Healing a Warrior

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Dan Nevin’s life forever changed when he lost both his legs during combat in Iraq. Dan was forced to look inward, finding a path to healing and redefining his life’s purpose through mindfulness, meditation, and helping other wounded warriors. This episode offers a heavy dose of heart and perspective.

Taped LIVE at Wanderlust Wellspring in Palm Springs, CA.

FULL TRANSCRIPT

Jeff: Dan is an American hero. You're an Iraqi War vet, a professional speaker, meditation and yoga teacher, spokesperson for the Wounded Warrior project. First I just want to thank you for your service.

Dan: Thanks, Jeff. I wouldn't trade a single day.

Jeff: I want to ask you about that.

Dan: Yeah, exactly.

Jeff: Tell us a little bit about your story. I know you grew up in Baltimore.

Dan: I did. I enlisted because I didn't have a great home life and where I'm from most people that I grew up with are products of broken homes. But for me, it was my mom that left when I was a teenager at 13 years old. My dad did the best he could to raise my brother and I, but it wasn't so great. What I saw in the military during the first Gulf War as it was unfolding and I was about to be a senior in high school, what I saw when I was watching these farewell ceremonies with the military being deployed, it wasn't the family stuff that pulled at my heartstrings, because I was a jaded kid.

Something that got me was when I watched the people in uniform leave their families and then come together and embrace each other, and there were more of the awkward smiles and tears, and I saw that, I was like, "Well, that's a family that I could be part of." So I enlisted to fight in that war, but if you remember your history, it started in February and it was over in March in my senior year of high school, but I still stayed in. I did eight years active duty. Loved it. In Germany for four years, Fort Bragg North Carolina for four years.

So, after eight years of active duty, I got out and simultaneously reenlisted into the National Guard. I went back to school, first person in my family to graduate from college. I was a stockbroker for a while in pharmaceutical sales. We all remember 9/11 and watching that unfold. I never imagined that I'd be deployed to fight the war that everyone was saying was going to happen. Because I was in the one weekend a month, the National Guard. Three years later, I was deployed and they took our National Guard unit who I would say probably wasn't the most qualified or fit to fight group on the planet at the time and became the tip of the spear fighting the war in Operation Iraqi Freedom Two.

We learned a lot of hard lessons. We lost really good people. That's something that I go back to all the time, is, we talk about goals all the time. There's really not a lot of consequence for not meeting your goals if they're personal goals, other than shame, defeat, like those feelings that we all carry around. In these situations, the consequence of not meeting your goal is that your best friends die. We learned some really tough lessons. And then I got to see these people, these human beings, who weren't necessarily the most fit to fight group in the world, become the most elite, efficient group of people that I've ever had the privilege of serving with.

Then everything for me changed. It was during the Battle of Fallujah started November 7th. It was three days later, we got some intelligence that some of the insurgency was leaving Fallujah to come to where we were in a place called Balad, Iraq. We were headed out for a 72-hour dismounted counterinsurgent operation that we had kind of planned and studied. I was going to be the non-commissions officer in charge of this action, this mission. My boss, this guy named Sergeant First Class Mike Hadalini, who you guys don't know, but hardest-working human being I've ever met. He was fighting with a protruding hernia in his abdomen for months. We finally caught onto it, and he had to have surgery so he wasn't being on this mission, but he had actually opted to drive that mission, which he wasn't probably supposed to do, but that's just the type of person he was.

I remember, we were leaving for this operation and left the main gates of LSA Anaconda at exactly 0400 hours, right on time, military precision. Took a right on a well-traveled paved road and almost immediately left on a not so well-traveled dirt road and it's pitch black outside, the low [inaudible] cloud cover, so you couldn't see the moon or stars, and it's eerily just silent. The only thing I really remember in those moments leading up, was, my head was bowed in prayer like it was before every mission. The only thing I remember hearing was the familiar 6.2 liter Cummins diesel engine in my Humvee as we moved carefully down this pitiful road and silence, and then boom!

The silence was destroyed by the deafening blast that sent my 18 thousand pound vehicle about six feet in the air in a ball of fire. I remember being in the prayer when the explosion happened. I could feel and hear the truck basically disintegrate around my body. I really didn't know what was happening. I was disoriented and I might have been knocked out for a couple seconds. When I opened my eyes, I realized that I was ejected from the vehicle, and my legs remained caught in the twisted and burning metal that used to be floorboard and undercarriage of the truck.

As the chaos started to unfold and I started to realize what was happening, I still couldn't see well but there was some lingering fire from the blast, so I could start to see as the dust cloud descended, I made out that Mike, who was driving, had made the ultimate sacrifice and seeing the condition that he was in, was very bad. Immediately obvious that he was gone.

I knew that I was hurt pretty bad and I started to check myself out. Helmet came apart in two pieces in my hand and it wasn't a great start, but I was conscious and that's a good thing, and I moved onto my arms and my torso, and I reached up for my legs. That's when I felt the unmistakable arterial blood spurt with every beat of my heart. So I realized that my femoral artery was severed. My leg was still attached, but I was bleeding out and just sort of gave up for a while. Then ultimately, as I was letting go, I had these sort of ... they say before you're about to die, your life flashes before your eyes, but that wasn't really my experience. What I saw was more like letting go of things that hadn't happened yet.

I had this vision of my 10-year-old daughter being all grown up, and there were a lot of things that sort of happened before. This is like in an instance, but it seems like it's taking forever. And I just saw my daughter grown up and dressed in white walking down the aisle without her dad. And I just remember, I shot up and I was like, "I'm alive. I have to do something about it." So I reached my hand into the wound in my thigh like I thought I was going to pinch the artery off like MacGyver and like, "No, I'm good." Walk it off. "It's fine." And it's really not how it went down.

I just pressed and prayed that it would give enough time for the medic to arrive and it's like I blinked my eyes and there was Dan Smee, my medic, and I had a tourniquet on my leg. I blinked again, there was an IV in my arm. And I blinked again and my whole team, like my new family, was there, putting themselves in harm's way to remove my legs from that vehicle that was still on fire.

Jeff: And how long did that take, before the medics arrived?

Dan: Probably at that point, maybe four or five minutes. So if I hadn't been ... If I was knocked out, I wouldn't be here. I'd be gone. I would have bled out for sure.

Jeff: Right. So you had the consciousness to essentially stem your own blood flow.

Dan: It wasn't graceful.

Jeff: To give you enough time.

Dan: Absolutely. And it was just ... I was very fortunate, 'cause Mike was killed, everyone else in the truck was either knocked out, like my gunner, Poindexter, was knocked out onto the roof somewhere. The 50 cal. Was ripped off the top of the truck and thrown in the canal. My boss, Lieutenant Daxy was on my right side and he was knocked out. There was all ... Everyone was either killed or knocked out. But somehow I stayed conscious. And I'm so grateful for that, because without that consciousness, I'd probably be gone too.

Jeff: You tell that with grace.

Dan: Thank you.

Jeff: So now, take us a little bit through what's going on in your mind during that period of recovery, and what that recovery was like.

Dan: Yeah. Right when me and my team came, they got my legs out of the truck. I was in the helicopter within a couple minutes from there. I had a less than a minute helicopter ride back to the main gates of LSA Anaconda where we had just left. That's where the Combat Surgical Hospital was, which is like a tent, a really nice tent complex where they did surgery, and they did it all there.

I remember going in off the helicopter. They put happy juice in my IV. I was out. And I woke up in the recovery section of the tent. There was a combat nurse's face right in mine. She was trying to keep me from looking down, was what, tactically, what she was doing. I'll never know her name, but I'll never forget her face or what she said. She's like, "Sgt. Nevins, you're a very lucky man. We managed to repair your femoral artery. We had to take your left leg below the knee. We managed to save your right one for now, but you'll probably lose that one too," which she was ultimately right.

In those moments like that, the pity party started to set in. It's like, "Wow, I lost a leg. What can a guy with no legs do?" In my mind, it was nothing. I hadn't ever considered it, I hadn't prepared for it, and the only thing I could think of in those moments was like, well, I was an athlete.

I was a competitive runner. Running is what brought my wife and I together. That's how we met. That's what we did together. How would she love me anymore? Then my daughter, again, like, "Maybe I'll get to see her walk down the aisle, but I'm not going to be able to throw her over my shoulders and run around the beach and play hard like that," do with our kids, and she looked up to me, and would she still look up to me and respect me in that way?

I knew for sure I wasn't going to be able to lead my team, and then my thoughts went to, "Well, I got to abandon my guy ..." I was the leader, and so now I abandoned my team, and so leave them to go fight. When all this pity party ... we're talking like less than a minute, and all these emotions are coming and flooding. Then I just took a breath, and I looked against the wall of the tent and there was my whole team just waiting for me to wake up. They came over, and I had shrugged off the pity party. I remember we just told horribly inappropriate jokes. It's just what we did. I can share this one, they actually said, "I guess I have to return the rollerskates I got for Christmas," which I didn't. There is just really good pain medicine, you know?

Then we just talked, and we told stories, and we laughed, and we talked about Mike, and shed some tears. I fell asleep, and I woke up the next morning at Landstuhl Regional Medical Center in Germany where I'd spend the next seven days with surgery every day, and it was busy time. I wasn't in the battle of Falluja, which if they write about the war in Iraq, if they write about any battles, it will be the 2004 battle of Falluja. I wasn't in Falluja, but the battle of Falluja was in the hospital. Every ward was full. The hallways were full with combat wounded, most of the Marines. Most of them 18, 19 years old, and most of them a lot worse off than I was.

So, I had the perspective of seeing this ... like, seeing what was going on with me, but no time to connect or talk to anyone because they were busy saving lives. The only thing I could think of in those moments was what that nurse says, "I lost one leg and probably the other," and I just got kind of spun down for those seven days of self-pity, self-loathing, of shame, of like, "What is life going to be like now?" Yeah, it was hard because I was completely alone, and any time that I was awake, I'd usually find myself sitting in a pool of my own blood waiting for a dressing change.

That sounds like a criticism on the hospital staff, and it really wasn't. They were busy. I had what looked like piano wire holding my legs together, and of course it's going to ooze and things. It's just the nature of what was happening, but there was nothing pleasant about it. I was in pain, or then if I was lucky enough to get someone to come by and give me pain medicine before the pain got bad, we didn't have any words for each other. So, everything was left to my own thoughts and my own kind of conjuring of what life was going to be like, and none of it was positive. It was just, "My wife's going to leave me, and my daughter's not going to be able to adapt to a dad that's different or changed."

Then, I was deployed from the National Guard, so I had a career to go back to. I was a pharmaceutical sales rep at the time, so I was in and out of my car and up and down the hospital steps. I'm like, "What I be able to do that anymore, and so how was I going up provide for my family?" Because I had taken a pretty drastic pay cut to go back into the military to be deployed, so I would just like, "Wow. Now, because of this I'm setting my family up for a crisis." Every thought was sort of down that rabbit hole of, "It's not going to get any better."

Jeff: When did you find the tools and the practices to get out of that headspace, and how did that happen?

Dan: Well, I was very fortunate that the organization Wounded Warrior Project met me at my hospital bedside with a backpack that we'd all take for granted what's inside: shorts and a T-shirt, calling cards -- I'm dating myself, calling cards to call home long distance -- playing cards, notes from grateful Americans, the toothbrush and ... I hadn't seen my wife in almost over a year, and I hadn't brushed my teeth or washed my face in seven days to that point, so it was really helpful to have that. There were socks in there that I really didn't need, but it was a nice gesture. It was really everything ... like, I can put shorts and T-shirt on to feel more like a human being again versus this paper-thin hospital gown, like all exposed.

It was probably the most significant gift that I've ever received, and that gave me a little breath of reprieve that like, "Maybe, just maybe, I was going to be okay." I could sing their praises all day long. They were at my hospital bedside helping me prove that my disability didn't define me, that I got to define with the rest of my life is going to be like. They're the ones that kind of knocked me off my pity party and said, "Look, you can still do all these things. Maybe a little differently. You might have to adapt, but you can make it happen," and they had other people, other warriors, just like me with similar injuries doing things, and so I had people to look up to and things to aspire to.

So, that kind of got me on the right track. Like, I'm a yoga teacher now, but yoga was not even in my vocabulary at that point, and what I realize now looking back is that I was practicing yoga in a lot of different ways back then. I did a lot of self inquiry, like I would write in journals and books like, "Okay, if this isn't what my life is going to be like, what will it be like? How can I create my life newly considering that physically I've changed?"

That's when I first got introduced, and so I have to give credit to Wounded Warrior Project for putting me in the headspace, like that act of kindness, that gift, just got me to just pause for a moment to take one clearing breath, and say like, "Okay, if I continue to think like this then that's what I'm going to create for my life, so I don't want that." I knew that. I didn't want to be like that, so I just said, "How can I do it differently?" It took that, and many years of that, and then learning to adapt physically, and then proving that I could still do the things.

Most of that though was geared toward my physical limitations, and then I learned coping skills to deal with like the invisible wounds, the wounds that back then I wouldn't talk about, or I didn't want to because I just wanted to, I don't want to say push it under the rug, but I just didn't want to go back and relive it, so I just learned that I could cope with it by doing physical things. Like, I got to be a single digit handicap in golf, and I climbed Kilimanjaro, and I did all these things as conquests to sort of shove that down, and it worked.

Jeff: Was there a time where, okay, you got fitted with prosthetics and you're like, "Whoa, wait a minute. I can do this"?

Dan: Yeah. Absolutely. Well, it was ... my saving my right leg was the thing that held me back, but it was like they gave me the option to save it. I had to try. When I looked at my legs, my left leg was a prosthetic in my right leg started out with pins and rods holding it together, and all these 30-some different surgeries to try to make it work. It was viable, but it was intensely painful. I was on enough pain medicine to kill an elephant. It just wasn't ideal. When I looked at my legs, I said, "Well, my left one, my prosthetic, is the good leg, and now my right one is real and it's mine, and I can kind of feel the ground, but it's my bad leg."

Then, so, another infection later in three years had gone by, and it took my right one off. Then the whole world opened up because then I could perform at higher levels, and I could run again, and I could ... even right now, I forget that I don't have my feet and my prosthetics. As long as I remember when I'm getting out of bed because that could be tragic. Yeah, it's like I had these moments of, "I got this. I'm good," but it was the invisible wounds when they would service that I had ... that's what I had to do something about: ride a bike, climb a mountain, play golf, get outside. That was my yoga before yoga.

Jeff: So, you got back on your feet, and you climbed Mount Kilimanjaro, you started doing these things, what was that inflection point to you discovering meditation, discovering yoga, and then becoming a teacher?

Dan: It was something I would of never expected. I had my last surgery, knock on wood, last surgery five years ago, and it was just to fix some skin stuff on what was left of my right leg. So, as a result of that surgery, I couldn't wear my leg for eight weeks, and I had to be home alone because it was like ... my first surgeries I was at Walter Reed Army Medical Center surrounded by warriors and families and all these people, and support groups, and systems. This I had a job, and I was an executive for a nonprofit, and I was working for Wounded Warrior Project at the time.

I had this big job and scope, but I had to take the Family Medical Leave Act to go get surgery, and I came back home alone to heal, and I couldn't email my team. I couldn't lead my team. I couldn't ride a bike. I couldn't climb a mountain. All these things I couldn't do, and then the invisible wounds started to like actually have effect on me. Like right now, I'm not diagnosed with PTSD, but if I would have went to a doctor I would have gotten the diagnosis, but that was just avoiding it because I didn't suffer.

I didn't suffer because when it started to lead toward suffering I had something to do. I could climb a mountain. I could ride a bike. I could play golf. I could get outside. I could do those things, but now not being able to wear one leg, I couldn't even be a parent. I had my 10-year-old when I got hurt was now 18 and in the Army, and my three-year-old at the time who's now eight, I couldn't take care of her. She had to stay with her mom because we were divorced, so I couldn't chase around a three-year-old up-and-down the steps with two crutches and a prosthetic leg, hopping around.

So, I was alone, and then I couldn't sleep. The thoughts and recurrences of a lot of horrific things from combat, everything you'd probably imagine, invading my sleep and I couldn't sleep. Then I'd wake up, and then I, "Boy, I need to go back to sleep," so I'd take a handful of Benadryl. You didn't have sleeping pills around, but I'd take a Benadryl and a couple shots of booze, and not wanting to wake up in the morning. It's not like I was suicidal, but I didn't want to be there anymore. I didn't want to wake up.

I called a friend, and I was telling her what was going on, and she happened to be a yoga teacher, which I didn't hold against her because she knew not to talk about yoga to me because this wasn't for me because I was a man. She had said, "Dan, you need some ..." I told her everything, she's like, "Dan, you need some yoga in your life," and I was a, "No." She read that just perfectly, so she said, "What about meditation?" Then I said, "Well, that's okay. That's more palatable, and Gandhi seems cool."

I read books about it, but just couldn't do it, so she taught me how meditation was about being present, not being vacant. Then I really started to get it, and I created a meditation practice over those remaining weeks, and things started to improve. I could sleep a little better. I wasn't chasing pills and booze. Yeah, I just kind of pulled myself up by my bootstraps, as we say, and just started moving forward. Then I made this mistake of calling her to say thank you, and I did that-

Jeff: Now she was ready to talk about yoga, right?

Dan: Right, exactly, and she's like, "Oh, this weird, Eastern hippie stuff actually work for you?" I was like, "Yeah, yeah, yeah." No, I feel like I'm wrong. I'll admit I'm wrong, and I admitted all day long. She said, "Well, I think you owe me some yoga," and I couldn't get out of it, so I agreed to three private lessons because I didn't want to be with weird yogis, right? Like, I say, "I'll do one on one," and I remember I went into some all or nothing guy, I went into Lululemon, and I was like ... I refinanced my house and bought a pair of shorts and a shirt. Then I bought a yoga mat, and I was like, "Okay, I'm going to do this," and it was miserable though.

I went in, I had just got my prosthetic leg back and I was being able to walk on it, I was bleeding inside of it some still. I didn't talk about that, but it was painful. I'm trying to get into these poses, and it's painful, and I'm like, "Why is it so hot in here?" Just like the whole situation was just not good from my ego, from shame, from not being good at it, and she's saying stupid things like, "Root down to rise up." I'm like, "What does that even mean?" Then she, "Press your feet against the ground." I'm like, "Say feet one more time. Say it one more time, and watch what happens."

I'm just going through this whole experience miserable, and when it was over I was like, "Thank god it's over." Then I remember she called me later that night to schedule the second class, and right before I told her exactly where to put that second lesson, I remember that I committed to three, and the commitment is a commitment, period. So, I showed up to the second class, and it was the same thing, and it was the same pain, and it was the same humiliation and embarrassment, and not being able to get it, and still some pain in my legs.

I got so frustrated, I said, "Can I just try this was my legs off?" She looked at me. I remember her eyes got so wide. Her eyes were saying, "No, because what am I going to tell you to do with your feet?" or like, "How am I going to get you into these poses?" But her mouth said yes, and I remember I threw my legs off. She's behind me, and I'm sure she's thinking, "How am I going to tell this guy what to do next?" She's probably just digesting it, and I just decided I was going to do Warrior One. I'm just going to try it because I'm a warrior, so I'm going to do like a warrior pose.

I remember at that moment saying, "Okay. Look, I'm doing this, so I'm going to really do it." So, what was the stupid thing she was saying? She said, "Root down to rise up." "What does it mean? Okay, let me visualize," just like you were saying. "Let me visualize roots growing from like what was left of my legs," and I just did that. So, I'm going to rise up, so, "I'm going to reach my arms up over my head like [inaudible] one. I'm going to reach up," and when I did that, the Earth like ... I can see this, I still shoot guns and I eat meat. I'm very careful where my meat comes from, and I'm trying, but I'm just a dude. I'm just a dude, and at that point I was just a dude-dude, and I didn't have any of the language or anything, right?

And I just remember this real, not metaphorical, this real jolt, like surge of energy just came up from the earth into my body and my hands flew up over my head. I felt like eight feet tall. And I was just like, "Holy shit," having this break through moment of my whole life on a yoga mat. I'm like this is crazy. It's was like the earth was saying, "Dan, where have you been for the last 10 years?"

And something changed and I got just excited. I'm like, something is in this practice. And then I just committed to it. And by the end of my third lesson I was enrolled in teacher training.

And now looking back at that moment, it was about connection. So I used to say my marriage was a casualty of the war, and really my marriage was a casualty of connection because I was so busy not dealing with all the demons that I had to deal with and get them out and reexamine them. Pull them back out and into the open, and then let go. I was disconnected from the earth. The most fundamental basic connection from my body down to the planet. And then since if we're all connected to the earth, then I'm disconnected from everyone else. Especially my wife and my kids. And I did a decent job, but I wasn't really connected anywhere. And I started to notice that more. And then I started to work on putting connection back into my life where it was missing. And then everything just got better.

It's like I had to look inside, like go deep inside to notice how everything outside was broken, and then what my responsibility and what my role was to try to fix it or improve it.

Jeff: Now can you talk maybe a little bit about what you're doing with yoga and meditation and vets?

Dan: Absolutely. I started my own little non-profit called Warrior Spirit Retreat where we use yoga, mindfulness and meditation really in a way to clear up some points and some of the misconceptions of things. Because I was teaching to a lot of Wounded Warrior Project events and I would get people like, "Wow, thanks for teaching, because I had to be here, but I'm never going to go to yoga again." So I learned how to translate the yoga philosophy and the eight limbs into things that they're going to do again like play golf, or just be outside in nature or horsemanship. Things that we're like these are things they'll do again and not have to deal with whatever else is in their way.

And in teaching, what's really important though too is, for me, I don't know if it's selfish or selfless, it's I look at this generation of warriors and the previous generations of warriors who didn't have the tools and really no one there to guide them. And I look at the data now. So the Wounded Warrior Project annual survey is like the largest, most comprehensive set of data for this generation of warrior, and some of their family information too.

And what you get from this data set, and reading the results from 2017-18's coming soon, but you see that 79% are living with PTSD. Over 50% are either obese or morbidly obese. 75% feel that if something happened to them that no one would come to their aid. That over 70% are living with depression. I think it's 76%, their physical limitation keeps them from doing ... No, it was actually 82%, their physical limitations keep them from earning the wages that they would think they could earn. 85% feel that because of their emotional wounds they're not performing at the level that they could.

And I look at this group of people that I care about and what they're missing are tools. And so, I'm just committed to sharing tools with them anyway that I can. Whether it's through my own non-profit, through my work with Wounded Warrior Project, or even coming to events like Wellspring where I'm probably not going to teach tomorrow and Sunday to a group of veterans. They're probably not showing up. They might. And I hope so. I invited them.

But my message for when I teach, I get to teach all over the globe, is to say invite a veteran to yoga because you just might save their life. Because that's really what I feel happened for me. One yoga teacher took a chance and I said no a 100 times before I said yes. And then that commitment, my 'yes,' being a 'yes' for myself in that moment when I didn't have anywhere else to turn changed my whole life. And if I could help introduce people in this community that I care about, and then they can turn around and become leaders in the space as well, or even more present in their own families and start to heal the relationships like I healed mine. That's the first step into so much more creation of positivity and influence in the world. That these people have some of the best training in the planet.

People come from the military from all over the world. And they come with their own learned ideas about cultures, races, religion, everything. But the military does a remarkable job at stripping most of that away because when the bullets start flying you don't see color anymore. You don't see gender anymore. You just see you're with me, I'm going to try to save your life, you try to save mine. And it's so great. And we need more of that in the world, where people who don't see skin color, they don't see religious differences as immediate as a lot of people do. And these people have so much to contribute and they're leaving it dusty on the shelf. And that's not okay.

So I just want to be a part of reinvigorating the warrior mentality and the warrior spirit inside of these warriors so then they can move onto the next mission. Because they are so service oriented. Now that they feel that they can't be that, whether they retired or whether they just got of the Army or whether illness or injury took them out, is they feel like a lot of times the best of their life, the best person they've ever been is over, and there's nothing left for me.

And I keep saying, no, the best thing you've ever done hasn't happened yet. And if you don't get off the couch and get out of the bed and get out of your house and start moving your body and taking better care of yourself, you're going to be right. Whether you think you can or you can't, you're right. And if you think the best person you've ever been is done, then you're right. But I actually disagree with you.

Jeff: After this whole journey, you're back on top, right? After that whole journey. Looking back on your life, is there anything that you'd change about it?

Dan: My knee-jerk is I wouldn't change a thing. And I say that because when I look back at what happened and everything I had to go through, I learned the important things in life. I learned about being the best possible human being I can be. I learned about the things that are important. I learned about connection and bringing it into my conscious brain of I'm missing it here. Where am I missing the mark elsewhere? And being able to look and then create my life as I want to.

And had this not happened to me, I'm not so sure that would be my life right now. And I'm not willing to trade or give it another shot. Now I've made dumb moves along the way. Decisions maybe I wouldn't have done it that way. But I think those are negligible compared to the risk that if I changed anything I wouldn't wind up in this spot, I wouldn't change.

Jeff: Thank you for sharing your story and God bless you for the work that you're doing.

Dan: Thank you.