Bruce Feiler: The council of dads

32,234 views ・ 2011-01-28

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Please double-click on the English subtitles below to play the video.

00:15
My story actually began when I was four years old
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and my family moved to a new neighborhood
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in our hometown of Savannah, Georgia.
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And this was the 1960s
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when actually all the streets in this neighborhood
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were named after Confederate war generals.
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We lived on Robert E. Lee Boulevard.
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And when I was five,
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my parents gave me an orange Schwinn Sting-Ray bicycle.
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It had a swooping banana seat and those ape hanger handlebars
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that made the rider look like an orangutan.
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That's why they were called ape hangers.
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They were actually modeled on hotrod motorcycles of the 1960s,
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which I'm sure my mom didn't know.
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And one day I was exploring this cul-de-sac
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hidden away a few streets away.
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And I came back,
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and I wanted to turn around and get back to that street more quickly,
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so I decided to turn around in this big street
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that intersected our neighborhood,
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and wham! I was hit by a passing sedan.
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My mangled body flew in one direction,
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my mangled bike flew in the other.
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And I lay on the pavement stretching over that yellow line,
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and one of my neighbors came running over.
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"Andy, Andy, how are you doing?" she said, using the name of my older brother.
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(Laughter)
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"I'm Bruce," I said, and promptly passed out.
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I broke my left femur that day --
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it's the largest bone in your body --
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and spent the next two months in a body cast
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that went from my chin to the tip of my toe
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to my right knee,
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and a steel bar went from my right knee
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to my left ankle.
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And for the next 38 years,
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that accident was the only medically interesting thing
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that ever happened to me.
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In fact, I made a living by walking.
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I traveled around the world, entered different cultures,
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wrote a series of books about my travels,
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including "Walking the Bible."
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I hosted a television show by that name
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on PBS.
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I was, for all the world, the "walking guy."
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Until, in May 2008,
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a routine visit to my doctor
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and a routine blood test
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produced evidence in the form of an alkaline phosphatase number
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that something might be wrong with my bones.
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And my doctor, on a whim, sent me to get a full-body bone scan,
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which showed that there was some growth in my left leg.
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That sent me to an X-ray, then to an MRI.
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And one afternoon, I got a call from my doctor.
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"The tumor in your leg
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is not consistent with a benign tumor."
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I stopped walking,
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and it took my mind a second to convert that double negative
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into a much more horrifying negative.
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I have cancer.
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And to think that the tumor was in the same bone,
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in the same place in my body
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as the accident 38 years earlier --
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it seemed like too much of a coincidence.
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So that afternoon, I went back to my house,
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and my three year-old identical twin daughters, Eden and Tybee Feiler,
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came running to meet me.
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They'd just turned three,
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and they were into all things pink and purple.
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In fact, we called them Pinkalicious and Purplicious --
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although I must say, our favorite nickname
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occurred on their birthday, April 15th.
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When they were born at 6:14 and 6:46
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on April 15, 2005,
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our otherwise grim, humorless doctor looked at his watch,
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and was like, "Hmm, April 15th -- tax day.
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Early filer and late filer."
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(Laughter)
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The next day I came to see him. I was like, "Doctor, that was a really good joke."
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And he was like, "You're the writer, kid."
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Anyway -- so they had just turned three,
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and they came and they were doing this dance they had just made up
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where they were twirling faster and faster until they tumbled to the ground,
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laughing with all the glee in the world.
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I crumbled.
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I kept imagining all the walks I might not take with them,
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the art projects I might not mess up,
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the boyfriends I might not scowl at,
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the aisles I might not walk down.
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Would they wonder who I was, I thought.
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Would they yearn for my approval,
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my love, my voice?
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A few days later, I woke with an idea
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of how I might give them that voice.
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I would reach out to six men
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from all parts of my life
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and ask them to be present
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in the passages of my daughters' lives.
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"I believe my girls will have plenty of opportunities in their lives,"
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I wrote these men.
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"They'll have loving families and welcoming homes,
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but they may not have me.
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They may not have their dad.
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Will you help be their dad?"
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And I said to myself
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I would call this group of men "the Council of Dads."
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Now as soon as I had this idea,
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I decided I wouldn't tell my wife. Okay.
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She's a very upbeat,
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naturally excited person.
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There's this idea in this culture -- I don't have to tell you --
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that you sort of "happy" your way through a problem.
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We should focus on the positive.
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My wife, as I said, she grew up outside of Boston.
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She's got a big smile. She's got a big personality.
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She's got big hair --
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although, she told me recently, I can't say she has big hair,
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because if I say she has big hair,
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people will think she's from Texas.
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And it's apparently okay to marry a boy from Georgia,
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but not to have hair from Texas.
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And actually, in her defense, if she were here right now,
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she would point out that, when we got married in Georgia,
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there were three questions
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on the marriage certificate license,
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the third of which was, "Are you related?"
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(Laughter)
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I said, "Look, in Georgia at least we want to know.
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In Arkansas they don't even ask."
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What I didn't tell her is, if she said, "Yes," you could jump.
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You don't need the 30-day waiting period.
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Because you don't need the get-to-know-you session at that point.
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So I wasn't going to tell her about this idea,
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but the next day I couldn't control myself, I told her.
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And she loved the idea,
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but she quickly started rejecting my nominees.
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She was like, "Well, I love him, but I would never ask him for advice."
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So it turned out that starting a council of dads
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was a very efficient way to find out
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what my wife really thought of my friends.
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(Laughter)
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So we decided that we needed a set of rules,
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and we came up with a number.
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And the first one was no family, only friends.
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We thought our family would already be there.
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Second, men only.
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We were trying to fill the dad-space in the girls' lives.
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And then third, sort of a dad for every side.
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We kind of went through my personality
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and tried to get a dad who represented each different thing.
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So what happened was I wrote a letter to each of these men.
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And rather than send it,
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I decided to read it to them in person.
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Linda, my wife, joked that it was like having six different marriage proposals.
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I sort of friend-married each of these guys.
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And the first of these guys was Jeff Schumlin.
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Now Jeff led this trip I took to Europe
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when I graduated from high school in the early 1980s.
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And on that first day we were in this youth hostel in a castle.
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And I snuck out behind,
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and there was a moat, a fence and a field of cows.
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And Jeff came up beside me and said,
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"So, have you ever been cow tipping?"
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I was like, "Cow tipping?
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He was like, "Yeah. Cows sleep standing up.
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So if you approach them from behind, down wind,
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you can push them over and they go thud in the mud."
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So before I had a chance to determine whether this was right or not,
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we had jumped the moat, we had climbed the fence,
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we were tiptoeing through the dung
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and approaching some poor, dozing cow.
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So a few weeks after my diagnosis,
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we went up to Vermont,
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and I decided to put Jeff as the first person in the Council of Dads.
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And we went to this apple orchard, and I read him this letter.
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"Will you help be their dad?"
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And I got to the end -- he was crying and I was crying --
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and then he looked at me, and he said, "Yes."
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I was like, "Yes?"
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I kind of had forgotten there was a question at the heart of my letter.
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And frankly, although I keep getting asked this,
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it never occurred to me that anybody would turn me down
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under the circumstances.
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And then I asked him a question, which I ended up asking to all the dads
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and ended up really encouraging me to write this story down in a book.
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And that was, "What's the one piece of advice
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you would give to my girls?"
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And Jeff's advice was,
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"Be a traveller, not a tourist.
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Get off the bus. Seek out what's different.
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Approach the cow."
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"So it's 10 years from now," I said,
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"and my daughters are about to take their first trip abroad, and I'm not here.
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What would you tell them?"
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He said, "I would approach this journey
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as a young child might approach a mud puddle.
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You can bend over and look at your reflection in the mirror
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and maybe run your finger and make a small ripple,
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or you can jump in and thrash around
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and see what it feels like, what it smells like."
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And as he talked he had that glint in his eye
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that I first saw back in Holland --
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the glint that says, "Let's go cow tipping,"
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even though we never did tip the cow,
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even though no one tips the cow,
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even though cows don't sleep standing up.
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He said, "I want to see you back here girls, at the end of this experience,
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covered in mud."
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Two weeks after my diagnosis, a biopsy confirmed
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I had a seven-inch osteosarcoma
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in my left femur.
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Six hundred Americans a year get an osteosarcoma.
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Eighty-five percent are under 21.
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Only a hundred adults a year
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get one of these diseases.
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Twenty years ago, doctors would have cut off my leg and hoped,
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and there was a 15 percent survival rate.
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And then in the 1980's, they determined
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that one particular cocktail of chemo could be effective,
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and within weeks I had started that regimen.
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And since we are in a medical room,
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I went through four and a half months of chemo.
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Actually I had Cisplatin, Doxorubicin
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and very high-dose Methotrexate.
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And then I had a 15-hour surgery
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in which my surgeon, Dr. John Healey
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at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Hospital in New York,
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took out my left femur
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and replaced it with titanium.
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And if you did see the Sanjay special,
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you saw these enormous screws
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that they screwed into my pelvis.
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Then he took my fibula from my calf,
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cut it out and then relocated it to my thigh,
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where it now lives.
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And what he actually did was he de-vascularized it from my calf
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and re-vascularized it in my thigh
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and then connected it
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to the good parts of my knee and my hip.
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And then he took out a third of my quadriceps muscle.
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This is a surgery so rare
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only two human beings have survived it before me.
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And my reward for surviving it
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was to go back for four more months of chemo.
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It was, as we said in my house,
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a lost year.
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Because in those opening weeks, we all had nightmares.
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And one night I had a nightmare that I was walking through my house,
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sat at my desk and saw photographs of someone else's children
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sitting on my desk.
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And I remember a particular one night that, when you told that story of --
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I don't know where you are Dr. Nuland --
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of William Sloane Coffin --
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it made me think of it.
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Because I was in the hospital after, I think it was my fourth round of chemo
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when my numbers went to zero, and I had basically no immune system.
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And they put me in an infectious disease ward at the hospital.
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And anybody who came to see me had to cover themselves in a mask
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and cover all of the extraneous parts of their body.
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And one night I got a call from my mother-in-law
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that my daughters, at that time three and a half,
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were missing me and feeling my absence.
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And I hung up the phone,
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and I put my face in my hands,
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and I screamed this silent scream.
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And what you said, Dr. Nuland -- I don't know where you are --
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made me think of this today.
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Because the thought that came to my mind
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was that the feeling that I had
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was like a primal scream.
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And what was so striking --
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and one of the messages I want to leave you here with today --
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is the experience.
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As I became less and less human --
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and at this moment in my life, I was probably 30 pounds less than I am right now.
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Of course, I had no hair and no immune system.
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They were actually putting blood inside my body.
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At that moment I was less and less human,
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I was also, at the same time,
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maybe the most human I've ever been.
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And what was so striking about that time
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was, instead of repulsing people,
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I was actually proving to be a magnet for people.
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People were incredibly drawn.
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When my wife and I had kids, we thought it would be all-hands-on-deck.
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Instead, it was everybody running the other way.
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And when I had cancer, we thought it'd be everybody running the other way.
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Instead, it was all-hands-on-deck.
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And when people came to me,
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rather than being incredibly turned off by what they saw --
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I was like a living ghost --
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they were incredibly moved
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to talk about what was going on in their own lives.
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Cancer, I found, is a passport to intimacy.
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It is an invitation, maybe even a mandate,
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to enter the most vital arenas of human life,
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the most sensitive and the most frightening,
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the ones that we never want to go to,
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but when we do go there,
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we feel incredibly transformed when we do.
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And this also happened to my girls as they began to see,
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and, we thought, maybe became an ounce more compassionate.
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One day, my daughter Tybee,
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Tybee came to me, and she said, "I have so much love for you in my body, daddy,
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I can't stop giving you hugs and kisses.
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And when I have no more love left, I just drink milk,
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because that's where love comes from."
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(Laughter)
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And one night my daughter Eden came to me.
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And as I lifted my leg out of bed,
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she reached for my crutches and handed them to me.
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In fact, if I cling to one memory of this year,
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it would be walking down a darkened hallway
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with five spongy fingers
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grasping the handle underneath my hand.
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I didn't need the crutch anymore,
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I was walking on air.
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And one of the profound things that happened
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was this act of actually connecting to all these people.
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And it made me think -- and I'll just note for the record --
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one word that I've only heard once actually
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was when we were all doing Tony Robbins yoga yesterday --
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the one word that has not been mentioned in this seminar actually
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is the word "friend."
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And yet from everything we've been talking about --
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compliance, or addiction, or weight loss --
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we now know that community is important,
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and yet it's one thing we don't actually bring in.
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And there was something incredibly profound
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about sitting down with my closest friends
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and telling them what they meant to me.
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And one of the things that I learned is that over time,
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particularly men, who used to be non-communicative,
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are becoming more and more communicative.
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And that particularly happened -- there was one in my life --
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is this Council of Dads
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that Linda said, what we were talking about,
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it's like what the moms talk about at school drop-off.
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And no one captures this modern manhood to me
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more than David Black.
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Now David is my literary agent.
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He's about five-foot three and a half on a good day,
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standing fully upright in cowboy boots.
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And on kind of the manly-male front, he answers the phone --
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I can say this I guess because you've done it here --
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he answers the phone, "Yo, motherfucker."
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He gives boring speeches about obscure bottles of wine,
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and on his 50th birthday he bought a convertible sports car --
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although, like a lot of men, he's impatient; he bought it on his 49th.
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But like a lot of modern men, he hugs, he bakes,
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he leaves work early to coach Little League.
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Someone asked me if he cried when I asked him to be in the council of dads.
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I was like, "David cries when you invite him to take a walk."
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(Laughter)
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But he's a literary agent,
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which means he's a broker of dreams in a world where most dreams don't come true.
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And this is what we wanted him to capture --
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what it means to have setbacks and then aspirations.
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And I said, "What's the most valuable thing you can give to a dreamer?"
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And he said, "A belief in themselves."
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"But when I came to see you," I said, "I didn't believe in myself.
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I was at a wall."
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14:47
He said, "I don't see the wall," and I'm telling you the same,
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Don't see the wall.
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You may encounter one from time to time,
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but you've got to find a way to get over it, around it, or through it.
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But whatever you do, don't succumb to it.
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Don't give in to the wall.
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15:02
My home is not far from the Brooklyn Bridge,
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and during the year and a half I was on crutches,
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it became a sort of symbol to me.
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So one day near the end of my journey,
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I said, "Come on girls, let's take a walk across the Brooklyn Bridge."
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We set out on crutches.
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I was on crutches, my wife was next to me,
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15:18
my girls were doing these rockstar poses up ahead.
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15:21
And because walking was one of the first things I lost,
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I spent most of that year
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thinking about this most elemental of human acts.
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Walking upright, we are told,
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is the threshold of what made us human.
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And yet, for the four million years humans have been walking upright,
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the act is essentially unchanged.
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15:38
As my physical therapist likes to say,
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"Every step is a tragedy waiting to happen."
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You nearly fall with one leg,
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then you catch yourself with the other.
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And the biggest consequence of walking on crutches --
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as I did for a year and a half --
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is that you walk slower.
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You hurry,
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you get where you're going, but you get there alone.
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You go slow, you get where you're going,
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but you get there with this community
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you built along the way.
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At the risk of admission, I was never nicer
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than the year I was on crutches.
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200 years ago,
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a new type of pedestrian appeared in Paris.
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He was called a "flaneur," one who wanders the arcades.
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And it was the custom of those flaneurs
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to show they were men of leisure
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by taking turtles for walks
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and letting the reptile set the pace.
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And I just love this ode to slow moving.
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And it's become my own motto for my girls.
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Take a walk with a turtle.
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Behold the world in pause.
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And this idea of pausing
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may be the single biggest lesson I took from my journey.
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16:42
There's a quote from Moses
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on the side of the Liberty Bell,
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16:46
and it comes from a passage in the book of Leviticus,
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that every seven years you should let the land lay fallow.
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And every seven sets of seven years,
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the land gets an extra year of rest
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during which time all families are reunited
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and people surrounded with the ones they love.
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That 50th year is called the jubilee year,
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and it's the origin of that term.
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And though I'm shy of 50,
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it captures my own experience.
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My lost year was my jubilee year.
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By laying fallow,
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I planted the seeds for a healthier future
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and was reunited with the ones I love.
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Come the one year anniversary of my journey,
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I went to see my surgeon, Dr. John Healey --
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and by the way, Healey, great name for a doctor.
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He's the president of the International Society of Limb Salvage,
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which is the least euphemistic term I've ever heard.
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And I said, "Dr. Healey, if my daughters come to you one day
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and say, 'What should I learn from my daddy's story?'
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what would you tell them?"
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He said, "I would tell them what I know,
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and that is everybody dies,
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but not everybody lives.
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I want you to live."
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I wrote a letter to my girls
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that appears at the end of my book, "The Council of Dads,"
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and I listed these lessons,
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a few of which you've heard here today:
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Approach the cow, pack your flipflops,
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18:03
don't see the wall,
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18:05
live the questions,
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harvest miracles.
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18:09
As I looked at this list -- to me it was sort of like a psalm book of living --
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I realized, we may have done it for our girls,
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but it really changed us.
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And that is, the secret of the Council of Dads,
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is that my wife and I did this
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in an attempt to help our daughters,
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but it really changed us.
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So I stand here today
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as you see now, walking without crutches or a cane.
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18:32
And last week I had my 18-month scans.
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And as you all know,
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anybody with cancer has to get follow-up scans.
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In my case it's quarterly.
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And all the collective minds in this room, I dare say,
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can never find a solution for scan-xiety.
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As I was going there, I was wondering, what would I say
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depending on what happened here.
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I got good news that day,
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and I stand here today cancer-free,
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walking without aid
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and hobbling forward.
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And I just want to mention briefly in passing -- I'm past my time limit --
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but I just want to briefly mention in passing
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that one of the nice things that can come out of a conference like this
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is, at a similar meeting,
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back in the spring,
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Anne Wojcicki heard about our story
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and very quickly -- in a span of three weeks --
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put the full resources of 23andMe,
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and we announced an initiative in July
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to get to decode the genome
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of anybody, a living person
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with a heart tissue, bone sarcoma.
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And she told me last night, in the three months since we've done it,
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we've gotten 300 people who've contributed to this program.
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And the epidemiologists here will tell you,
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that's half the number of people who get the disease
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in one year in the United States.
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So if you go to 23andMe,
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or if you go to councilofdads.com, you can click on a link.
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And we encourage anybody to join this effort.
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But I'll just close what I've been talking about
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by leaving you with this message:
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May you find an excuse to reach out to some long-lost pal,
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or to that college roommate,
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or to some person you may have turned away from.
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May you find a mud puddle to jump in someplace,
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or find a way to get over, around, or through any wall
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that stands between you and one of your dreams.
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And every now and then,
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find a friend, find a turtle,
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and take a long, slow walk.
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Thank you very much.
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(Applause)
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Original video on YouTube.com
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