Darcie Wells: Welcome to Hope in the Face of Cancer, where we share real stories of courageous people in their cancer journey.

Today's guest brings a thoughtful perspective to conversations that often go unspoken, especially when it comes to men's health and cancer in young people.

Greg King is a testicular cancer survivor who was diagnosed in his 30s.

He's also an entrepreneur and advocate who channels his journey through diagnosis, treatment and recovery into meaningful support for others facing similar challenges.

Since completing treatment, he has become a vocal advocate for early detection and the emotional toll cancer can take.

He's been an active participant with the testicular cancer foundation offering support to newly diagnosed men.

His advocacy extends well beyond his diagnosis, and he's currently exploring innovative ways to support children with cancer by helping young patients embody strength and resilience during treatment.

Greg, thank you so much for joining the show today.

All right, thanks for having me Awesome.

Well, I'd love for our audience to get to know you a little bit before we dive into your cancer journey.

So sure.

How would your friends describe?

Greg?

Greg King: Oh, unpredictable.

That's the knee jerk reaction I you know, I'd say probably, like, optimistic, sincere, fun loving.

That's a you know, whether that's a good thing or a bad thing.

It seems to hold true to my personality over time.

Darcie Wells: Yes, you're definitely an adventurous one.

I know you love adventure and spontaneity and experiences.

Even booking you on this show was troublesome because you travel so much so you have a very active, active life, and I know that that got abruptly stalled during a period of your life as well when you were diagnosed with cancer.

So tell us a little bit about you know what kind of prompted you to learn about your cancer diagnosis, just, you know, what was going on in your life, and just kind of, how did all of that come to be,

Greg King: yeah, depending on, you know, the day that you asked me, in the mood that I'm in, I think the story kind of is shaped by that, As I recall the, you know, the history, but you know, more or less the 2020, pandemic brought on, you know, tons of stress for for everybody, um, and everyone's individual walks of life.

For me, individually, I was going through probably my hardest moment.

I had a relationship that profoundly failed the that I was considering marriage.

I had a business failure, a fallout with a mentor and a very close friend, and my professional pursuits in the oil business I had moved out of the town I was living in in the Permian Basin of Midland, Texas, and then the pandemic hit, and I thought, This couldn't get any worse.

And then, you know, as time moved on, I ended up getting robbed in the middle of the night, and had a very disruptive, invasive environment in my home, and I chose to leave America.

Kind of hang everything up on a shelf.

I put everything for sale.

I turned my entire life, my Airbnbs, everything into cash, and decided to take a break from life.

And I moved to Croatia and jumped on a sailboat.

Was living on a boat for about six months, and decided to come back to the States briefly after the after the weather had turned south and it was getting quite cold and choppy out there and the Adriatic.

And had met a girl in Miami and was explaining to her how I thought that the stress of COVID and everything my life had been going through was bringing on a sense of fatigue that I just could not kick, and I was sleeping 10 to 12 hours a day, like I would go to bed at 930 and I would wake up at 11 in the morning, and my my beard had suddenly started turning gray, and as I complained about it To my father, who's a retired orthopedist and hospital Chief of Staff in my hometown.

He was jokingly saying, like Greg, you know you're going to have to get over your vanity and realize you're just getting into your late 30s, and this is what happens to all men.

I just insisted that that wasn't the case, and in a dialog with that that person, she had joked, well, you know, what does your doctor have to say about things?

And in the moment of joking, I had responded that, you know, I don't go see a doctor.

I'm perfectly healthy.

And she had some fun.

Rank words to me that were, you know, one of these brief moments of maturation.

I think, you know, we go through these swift moments of growth in our lives, whether you're facing the death of a parent or something, something deep happens personally.

And that was one of those moments for me.

And she, she said, if you're old enough to date a woman like me, then you're old enough to be responsible for yourself and take care of yourself.

And I I put it off with a joke, which is my behavior response, and I woke up to the middle of the night in a cold sweat, couldn't get her words out of my head.

Mm, decided that next day I would get that was a Sunday morning, about four in the morning, and I decided I get blood work done on Monday, I chose to fly home to Texas, where my dad could get me into some, you know, quick response appointments and got blood work done, and I found out about eight hours later that I had testicular cancer.

So it went from me flying home to get a blood work we had about a week before Christmas, where the family was getting together, and I said, You know what?

Let's just start there.

Let's see a urologist.

Let's see a general practitioner.

Let's go to your primary care physician.

Let's just do the whole work of 37 I've never had any, you know, anything done in my life.

And by one in the afternoon, one in the afternoon, I was getting called into the urologist office I wasn't supposed to meet with the next day, and and he asked me, Are you experiencing any pain?

And I said, No.

And he said, I gotta sit you down.

This is an open and close book case of testicular cancer.

And I said, No.

I said, I'm not experiencing any pain.

And he said, Yes, that is the dead giveaway.

Cancer is most often painless.

You may have experienced some lower back pain, but outside of that, this is just a clinic like clinical by the book case, and I'm going to diagnose you stage three of three until we know more.

And I'd like to get you under the knife at 630 tonight.

And if I can talk or 930 in the morning, and if I can talk my wife into moving around dinner, maybe 630 tonight.

And it was, it was a gut punch.

Of all gut punches.

Darcie Wells: What were you thinking at that moment?

I mean, how did you react when he shares this with you?

And it's shocking news,

Greg King: complete and utter disbelief.

Yeah, you know, it's, it is shock.

And funny thing, you know, I'm like, in my hometown, so I'm staying at my parents home, and, like, my dad called me to like crap that I forgot to close the garage because I was late to get the blood work.

And I was like, Stop, you know, like Doctor Johnson, who grew up with our family, like, you know, he went to junior high school with my sister, so I knew him as Brian, you know, and, and Doctor Johnson is telling me, like, you have cancer and, and he went immediately into just the matter of fact, where, like, I'm wondering what's going on, and he immediately turns a conversation to talk clinically with another doctor, yeah, and he's he's giving his prognosis, and it's just by the book, this is what we're gonna do.

I freaked out.

I walked out of the appointment.

I called my brother in law, who had just left his annual appointment with his urologist, and he said, Well, hey, let's get a second opinion.

So that guy called me at five in the afternoon and said, Put off the surgery for at least 24 hours.

You need to breathe.

You need to consider sperm banking, if nobody has mentioned that, because, more often than not, men with testicular cancer hyper react to the decision to get the cancer out of the body, they don't address reproductive health issues that will come down the road.

Yeah, you should address that first and and so I inch this state of shock, went into a fight or flight mode, I guess, and and started making life decisions I had never, ever considered before, and was having to jump the gun on figuring out, you know, where do, where do you sperm bank?

What is involved in that?

How do you do that?

All the while addressing the very scared feeling that I may die of cancer, and then having to figure out, how am I going to tell my family I'm missing Christmas because I have an emergency surgery coming out, it was just it was layers upon layers of just emotion hitting me from all all angles and wild, how life comes at you fast.

Darcie Wells: So did you decide?

Did you delay the surgery and or did you did?

Greg King: Yeah, I delayed it as far as I could.

Coincidentally, my i.

Health insurance as an entrepreneur, in our current environment, it's very hard to get health insurance as an individual unless you own more than a business with more than two employees.

So I was on a rotational catastrophic plan through United Health.

My deductible was $10,000 the plan was expiring on the 23rd so that was my drop dead date to have the surgery.

Coincidentally, my urologist was taking his family Christmas break and going skiing, so he was going to be out of state starting on the 23rd and when you deal with sperm banking, there are rules around how to optimize for that deposit.

So I had this precious window to try to get one to two deposits in before I had, I was forced by all hands in the deck to have the surgery.

And so we just made decisions.

And it was like the 18th I was going to do my first donation.

The 20th I was going to figure out how to tell my siblings I had cancer.

The 22nd I was going to have a second sperm banking, and then the 23rd I'd have this emergency surgery, and everybody would, you know, break camp and move on.

Darcie Wells: Yeah, my goodness, it sounds like you were in such a flurry.

You had so much to do, you know, all these decisions and things to act before you could even get to the surgery.

At what point did this all like sink in for you?

I mean, February, months later.

Yeah,

Greg King: well, I was fortuitous that I had a doctor that for a father, and, you know, he kicked into high gear about just taking over the practical application, like the decision making apparatus, so that we could think through, you know, do we do option A?

Do we do option B?

And then, if, then, then what?

You know, and even though I grew up in a that sort of a family I had, I didn't have an appreciation for how the medical field thinks through things, and it's based on 1000s and 1000s and 1000s of examples they get put into clinical trials and added into national protocols, and then it becomes like this NCAA bracket.

That's my analogy, because I'm just a dopey dude of how decisions are made in January.

I think the depression of the circumstance really set in.

You know when you so the first order of operations in testicular cancer, regardless of kind, is a radical archaeectomy.

I had a unilateral radical.

Me most that that can be bilateral.

And when a man's identity, his manhood, his status among other men in a competitive landscape, in the workforce, in the dating pool, you know, am I going to be attractive to the female sex?

Am I going to look like used goods?

Are they?

Are women going to want me?

Is a man in the workplace going to respect me?

All of that stuff really sits heavy on the mind and and that saying can after my orchiectomy, and I was more or less bedridden for about 30 to 45 days, and also recovering from the damage of the surgery, because the cancer had spread up through my spermatic or epididymis into my abdomen, so the doctors had to do some origami on my stomach.

That was a big setback, and that's when you know the reality of life.

Circumstances started to hit in February.

I was still living, I mean, I just left all my things in in Austin, where I live, and was staying at my parents home, and also to be closer to my own now.

Now your care gets moved to an oncologist from the urologist, so I had to be close to that doctor anyway.

And one point my my dad said, You got to get out of this house like you don't live here.

You need to put it all together, figure it out and and my knee jerk response is escapism.

So I I'm an avid skier.

I grew up in the Ski World.

My I lived in Colorado for seven years, and so I just, you know, it's just good Chase snow storms, be by myself and ski and try to, you know, I think, work through this.

And so that's, that's when the reality really hit.

Was when I was traveling out of the back of my car, working on enough energy.

Be to like during the waking hours as the scar was healing, to like Chase snow, and that's what I did.

Darcie Wells: So your your instinct was to kind of go out on your own, but you're at a place where the reality of it is hitting hard.

And and often times we hear people who, who, you know, face cancer to say the hardest part was after treatment concluded, after the busy after, you know, the the appointments and then the checklist.

That's when the emotions happen.

So you were alone when the emotional part of this really hit you.

I mean, how did you cope with that, and how did you kind of come out of that emotion?

I don't know why

Greg King: I chose that, that path that I guess I'm a bit of a loner to begin with.

I'm assuming everybody copes with it differently, but I had to go back on a lease.

I was expected to move into another house in January, and because I didn't know, being diagnosed stage three, I didn't know if that meant I was going to spend three to six months in Rochester, at the Mayo Clinic at MD Anderson in Houston.

I didn't know what my future entailed beyond one month time, because that's what I was dealing with in these meetings with my oncologist.

So I had to back out of a lease that my, one of my best friends mothers had, and I I had to tell him and his wife that, hey, I'm sorry I can't sign this lease.

I know you're you know, your mom uses this as supplemental income, and their coping mechanism was to make levity of the situation, and the joke came across the bow that like, Hey, I never figured you for much of a father figure anyway, as I'm dealing with, could I?

Could I ever have children?

And that's not an that's not a a cut against that individual.

It was, it was an acknowledgement that this is how this person is coping with the situation.

They're resorting to humor.

But I don't have the bandwidth, the emotional bandwidth, to because I'm trying to keep myself out of a spiraling depression from dealing with everyone else's coping mechanisms.

So I shut down, chose not to tell anybody, and I made my the only people that knew were my brother and sister and their spouses and my parents and my doctors.

And I made everybody Swear to me, whether they did or not, that they wouldn't tell anybody.

I made them not tell my nieces and nephews.

I didn't want any extended family to know, or any family friends.

And then I chose to leave, wow, you know, that's how I chose to leave the pandemic stress and go live on a boat.

So maybe that's just but.

But then I made it a year and a half, I started dating somebody in that I had met on a surfboard in western France and beer eats a year and a half later, and I was sneaking back to the US to have these oncological updates every

Darcie Wells: night you didn't tell her, even Though y'all were dating, absolutely not so

Greg King: I came home and the cancer had spread.

That was the summer of 2022 my doctor, even though he was a great oncologist, he had done 12 of my kind, and my kind, I mean the larger umbrella, not my specific germ cell, seminoma, but all testicular cancers over the course of his career.

And so I chose to go to someone who a large institution that does a lot of reps on goal.

And so I found an oncologist at MD Anderson that sees 12 months.

Yeah, moved my care to Houston, and once again, we were in the same decision making matrix of like we need to rush.

But he said, Look, this is spread.

Now.

You have tumors on your vena cava.

It's in the retroperitoneal lymph nodes, and we're going to hospitalize you within the next week, and you'll be at MD Anderson, where we can do an intensive chemo care protocol, and I knew that my hair was going to fall out.

I knew that, like life would then profoundly change.

And that was the moment I chose to tell people, yeah, so I kind of made a public announcement, and I didn't want to some friends knew other friends I was hiding it from, and I knew it was going to be in Houston, where a lot of my college friends were living, and I just didn't want to keep the secret anymore.

It was weighing too heavily on me, and I had to tell this person across the globe that I had left, you know, in a travel excursion, that I wasn't coming back and I was going into hospital.

No, by the way, I had cancer, and.

Then I announced to the world, like, oh, by the way, I have cancer.

And I think it started to solidify, like, maybe what a lot of my friends were seeing on my Instagram is like, Greg living out his midlife crisis, which really I was, I was taking 90 day breaks between blood work to to wrap up bucket list items, because I was living a very private life, wrapping up my life and preparing my estate and writing my will, and then doing all the things that I wanted to do before I died.

Over that year and a half, luckily, I was under some really amazing care.

Got out, and it took about a year for my body to start recovering.

I don't think people outside of the cancer world appreciate just how much nerve and neurological damage takes place.

But you know, you go from you get out of the hospital, it's not like you can just get a job again, right?

Life the way it was.

Yeah, your doctors are like, get, you know, two liters of water in your stomach a day and like that.

Okay, that's my goal for the next month.

You know, there's nothing beyond that and and luckily, because I had sold everything before this whole cancer experience, I had the ability to to live without a job and focus on healing my body for a time period, and my heart really goes out to families that don't have those circumstances.

I mean, I'm I was surrounded with and just in the genital urinary department at Indy Anderson, you had dads that had, you know, young children and wives and spouses at home.

And you know, there are multiple dependence on other people that didn't have the liberties I

Darcie Wells: had, yeah, when you decided to make it public that second round, how did what was that like?

I mean, how did people respond?

How was that for you?

You know, having kept things so private for so long,

Greg King: I was blown away at who chose to show up.

Yeah, you don't have an appreciation for who loves you in your life until these sorts of moments, and people I had considered loose friends were making daily calls.

Wow.

Some people that I the antithesis also happened.

Some people I thought would show up, a lot more didn't.

There were family members that pretended it, it wasn't happening.

There were, you know, everybody deals with it in their own way.

And I, I went from through these like states, I don't know if there's like a grieving process, but like anger at some people that that I thought like this person would be in my corner, that, you know, in my fox old didn't even bother to call through the whole experience to like understanding, having a deeper understanding that people are dealing with it in their own way.

I had friends.

I had one friend's wife that showed up on my porch with an iced tea one day, which is behaviorally very odd.

I was not very close with her, yeah, and she, she just sat there on my port.

And at one point, you know, it's in the awkwardness of fitting there with her.

I'm like, why are you here?

You know, and, and she says, she says my parents were sneaking off to MD Anderson when I was in high school, and they did not tell the children that I had cancer, that dad had cancer.

I just knew my parents were leaving town, and I was throwing parties when mom and dad were out of town.

Wow, to try to be the cool kid in my grade.

In my junior year of high school, I was getting drunk in my home with my friends while my parents were dealing with this cancer diagnosis.

My dad was stage four of four, and he died my senior year, wow.

And she broke down crying and said, I've never wrecked like I've never reconciled that.

And this is a 34 year old wife and mother.

I had another friend who had never told anybody that she had breast cancer, didn't even and she said, my sister is diagnosed with breast cancer, and I have never told her.

Maybe I should tell her, wow.

And she said, your strength and telling everybody that you have cancer is giving me the courage to tell my mother and my sister that I've had this, that I've been through this.

It wasn't strength.

I mean, get out of here.

I could not.

Believe that other people were harboring this secret.

Yes, and why is it a secret?

Why is it taboo to discuss?

It's I learned through all of and this is like two of like dozens.

I had a friend call me that I was close with in college, come out of the closet on the phone, and there's, there's a concept called cancer counselor where, like, people think it's kind of sad that I'm laughing about this, but, and it's something people with cancer, like, have talked about, that they either think you're not going to make it, or like, they think, like, I need to relate to this person's trauma, and so they come out with their own secrets.

And you know, I had to tell this individual like I have viewed you no differently in my life since we knew each other, and it's been 20 years.

You know, I will, I still love you for the man that you are in the friend that you are in my life, regardless of your life experience and your secrets.

And then so maybe you're giving me the courage to, you know, tell my my Catholic parents, you know.

And I say, Well, I don't take this as like me giving you advice on how to walk through your journey.

I just I realized, like you don't have to scratch hardly any below the surface before you realize there is trauma and pain in everyone around you, your your concentric circle, your extended circle.

It.

It was a shape shifter for me, because

Darcie Wells: you see people through different eyes, and what am I?

Yes,

Greg King: and it's like and and then like, and then the second wave of depression hits you, where you're realizing like, the value system with which you chose to subscribe to is failing or has failed, and it's time to choose new values if you're going to care, if you're going to survive this cancer experience and carry forward with the time that's remaining.

You know, what is it that you are going to choose to live by and to and who are the people you're going to surround yourself with, and how are you going to engage in the world?

Because, because there is pain and suffering and trauma literally everywhere.

And I just I became much more empathetic, empathetic, sympathetic.

I don't know what the right word is to human life, than I had ever I mean, I've always been, like, everybody deals with their own stuff and their own time, and like, change changed my life profoundly.

Darcie Wells: Yeah, it's a pivotal moment.

It's like, you know, BC and AC, you know BC, before cancer and after cancer.

I mean, it's hard for anyone to not let it fundamentally change the way you see the world, the way you see people around you.

And I think we hear a lot similar to your story, that it changes you in some ways for the better, and that you see the world differently.

You appreciate things more you are you know, you're more empathetic.

I mean, that's a common theme we hear a lot.

You've really channeled that empathy and heart that was uncovered in this journey into advocacy.

So tell us a little bit about that.

Like, what made you decide, you know, I'm going to do something with this.

You know, I'm going to make this purpose.

Greg King: I don't, I mean, the it's still a work in progress.

It's it's this value system you're choosing to live by.

Another mentor of mine was diagnosed with stage four prostate cancer when I was diagnosed with my germ cell seminoma.

He was a professor of mine and an avid entrepreneur and very financially successful, he found a way to get his cancer into remission, and he chose to live his life going around the larger Austin community and helping the impoverished.

He said, There's a profound underbelly of impoverished individuals that live out in these little, teeny farm houses.

You speed by going 80 miles an hour down the highway, you don't realize there's somebody in there with with debilitating circumstances, in a spiral they can't get out of and not only are they broke, they are dealing with mental instability or drug addiction, or they're just, it's so poor, they they and they're in a they're in a food, I don't know what he called like, a food Island, or food, yeah, food desert.

They can't do desert.

They can't even they go to the, you know, Dollar General.

And.

They can't even find adequate calories to put their cell biology on a positive trajectory.

And very, very close with him and he started to shape my perspective a bit, but I think it was the reconciliation of the way I had chosen to live my life, I pursued finance.

I started my career in Wall Street and was an investment banking analyst, and then tried to dabble in private equity, but I got flushed out with the oh eight financial crash, and then I went into the oil and gas business and on the finance side, and and I'd always chased money, and I had always surrounded myself a professional colleagues, my friends, with people who shared that core value.

And it was the abandonment that that of that value.

It was the it was that peripheral expansion that you don't know what you don't know until you look and it's right there, right off in the distance, but you don't see it until something widens your visual horizon, that then you start to see other values and other ways people live.

And so you know, after chemo, when I couldn't stay awake more than four hours at a time.

You know, I went from watching a YouTube video, like putting on boiling water to like, at eight in the morning, to coming to at noon and realizing that, like, I've seen 50 YouTube videos, and the water is boiled, you know, like, there's no water left, like, wondering what's happening to the day to like, okay, now I need to get some physical exercise and some vitamin D.

So like, I chose to learn how to surf I'd never served my life.

And then, like, now I'm surrounded with a group of people who dietarily, live differently.

They're like, their dietary intake the way they value their day is in sunrises and tides and not in how much money they're making.

Like that started to shift me, yeah, and and concurrent to that, which I hadn't really shared, my mother, my father and my dog were all diagnosed with cancer post chemo, oh, my God, that like, I just became very numb, yeah to the old life, yeah.

And started trying to figure out, like, either you're going to find a way to not live and that sucks, or the alternative is to get through it and find a way to live.

And that's like, a deep irony that I don't know that the Western value set, or, like, maybe it's the millennial generation, or maybe it's the lack of church I don't know.

Like, I'm not deep enough to truly understand it's something I'm searching through.

But like, for some reason, we've determined that stress and depression should be sedated somehow, and we have so many outlets to sedate that we either turn to Instagram, like, look how awesome my life is.

Or, you know, alcohol or drugs, like recreational I'll just go to a music festival.

I'll go, I'll go to Burning Man and find myself there.

Or, you know, like, maybe some, maybe an Ayahuasca journey on a yoga retreat, you know, in Costa Rica is going to solve this pain I'm experiencing.

And I chose, this is really dark and bizarre, but I chose to kill that sense of self.

And I wasn't having suicidal thoughts specifically, but I did have this unreconcilable feeling that I just want to die, and in these moments of sitting with this sadness as I'm crying on a surfboard, like, as everybody's like enjoying their day, or crying in a bowl of lemon Fettuccine, like in the Amalfi Coast, while everybody, like honeymooners around me enjoying their self that like, I think this is my little AHA that may be applicable for other people, but I've maybe not, but I think that sitting with pain, sitting with profound sadness was Mother Nature or God or the universe, or however you choose to describe it in your journey where you are right now to tell me change your behavior.

Yeah.

And then that Aha led me to, like, Ooh, what if I could share this with the next guy that thinks he just wants to die going through his cancer?

Or what if, like, I can talk about this with my mom that's going through her cancer that she can't.

Seemed to kick like, maybe she's had these dark thoughts when she was in her 40s and had teenage kids and and just went inward.

And I never knew about that as her child.

And like, that's where I decided to start, like, getting out of my shell.

So, like, in terms of the advocacy, like, where I am right now is, I've chosen to be a more active participant in an organization called the testicular cancer foundation, and it's to try to, like, put tentacles out in the universe, whether it's Reddit or Google or Instagram or discord channel or your oncologist of like, hey, you've gotten hit with a brick in the face.

You probably think you can't talk about this because you don't want your friends to make fun of you, or you know you're going to resort to humor, but you may not like actually start thinking about, how do I take care of the self?

Or you're not thinking about progeny, or you're not thinking about a list of other issues.

Here's a group of 100 to 200 guys that are all at different walks in the journey, that have had the entire gamut of testicular cancer, that are all over the globe, all over Europe, Asia America, that have had every kind under the umbrella of cancer and like let's just bring you into the into the fold, wherever you are, whether you just were diagnosed, or you're going through chemo, or you're on the back end, or you're trying to deal with, like, how do I come up with, like, my will, or how do I sperm bank?

Or how do I talk about that?

Like, What does my spouse do and on her end, as she's taking on a heavier workload of, like, the children, or, you know, whatever.

And so I've become an active participant in that.

That's a growing organ.

It's been around, but now it's like experiencing a lot more growth.

I trying to figure out ways to like, help that help the funding, help spread the word in that organization.

I've also been I had this experience my first week when I was in the hospital where a so I wasn't on the genital urinary floor, I was on a different floor, and like, I'm like, still dealing with the shock of, like, my first round of chemo, but there was a infant that had a leukemia that was On a clinical trial to the room next to me with her, that baby's parents, and I think the child clearly was going to die.

And on the right side of my room there was another room, and it was a 2022, year old girl that was also on a clinical trial that was dealing with stage four situation and and so I've also been trying to gin up ideas of like, How can I take this journey of me recognizing that I have to be my own hero, my own champion, and translate that into the world view of a child or a teenager.

So some ideas that I've come up with have gained some ground.

I've gotten some tentative hospital approvals, but I'm still working on that.

One of those is like, I'm trying to take this concept of a hospital gown that's in the shape of superheroes or Disney princesses, and turn it into turn it into a costume that can withstand the laundry and the protocols of the hospital, so that you can take both the state of, You know, feeling like you're dying in a hospital room to a little bit more of a state of play.

But it's really more profound than that.

It's like at some point that child is words of encouragement from other people, like you got this like the individual has to mentally gain the fortitude to help all the systems that we don't understand as humans, and in the medical world, to mentally, help champion the cell biology, to overtake this cancer.

And so they have to become their own hero.

And so if they can pretend that they're Batman, or pretend that they're, you know, the princess that they want to be, you know, I want that to be something that becomes very real and palpable to them.

So I've been working on prototypes, and I've been working on hospitals to try to take on an experimental volume of these to test them out.

So I'm still trying to find a manufacturer for that, but that's another project that I'm kind of working on as I get back in my own, you know, entrepreneurial journey of like, putting my own food on the table.

So

Darcie Wells: that's sorry.

That was a very, very No.

That's incredible.

I love that.

I love that

Greg King: cut me off if you

Darcie Wells: had to do it all again, would you do anything different?

Would.

You respond in a different way.

Greg King: Oh, I mean, I'm only, I just hit my two year mark, so, I mean, I'm still like, in the process, it's not like I'm coming at it from a place of of authority.

You know, there are, I still have about one out of eight days that I have, like, just brain fog, and I'm just cooked for the day, and you can feel it coming.

Like, if you really listen to your body, you can just it used to be one.

It used to be every day right after chemo is every day, and then it was like, every other day a couple months later, and it was every third day.

And like, I chose that most variables I can't control.

I can't control whether or not I will be able to have children again.

I can't control because the damage of the platinum of the chemotherapy.

I can't control how other people react.

I can't control if I'll have peripheral neuropathy for the rest of my life and other debilitating side, chronic side effects.

But I can control some variables.

I can control the sleep I try to get, the food, I try to eat, the knowledge that I try to gain on how to optimize my body, doing tons and tons of live experiments that we could have another hour discussion.

Maybe we will try that.

Yeah, I'm implementing AI and gathering data that's Well, well, well, and this is cash out of pocket, because insurance doesn't pay for it.

It's another advocacy thing, like insurance should really cover cover men's reproductive health, which it doesn't.

But I'm trying.

I'm trying to control the variables that I can to optimize my body for the time that remains, and the cold, hard truth is that we're all going to die.

I have just faced that mortality and chosen that I will live my life with a certain gratitude is not the right word, with a certain application to make it a life worth living.

And I heard a quote a couple of weeks ago that hit me as just a gut punch, because this is some truth that I'm still working through, but it's what of God's punishment didn't turn out to be blessings, and I'm grappling with that right now.

And maybe, maybe that's like the antithesis of this darkness of death, because it's the death, it's the it's the shortness of life that makes that makes the experience precious, yeah, and I think that goes beyond cancer, that goes to suicide, it goes to depression, and it goes with people feeling like they're in a prison, living in a situation that they don't know how to climb out of.

Yeah?

Like, that's a message that I think spreads to other people's lives, and it's, it's certainly applicable to my cancer journey.

Yeah,

Darcie Wells: I know that there's a many more chapters for you to write in the story, but if you looked today at what gift cancer has given you, what would you say that that was

Greg King: learning how to live a life of deeper meaning.

I grew up, you know, it's, it's a chemical.

Jordan Peterson would say, oh, it's your chemical construct of it makes your personality, you know the church would say, Well, it's, you know, God's gifts that he's imparted on here.

You know it.

There's a lot of people will come will describe this from their own lens of language.

But I, I know maybe with my childhood, and, you know, my dad is a planner, yeah, and that translated into my value set.

But I've always been focused on the future and I've always dwelled on the past, and I've never lived in the present, adequately at any stage of my life.

And then when you think like, when were you happiest?

You miserable individual?

That's what I was thinking in the darkest of my moments over the last few years.

It's like when I was a.

11 in the backyard, and I was in a sense of play, yeah, and I didn't have a care in the world.

And then it sounds ridiculous to say, well, act like a go.

Act like a child now, but I started to ask myself, like, what can you do that makes your adult walk in life feel with the knowledge of an adult, but the heart of the child feel more at play, have more fun with your day and that like that.

It brought home like really, learning how to live in in the present moment, and it's scary.

It's scary.

It scares a lot of people, but it's also a lot of fun and and now I'm trying to reconcile the two.

Yeah, you know, now that I'm getting healthier, now that my blood markers are coming back into normal, how do I optimize my i i may die in three years, but I'm going to make the best damn three years that remains, or if I live another 30 years and make that the best 30 years that remains and and now I need to figure out, like, how do I mold all those worlds?

And that's kind of the that's the live journey.

It's how do I make my work meaningful that makes me want to jump out of bed, yeah.

How do I make my relationships meaningful that makes me want to jump to go be with those people?

How do I, you know, and like, it's generative, and that's that's been by far the biggest things.

Darcie Wells: Thank you.

I mean, thank you for your vulnerability and sharing your journey with us.

I know our listeners can take so much from this and your journey continues.

I'd love to come back in a year or so and just to hear you know what's unfolded in your life, what you've been able to accomplish, because I know that your experience will help others in so many ways, and has has really charged you to make a difference in a way that you never imagined before.

Greg King: We have these.

We have the you go to somebody for expertise, you go to your doctor, you go to your acupuncturist, you go to and, like, a lot of times we we give authority, where authority is due, where people have a lot of knowledge, but then there's but then, let's say somebody delivers negative news.

We take that to heart, unfortunately, and we say like, well, you know, I'm going to have this peripheral neuropathy the rest of my life.

And that's not true.

I did a sex analysis two weeks ago, and I found out that I can have children, and my progeny is equivalent to that of like, a 22 to 25 year old male.

And I don't think that's happenstance.

I think it's because I focused on what I'm eating, I'm sleeping, and how I'm exercising, and what I'm allowing in my life that's manipulating my cortisol levels, etc, etc, etc, that is having a dramatic and direct effect on the outcome.

There are opportunities for hope and like, take a take ownership of your own circumstance and your and it sucks and like, it's not your fault, or maybe some of it is your fault, you know, and but regardless, like, take ownership.

This is your life.

This is your journey.

This is your short moment that I think that like somebody, that maybe, if that's the message, they can take that in, and if it affects one person, then this hour we've had together is worth it.

Darcie Wells: That's right, that's worth it.

Thank you, Greg.

I so appreciate it, and we'll come back and have you on at another time, hear more of your story, and thank you all for joining us for this episode of hope in the face of cancer.

If you or someone you love is facing cancer, CanCare is here to support you.

Visit us@kancare.org until next time, remember there is always Hope in the Face of Cancer.