Prologue Part 1: How I Found the Rabbit Hole

Introduction Soundtrack: 00:00

Chris: 01:33

Before we jump down the rabbit hole together, I think it would be best to tell you how I found it.

There are all kinds of conspiracies out there. Everything from the classic Bigfoot and UFO’s, to those who are a bit more polarizing like the flat earth and 9/11. And then there are still others that make us uncomfortable, because they deal not just with novelty, intrigue, or politics, but they hit the very essence of our lives. In fact, they go so deep because whether we want to admit it or not, they affect life itself. And whatever side of the fence we stand, whether it is staunch dogma or blissful ignorance, our view actually shapes our life and our future.

Healing…

For some it's just a biological process and for others it's a state of being. Entire belief systems and faith can be shaped by this word, and still it is a reality that everyone is experiencing at all times. It most certainly has its place in the physical and biological realm. There is undeniable scientific evidence of how our bodies work, yet there is a war that wages secretly over this process.

How does it work? What is our role? Why is healing so often selective? How can one person get well from a methodology while another loses their life in the process? This is complicated, and to ignore it… well that tends to only happen until you're in need of it.

This podcast is created out of struggle, my struggle. I struggle to combine Science, Biology, and the reality I live in, with the mainstream narrative of health, modern technology, human advances, and faith.

I've been on this journey for over 5 years, and every day my discoveries and experiences, the people I meet, the stories I hear, and the healing I experience, radically leave me questioning.

Questioning everything.

Healing is not simple. It is often not pretty, but it is a beautiful journey full of twists and turns that shape our lives whether we realize it or not. So it's best if I turn back time so that you know what landed me here. I am your host Chris Pratt, and this is my story.

Prior to: 2019

It has its moments, but I'm not going to lie, this is a job that is often destructive. Long hours, sometimes 60 or more per week! There were nights I would sleep in my office because it wasn't worth the time to finish a Friday night football game, drive almost an hour home to sleep for 3 hours, and be back at school by 4:00 a.m. to start the next day at a big competition.

In Texas, the only thing bigger and more competitive than band is football, but we come in a close second. We tend to be the first and last ones in the parking lot every day, all year long. It's a bit of a self-induced punishment, but it can be thrilling. There's an untold story after the Friday Night Lights and state championships. It's the toll it takes on your body both for students and teachers alike.

did a study in the early/mid-: 2000

That's crazy!

It's ours in the intense heat, massive amounts of water and caloric consumption, and high levels of cognitive demand. I mean these students are actually moving at high velocities on a field, while playing an instrument at very high symphonic levels. It's the culmination of both physical activity and fine arts, but for a director it actually is many of these same exact conditions only multiplied.

Although I wasn't out on the field giving the workout that the students were doing, I find that the same mental elements and many of the same physical elements were there beating on me every single day. Day after day. Plus the added stress of things like safety, logistics, and community politics, just to name a few.

So I was about 15 years in and I began to ignore my body's warning signs. A major warning sign that hit me was I started to develop a couple of spots in my facial area where my skin began to show signs of damage. Now I am a pasty white male, I freckle easily, so you kind of think it's par for the course. You get some sunburns, sometimes they blister.

But I had a spot above my eyebrow and a spot in the crevice behind my ear that would begin to flake and scab and then it wouldn't heal. It would just continue to fester. As soon as I started to notice this warning sign, I immediately jumped to the worst case scenario in my brain. I was like, “Oh great - I have skin cancer!” So I did what any red-blooded American who is going to take control of their health would do… I ignored it. And I ignored it for years. In fact, I ignored it for about 7 years.

ly began to ignore it. But in: 2019

The spot above my eye… I realized that it was starting to spread. It had maintained its size for years, but in a matter of months it was like doubling over and over, and it was growing, and it was becoming much more irritated. It was becoming pink and red all of the time and I was having to cover it up sometimes with a Band-Aid because it was bleeding. The same thing was happening behind my ear, but to a much greater extent. Behind my ear it was getting so bad that at night, whenever I would sleep on my pillow, I would wake up the next morning and there would be blood on my pillow.

My wife begged me to do something about it and I basically ignored her. I thought to myself, “You know, if this is what it is, I'm not going to have a surgery… I don't want to be mutilated!” (The irony was I was already being mutilated.) “I don't want there to be problems and I don't want to go through surgery.

I'll admit it, I was basically just afraid.

I started in this time period to do some research, because for some reason it just wasn't sitting well with me that this was all the result of a sunburn, which I just assumed that was the case. In my research, of course I found tons of articles, warnings, and medical research that claimed that sunburns, especially on someone with fair skin, was a recipe for skin cancer. But I also started to discover a lot of research that made a lot more sense to me. It was the correlation between cancer and diet.

Let me backup and just share very candidly that my diet was basically a trash can. You know I was working 60 hours a week, I was constantly on the road, I was constantly traveling, I was constantly working with students under high levels of stress, so I found myself usually skipping breakfast and then eating out at least two or more times a day. Now when I say eating out, I'm not talking about going to some really quality restaurant. I'm talking about fast food down the street. Get it done in 30 minutes or less. My diet became one of nothing but ultra-processed foods. If I did ever cook at home it was generally something quick, something easy, oftentimes something microwavable, something in the frozen food section, something from a box. And as I began to study and read, I discovered that the very foods that I had been consistently consuming for years are also the very foods that have a correlation with cancer.

So I began to run my own experiments and I thought to myself, “Well if it's my diet, then let me take care of that… I'll just stop eating!”

Now I know that sounds crazy, but I am an all or nothing kind of personality. If I'm going to do something, let's go big or go home right? So I just thought, “Well then what I'll do is I'll fast, I won't eat, I'll just drink water until it goes away.”

So I started trying this out and I would maybe fast one day because that's all I can make it. I began to notice something in that one day. By the end of the day and the start of the next day, the itching, the swelling, the bleeding had lessened, and I was like, “Hey, clearly not having the food is helping me kind of clean out my system.” So then I went a little more bold. I went three days. So I made it three days and in that 3 days I really saw the symptoms, if you will, reside.

So I worked myself up until I decided, “Now I'm going to get rid of this,” and so I said, “I am going to not eat until it goes away!” I actually made it 6 days. I made it 6 days and in those 6 days the spots began to dry up. They didn't go away, but all of the annoying symptoms, all of the bleeding, all of the itching, all of the inflammation; it was disappearing. But after 6 days, I began to feel deprived.

Now studies show that you can definitely go 40 days, some people have gone more, without food. I was of course drinking water, but I wasn't one of those people, at the moment. So after 6 days, I just kind of made up my mind, “I can't take it anymore, I'm going to eat.” So I knew nothing about fasting other than it was good for your body. I didn't consider what happens after a fast, so I decided, “I'm done, let's go to Taco Bell,” and that's exactly what I did.

t brought me to the summer of: 2019

In June of: 2019

He explained how the way the MOHS surgery works is basically they go in and they're going to cut the tissue layer by layer, and then look at it under a microscope until they can see no more abnormalities. Then once they get to that point, they feel safe that they've gotten all the cancer out. So it seemed pretty straightforward, it made sense to me, so I said okay.

With my eyebrow they went in and deadened the area and then they begin the first procedure. After they're done, they kind of put a bandage over it and then say please wait in the waiting room. Because this is all a real-time process; there's no anesthesia. You're very aware of what's going on. Thankfully you can't feel anything but a little pressure, but you hear it and you're awake, and you're aware. So you know you go sit in the waiting area with a bunch of other people who have bandages all over their bodies, and you're hoping we got it.

So the assistant comes out and says, “We need you to come back.” The doctor tells me we did not get it all, let's go again. So I went through my second time, same procedure, same process. The physician's assistant comes out and says, “We need you to come back.” I go a third time, and this time you're all bandaged up, you can't really see what's going on, but you've heard the sounds, you've felt the pressure, and your mind really goes wild and you're thinking, “I am literally going to be Frankenstein by the end of this!”

It begins to take an emotional toll, but I was told this was the path to healing. Thankfully the eyebrow procedure only took three trips, then once that was done he took a skin graft from just under my collarbone and grafted skin over my eyebrow to replace the skin that was taken away. He told me it would be an 8 to 10 or 12 week process of healing. So we scheduled to come back in July to give my body some time to recuperate, and in July we would tackle behind my ear.

So I felt better, and I thought to myself, “Okay, I made it through this, we're going to be okay.” It was ugly, but I knew that it would heal.

So I got to July, came back in the same office with the same doctor and same procedure, this time behind my ear. I went in for my first round, went back, went in for the second round, went back…

Then after round number five, something very deep happened to me. I began, for the first time in my life, to sort of lose hope. When someone's cutting the skin from behind your ear, you know that just under the skin is your brain and my mind began playing the most worst case scenarios that I could possibly imagine. By round five I literally felt like either my ear is going to fall off or they're going to get to my brain, and this is not going to be repairable. So I began to feel quite a bit of despondency, and I went and sat in the waiting area after round five. I was just praying, “Let this be the last time,” and then they called me back again for round number six and then they sent me back out and then they called me back in again for round number seven.

I remember asking somewhere around round five or six I said, “What's the most that anyone comes in here? How many times do you have to do this?”

I remember the physician's assistant said, “Well the most I've ever seen is 21.”

At that moment my heart sank, because I was only around layer five or six. So they called me back in for number seven, and at this time I'm in excruciating pain and they're just pressing and pressing and cutting, and the sounds and the smells and just the entire situation is making me lose all hope. But somehow after that seventh time I pulled it together and I know deep in my heart I just said a prayer, and I asked God to let this be over.

Thankfully they called me back and said, “We think we've got it; however, it's caused too much damage and we can't do a skin graft here.” The doctor actually looked at me and said, “I considered just taking your entire ear off, and it would have been way easier, but because you're young I wanted to try to spare it.” He said, “If you were older, I wouldn't have thought twice.”

Then it really sunk in, the severity of what I was dealing with. So the plan was for me to go home bandaged up, rest that night, and early the next morning I would be traveling over an hour across town to a reconstructive surgeon who specializes in reconstructive surgery after these sorts of operations. So I felt like I was going to be in good hands.

I made the journey, and for this they actually put me under anesthesia. The plan was to take a skin graft from the inside of my leg to replace the skin behind my ear and my ear that was missing. I went through the procedure and the doctor felt like it was a success. So he sent me home for a week to rest, heal, and after a week he said I would have to come back in so that he could inspect that the graft actually took behind my ear. Because what can happen is oftentimes your body will not accept that skin graft, and the graph will just die. He said that is possible, and if that is the case, he would have to start over.

So I went back, rested for a week, came back in,and I was doing a lot of praying because I did not want to go through that again. I was just hoping that the graph took and that everything was good, and I was on the road to recovery.

As I went back in for him to inspect, he discovered that unfortunately only 25% of the graft actually survived, which meant that within the next few days I had to come back in and start all over, which is what I did.

I'm giving you these details because I think it's important for you to understand the extremely long, complicated journey I had to get my body to just be okay again. I was at a point where I felt strongly that if I have the surgeries, they're going to remove it, the skin cancer is gone, and I'm going to move on with my life. Hearing that I had to go back and get a skin graft a second time began to cause some concern in me, because things were not going as smoothly as I had imagined that they would.

So that week I spent a lot of time really in prayer, really calling out to God, trying to understand what was going on. How is it that I went from active, healthy, doing well in my career, to suddenly I am floored with multiple surgeries and at this point I feel like, at the very least, I'm going to be physically mutilated? Add to that the uncertainty of; if I go back in and have a second skin graft will this one take? There's no guarantees. So I felt prepared to go back in, and as I went in early that morning for my second surgery, for the second attempt, I felt a wave of helplessness come over me, and it was just this feeling that there's nothing I can do.

So as my family left me, you know they were in the waiting room, and I was being prepped to go into anesthesia so that they could perform the second graft, there was a moment where I was all alone in the room. And in that moment, I experienced at the same time a loneliness but a comfort that I can't describe. Because I knew I was hitting a low point in my physical body, but I also knew that God was with me. So I simply asked a question to God and I said, “If you will just tell me what caused this… I will change.” And without hesitation I heard three words spoken to me by God. He said:

“It's your diet.”