly
Speaker 1: it was you know, in a conversation and being addressed
Speaker 1: as being handicapped, probably challenge whoever to push up contest
Speaker 1: or something like I don't know, but um if someone
Speaker 1: said like, hey, look at that handicap guy, yeah you
Speaker 1: know or oh you know. But but then the same
Speaker 1: goes to there's like I think we need to curb
Speaker 1: our entusiasm for wanting to find fault in everything. Like
Speaker 1: I think there needs to be a little bit more
Speaker 1: leniency to just just being organic. Right, So so if
Speaker 1: someone you know says, oh, can I help you with that?
Speaker 1: You're missing a hand, I'm not going to attack the
Speaker 1: person like, sure, hold the bag, you know, thanks. You know,
Speaker 1: for sure, That's something that comes with me all the
Speaker 1: time because I think that if you if you spend
Speaker 1: your life hanging around younger people who are more involved
Speaker 1: in sort of the evolving cultural dialogue and cultural landscape,
Speaker 1: they have a sense of you know, they can tiptoe
Speaker 1: through the mind field of terms and ways we talk
Speaker 1: about things, and they're hip to like changes. But then
Speaker 1: if I go back to where I grew up and
Speaker 1: I'm and I'm talking to someone, you know, one of
Speaker 1: my father's contemporaries who's in their eighties now, and they
Speaker 1: just kind of you know, spend their time fishing and
Speaker 1: living a real environment, and they'll and I know what
Speaker 1: their heart within their heart, and I know just from
Speaker 1: having a lifetime exposure to them, what kind of person
Speaker 1: they are, and they'll use language that would too many
Speaker 1: people betray another kind of person. M But their adoption
Speaker 1: of it was so long ago that they felt that
Speaker 1: they were moving in the right direction and never heard otherwise. Yeah,
Speaker 1: for you, listen, you know, I would encourage for me,
Speaker 1: I'm honestly unless unless I kind of I think I
Speaker 1: kind of just decided I was not gonna be moved
Speaker 1: by other people's interpretation of what they see, Like I mean,
Speaker 1: first of all, and that didn't start with my injury,
Speaker 1: but it was probably super crystallized with my injury. But
Speaker 1: growing up a Mexican kid in a country town southwest Montana,
Speaker 1: you know, change my name from Eduardo to Edward Eddie
Speaker 1: just so I wouldn't get made fun of, you know,
Speaker 1: like so that prejudice, you know, you know I saw
Speaker 1: that early in life, you know. And uh, and so
Speaker 1: for now, this for me is just a radical humility test.
Speaker 1: It's just a it's just a radical introduction into just
Speaker 1: being a little bit more human. You know, like Michael
Speaker 1: Frontie who always wears a hat, right, stay human, And
Speaker 1: I think that just means it needs to be room
Speaker 1: for organic occurrence to happen. And of course some people
Speaker 1: are malicious and malintended, but not everybody. I think we
Speaker 1: need to continue to give people the benefit of the
Speaker 1: doubt that they're just trying to react the way they
Speaker 1: naturally know. And let's just hope they're open to being
Speaker 1: told like, hey, that kind of hurt me this way,
Speaker 1: but you know, like call a handicap person just Mr
Speaker 1: so and so instead of like that guy who's handicapped,
Speaker 1: you need help, you know, um. And I would encourage
Speaker 1: everybody get get involved, you know, get involved in something
Speaker 1: that challenges you. So I do a lot of work
Speaker 1: right now with the group called the Challenge Athletes Foundation
Speaker 1: at of San Diego, and that's the group that I'm
Speaker 1: sort of doing these triathlons and stuff with, and so
Speaker 1: that what they stand for. They've been around for twenty years,
Speaker 1: nonprofit and they basically believe that through active sport, anybody
Speaker 1: can lead a healthier life. And of course their focus
Speaker 1: is on on people with physical disabilities, whether it's congenital trauma,
Speaker 1: um or trauma based you know, and so you know,
Speaker 1: through being a part being you know, one of their
Speaker 1: athletes now and one of their spokespersons. I also you know,
Speaker 1: fundraise for them. So I'm an active part of that UM.
Speaker 1: But what you know, what it does for me is
Speaker 1: it's it's it's fun and it makes me feel like
Speaker 1: I have a community you know of other amputees that
Speaker 1: I and non amputees just folks with. You know, they
Speaker 1: were born with some type of you know, spin o
Speaker 1: bifida or whatever it may be. UM, some type of
Speaker 1: physical challenge, right, and let me tell you what you
Speaker 1: want to be inspired and go to Challenge Athletes Foundation
Speaker 1: event and you get your ass handed to you in
Speaker 1: a swim by blind swimmer or a summer without legs
Speaker 1: and sure, you know, like you get smoked in the
Speaker 1: water by as summer with no legs and you're like
Speaker 1: blown away and you go up to the guy and
Speaker 1: you're like ship or the woman or whoever, and you
Speaker 1: shake their hand. You're like, wow, you just crush that
Speaker 1: swim and you have They're like thanks, but I had
Speaker 1: no drag through the water, m you know. So it's
Speaker 1: just like there's a humor right that they kind of
Speaker 1: they invite you into just smiling and laughing at the
Speaker 1: many different lenses that is being human today. You don't
Speaker 1: have to have your legs, you know. I should have
Speaker 1: one last question for you. You've you've come out of
Speaker 1: this a transformed person and and a powerful, powerful person,
Speaker 1: and you're in touch with the symbolism of what happened
Speaker 1: to you and how you came out of it. Do
Speaker 1: you ever think to yourself, m Um, if you go
Speaker 1: back to that day in October in two thousand eleven,
Speaker 1: if you once again had like grab your knife and
Speaker 1: reach out and touch the bear, would you touch the bearone?
Speaker 1: I wouldn't change a thing. I don't imagine you would. Yeah,
Speaker 1: all right, man, thanks for joining us. Check out the
Speaker 1: movie Charged, the Eduardo or Garcia's story