Life's Curveballs: He Outlived His Cancer Diagnosis

In this episode of In Shock, Teresa Baglietto sits down with Glenn Sturm for a powerful conversation about living with incurable cancer, resilience, integrated cancer care, self-advocacy, mental strength, family, purpose, and what really matters most in life.

Glenn has lived an extraordinary life as an attorney, entrepreneur, CEO, founder, author, and photographer. After being told in 2009 that he likely had only a few years to live, he chose not to let cancer define him. More than 6,000 days later, he shares the mindset, medical advocacy, and life philosophy that have helped him keep going.

This episode explores long-term cancer survivorship, building the right medical team, managing cancer fatigue, staying mentally sharp, navigating drug interactions, and why Glenn believes children spell love T-I-M-E. It’s a conversation full of wisdom, perspective, and practical life lessons for anyone facing adversity or rethinking how they spend their time.

To learn more about Glenn and his work, visit his website and store.

 https://glennsturm.com/, where you can find his books, including: 

• The Great American Eclipse of 2017
• Warriors Hate War
• Syzygies: Capturing the Hiding Sun
• Cancer Set Me Free. 

If this episode speaks to you, share it with someone who may need to hear it, and follow InShock for more conversations about resilience, healing, and moving forward after life’s hardest moments.

Thank you for tuning in! I truly appreciate every one of you, whether you’re here for the first time or have been with me from the start.

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:38

Hi everyone and welcome to the show. I just want to start off by thanking all of you because all of you keep tuning in by subscribing, liking, following across social media, YouTube, and of course here on the audio podcast. Thank you so much for all your support. It means so much to me. And I've got a lot of great guests who want to be on the show and share their stories with all of you because this podcast was created for all of you. It's about sharing stories of individuals who have overcome those shocking moments, unexpected moments in their lives that so many of us out there have gone through. And it just validates that we all go through hard stuff. And there's people out there who are incredibly resilient, who know how to push through, who don't let anything stop them. And that's why it's here. It's to be supportive, inspirational, and help you think differently about the way that you're moving forward in your life. So let's get into it. Every once in a while, you meet somebody who makes you stop and think for a moment. You know, those people, they're not loud, they're not trying to impress you, they don't have big egos, but they carry something deeper and they're bringing wisdom and perspective. My guest today, Glenn, is one of those people. And it's not just because of what he's accomplished and that he has survived an incurable cancer, but it's that he's developed a philosophy along the way. He says, unless you stop yourself, there's no stopping you. Think about a time where you may have set a goal for yourself and you didn't achieve it because it either got too hard, you got scared, and you just quit. That's stopping yourself. So I love what he says, and I'll say it one more time. Unless you stop yourself, there's no stopping you. So if you're trying to achieve something, get out of your own way and go achieve it. This conversation is not just about illness, it is about something that Glenn believes deeply in that I've never heard anybody talk about. He says, love isn't measured by success or achievement. It's measured by time. I love what Glenn says because it's about quality time and especially time with your children, if your grandparents, time with your grandchildren. If it's neither of those, it could be all-encompassing about time creating memories that will last long after that moment has passed. There is a lot of wisdom in this conversation, and what you're about to hear might just change the way that you think about your own life, about the way that you're spending your time and what really matters. So I want to introduce you to Glenn Sturm. You've worn a lot of hats over the years. You've been an attorney, an entrepreneur, a CEO, founder, board of directors, author, photographer. We've almost covered the gamut in terms of what you've done over your lifetime. And through all of these roles and reinventions, what core principles have guided you the most?

SPEAKER_01 4:31

Somebody in my family said that I had the attention span of an adolescent fruit fly. And there may be some truth to that, but I think the core principle is that our family has a motto that storms never quit. And that goes throughout the whole gamut. I was at the top of my game when I was diagnosed with cancer on January 21st, 2009. And during that first year, not much changed because I was taking oral chemo. But on the following January, they had to put me on IV chemo, which I'm still on. And when that happened, everybody was worried. The insurance companies were all worried about me because I was multi-billion dollar transactions as a lawyer, and they were worried about me making a mistake or missing something. So I went from being the corporate chairman and running a big law firm to being put on long-term disability. So it took a little bit to adjust. There were some other things in my life that happened during that time frame. But as a result of those things, one of my docs said that I needed to see a psychiatrist, which is one of the best things that ever happened. And I I haven't learned how beneficial that was until recently. But the core principle again is don't quit. So what was I gonna do? I didn't quit the job, the job quit me. Yeah, I was 54 years old. What do you do? It's kind of ridiculous. So my photography was here. I had this wonderful home in Jackson, Wyoming. And so I started taking pictures. And after about 18 months, the local hospital here asked me to do an exhibition, and we raised a bunch of money for the hospital. So can't photography started doing well, and then there was the 2017 eclipse. And so I said, I'm gonna start doing it. I'm gonna do an eclipse thing on this picture. So we did eclipse photography, which I'm still doing, and the next eclipse is August 12th of this year in Spain. It's a sunset eclipse, which is one of the most beautiful things that you could ever see.

SPEAKER_00 6:34

I bet.

SPEAKER_01 6:36

And so that worked well. I had been doing a Careing Bridge blog forever. And we converted that into the first book, and now there'll be a second one sometime soon. And that written two other non nonfiction books. I think the best thing they would describe me is out of the attention span of an adolescent fruit fly, because I get a lot of things done, but it's hard for me to focus on any one thing long term. But you don't quit. And what happened with cancer was it taught me the lesson that it can surprise you at any time. So you have to be prepared, you have to have a group that's supportive. You don't quit, but you have a team and you create a team to keep you going and to be with you.

SPEAKER_00 7:19

Yeah, that's a great way to put it. You'd mentioned that you saw a psychiatrist during that time. What was that like for you?

SPEAKER_01 7:29

My regular doc knew that what had happened to the law firm. I had also lost my dog, and my wife had served me with worse papers.

SPEAKER_00 7:40

That's a lot at once.

SPEAKER_01 7:41

Yeah, he said you need to see somebody. I ended up with an extraordinary professional, and she had treated a lot of women in with breast cancer, and so she knew what was coming before I did. And it was just a spectacular relationship. I still see her today. But one of the things that happens is to everybody is cancer fatigue syndrome, and the NIH has said cancer fatigue syndrome during survivorship is associated with higher mortality rates. My doc knew that, and I would fall asleep in the middle of the afternoon all the time. And so I put on a prescription for a medicine that I'm still on that has eliminated those issues, but it's giving me the ability to work and be productive. Most institutions that I'm aware of, the advice they give to people who are having that problem is get a little bit more exercise and get more rest. That doesn't do anything. NIH has said it doesn't do anything. So it's just, as they've said, it's a very serious issue, and it can increase higher mortality rates if it's not addressed. And my psychiatrist was so good at it, she knew how to address it and took care of that problem for me that has gone away since then and still gone.

SPEAKER_00 9:03

You'd mentioned you're having treatment still. It's been more than 6,000 days.

SPEAKER_01 9:09

More than 6,200 days of oral chemo and more than 620 days of IV. And next Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday, I'm at the hospital for more ID B treatment.

SPEAKER_00 9:21

And tell us a little bit about why the treatment's been so long.

SPEAKER_01 9:25

Well, first off, I guess if it's incurable. And my daughter, who talked to my oncologist, my middle daughter, when this first happened, was told I probably had two and a half years to survive. And we've contained it, but every time we've tried to reduce it, it just comes flying right back in a big way. Hopefully, someday they'll find a cure that'll work for me. Now, there are very aggressive treatments that might give me a better result, but might not. But the mortality rate on those is maybe five or ten times the mortality rate that I've got now. I'm very functional with the treatments that I have to have. So why take the risk with something with a higher mortality rate?

SPEAKER_00 10:10

We also talked about the number of pills that you take. That's what's really keeping your energy where it's at and your mind in a good place.

SPEAKER_01 10:19

Absolutely. I'm in the gym every morning promptly at 7 a.m. And that's being lazy to do it at 7 to 8:30. But I do 30 minutes of cardio, 30 minutes of lightweights, 30 minutes of Pilates, and some other things. The medicines that I take permit me to do that, but I I take about 39 pills a day. It used to be 31, but it's now 39. This is my wonderful little pill box that I use. It's purple so I don't lose it. And I take pills when I get up in the morning and then I take pills at lunch, then dinner, and then before I go to bed. And I take my daily chemo at night. As for some people, it knocks them out. One of the wonderful, wonderful things I've been blessed with is when I lay down and go to sleep, I am generally out within 30 seconds.

SPEAKER_00 11:08

That's amazing.

SPEAKER_01 11:10

The flip side of that is if I go to bed too early or fall asleep too early, I can wake up at three or four o'clock in the morning.

SPEAKER_00 11:17

And that's when you start your day.

SPEAKER_01 11:19

Yeah, I try normally start at about five. So I get two hours in before I go to the gym. But the gym's critical too. Uh because uh getting the cardio activity is amazing. I live at 6,900 feet, I think. It's harder to breathe for everybody up here. So if you work on cardio and if you've been doing it for a long time, you acclimate. And so I'm very acclimated to the environment. And the meds just take care of me. I really don't have any side effects. I've had a lot of surgeries, and some are non-cancer-related surgeries. One of the interesting things is I've never gotten COVID, and I think that's probably attributable to a medicine I take that has a high level of zinc in it, but it's an eye medicine. And I flew back and forth to New Haven, Connecticut, or actually Hartford, and drove to New Haven on commercial airlines during the entire COVID period, and I never caught anything. So I'm very blessed. That high level of zinc probably has a lot to do with it.

SPEAKER_00 12:24

You're not somebody who should have ever gotten COVID. It probably wouldn't have been good with everything else, but that's incredible. And I'm sure that exercise makes a big difference.

SPEAKER_01 12:35

The interesting thing is when I started, I had my oncologist, a uh gastroenterologist surgeon who was spectacular. And then I had Stacy Hund, who is a physical therapist, but she's also an exercise physiologist. And my insurance company paid for me to have four to five days of physical therapy with her an hour at a time, private. And she taught me so much, she got me into Pilates, and I love Pilates because it gives you the flexibility and helps you work on balance. Yeah. And the older you get, the more balance is important. It's helped everything helped my golf game, and it's just been a good time. Now, last year was kind of rough because I had a tumor on my spine, it had all three that had to be removed. And so I'm just not back into the into being able to swing a golf club. So I've got a lot of work to do because I had a plus two handicap before this happened.

SPEAKER_00 13:33

And now you got to make up for it.

SPEAKER_01 13:35

Yeah, I do.

SPEAKER_00 13:36

Was the tumor on your spine cancerous? I'll find out next week.

SPEAKER_01 13:41

I've had tumors on my spine and on my in my lungs since this started, and they have not grown. That's the one that popped up on L3, which was on the root nerve, was pretty nasty because I could sit down and write a book for 13 hours a day and it didn't bother me. But the minute I stood up and put pressure on it, it did. My surgeon was very happy with me because I lost a bunch of weight, 25 pounds or so, and got me down to under 150 pounds, which is the weight I had when I was active in the military. And that takes all the pressure off of it. So when he did the surgery, um, there I reduced the pressure vertically. People don't realize that if you lose, let's say 20 pounds, your knee problems probably most cases will go away. And you know, if you do the workouts, you know, you may be able to avoid certain types of orthopedic surgeries by just doing that.

SPEAKER_00 14:35

You've got five books, and it sounds like maybe a six one underway.

SPEAKER_01 14:40

There's number six and number seven. The novel is finished, and uh, it's a multi-generational, multi-family saga, the six-book series. So this is book one, and I'm writing book two now. And then I've got the book called In Hope, the compelling promise of integrated cancer care, and the results that are just knocking a dead, and it's about the benefits of integrated cancer care and how it's changed the survival statistics. For instance, my survival instead of two and a half years now, it's 30. It's just incredible. The book will probably be released around the 1st of April. There was a study done that looked at 56,000 plus patients who worked with integrated processes, and the mortality rates dropped dramatically. In that initial report, which is a couple years old now, it showed anywhere between 9% and 90% reduction in mortality. Wow. Most of them today are above 40% reductions in mortality. Even some of the worst cancers, they're really huge. In breast cancer, which is probably the lowest increase, there's been a 14% reduction in the risk of death. And the debt-free survival rate has gone from 42% to right at 60%. If you looked at a drug company, if they could produce those kinds of results with a pill rather than a bunch of doctors and other professionals working together, that drug would be probably worth tens, maybe hundreds of billions of dollars in market cap for the company. Yeah, absolutely. So the value of multi-care integrated, multi-discipline integrated cancer care teams is staggering. What I didn't know is I put together my own team. There are a lot of people who work in silo-based or patients in silo-based oncology practices. And the studies have shown that there is zero increase in the reduction of mortality if you're in a silo-based practice where they're not multidisciplinary people. And some of the big hospitals are still using silos. Some people, some people even have silo-based practices.

SPEAKER_00 17:07

Can you talk about the difference between the team that you put together and what a silo-based practice is?

SPEAKER_01 17:15

Just to give you an example, there are about 25 disciplines that you need. I used five. And so you're going to have your medical oncologist. And I believe you have to have a psychiatrist, and that's important because of narcolepsy and fatigue syndrome issues, where they're the best people to assess it and prescribe the two medicines that are needed. I had a surgical oncologist because I had to have some pretty nasty abdominal surgeries. You need a pathologist for sure, a radiologist, a hematologist. Then the most important member of the team, I think, is the navigator or the guide, because they will be able to assess what's going wrong. If you have low energy levels, they can figure out that you need to see a psychiatrist. The oncologist isn't probably going to write the prescriptions for that area because some of them, in some states, they're not permitted to, because you need to be a psychiatrist to write the scripts. So you'll have a nurse oncologist and you need probably a nurse practitioner or a physician's assistant. But you also need the PA. But then you get outside that group, you need a physical therapist, no doubt. In Jackson, where I live, I've got Dr. Abby, that's her first name. See her one day a week. And then you might need a speech pathologist. You probably need a dietitian. It turns out that I need that now because with chemo, my protein levels are way too low. So we're having to figure out what I can eat to do that. Then the other ones you may need an oncology social worker, just a general psychologist, a genetic counselor. And one of the things about genetics is when you first diagnose, one of the tests that they should run immediately is a full genetics panel. And that will help them diagnose the right kinds of medicines you should take. When I got diagnosed, they weren't doing that at all. And I still haven't had a full genetics panel done. I was at the airport getting ready to go give a speech to the University of North Carolina, and my phone rang, and they did biopsies on me in December, and now it's January 21st. And the person on the other end of the phone was a dermatologist who said, Glenn, we got the results back for your biopsies. And I said, Okay, whatever. She said, No, you've got to come in tomorrow. You've got cancer. I said, What?

SPEAKER_00 19:42

I had no idea it was not expecting that at all. So that threw you for a loop, I'm sure. Oh yeah.

SPEAKER_01 19:48

And I I described that in my book, uh, Cancer Set Me Free. But that first day or two, it was the roller coaster.

SPEAKER_00 19:55

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 19:56

But then I decided something that I wasn't gonna let cancer define me. I was gonna spend my life making sure I put a smile on somebody's face every day. And that's just a wonderful thing to do because it puts a smile on your face.

SPEAKER_00 20:11

Yes.

SPEAKER_01 20:12

And I've taught my kids the value of a tip that somebody doesn't expect. And if you give somebody a tip that they don't expect, it always puts a smile on their face, no matter how big it is, because it means you care about them and you appreciate what they did for you. There's another thing that I preach to my friends and family. We must all give up hope for a better yesterday. We can dramatically impact the future by what we do, but we can't fix what we did yesterday or what happened to us yesterday. Those are the kinds of things that I learned to do. But not letting cancer define me, number one. And number two, knowing that I wasn't gonna quit. And I had a lot of things to do to try to make the world better, meant that I had to figure out what the best way to manage the disease was to have energy so I could do things.

SPEAKER_00 21:05

Absolutely. It is true. You want to have that energy so you can continue to do the things that you love to do.

SPEAKER_01 21:13

All my art, especially body photography, 100% of the revenue for that goes to children's health issues. And I was talking to some folks about the issues and things, and I said, What studies are you doing for long-term cancer survivors? And the answer was basically we don't study that. Now they want it gone, but wouldn't they like to be if you can't get rid of it, wouldn't they like to be alive and then have the energy and the mental acuity to handle everything? It's not a big study area. Now it's also for the insurance company should be paying for those studies because I'm their nightmare. Right.

SPEAKER_00 23:11

And you're sucking them dry. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 23:13

Oh boy, it's well over a million bucks a year. Yeah. Why aren't you studying it to figure out what you can do to maintain my quality of life, but reduce the cost? Where are the studies for that? So maybe I don't take 39 pills anymore. Maybe I get away with 10.

unknown 23:33

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 23:33

It's nuts, but normally study long term stuff.

SPEAKER_00 23:36

It's just it's mind blowing. It's left up to us to do that and to try and figure out is there something new, different, better that I could be doing? That I'm not doing today.

SPEAKER_01 23:51

I always grab the experts, multiple experts and multiple disciplines to do it. And we were very successful doing things like that. So when I got diagnosed with cancer, I ended up just intuitively doing the same thing. And what's coming out now is that team approach is what's critical in solving the issue, in solving the quality of life issue.

SPEAKER_00 24:11

I think so too.

SPEAKER_01 24:13

One of the things that happened to be part of my 55 surgeries is the five detached retinas in my left eye and the one in my right, torn retina in my right. And knock them on wood. I haven't had that happen in the past five years, but for five years I was dealing with a detached retina at least once a year. And there's some vitamins you can take that will materially offset some of the keto side effects. The NIH put out a requirement that I found that all doctors report any eye-related matters for anybody who is on systemic chemo. I was on it and I put together the report.

SPEAKER_00 25:01

Was it the chemo that caused the issues with the eye?

SPEAKER_01 25:05

There's a correlation, clearly. But I'm not sure there was causation. That's causation in the scientific sense. Now, do I think it caused it? Yeah, I do.

SPEAKER_00 25:16

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 25:16

No doubt. But because when we cut back on some of the one of the chemo agents and changed another one, it stopped happening. Okay, to give you an example, I had liver failure at one point. And I was on the liver transplant list, and they couldn't figure out what had caused it. Why was happening was I had perfect liver function, and all of a sudden my AST and ALT or liver enzymes had were doubling regularly. And so I sat down and over a two-year period, I looked at everything in my life that had changed. Quality of life issues, whether I had a pet or not. I mean, everything, and then that to the medicine, and then I put a delay factor in it to look at what happened on a 30-day delay, 60 day, and 90-day delay. When I did that, there was a correlation coefficient of 0.96 with the medicine they had added. And so I go back to the docs at Yale and said, Look at this. And they said, Well, there's call clear correlation, but that drug was tested so much it's crazy. And I said there can't be causation. And I said, If I quit taking the drug and my liver gets better, would we all say that there's causation then? And they all kind of looked at each other and they said, Well, then we don't know. And I said, Well, I'm not taking it again. Six weeks later, the blood test showed my liver enzymes were back to normal. I don't know many people who can do correlation coefficient analysis. There are not many, especially at our age. But you can make common sense. And if you see something on a timeline, and then you look that after that happened, after you went on that something happened, you need to aggressively look at it. Again, you've got to create your own team and you're part of it, and you're responsible for things. They were ready to do a liver transplant with probably within six or eight weeks on me.

SPEAKER_00 27:05

Oh my gosh.

SPEAKER_01 27:06

It was pretty bad shape.

SPEAKER_00 27:08

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 27:09

It turned out that it was a pain med that caused it. And we did a lot of research on it, and there's now a black box warning label on that medicine and the correlation with my chemoagent. I feel good about that because something positive came out of what happened to me. And we were hopefully we're preventing it from happening to anybody else.

SPEAKER_00 27:30

Yeah. So everybody reacts differently to a drug. I was on tamoxifen and it wreaked havoc on me in ways that was going to put me six feet under. And I knew in my heart and soul it was the drug causing all the problems that I was having, the strokes, the brain aneurysms, which led to a craniotomy. And it was finally a neurosurgeon who is a specialist in strokes that said, You got to get off this thing. If you have one more, it could be the big one that takes you down. And I have friends who are on tamoxifen and they've had no issues whatsoever. I remember screaming to these doctors saying, I think I'm having an allergic reaction to this drug. I don't want to be on anymore. No, it's not the drug, it's all the surgeries that you had. You haven't recovered yet. It always seemed like they were grasping for something else. I tell people when you start any kind of medication or drug, if something changes in the following weeks, it's likely to be the drug or medication that you're on, right?

SPEAKER_01 28:46

Absolutely. But I had a similar issue last year because of the pain issues I was having, because of the tumor where it was in the root nerve. And you'll be reading a lot about this thing, but the pain was just extraordinary. And they tried to put me oxycodin, and oxygen doesn't do anything for me. I figured out that the best thing was something called pampyrin, which is generally used by women, and that helped a lot. But then I got in a situation around close to Memorial Day where the pain was extraordinary. And I was in with Dr. Abbey, and she stopped working with me that day and said, You've got to go to the emergency room right now. This pain's insane. They gave me a like a Z pack with the 54321 protozone. On that was Monday, and that evening, I didn't eat anything for a week. My daughters couldn't get me on the phone. And a friend of my daughter finally had a friend of mine come see me and take me to the emergency room. They couldn't figure out what happened. They were the ones who prescribed the protasone, they didn't understand it. And so I was in bad shape. I was actually called keto acid doses, which is really scary. It's close to that. And so they flew me to another hospital. They couldn't figure it out. I got a lot better. The big problem was I hadn't had anything to eat or drink that week, no water at all. I don't drink alcohol. And once I got food in me and water in me, I was better. But what caused it me to go into that comatose state? It was a multi-factor drug interaction problem. A very good neurologist saw me. The doctors here who caused the problem thought I had amnesia and anesthesia, and may have been having uh onset of Alzheimer's. And so the neurologist that I saw gave me all the tests, and I was doing the math quicker than he was. And I'm not surprised. I said, There's no amnesia, nophasia, zero evidence of any form of dementia. So this, your dad's not, your father-in-law's never gonna have one of those issues. He said, We have his test from 30 years ago from the military. I don't know if he's as fast as he was then with all these things, but he's faster than I am. And so he said it was caused by predazone's interaction. Then he told me, and I have not researched this to confirm it, but he said predosome for people over 60 has to be very carefully prescribed because it could have the impact that it had on me.

SPEAKER_00 31:28

I took prednisone. I was sitting in my car, the car was stopped, and everything felt like it was moving. I started having cognitive issues. We went to the emergency room, and I'll never forget the nurse and the doctor looked at me and said, What are you taking for your pneumonia? And I thought, My pneumonia, what are you talking about? I said, I've been on prednisone four times a day. You could see on their faces, somebody effed up. And it's that drug that caused all the problems. And I was borderline turning 60. So that's an interesting study.

SPEAKER_01 32:05

The other thing is the funny part about it is I don't drink. I mean, I haven't drank for 30 years. And my daughter was there and knew it, and they my blood alcohol level was 2.5 on the prednisone. Yeah, not 0.25. Two unbelievable. The reason was I was in ketoacidosis. I was in the hospital like 18 hours later, did a blood test, and I was at two, still at 2.5. If you're drink, if you're drunk, you drink a lot of alcohol. After 18 hours, if you haven't had a drink, it's gonna mostly be gone. And the folks at IHMC looked at it and said, You're in ketoacidosis, and ketoacidosis creates alcohol in your bloodstream. So that is no kidding. Those two things are first-year medical school issues that should have been caught, uh should have been okay immediately because once that's caught, you can fix it. But the people who prescribe the pretosome were the ones who couldn't figure out what's wrong and diagnosed with these crazy things. You've got major drug interaction issues when you're taking as many prescriptions as I am, and you've got hyper concerned. So I had liver failure with one situation, and I was in ketoacidosis on another situation because doctors prescribed stuff and then didn't follow up, didn't do anything. And then I went to the back to the emergency room. The people who wrote the prescriptions couldn't figure out what had caused it for me.

SPEAKER_00 33:38

Because there was too many drugs to look at.

SPEAKER_01 33:40

Yeah, but there's also, and this is what is highly irritating. My oncologist, uh, my psychiatrist, my other medical doctor, I think so much of Dr. Vic Reddy, I've got their cell phone numbers. And then my road ID band that I wear, it has my complete medical history, and it starts by saying, if I am not cognizant of to talk about something, if I'm not doing well, call Dr. Francine Foss on her cell. And here's her cell phone number. I wear that on hand, and it's right there. So if I'm not cognizant, you need to call that doctor. She's available 24 hours a day, seven days a week. I believe she's the former head of NIH hematology and hematology oncology. But she's a world-renowned physician in my field for cancer. The way so people say, How did you get to her? Otis Brawley, who's the former chief medical officer and chief scientist for American Cancer, and I knew each other, and I called him up and I got diagnosed, and he sent me to Dr. Foss, said she was the best doctor in the world for it. And I have her cell phone number, I've always had her cell phone number. Dr. Reddy, who is the head of gastroenterology and did the first robotic surgeries in gastro years ago, I have his cell phone number. Most of my doctors have their cell phone number, and I do I ever use it? No. Send them a text and say, Can you call me? But call them it's an emergency, then they know it is. But the great doctors want to have contact with you if there's a problem. They're research people and they're also caring people. Every year at Christmas time, I frame pictures for all the people who work in Infusion 7, from the janitors to the doctors, whether they're my doctors or not, I frame a picture and sign it for them. And it's called the Cancer Collection. And one every year, probably the best day that I have in that year is when somebody shows me a picture of like 10 of my pictures hanging over their sofa. Oh, that's really it's a way of giving back to these wonderful human beings who care about you.

SPEAKER_00 35:48

And yeah, absolutely.

SPEAKER_01 35:51

My caregivers are two golden retrievers.

SPEAKER_00 35:53

I've seen one of them walking around in the background.

SPEAKER_01 35:56

Yeah, the other one's asleep on the sofa behind me. But uh I fed them about an hour before this so they would be calm and relaxed. A good friend of mine's wife got diagnosed with early on, said Alzheimer's. He quit his job, he'd done well enough to save the money, and personally took care of his wife for five years until she passed. And I kept on saying his name was Randy. I said, Randy, you need help doing this. If you don't take care of yourself, you can't take care of her. That's right. And he said, Glenn, I've got this, don't worry. And it aged him a lot.

SPEAKER_00 36:30

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 36:30

But he's such a wonderful human being that he knew he was doing good. Did that make sense? He knew that he was doing good by what he was doing. He knew that he was making somebody else's life better.

SPEAKER_00 36:44

Sacrificing his a little bit in a way.

SPEAKER_01 36:46

Yeah, it's like in a good relationship, both people do more than 50%, and Randy was doing 90% because he had to bathe her at the end. And he did enough working out that he could pick up his wife and bathe her. But amazing. That's the most extreme I've ever seen.

SPEAKER_00 37:03

In closing, I'd love to know what advice would you give somebody.

SPEAKER_01 37:08

Here's the thing only you can stop you. Okay. Once you know that and believe that, it opens all the doors. Because if your organization is holding you back, in today's world you can change. I say to I was offered three times my compensation for probably eight years in a row by another institution because I could build organizations. They offered me three times what I was making. Well, that was in the many millions of dollars. I didn't take it because I had built this organization and I was loyal to the people. But that's a rare thing.

SPEAKER_00 37:46

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 37:47

Just let's say you're responsible for your own health care. If you need to build a team for your cancer, you build it. You have to know that you can do anything. So let me give you an example of that personally. I went to four high schools. And so my senior year, I went to my fourth, but dad had retired from the army. They asked if I wanted to finish at one high school in Ohio or move to where they were going to live permanently in Florida. I said, let's move to Florida, whatever. I was so used to moving, it didn't matter. But I got to the new high school, they had a test in the time called the Florida Senior Placement Test. And a teacher told my parents in the second week of school, I'd already taken the test. We hadn't didn't have the results. That I shouldn't go to college, I should go to trade school. She'd made that judgment after two weeks. Two weeks after that, all the teachers are huddling up and whispering and talking. And when they see me, they turn away. It was just I knew something was going on. It turned out that I was the first person in the history of the school to get a perfect score of that test. Okay. So the new kids' parents were told that I should go to a trade school, I should go to college, and yet I get the perfect score on the test. And I could go to any university I wanted to after that. And a year at the end of the next year, after the first semester in college, I was number one at the university for all freshmen in my rank. And I ran into that teacher over Christmas break when I was on a date going to a movie with her and her husband. And I probably was not the most politic at the time. But I asked her if she had ever had a 4.0. And I said, Oh yeah, you went to a teacher school. So you probably did. But you didn't get into the University of Florida, which was the academic school of Florida then and now. And I said, I'm ranked number one out of all of the freshmen after the first semester. I did pretty well.

SPEAKER_00 39:38

Yes, I should say so.

SPEAKER_01 39:40

I said, now let me ask you a question. Do you think you have the judgment skills to tell parents what their kids can do and can't do? I said, I know the answer to that, but do you know the answer yet? I said, you shouldn't be doing that. Don't try to limit people. If I had paid attention to her, my life would have been completely different. If my parents had paid attention to her, it would have been different. But believe it or not, you can do anything you put your mind to. There is creativity in every person in the world.

SPEAKER_00 40:14

Yeah. You just gotta leave that.

SPEAKER_01 40:16

You gotta unlock the door. So take that skills that you have and maximize your life. But the way you really maximize your life is my uncle one day asked my mom whether I was rich or wealthy. And my mom just looked at him and said, He's wealthy, and that has nothing to do with money. You don't let other people stop you.

SPEAKER_00 40:40

It's just looks. Did you ever get frustrated when you're building a business and say this isn't going the way I want it?

SPEAKER_01 40:48

I was the CEO of a company, and one of the directors was doing something that was inappropriate. It was a company I founded. And I'm a securities lawyer and I know what the rules are. Right. So I resigned. Okay. I was still a senior partner in my law firm full-time and working full-time as a CEO of a company. And my son was about six months old. In retrospect, I should probably should have confronted the director and made him resign, but I don't think he would have. And that would have been just a nasty mess. And I did a at the time it was not a noisy resignation. Today it probably would have been. Because there's no way he could adequately perform as a CEO of a public company. We were growing revenue every quarter by 100%. It's just really an insane number.

SPEAKER_00 41:46

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 41:47

Not sustainable. But and then you got a law firm that is growing into one of the best law firms in the East Coast. And I had a new son. And the one other lesson I will tell people today is I wish I'd had created this phrase, but how do children spell love? It's not quality, it's called time. People say quality time. I do quality time with my kid. No, you're missing immense amounts of time with your child.

SPEAKER_00 42:17

Right. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 42:19

So my best days today are with my grandson Sam. They're absolutely the best days. And last year I had the privilege of teaching him how to play golf. And I'm going to say this and nobody will believe it. But after a week, I took him out. We played from 150 yards in on our club. He shot 36 on nine holes.

SPEAKER_00 42:42

He's got an incredible coach. He's got the skills and talent to go with it, right?

SPEAKER_01 42:48

He's athletic. And but the point is, I uh there's a way to teach golf that's a lot simpler than most pros teach. It's so simple, it's ridiculous. And so I teach people with my teach them with a driver first. And I use paint on the ground to get where your left foot's supposed to be and where you're supposed to put the T. And once you do that, he was hit the ball 150 yards at five. And it was so much fun to watch him do it. And he had no clue how spectacular his performance was. Driving range were watching it and couldn't believe it.

SPEAKER_00 43:23

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 43:23

And somebody accompanied me, and he drove every hole in one. He got it on every hole in one stroke.

SPEAKER_00 43:32

Unbelievable.

SPEAKER_01 43:33

Yeah, and so he got a 36. He wasn't great at putting yet. But but his first work card says he's got even par. So he's a six-year-old. This is not true. He couldn't have a handicap that if you had to have more than one round or more than nine holes. But his handicap base on that, if you all those rounds were that good, would be a scratch coffer at five. But the point was we just had fun. The thing about Sam has rules for my son-in-law and my daughter. They cannot come, neither of them can come to visit me by themselves without ringing. Sam said, I have to be with you on every trip to see grandpa.

SPEAKER_00 44:12

Oh, so it's true what they say that life is better with grandkids.

SPEAKER_01 44:17

Absolutely. One's head of marketing for a big company, and the other's starting a new business. And they just are having a real problem getting the time for it. So I said, okay, we're gonna get my dogs and I are getting in my truck. I'm running uh an Airbnb for a month, and Sam's gonna move in with me for that month, and I'll get him, I'll get him to kindergarten. But we're gonna play golf and throw footballs and go to top golf and do all sorts of things. I hope the listeners understand that. One of the reasons you take the medicines that give you energy is if you have children or grandchildren, it'll give you the ability to get up and do what they do. And then you take the medicines that address chemo brain, and you may have to change a couple to get it right. But once it's right, you're gonna have the cognitive function you had when you were in the 20s. So if you have the energy and the cognitive function that you need, and I've got that, right? Then it's amazing what you can do. But start off with building memories for your family, do things with them. And if you got grandchildren or children, again, they still love T I M E, and it's not quality time, it's the volume of time. If you're sitting on a sofa watching a football game or a game show or something you want to watch on TV. Um, that's not really quality time, but it is. Because every minute it's quality time, but you need huge blocks of quality time. So when you're communicating with doctors, how important do you think it is for them to know that you want to live and you want to live in a high quality life? That you can't accept any less than that.

SPEAKER_00 46:08

Yeah, you have to share that with them. They can't just uh expect everybody has that same desire.

SPEAKER_01 46:17

You're right. If you do that, what do you think of the quality of care you get versus being a person who doesn't do that? My my supposition is that you're gonna get a lot better quality of care if the doctor knows you're in it for the long term and you're gonna do everything right.

SPEAKER_00 46:35

Glenn, thank you so much for sharing your story and all of your wisdom with us. There were so many powerful takeaways in this conversation, but the one that really stayed with me is something that you said toward the end that children don't spell love quality, they spell it time, T-I-M-E. And I think that's such an important reminder for all of us. Life moves so fast, and we can get caught up chasing success, building careers, and trying to accomplish the next big thing. I know I do for my own self. But when you take a step back and listen to Glenn's journey, you realize that what truly matters isn't just what we achieve, it's the time we spend with the people that we love. His story is a powerful example of resilience, of refusing to let circumstances define you, of building the right team around you, advocating for your own health, and continuing to live fully even in the face of uncertainty. If you'd like to learn more about Glenn and his work, I'll include links in my show notes along with information about his books, including The Great American Eclipse, Warriors Who Hate War, Sis G's Capturing the Hiding Sun, and Cancer Set Me Free. If you found value in today's conversation, share this episode with someone who might need to hear it. And if you haven't already, please follow the podcast so you don't miss the next conversation. I've got more guests coming up with inspirational stories that you aren't going to want to miss. Until next time.