Courage in the Face of Cancer: Terry Tucker's Inspiring Philosophy

SPEAKER_01 0:00

Welcome to the Living the Dream Podcast with Curveball. If you believe, you can achieve. Welcome to the Living the Dream with Curveball Podcast. A show where I interview guests that teach, motivate, and inspire. Today's guest is someone who has a story that everybody is a resilient and the power of the human spirit. Harry Tucker is a former NCAA player. And a fourteen-year cancer warrior who has went through extraordinary events including the invitation of his voice and then the invitation of his leg later. Terry has built a philosophy which is surrounded by fortruth. So we're going to be talking to Terry about his philosophy, his story, and everything that he's up to and gonna be up to. So Terry Tucker, welcome to the show.

SPEAKER_00 1:14

Well, thank you, Curtis. I'm really looking forward to talking with you today.

SPEAKER_01 1:18

Well, just start off by telling everybody a little bit about yourself.

SPEAKER_00 1:22

Sure. So I grew up on the south side of Chicago. I am the oldest of three boys. You can't tell this from my voice, but I'm six foot eight inches tall and actually went to college on a basketball scholarship at the Citadel in Charleston, South Carolina, despite having three knee surgeries in high school. When I graduated from college, I moved home to find a job. Curtis, I'm really going to date myself now, but this was long before the internet was available to help people find employment. I was very lucky. I found that first job out of college in the marketing department at the corporate headquarters of Wendy's International, the hamburger chain. That was the good news. The bad news was I lived with my parents for the next three and a half years as I helped my mother care for my father and my grandmother, who were both dying of different forms of cancer. After Wendy's actually went to work for the hospital that cared for my father and grandmother, I thought they did such a great job that I wanted to be part of that organization. And then at 37, I made the major pivot in my life and I became a police officer. And as you mentioned, I was a SWAT hostage negotiator. After that, I started a school security consulting business, coached girls' high school basketball when we lived in Texas. But for the last 14 years now, I've been battling a rare form of cancer, a rare form of melanoma. And then I guess just finally, my wife and I have been married for 32 years. We have one child, a daughter, who's a graduate of the United States Air Force Academy and is an officer in the new branch of the military, the Space Force.

SPEAKER_01 3:10

Well, you know, you went from athlete to police officer to cancer warrior. So talk about the mindset that has helped you succeed through all chapters of your life.

SPEAKER_00 3:22

Absolutely. I think as I was, well, I don't know if I was lucky, but having three knee surgeries in high school and having to fight back to play basketball again, it was something that I loved and something I was very, very good at. And it's something I didn't want to give up just because I'd had surgery. And my second surgery, I had 25 pieces of my bone removed, and the doctors put me in a cast from my hip to my ankle for the entire summer and told me that my basketball playing days were over and that I might not walk normally again. But I was not going to accept the prognosis that a doctor had said the doctor doesn't know your heart. He doesn't or she doesn't know your mind. They don't know your spirit. And those things are incredibly important when you're trying to do something, when you're trying to fight back from something, to do something that you absolutely love in your life. So I guess I learned early that I needed to control my mind, that I needed to basically be in control of the thoughts that were going through my mind at that. And that has carried over to being an athlete in college, that carried over when my father and grandmother were dying. And that certainly has carried over during these 14 years where in 2012, when I was diagnosed with this form of melanoma that appeared on the bottom of my foot, that I was told that more than likely I'd be dead in two years. They had absolutely nothing to offer me. And I was like, okay, you've given me a death sentence. Now I've got to try to figure out, based on what I'm thinking, what I'm doing, what I'm feeling, how I'm going to take that death sentence and try to turn it into a life sentence. And 14 years later, I'm still here. Some of it's certainly based on what I've done, but I think a lot of it is based on what medical science has done and the improvements that they've made. And also I think in the in the deep faith that I have in God and keeping me here because, as I always say, he's not done with me yet.

SPEAKER_01 5:39

Well, you play black basketball in college. Uh do you you want to talk about uh who you play for?

SPEAKER_00 5:45

Sure. So I um I played for a small Division I school in Charleston, South Carolina called the Citadel. It's a military school. When I went there, it was all male. And it's it's since been um gone co-ed. But I I had such a great opportunity, and and you know, things that happened to you in life that you don't realize till later the significance of them. So my senior year, our team played in um a tournament called the North South Doubleheader. And they took two teams from North Carolina, which were North Carolina and North Carolina State, and two teams from South Carolina, which were my school, the Citadel, and Furman University. And we played at the Charlotte Coliseum in North Carolina. So on Friday night we play North Carolina, who has a freshman by the name of Michael Jordan. And their big gun at the time was a person by the name of James Worthy. Worthy went on to play with the Lakers. He's in the NBA Hall of Fame. But that was 1982, and North Carolina would go on that year on a last second shot by Jordan to win the national championship. So that was Friday night. And then Saturday night, we played against Jim Valvano and the North Carolina State team that the following year, 1983, they would go on and win the national championship. So without knowing it, in the course of one weekend, we had the opportunity to play against two national championship teams. And then, you know, having grown up in Chicago, you know, Jordan goes to Chicago, wins six championships with the Bulls. So for me, it was just it was just a great opportunity and something I am very grateful that I had the opportunity to do.

SPEAKER_01 7:45

Well, congratulations on that.

SPEAKER_00 7:47

Thank you.

SPEAKER_01 7:48

Let's talk about your uh four truths, you know, explain people about your philosophy and why you created it and and you know anything you want people to know about it.

SPEAKER_00 7:59

Absolutely. So the four truths are the way I came up with these, and it's it's actually kind of a funny story. I was on a podcast called My Three Truths, and I had three truths, but there was sort of this nag sort of in the back of my mind. It's like there's a fourth one. There's a fourth one here that I need to include. And as human beings, we like things in threes, you know, ABCs, one, two, three, father, son, holy spirit. We like things in threes. And I thought, boy, adding a fourth one's really gonna kind of mess it up. But the more I thought about it, the more I thought it was really important to add. And so I'll I'll give them to you. They're one sentence each. I have them on a post-it note here in my office. So I see them many times during the day, and they constantly get reinforced in my mind. So the first one is control your mind, or your mind is going to control you. The second one is embrace the pain and the difficulty that we all experience in life, and use that pain and difficulty to make you a stronger and more resilient individual. The third one, and this is the one that I ended up adding, is more what I call a legacy type of truth. And it's this what you leave behind is what you weave in the hearts of other people. And then the fourth one, I think, is pretty self-explanatory. It's as long as you don't quit, you can never be defeated. And I call these four truths kind of the bedrock of my soul. I think they're they're just a good place to start to try to build a quality life off of. It's they're foundational for me. I know they're not going to change. I know they're there's something that I can anchor my actions to, my thoughts to, my feelings to, and that they're gonna be something that that's gonna be there. It's gonna be like that rock that will support me throughout my life. So those are those are the four truths. I can go into them a little bit more if you'd like. I've got some stories around them, but yeah, that's yeah, that's kind of how kind of how it how they happened. Um, so I you want to start just with the first one?

SPEAKER_01 10:23

Absolutely.

SPEAKER_00 10:24

Sure. So control your mind, or your mind will control you. The Cleveland Clinic, I mean, and I've heard a lot of different statistics, and Curtis, I'm sure you probably have too, about how many ideas, thoughts pass through our mind every day. But I'm gonna use the the Cleveland Clinic's estimates. And they feel that on any given day, we have about 60 to 70,000 thoughts that pass through our minds. And 95% of those thoughts are the same ones from the day before, which means we have approximately 3,500 new thoughts, new ideas that pass through our brain each day. In addition, our mind, our brain, operates at a speed of about a thousand words a minute. Given all those thoughts, your mind can still only hold one thought at a time. Why would you want to make that a negative thought? The problem with most of us, and Curtis, I know I've done this in my life, is that we think with our fears and our insecurities instead of using our minds. I mentioned that when I was in college, it was a military school. And one year we had a president by the name of James Stockdale. Stockdale had been an admiral in the Navy, a rear admiral when he retired, but he'd also been a naval aviator flying off of aircraft carriers during the Vietnam conflict. And he was shot down and spent eight years in the infamous prisoner of war camp that was known as the Hanoi Hilton during the Vietnam conflict. And I remember I didn't spend a lot of time around him. He was the president of the school and I was just a cadet. But I remember being at a function one time where somebody asked him, who were the people that survived that captivity, that brutality, that torture? And this is what he said. He said, Let me tell you who didn't survive. He said, it wasn't the big, strong, tough guys that had, you know, thought that they could handle any kind of abuse or torture. And the next thing he said really surprised me. He said, the other group that didn't survive were the optimists. He said these were the prisoners who always believed that they would be released by Thanksgiving or Christmas or Easter. And he said, when they failed to be freed, he said those people died of a broken heart. He said, the people who did survive were those who understood what they could control, which, according to Stockdale, were basically the thoughts in their minds and the breathing in their lungs and controlled them. And he's famous for what's become known now as the Stockdale paradox. And the paradox is this you must never confuse fate that you will prevail in the end, which you can never afford to lose, with the discipline to confront the most brutal facts of your current reality, whatever those facts might be. And I'll end with this small minds and weak people kill big dreams. Most people live their entire life without ever contemplating what it means to be great at something purposeful. If you want to overcome the difficulties that you experience in life, you have to be able to control the thoughts in your minds, in your mind, because we all become what we think. So that's that's the first truth that I've come up with.

SPEAKER_01 14:18

Okay, well talk to the listeners about your book. Uh you know, tell us uh what we can expect when we read your writings and you know what inspired you to become an author.

SPEAKER_00 14:29

Sure. So I never, honestly, Curtis never expected to become an author. I mean, if you would have talked to my high school English teachers, they they would have said there's no way I could become an author. But I've always been somebody who's been curious. I've always wanted to learn. I've you know, things that I don't understand, I want to dig into a little bit more and learn. So my first book was called Sustainable Excellence: 10 Principles to Leading Your Uncommon and Extraordinary Life. And that was a book that was born out of two conversations that I had. One was with a former player that I had coached in high school. As I said, I coached girls' high school basketball when we lived in Texas. And one of my players moved to the area in Colorado where my wife and I live with her fiance. And the four of us had dinner one night. And I remember saying to her after dinner that I was excited that she was living close and I could watch her find and live her purpose. And Curtis, she got real quiet for a while, and then she looked at me and she said, Well, coach, what do you think my purpose is? And I said, I have absolutely no idea what your purpose is, but that's what your life should be about. Finding the reason you were put on the face of this earth, and there is a reason, finding that reason, and then once you find it, living it. And I was, you know, I was extremely proud of her for even entertaining that there might be a purpose in life that we're just not here to do whatever comes comes across. So that was one conversation. And then I had a young man reach out to me on social media and he asked me what were the most important things that he should learn, not to just be successful in his job or in business, but to be successful in life. And I didn't want to give him the, you know, get up early, work hard, help other sort of the cliches that we all know. So I spent some time and I was taking notes and eventually came up with these 10 thoughts, these 10 ideas, these 10 principles. And so I sent them to him. And then I stepped back and I was like, okay, I've got a life story that fits underneath this principle, or I know somebody whose life emulates that principle. So literally during the four to five months that I was healing, after I had my leg amputated, I sat down at the computer and I built stories. And they're real stories about real people underneath each of the principles, and that's how sustainable excellence came to be. But as soon as I published it, I kind of felt there was this second book. Because sustainable excellence is a book about how we can be successful. It's about something that you could use as an individual. I felt there was another book inside of me that also began with the letter S, and that word was significance. Success is what we do for ourselves, significance is what we do for other people. So in around Thanksgiving of 2023, I started working on Four Truths and a Lie. And I was able to publish that on September 11th of last year. So I kind of feel that those were books, I always say though those books were inspired by something that was much bigger than me.

SPEAKER_01 18:08

Well, I know you talk a lot about embracing pain instead of avoiding it. So talk about how pain has become your greatest teacher and what lessons has pain taught you about the human potential.

SPEAKER_00 18:21

Absolutely. You know, our brains are hardwired to avoid pain and discomfort and to seek pleasure. So to the brain, the status quo, the way things are right now, it's comfortable and familiar. And as far as the brain's concerned, should just be left alone. The problem with that, and we all know this, is the only way you're gonna grow, the only way you're gonna get better, the only way you're going to improve is if you step outside those comfort zones and you do things that make you uncomfortable. When I was a high school basketball coach, I would constantly, my players would tell you this, I would constantly remind them that they needed to become comfortable with being uncomfortable. We're all going to experience pain of some kind in our life. And it doesn't have to be cancer pain like I've experienced, or any even any kind of an illness. It could be as simple as you know breaking up with your boyfriend or girlfriend, or the flight you're leaving on to go on vacation gets canceled, or someone else at work gets the promotion that you believe you deserve. Pain is inevitable. Suffering is optional. Suffering depends on what you do with that pain. Do you use it to make you a stronger and more determined individual, or do you wallow in it and feel sorry for yourself and want others to feel sorry for you? The writer Ernest Hemingway had a great line in his book, Farewell to Arms, that goes like this life breaks everyone. And afterward, many are stronger at the broken places. We all are going to experience pain, as I said. So how can we inoculate ourselves against pain? So I'm going to offer this to your audience, Curtis, because I do this every day of my life. Each day do at least one thing that makes you uncomfortable, that scares you, that makes you nervous, that is potentially embarrassing. It doesn't have to be a big thing. But if you do those small things every day, when the big disasters in life hit us, and they hit all of us, we things like losing somebody close to us or getting let go from our job or finding out we have a debilitating illness or injury, you will be so much more resilient to handle those things than people who never step outside their comfort zones and do things that challenge them.

SPEAKER_01 20:56

Speaking of things that that challenge talk about uh the amputation of your foot and your leg. You know, how how did you find uh strength uh to make it through those dark times?

SPEAKER_00 21:08

Sure. So that's I I don't know where I found the strength, honestly, Curtis. I I I I think it was just my faith in God. My my foot was amputated in 2018. Um, as I mentioned, my my cancer, my melanoma started on the bottom of my foot. I went through five years of a drug that gave me severe flu-like symptoms for two to three days every week after I took the drug. And as my oncologist used to tell me, Terry, this isn't a cure. We're just trying to kick the can down the road and buy you some more time. Eventually, that drug became so toxic to my body that I ended up in the intensive care unit with a fever or a body temperature of 108 degrees, which is usually not compatible with being alive.

unknown 21:59

So

SPEAKER_00 22:00

Had to stop that drug. That drug was called interferon. And my only option then was to have my foot amputated. And I actually got lucky because I was originally going to have a below-the-knee amputation. And my orthopedic surgeon had a friend who was a foot specialist. And between the two of them, they were able to basically save my heel and my ankle and take everything in front of that. But I still had to learn how to walk again, how to balance, how to, you know, do all that. And then in the middle of the COVID pandemic in 2020, I found out through several different PET scan and an ultrasound and things like that, my entire lower leg was filled with cancer. And so I had to have an above-the-knee amputation. The problem was there were no surgeries being done at that time. Everything had been shut down medically. And so I ended up having to have my orthopedic surgeon get special permission to do the amputation. In the morning of the surgery, I was not allowed to have anyone with me. My wife dropped me off at the hospital. A nurse put me in a wheelchair, wheeled me back to the pre-op area, which for anybody who's had surgery before, you know, is this large room kind of cording off into different um bays, all designed to be prepping people for surgery. And Curtis, I was the only person in that entire pre-op area. It was me, the nurse, the pre-op nurse, and an anesthesiology resident. And if I could have run out of there, I would have. I was absolutely scared to death. They told me I'd be in the hospital for 10 days to 14, 10 to 14 days after the surgery to learn how to function without a leg. And Curtis, they sent me home after 48 hours because of COVID. I mean, my pain wasn't even managed at that point in time. We certainly weren't ready from trip hazards and things like that in our house to show up with, you know, in a wheelchair with one leg and function. But my wife and I figured it out. And I think that's so important in life to, you know, you're going to have adversity in your life. And when that happens, you got to figure it out. You've got to figure out how to keep going, how to keep moving forward, whatever that ends up being. You're going to make mistakes, you're going to fall down, you're going to, you're going to mess up, but that's okay. You learn from that and you move on. So yeah, being being an ampty tee certainly is not something, you know. I mean, I'm six foot eight inches tall. So, you know, falling on a prosthetic, kind of scary. Uh, I spend most of my time using a wheelchair, and I I figured it out with along with my wife.

SPEAKER_01 25:04

Well, your third truth focuses on what we leave behind in the hearts of others. So uh let's talk about your legacy. What do you hope to leave leave behind in the hearts of others?

SPEAKER_00 25:17

Absolutely. I I Curtis, you and I are probably old enough to remember um Fred Rogers, Mr. Rogers on his television show, Mr. Rogers Neighborhood. Absolutely. Um who educated so many young children, including me, on public television. And there's a story about Fred Rogers who died in 2003, and his family are his family was going through his effects, and they found his wallet. And inside his wallet was a scrap piece of paper on which Mr. Rogers had written four simple words. Life is for service. Curtis, I've seen so many people, and I my guess is you've probably run across these people in your life as well, who kind of feel that they're born empty and that when they get out of school and get into life, whatever that looks like for them, that they feel that their job then is to fill up their empty self. They've got to get the best education, make the most money, live in the nicest house, drive the nicest car, have the latest gadgets and gizmos. And what I found is it's just the opposite. We're not born empty. We're born full with whatever we need to be successful, however you define that word already inside you. So your job in life should not be to fill yourself up. Your job in life should be to empty yourself out with your unique gifts and talents, certainly for the betterment of yourself, but also for the betterment of your family, of your friends, and of your community. And I there's a story, um, there's a psychology professor at the University of Chicago who does this experiment with his students. And the idea is you go out and you get on a bus, and in three questions, you try to go deep with another human being. So you sit down next to somebody on a bus, hey, how you doing? I'm fine, how are you? Question one, I'm just making this up. Question two, what do you do for a living? Oh, I'm a doctor. Question three, have you always wanted to be a doctor? Curtis, it doesn't matter what they say. They could say, no, I grew up on a farm and I wanted to be a veterinarian, but X, Y, and Z happened. Or my mother was a doctor, but she died of breast cancer at 40, and I'm honoring her memory by being a doctor. Whatever they tell you, they're telling you their why, their purpose, their mission in life. And that's that's what I want right now in terms of a legacy. I want to be able to have those deep connective relationships with other human beings. I mean, 100 years from now, 50 years from now, nobody's even going to remember I was here. And that's fine with me. But what I want now are those deep relationships. And I think social media lets us stay on the surface. You know, everything's fine, everything's wonderful. Look at all the great things that are going on. And we don't go deep with people again. We don't have those connections. And for me, Curtis, that's right now probably the most important thing that I'm looking for in my life.

SPEAKER_01 28:30

Well, I know that uh many people quit on their dreams, you know, when they face repeated setbacks. So, what advice would you give somebody who's on the verge of giving up on their dreams right now?

SPEAKER_00 28:43

You know, that's that's a choice. That that's something that you have to decide. And I'll I'll tell you this from my perspective. I wanted to be a police officer for a number of years. My my grandfather, my paternal grandfather, my dad's dad, was a Chicago police officer from 1924 to 1954. And in 1933, he was shot in the line of duty. My dad was one year old at the time. And my dad always remembered the stories my grandmother told of that knock on the door of Mrs. Tucker, grab your son, come with us, your husband's been shot. My grandfather was shot in the ankle. It was not a serious injury. He recovered fully from it. But when I expressed an interest in going into law enforcement, my dad was absolutely not. You're going to college, you're going to major in business, you're going to get out, get a great job, get married, have 2.4 kids, and live happily ever after. But that's that's the life my father wanted me to live. That's not the life that I felt I was born to live. So I had a choice when I graduated from college. As I mentioned, my dad was dying of cancer. I could have said, hey, dad, I know you're dying. Sorry. I'm going to go blaze my own trail. I'm going to do my own thing. Or out of love and respect for you, I will do what you want me to do. So understanding that backstory, my resume makes a little bit more sense now. My first two jobs were in the private sector, in business, because that's what my dad wanted me to do. But the thing I'm most proud of, Curtis, is the fact that I never let my dream die. I became a police officer at 37 years of age, which is pretty old to be getting into that line of work. I can tell you I took a whole lot more Tylenol on the police academy than my younger counterparts. But it was something that I am incredibly proud of that I never let my dream die. So you've got a choice. I could have let my dream die. I could have said, you know what, I'm making decent money as a hospital administrator. I'll just stay here and do that. But it wasn't what I felt I was supposed to do with my life. So I guess I would say to anybody, to answer your question, anybody who's thinking of giving up on their dream, I would ask you to take a minute and is that really your dream? Is that really what you're supposed to do in life? And if you come to the conclusion that it is, I would tell you not to let that dream die. Maybe it's not going to happen today. Maybe it's not going to happen in a year. Maybe it's not going to happen for another decade. But don't give up on your dream. And I think that's an incredibly important thing to understand. Not only don't give up on it, but think about how you can make it happen. It doesn't have to be from I go from one to a hundred. Maybe you start at one and you go to five, and then you go to ten, and you work your way toward that dream. But if something inside you is burning to do it, you're probably supposed to do it. Don't give up on it. It's worth hanging in there until it finally happens for you.

SPEAKER_01 31:57

Well segue in from that. What is the biggest lie that people tell themselves that keeps them from living what you call an uncommon and extraordinary life?

SPEAKER_00 32:07

I I think it has to do with how we assign value to ourselves. And you know, people people want money, they want power, they want status, they want influence. And they think when they get those things that they will be somebody. And there's there's an old saying from Mother Teresa that said, God never asked us to be successful, he asked us to be faithful. So I would I would tell people, you have to be, you have to be able to go to bed at night and look yourself in the mirror. And there's a there's a story, I believe it's a fable. I don't believe it ever happened, but it's really a good story that I think kind of illustrates the answer to the question that you just asked. And it's about Alexander the Great, probably the the greatest conqueror of all times. And the story goes that as Alexander the Great lay dying, he calls his counselors, his advisors to him, and he says, I want you to carry out my final three wishes. And he said, My first wish is I only want my doctors to carry my coffin to the grave. My second wish is that I want the road to the cemetery paved with gold and silver and precious stones. And my third wish is that my hands be left hanging out of my coffin. One of his advisors steps forward and says, you know, you're Alexander the Great. You're the most powerful man at the world in the world at this time. You can have anything you want. Why would you ask for these three things? They seem beneath you. And he said, Well, number one, I want my doctors to carry my coffin to the grave because I want people to understand that no doctor heals anything. They just help your body to heal itself. So be cognizant of how you treat yourself, what you eat, if or you exercise or don't exercise, if you're abusing drugs or alcohol or tobacco or things like that. You have a responsibility to treat the body the same way that you want your doctors to treat it to heal you. So understand you have that responsibility in your life. Number two, I want the road to the cemetery paved with gold and silver and precious stones. He said, I've spent my entire life conquering, accumulating wealth, accumulating power, accumulating influence, and yet none of this treasure is going with me behind beyond the grave. And then he said the third part of I want my hands hanging out of my coffin because I want people to understand that I came into this world empty-handed and I leave it the same way, and I will occupy the same small plot of earth next to the pauper, the poor person who's buried next to me. And so I think all these people who think, you know, when I get all this stuff, I'm gonna be happy, I'm gonna be fulfilled, I'm gonna be successful. And Curtis, I don't know about you, but I've seen so many of those people that are miserable. They they they're all there's always another thing to chase. So again, going back to it's not what you get, it's what you give. It's taking your unique gifts and talents and using them for the betterment of the world, for the betterment of yourself, certainly, but for the betterment of your family, your community, your friends, and things like that. We all have unique gifts and talents. The uh Victor Frankel, who wrote Man's Search for Meaning, he was a psychiatrist and he was a Holocaust survivor. He was an Auschwitz and he survived that during World War II. He talks about how people should not live their life in the abstract, that every one of us has a purpose, a mission, a duty to do what we were put on this life to do, that we almost have a moral responsibility to find our purpose in life and live it. And Curtis, I just don't think people even look for that purpose in life. They look for what society says would make them successful. And those two things are not necessarily the same.

SPEAKER_01 36:39

Tell us about any upcoming projects that you're working on that listeners need to be aware of.

SPEAKER_00 36:44

Sure. So I've written these two books, and I've I've kind of changed direction now. I'm working on a screen play. I've I've mentioned my grandfather who was shot in the line of duty. There, there's a whole um really interesting story. It starts with a bank robbery where a teller gets shot and killed. The person who shot my grandfather was part of that bank robbery. Um, he is uh he is caught, he is uh questioned, he shoots my grandfather, he doesn't get away uh because of this was in the detective bureau where he got shot. So there were cops all over the place. The individual doesn't get away, but during his trial, his sister slips him a gun and he makes a break for it during the trial and ends up shooting and killing a rookie police officer in the back of the courtroom, uh, and is eventually caught for that, tried, convicted of killing the police officer, the attempted murder of my grandfather, and then the the murder of the teller at the bank, and ends up being executed uh in the electric chair in the Cook County jail only six months after he was convicted. And so the story is is pretty interesting in the and the characters in it. So I'm I'm in the process of trying to write a screenplay that maybe would get made into a movie. Maybe not. I, you know, I didn't know how to write a book and I figured that out. And I don't know how to write a screenplay, I'm trying to figure that out. So that's that's the big project I'm working on right now.

SPEAKER_01 38:23

Well, throw out your contact info so people can keep up with everything that you're up to.

SPEAKER_00 38:28

Sure. The the easiest way to get in touch with me is through my website, which is motivational check. So motivationalcheck.com will get you to me.

SPEAKER_01 38:40

All right. Close us out with some final thoughts, maybe if that was something I forgot to talk about that you would like to touch on. Any final thoughts you have for the listeners.

SPEAKER_00 38:48

Sure, I'll I'll leave you with with this story. Um, I think a lot of times we think our lives don't matter. That, you know, I'm just one of billions of people running around on this planet and and things don't matter. There was uh a nurse. I was in a four and a half year clinical trial uh drug test for a therapy for my my tumors and my lungs. And there was a young nurse who I'd met at the time. She was about 25 years old, already a nurse, but learning how to do things on the unit where I was cared for. And about six months later, she was taking care of me by herself. And she came in and she said, Terry, I've got a story I want to tell you, but I'm not sure how to tell it to you. And Curtis, I didn't know how to respond to that. It's like, what, you know, what do you say when somebody says that to you? So so I just said, Well, I hope you decide you want to tell it to me because I think I would enjoy hearing it. And so for the next couple hours, she's in and out taking care of me, checking my IVs and stuff like that. And then finally comes in, sits down, she said, All right, here's the story. She said, When I first met you, I was going to get out of nursing. I'd had a good friend of mine die. I was in a really dark place. I had spoken with my family. I was gonna get out of nursing and go to work for Amazon. And she said, and then I met you. And I see how you come every single day. And I would come for an entire week, every three weeks, and the medication had a really bad uh reaction in my body. I shook very violently, I threw up, a lot of other things. She said, but regardless of all that, you come, you come back every day, you you keep coming back, you keep coming back. And she said, and then I went when I was caring for you and into the file, and I read everything you've been through, your drug trials, your amputations, and things like that. And she said, when I finished reading your story, I knew I was where I was supposed to be. Now, Curtis, if she'd never told me that story, I would have had no idea that just the way I was living my life had had such a profound impact on this young woman. So anybody who's listening to us who thinks you don't matter, I can promise you there are people out there that are watching how you handle your adversity in life and would give almost everything they have just to walk five minutes in your shoes. So never think your life matters. Never think your story isn't important to tell. I think all of our stories are very important and things we need to share with the world.

SPEAKER_01 41:24

Absolutely, ladies and gentlemen, and to pick up Terry's books and keep up with everything that he's up to, visit motivationalcheck.com to keep up with everything that he's up to. And we know that a screenplay is gonna come out, and when it does, it's gonna be a great one. So please follow Ray Review, share this episode to as many people as possible. Also, to keep up with all things living the dream, visit www.curveball337.com and share the website and the show to everybody you know. Thank you for listening and supporting the show. And Terry, thank you for all that you do. Thank you for sharing your story, and thank you for joining me.

SPEAKER_00 42:05

Well, thank you for having me on, Curtis. I really enjoyed it.

SPEAKER_01 42:08

For more information on the Living the Dream with Curveball Podcast, visit www.curveball337.com. Until next time, keep living the dream.