June 21, 2022 • 32 mins
Join your host, James Brown as he explores the power of positive thinking with the Kansas City skateboarder and owner of the pro wrestling company “Journey Pro” who continues to kick cancers ass, DJ Stewart.
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Speaker 1 (00:07):
The power of positive thinking is something I hear people
talking about. It's also the title of a famous book,
and I've always wondered just how powerful positive thinking really is.
Doesn't have limitations, are the effects lasting or temporary? Just
how powerful is it? Today's guest is one of the
(00:29):
most positive humans I've ever talked to. He radiates it.
It's his superpower. This episode features the Kansas City skitter
and owner of the pro wrestling company Journey Pro, who
continues to kick cancer's ass every day. D J Stuart.
(00:50):
This is the unimaginable. I'm your host and musician James Brown.
My name is DJ Stewart. I live in Kansas City,
(01:13):
Co Chiefs. I'm thirty one years old now at the
time that this is being recorded. I am a brain
cancer fighter, future survivor, all around life lover basically, and
I'm gonna tell you a little bit about some crazy
(01:35):
ship that's happened in my life. I am a skateboarder
at heart. Since I was twelve or thirteen years old,
it has given me every amazing thing in my flat
out epic life, from my ridiculous, awesome group of friends
to my best friend that's also my wife, I would
(01:58):
have none of it without skateboarder. You know, a fairly
regular guy, work irregular kind of nine to five job
right now, it's t mobile. I've done everything from selling
solar panels to toys, and in that I one day
at my nine to five job at a seizure, woke
(02:23):
up in an ambulance for a second, woke up a
few minutes later, and well, what felt like a few
minutes later in a hospital where I was told that
I had a golf ball size tumor in the right
temporal lobe of my brain. There was May of nineteen
(02:44):
when I had that seizure, and a few months before
that I had well, I guess it was almost ten
months before that I had found a tumor in my
right knee. I went into a doctor for a regular checkup, and,
like I said, I'm a skateboarder, but I've been having
these weird twinges in my knee, and I for a
(03:08):
long time chalked it up to, all right, I've broken ankles, legs,
I've torn everything in my knee. It's just a reoccurring thing.
From that, it's not really messing me up too bad,
so I'm not worried about it, and then my wife,
a girlfriend at the time, convinced me, like, hey, dumbass,
you should probably go see a doctor for the first time.
And god knows how long and I did. He felt
(03:30):
around on my knee and he told me, oh, man,
it's nothing to worry about. It's probably like a calcium
deposit something. We got a couple options. I could cut
this thing out right here in this office, I continue
to a surgeon, it's probably gonna cost you a lot
of money, or or honestly, third option, you could just
leave it in there, because I'm not worried about it. Well,
(03:51):
I went with option. A doctor seemed confident he was
going to chop it out for me. I was gonna
move on, so we set up surgery, not even surgery.
I had to cut maybe six inches long if that, uh,
ten stitches for just a few days later, he pulled
it out. It looked like kind of gross, but it
(04:12):
looked like a gob stopper, a little bit like a
gob stopper that somebody had been sucking on for a
while because it was kind of white. It was like
hard as a rock. I could hear it when he
dropped it into the little tin. I have a picture
of it, because I'm weird. I wanted to see it.
And he stitched me up and said, hey man, I'll
see you back here in a few days to get
the stitches taken out. I'm gonna send this to pathology
(04:35):
just to you know, make sure it's all good. Have
a good one. So go about my life for a
few more days. Come back to get my stitches taken out.
And I noticed the doctor seems a little more down
or just a little less chipper than he was previously.
And he says, ay and take a seat, and he
(04:58):
tells me that he was wrong. It was not a
calcium deposit. It was not a polyp or any weird
thing like that. It was actually what they call alo
myo sarcoma, which is a soft tissue cancer can happen
in soft tissue, muscle or bone. Mine was in the
muscle and like tissue of my right knee. So he
(05:20):
sent me to a surgeon who is a phenomenal surgeon.
He's like the best sarcoma doctor in the country, and
he happens to be right here in Kansas City. So
he cut me open just a few about a week
after that, and I had what's called an extra large incision,
so I have an epic scar on my right knee.
(05:41):
But he felt amazing about it, and I did too.
I you know, did a lot of physical rehab and
then he definitely feels weird, but I wasn't too worried
about it. I was like, all right, you know what,
I'm gonna beat. This thing's asked. It's no big deal.
They caught it nice and early, so they were really
optimistic about everything. And about ten months later, I believe,
(06:07):
going through some odd times in my life, this is
so in February, I proposed to my wife on the
fifty yard line of Arrowhead Stadium where the Chiefs play
here in Kansas City, in front of our whole family,
and surprise there it was epic. April, we bought a
(06:28):
house together, and then in May I was signing insurance
paperwork at a new job to sell solar panels and
was really excited about it, and I had a seizure.
I woke up in the hospital and what had happened
(06:48):
was I had started this weird feeling when I was
signing the paperwork. Come to find out, these are called auras,
which is a symptom of bring and to me, it
felt kind of like deja vould have this weird deja
vu type of feeling, not in a situation where I
was actually getting dejab It was just kind of that
(07:08):
weird like feeling. And sometimes I would actually have to
go to the bathroom because of it. It It would like
manifest to my body, make me I have to go
and use the bathroom. So that happened. I went to
the bathroom, came back first day of this job, signing
my insurance paperwork. I'm in this cool fancy standing desk,
nice high chair, and I fell out of it at
(07:32):
a seizure. So when I woke up in the hospital,
I was sore, and I was telling the doctor that
I wasn't feeling good, like my neck and shoulder hurt,
and so right then he ordered ct s and m
R eyes and that's when they found what's called a
GBM glioblastema, which is the most aggressive type of brain
(07:54):
tumor in my right temporal low of my brain, like
I said, roughly a golf ball side, and I opted
to have it cut out. I believe it was the
next day, maybe two days later. Stayed in the hospital
and had a craniotomy from an epic surgeon thirty five
staples to the head. Instantly from there started radiation, which
(08:22):
I did five days a week for six weeks. I
did thirty five, actually thirty six sessions of radiation where
I was in this crazy machine that locked my face.
I had this like face mold. It locked my face
in and radiation straight to the area that had been
removed at that time. But along with that, I went
(08:43):
on a regiment at that time of chemo five days
a week, which eventually I bumped to seven days a week.
I also started wearing a device called the op Tune,
which for those that don't know what that is, which
is everybody in the world. It's this crazy backpack that
(09:05):
I would wear every day seven for about four days straight.
There was a backpack weighed like nine pounds. Out of
that backpack came four wires. Those wires had four imagine large, large,
large like bandages. Four of those, one attached to the
back of my head, one attached to the top and front,
(09:28):
one on each side. Those big bandages were actually electrical conduits. Essentially,
UH they sent what was called t t fields, which
is a tumor treating field through my brain. Seven. They
were mapped to like my head and placed in a
(09:49):
very specific area. My wife had was amazing working with
me on that device. I would wear it, like I said,
seven for about three or four days straight. I would
then take it off for a few days or for
a few hours, shave my head, maybe do something that
I normally wouldn't be able to, like go swimming or
(10:09):
something like that. But past that we put it right
back on. I slept in it, I skated in it.
I modified a military vest to be able to hold
it so that it would stay close to my body
and not bounce around when I was skating, rode my
motorcycle in it. Just had to get a helmet that
was two sizes too big because it looked like I
was wearing this weird lunch lady swimmers cat thing. But
(10:34):
I dealt with it. I wore that every single day
for about two and a half years. I was on
chemo at that point as well, like I said, and
bumped up. About eight months after starting chemo, I bumped
up to seven days a week. There was an oral
chemo that my body, thank god, responded incredibly well to
(10:56):
to where I was still able to be like semi active.
Thought I was being super active, but looking back now,
I'm way more fired up doing ship um. During that time,
I also went to Newport Beach, California, to Hog Hospital
and had a kind of cutting edge whatever procedure called
(11:20):
the gamma knife, which you would learn about if you google,
which I do not recommend ever googling your ailment. I've
never done it, but if you were to do it,
you would find a Ted talk by an epic human
name Dr Duma. He literally did the Ted talk on
(11:40):
le oblast emma and he has this procedure that he
did called the gamma knife to me, which was pretty gnarly.
They screwed in this crazy like halo piece to my
head and locked me in this machine and it was
kind of an aggressive form of a radiation designed to
burn the surrounding area essentially of the tumors so that
(12:03):
it couldn't spread. So did that. My badass of a
wife turned what should have been like a shitty trip
like that into an epic vacation. We went to the
Harry Potter or World. We are total nerds. I know
you can't see me, but I'm recording this from my
home office that looks like a damn toy store. Um.
(12:27):
So we got really good at living with my illness.
I didn't live in it. I lived with it. I
don't live in having a brain t I live with it.
And I kicked the ship out of it every day.
And a year after my initial diagnosis, on my cancer versary,
(12:49):
we were celebrating me kicking the ship out of it again.
My epic wife teamed up with my mother and she
surprised me with a motorcycle, which was insane because I
won't lie. I had resigned to not riding a motorcycle again.
I was worried about a seizure. I was worried about this,
(13:09):
that and the other. Nothing could stop me from skating.
But I was scared of a bike. And she wasn't happy.
She was like, no, this is a part of you.
This is what makes you happy. I've seen it. And
so she got together, I don't know a hundred of
like my best friends, flew family in from Colorado, surprised
me with the motorcycle. This amazing video just one of
(13:33):
the most beautiful night's days of my entire life. And
then the next day I went and I had an
m r I. And then the day after that, I
had the appointment for that m r I, and in
that m r I, they had realized that I had
(13:54):
had a reoccurrence, meaning the tumor came back and the
same spot, the same size, just as bad. So two
days later I went in at this point now in
the heart of COVID to have my second crane yard,
(14:16):
which I won't lie was way way worse than the
first one. In the first one, I got to be
surrounded by my family and my friends, which are my family.
I know that's a cheesy thing to say, but it
made it so much easier to be just surrounded by love.
If I took a nap, I woke up in a
(14:36):
room full of beautiful people that wanted nothing more than
to make me smile and feel better COVID. I got
dropped off five in the morning from my crying wife
because she knew that she couldn't see me, she couldn't
come in the hospital. Thank God, my sister was there too,
(14:57):
like Consoler and their homies, so I'm eternally grateful for that.
But I spent three and a half days in the
hospital in the beginning of COVID alone I had my surgery,
and then even like the doctors and nurses the first
time around, they'd be in there for ten fifteen minutes
(15:19):
at a time just talking to you this. They were
in the room to give you whatever you needed, and
they were gone. I was. If there's twenty four hours
in a day, I was alone twenty three of them,
and that one hour was not consecutive. It was split
between that entire probably like the least amount of human
(15:41):
context I've ever had. Thank God for social media in
that point. I don't say that lightly, but it saved
me in all honesty. But the second surgery was successful.
I was up walking around earlier than I should have been.
I was able to, you know, maybe get away with
(16:01):
a little more because I wasn't supervised as much. I
got up to take a leak faster than I was
supposed to. I was cutting jokes and trying to get
the doctors and nurses to come in and hang out
with me, but they weren't having it. So a few
days later my wife picked me up and we were good.
Since then, I've lived with brain cancer. That was a
(16:26):
year and three months ago. It was my last craniotomy.
My initial diagnosis. They gave me eleven months eighteen at
the very very highest, and that was thirty six, thirty
eight months ago something like that. And so, like I said,
I've lived with it ever since. And it's weird to say,
(16:48):
but the worst thing in my life has given me
the best things in my life. I grew up a
skateboarder and because of that, I've got all my best friends.
One of my best friends is an absolutely amazing filmmaker,
and he made a twelve minute documentary about my story
(17:10):
called Rare Enough, and the filming process of it alone,
if it never even came out, was a highlight of
my entire ridiculous, amazing life. I got to be a
part of something just absolutely beautiful. With all of my
best friends. We got to do ridiculous things like strapped
(17:30):
me to the back of a moving truck hanging off
like this, and skate through the city with closed down
streets and live every little skate rat kids dream. Uh. Well,
the video did get released, and apparently everyone in the
world somehow saw it, including people like, Oh, I don't
know Tony Hawk, So I'm gonna fly out with my
(17:56):
wife and stay at any hawks house and record an
episode of his podcast, and it's also led me to
I can't even be The list would take up this
entire interview of the amazing people that have reached out
to me with their own ailments, and I have said
(18:20):
that my stories somehow made them smile or brought them
hope or anything. And that's from everything from from brain
cancer to mental health to just people having a ship day.
And it's as incredible as it is to have like
skateboarders and big celebrities even reach out. There's nothing cooler
(18:43):
than being able to help somebody that's going through something. Oh.
I can't even begin to describe how amazing and grateful
I am for all of this that has happened, because,
like I said, it's a shitty thing to live with
brain cancer, but I live with it. I kicked the
(19:05):
ship out of life every day, and I couldn't do
that without everybody in my corner. And people ask all
the time, I got you day so positive, and it's like,
you don't get it. It's not as I'm not as
cool as you think i'm. I just have so many
amazing people. I've got this epic support system, and now
it's somehow man managed to where I'm able to support others,
(19:29):
and that's a gift I never thought I would be
able to have. I have a pro wrestling company. I
own a professional wrestling full like murder gymnastics theater. Uh.
I live my dream every single day. I skateboard, I
do this, and I have one really bad, shitty thing,
(19:53):
but everything else in my life is amazing. And so
the way I look at it, the old saying, if
you meet five assholes in a day, you're probably the asshole.
If you've got four amazing things and one sucks and
you're bummed about that one, you're probably the asshole, is
just the way I look at it. Um. My grandma
(20:16):
told me early in my diagnosis that I lost my
grandpa really young to lung cancer. But he was a smoker,
like a hardcore smoker. He smoked NonStop and passed of
lung cancer. That makes sense. What I have is just
a literal, not a joke. That it's a mutation. They
(20:37):
call us mutants, and like Science magazine that rules. I'm like,
all right, one of these days I'll just walk out
of m R I with superpowers. It's gonna be great.
But my grandpa when he got diagnosed, My grandma said this. Sorry,
my grandma told me this that when my grandpa got
(20:58):
diagnosed was the day that he started dying. And that
like made sense to me in a way that I
could reverse engineer, Like, Okay, So if I just keep living,
then I'll just keep living. And if I just live
(21:22):
hard that's as cheesy as that sounded, Jesus Christ. Um,
if I just like I said, lived all the way,
like go for it every single day, then I'll just
keep being able to do that. And somehow, in spite
of all of this doctors telling me that I have
this long to live or that I could lose these functions.
(21:45):
I skateboard every single day. I could do a backflip
right now, I could do a pool though. Um I
lived a dream man. Buddha said, our life is shipped
(22:07):
by our mind. We've become what we think. Joy follows
a pure thought, like a shadow that never leaves. Am
I right in assuming you would attribute a lot of
your ability and kicking concerts us to your positive attitude,
I mean without a doubt, I without like even remote
question that, Like if you ask me what what is work?
(22:30):
The best? Was it the gam and if was it
the op tune. Was it chemo? Was it radiation? Like, no,
it's my attitude straight up, like, and that's not easy
for me to say. I'm not gonna lie like DJ.
Pre all of this ship, I would have been like,
you're a dork, dude, Like no, if you got shipped,
(22:50):
you got shipped, like because I've just been used to
like breaking bones, you know stuff that like, Okay, I
didn't understand, like, oh, I would have. I would have
liked laughed. I would have been like, man, that's great
that you feel like that, but you know, I doubt
that's what's happening. And now that it's actually happening, without
(23:11):
a doubt, I think that the best medicine that I've
had has been the fact that I want to keep going.
You have this kind of idliar personality. I mean, it's infactious.
Where did that come from? That's that answer would be
twofold my mom with out of doubt. My mom was
(23:36):
very young when she had me. She was sixteen, she
was a baby, and she's a fucking gangster like she
is the smartest, strongest woman I've ever met in my
entire life. Followed directly by my badass wife but my
(23:56):
mom went through ship. We had. Ship happened when I
was a kid. That was terrible, but I never knew
it until like later times. My mom busted her asked
to give me an absolutely amazing life. She instilled a
(24:19):
work ethic in me. She treated me like not only
like her baby, but like an adult at such a
young age that like she get. She gave me everything.
My attitude on how you just fight until you win
comes from her without a doubt. Uh. Then when I
(24:41):
was like thirteen, early thirteen, I made the psychotic choice
to fall in love with skateboarding. And I say that
because skateboarding, like I said, not only to give me everything,
but it taught me so much to be a lifelong
(25:03):
skateboarder and to pursue it with everything. Like I can
look at skateboard and be like, all right, I gave
that everything. Like you have to be kind of out
there because you just have to fall a thousand fucking times.
There's no way around it. There. It's one thing in
(25:23):
life that there is just no shortcut to whatsoever. Sure
somebody might be you know, naturally gifted or whatever, but
there's nobody that's not out there punishing themselves. It is
a a flat out ridiculous thing to do. I was
talking to a buddy about this last night, and he's
(25:43):
a wrestler, and I was like, dude, do you realize
that if aliens came down saw us, they saw you
like with the fake fight in your underwear, but beating
the hell out of your body. And then they saw
me jumping a wooden toy down stairs or trying to
land it onto rails and then land back on it,
(26:04):
They'd be like, oh my god, those things are broken.
There's something wrong with them. Like what what is that
we would look and be looked at is like this
weird low life form because it's psychotic to do what
we do. And so I just carried that over. I
just carried over like, all right, you get your asked,
(26:24):
be you get back up, and you go again, and
you go again and you go again. Well, when you
say you live with cancer, I'm not in it. And
I think that's kind of a skill set in of itself,
Like what got you to the place of being able
to sort of categorize high consortable play a part in
(26:48):
your life? Damn that's a good question. Um, I like that.
So I think A big part of it is it
would be like I kind of like alluded to it
or said it earlier. I would be in my eyes,
I would be selfish to let that ruin everything else
that I have. Like when I was I don't know,
(27:12):
probably like fifteen sixteen, I met all the dudes in
Kansas City that skateboarders that red like I start, you know,
I was getting kind of good and and they would
start saying, what's up to me at the park, and
that's when I like fifteen sixteen is when they really
started talking to me, and I remember wanting so bad
(27:35):
to be like part of that crew. And and then
seeing like going to one of the first times where
I was hanging out with them outside of just like
the park, and then you know they're their chicks were
all friends with like the other skateboarders chicks, and like
Ken's City just had this crazy, weird scene of skateboarding
(27:56):
and people that I was like, man, that would be
amazing to be like in on and and then like
at the same time, the I'm a kid and I
go home and after skating and I watched pro wrestling
for Goofy Ship like that, like Nerdy Star Wars is
(28:17):
like a passion of mine. Um And now I look
back on all those sort of things I look back
at like, you know, thirteen, fourteen, fifteen, sixteen, seventeen, eighteen, whatever,
all young me. I have every damn thing that I
like wanted. I all those guys that I like grew
(28:39):
up idolizing, even though they were just about the same
age as me. I just got back from Mexico with
literally all of them. I've gotten to travel the country with.
I can't even remember how Like I couldn't put a
number on how many of my friends because of a
wooden toy, because of a damn skateboard. I own a
professional wrestling company. I'm in the process right now. I've
(29:01):
I've opened a professional wrestling school so that people can
come and learn how to do this insanity that we do.
Ah right now, I'm opening my own venue, to host
my own events, to host charity events, to host concerts
and fundraisers, and all of this epic ship. And I
do all of that. I have all of that. I
(29:22):
have so much ship that people would kill for. And
I happened to also have a brain tune. I happen
to have to go to the doctor a lot more
than your standard everyday person. But when somebody meets me,
they don't know that. Now that I don't have to
wear the optune thing, nobody knows it. And that's the
(29:44):
fucking highest compliment in the world. When I tell people,
they're like, wait, what, Um, do you have any advice
for someone that just got diagnosed with concert? Fuck? Yeah,
I absolutely have one. Um, if you're diagnosed with anything,
if you just in a shitty day, if you're whatever,
like whether it's a diagnosis or not. But you said,
(30:05):
you know, you dove through my instagram a little bit
um the like one of the early on videos I
said it, And I don't remember exactly which one, but
I do remember it was around the time where I
was starting to realize like, huh, I still feel all right, Like,
you know, it's a few months after brain surgery and
I'm on chemo and I'm in radiation and all this,
(30:26):
and I'm like, man, I feel like they made it
seem like I was gonna be some like decrepit piece
of ship. And I'm like I'm tired, but like, okay,
fuck you guys kind of thing. Um. And And around
that time is when I started getting like responses on
social media from people that might have been going through
(30:46):
stuff and that found it through like a GBM hashtag
or whatever, and they would send me like, hey man,
thanks for like smiling and making like making not making
jokes out of it, but like smiling with it and
and that sort of thing. And so I I always
try to like build some hype in those videos, and
so in one of them, I just like blurt it out,
(31:09):
like don't let your circumstances control your life, or like,
don't let your diagnosis control your life. The obvious take
away from DJ's life with cancer is his point of view.
(31:31):
He chooses to kick cancers ass every day. He chooses
to live not die. Every day. DJ's existence is a
testament to choosing life. He's not merely surviving. He keeps
kicking concerts ass. And I've got a tremendous amount of
respect for that. You've just listened to the unimaginable. I'm
(31:55):
your host, James Brian, until next time you're writing for
The power of positive thinking is something I hear people
talking about. It's also the title of a famous book,
and I've always wondered just how powerful positive thinking really is.
Doesn't have limitations, are the effects lasting or temporary? Just
how powerful is it? Today's guest is one of the
(00:29):
most positive humans I've ever talked to. He radiates it.
It's his superpower. This episode features the Kansas City skitter
and owner of the pro wrestling company Journey Pro, who
continues to kick cancer's ass every day. D J Stuart.
(00:50):
This is the unimaginable. I'm your host and musician James Brown.
My name is DJ Stewart. I live in Kansas City,
(01:13):
Co Chiefs. I'm thirty one years old now at the
time that this is being recorded. I am a brain
cancer fighter, future survivor, all around life lover basically, and
I'm gonna tell you a little bit about some crazy
(01:35):
ship that's happened in my life. I am a skateboarder
at heart. Since I was twelve or thirteen years old,
it has given me every amazing thing in my flat
out epic life, from my ridiculous, awesome group of friends
to my best friend that's also my wife, I would
(01:58):
have none of it without skateboarder. You know, a fairly
regular guy, work irregular kind of nine to five job
right now, it's t mobile. I've done everything from selling
solar panels to toys, and in that I one day
at my nine to five job at a seizure, woke
(02:23):
up in an ambulance for a second, woke up a
few minutes later, and well, what felt like a few
minutes later in a hospital where I was told that
I had a golf ball size tumor in the right
temporal lobe of my brain. There was May of nineteen
(02:44):
when I had that seizure, and a few months before
that I had well, I guess it was almost ten
months before that I had found a tumor in my
right knee. I went into a doctor for a regular checkup, and,
like I said, I'm a skateboarder, but I've been having
these weird twinges in my knee, and I for a
(03:08):
long time chalked it up to, all right, I've broken ankles, legs,
I've torn everything in my knee. It's just a reoccurring thing.
From that, it's not really messing me up too bad,
so I'm not worried about it, and then my wife,
a girlfriend at the time, convinced me, like, hey, dumbass,
you should probably go see a doctor for the first time.
And god knows how long and I did. He felt
(03:30):
around on my knee and he told me, oh, man,
it's nothing to worry about. It's probably like a calcium
deposit something. We got a couple options. I could cut
this thing out right here in this office, I continue
to a surgeon, it's probably gonna cost you a lot
of money, or or honestly, third option, you could just
leave it in there, because I'm not worried about it. Well,
(03:51):
I went with option. A doctor seemed confident he was
going to chop it out for me. I was gonna
move on, so we set up surgery, not even surgery.
I had to cut maybe six inches long if that, uh,
ten stitches for just a few days later, he pulled
it out. It looked like kind of gross, but it
(04:12):
looked like a gob stopper, a little bit like a
gob stopper that somebody had been sucking on for a
while because it was kind of white. It was like
hard as a rock. I could hear it when he
dropped it into the little tin. I have a picture
of it, because I'm weird. I wanted to see it.
And he stitched me up and said, hey man, I'll
see you back here in a few days to get
the stitches taken out. I'm gonna send this to pathology
(04:35):
just to you know, make sure it's all good. Have
a good one. So go about my life for a
few more days. Come back to get my stitches taken out.
And I noticed the doctor seems a little more down
or just a little less chipper than he was previously.
And he says, ay and take a seat, and he
(04:58):
tells me that he was wrong. It was not a
calcium deposit. It was not a polyp or any weird
thing like that. It was actually what they call alo
myo sarcoma, which is a soft tissue cancer can happen
in soft tissue, muscle or bone. Mine was in the
muscle and like tissue of my right knee. So he
(05:20):
sent me to a surgeon who is a phenomenal surgeon.
He's like the best sarcoma doctor in the country, and
he happens to be right here in Kansas City. So
he cut me open just a few about a week
after that, and I had what's called an extra large incision,
so I have an epic scar on my right knee.
(05:41):
But he felt amazing about it, and I did too.
I you know, did a lot of physical rehab and
then he definitely feels weird, but I wasn't too worried
about it. I was like, all right, you know what,
I'm gonna beat. This thing's asked. It's no big deal.
They caught it nice and early, so they were really
optimistic about everything. And about ten months later, I believe,
(06:07):
going through some odd times in my life, this is
so in February, I proposed to my wife on the
fifty yard line of Arrowhead Stadium where the Chiefs play
here in Kansas City, in front of our whole family,
and surprise there it was epic. April, we bought a
(06:28):
house together, and then in May I was signing insurance
paperwork at a new job to sell solar panels and
was really excited about it, and I had a seizure.
I woke up in the hospital and what had happened
(06:48):
was I had started this weird feeling when I was
signing the paperwork. Come to find out, these are called auras,
which is a symptom of bring and to me, it
felt kind of like deja vould have this weird deja
vu type of feeling, not in a situation where I
was actually getting dejab It was just kind of that
(07:08):
weird like feeling. And sometimes I would actually have to
go to the bathroom because of it. It It would like
manifest to my body, make me I have to go
and use the bathroom. So that happened. I went to
the bathroom, came back first day of this job, signing
my insurance paperwork. I'm in this cool fancy standing desk,
nice high chair, and I fell out of it at
(07:32):
a seizure. So when I woke up in the hospital,
I was sore, and I was telling the doctor that
I wasn't feeling good, like my neck and shoulder hurt,
and so right then he ordered ct s and m
R eyes and that's when they found what's called a
GBM glioblastema, which is the most aggressive type of brain
(07:54):
tumor in my right temporal low of my brain, like
I said, roughly a golf ball side, and I opted
to have it cut out. I believe it was the
next day, maybe two days later. Stayed in the hospital
and had a craniotomy from an epic surgeon thirty five
staples to the head. Instantly from there started radiation, which
(08:22):
I did five days a week for six weeks. I
did thirty five, actually thirty six sessions of radiation where
I was in this crazy machine that locked my face.
I had this like face mold. It locked my face
in and radiation straight to the area that had been
removed at that time. But along with that, I went
(08:43):
on a regiment at that time of chemo five days
a week, which eventually I bumped to seven days a week.
I also started wearing a device called the op Tune,
which for those that don't know what that is, which
is everybody in the world. It's this crazy backpack that
(09:05):
I would wear every day seven for about four days straight.
There was a backpack weighed like nine pounds. Out of
that backpack came four wires. Those wires had four imagine large, large,
large like bandages. Four of those, one attached to the
back of my head, one attached to the top and front,
(09:28):
one on each side. Those big bandages were actually electrical conduits. Essentially,
UH they sent what was called t t fields, which
is a tumor treating field through my brain. Seven. They
were mapped to like my head and placed in a
(09:49):
very specific area. My wife had was amazing working with
me on that device. I would wear it, like I said,
seven for about three or four days straight. I would
then take it off for a few days or for
a few hours, shave my head, maybe do something that
I normally wouldn't be able to, like go swimming or
(10:09):
something like that. But past that we put it right
back on. I slept in it, I skated in it.
I modified a military vest to be able to hold
it so that it would stay close to my body
and not bounce around when I was skating, rode my
motorcycle in it. Just had to get a helmet that
was two sizes too big because it looked like I
was wearing this weird lunch lady swimmers cat thing. But
(10:34):
I dealt with it. I wore that every single day
for about two and a half years. I was on
chemo at that point as well, like I said, and
bumped up. About eight months after starting chemo, I bumped
up to seven days a week. There was an oral
chemo that my body, thank god, responded incredibly well to
(10:56):
to where I was still able to be like semi active.
Thought I was being super active, but looking back now,
I'm way more fired up doing ship um. During that time,
I also went to Newport Beach, California, to Hog Hospital
and had a kind of cutting edge whatever procedure called
(11:20):
the gamma knife, which you would learn about if you google,
which I do not recommend ever googling your ailment. I've
never done it, but if you were to do it,
you would find a Ted talk by an epic human
name Dr Duma. He literally did the Ted talk on
(11:40):
le oblast emma and he has this procedure that he
did called the gamma knife to me, which was pretty gnarly.
They screwed in this crazy like halo piece to my
head and locked me in this machine and it was
kind of an aggressive form of a radiation designed to
burn the surrounding area essentially of the tumors so that
(12:03):
it couldn't spread. So did that. My badass of a
wife turned what should have been like a shitty trip
like that into an epic vacation. We went to the
Harry Potter or World. We are total nerds. I know
you can't see me, but I'm recording this from my
home office that looks like a damn toy store. Um.
(12:27):
So we got really good at living with my illness.
I didn't live in it. I lived with it. I
don't live in having a brain t I live with it.
And I kicked the ship out of it every day.
And a year after my initial diagnosis, on my cancer versary,
(12:49):
we were celebrating me kicking the ship out of it again.
My epic wife teamed up with my mother and she
surprised me with a motorcycle, which was insane because I
won't lie. I had resigned to not riding a motorcycle again.
I was worried about a seizure. I was worried about this,
(13:09):
that and the other. Nothing could stop me from skating.
But I was scared of a bike. And she wasn't happy.
She was like, no, this is a part of you.
This is what makes you happy. I've seen it. And
so she got together, I don't know a hundred of
like my best friends, flew family in from Colorado, surprised
me with the motorcycle. This amazing video just one of
(13:33):
the most beautiful night's days of my entire life. And
then the next day I went and I had an
m r I. And then the day after that, I
had the appointment for that m r I, and in
that m r I, they had realized that I had
(13:54):
had a reoccurrence, meaning the tumor came back and the
same spot, the same size, just as bad. So two
days later I went in at this point now in
the heart of COVID to have my second crane yard,
(14:16):
which I won't lie was way way worse than the
first one. In the first one, I got to be
surrounded by my family and my friends, which are my family.
I know that's a cheesy thing to say, but it
made it so much easier to be just surrounded by love.
If I took a nap, I woke up in a
(14:36):
room full of beautiful people that wanted nothing more than
to make me smile and feel better COVID. I got
dropped off five in the morning from my crying wife
because she knew that she couldn't see me, she couldn't
come in the hospital. Thank God, my sister was there too,
(14:57):
like Consoler and their homies, so I'm eternally grateful for that.
But I spent three and a half days in the
hospital in the beginning of COVID alone I had my surgery,
and then even like the doctors and nurses the first
time around, they'd be in there for ten fifteen minutes
(15:19):
at a time just talking to you this. They were
in the room to give you whatever you needed, and
they were gone. I was. If there's twenty four hours
in a day, I was alone twenty three of them,
and that one hour was not consecutive. It was split
between that entire probably like the least amount of human
(15:41):
context I've ever had. Thank God for social media in
that point. I don't say that lightly, but it saved
me in all honesty. But the second surgery was successful.
I was up walking around earlier than I should have been.
I was able to, you know, maybe get away with
(16:01):
a little more because I wasn't supervised as much. I
got up to take a leak faster than I was
supposed to. I was cutting jokes and trying to get
the doctors and nurses to come in and hang out
with me, but they weren't having it. So a few
days later my wife picked me up and we were good.
Since then, I've lived with brain cancer. That was a
(16:26):
year and three months ago. It was my last craniotomy.
My initial diagnosis. They gave me eleven months eighteen at
the very very highest, and that was thirty six, thirty
eight months ago something like that. And so, like I said,
I've lived with it ever since. And it's weird to say,
(16:48):
but the worst thing in my life has given me
the best things in my life. I grew up a
skateboarder and because of that, I've got all my best friends.
One of my best friends is an absolutely amazing filmmaker,
and he made a twelve minute documentary about my story
(17:10):
called Rare Enough, and the filming process of it alone,
if it never even came out, was a highlight of
my entire ridiculous, amazing life. I got to be a
part of something just absolutely beautiful. With all of my
best friends. We got to do ridiculous things like strapped
(17:30):
me to the back of a moving truck hanging off
like this, and skate through the city with closed down
streets and live every little skate rat kids dream. Uh. Well,
the video did get released, and apparently everyone in the
world somehow saw it, including people like, Oh, I don't
know Tony Hawk, So I'm gonna fly out with my
(17:56):
wife and stay at any hawks house and record an
episode of his podcast, and it's also led me to
I can't even be The list would take up this
entire interview of the amazing people that have reached out
to me with their own ailments, and I have said
(18:20):
that my stories somehow made them smile or brought them
hope or anything. And that's from everything from from brain
cancer to mental health to just people having a ship day.
And it's as incredible as it is to have like
skateboarders and big celebrities even reach out. There's nothing cooler
(18:43):
than being able to help somebody that's going through something. Oh.
I can't even begin to describe how amazing and grateful
I am for all of this that has happened, because,
like I said, it's a shitty thing to live with
brain cancer, but I live with it. I kicked the
(19:05):
ship out of life every day, and I couldn't do
that without everybody in my corner. And people ask all
the time, I got you day so positive, and it's like,
you don't get it. It's not as I'm not as
cool as you think i'm. I just have so many
amazing people. I've got this epic support system, and now
it's somehow man managed to where I'm able to support others,
(19:29):
and that's a gift I never thought I would be
able to have. I have a pro wrestling company. I
own a professional wrestling full like murder gymnastics theater. Uh.
I live my dream every single day. I skateboard, I
do this, and I have one really bad, shitty thing,
(19:53):
but everything else in my life is amazing. And so
the way I look at it, the old saying, if
you meet five assholes in a day, you're probably the asshole.
If you've got four amazing things and one sucks and
you're bummed about that one, you're probably the asshole, is
just the way I look at it. Um. My grandma
(20:16):
told me early in my diagnosis that I lost my
grandpa really young to lung cancer. But he was a smoker,
like a hardcore smoker. He smoked NonStop and passed of
lung cancer. That makes sense. What I have is just
a literal, not a joke. That it's a mutation. They
(20:37):
call us mutants, and like Science magazine that rules. I'm like,
all right, one of these days I'll just walk out
of m R I with superpowers. It's gonna be great.
But my grandpa when he got diagnosed, My grandma said this. Sorry,
my grandma told me this that when my grandpa got
(20:58):
diagnosed was the day that he started dying. And that
like made sense to me in a way that I
could reverse engineer, Like, Okay, So if I just keep living,
then I'll just keep living. And if I just live
(21:22):
hard that's as cheesy as that sounded, Jesus Christ. Um,
if I just like I said, lived all the way,
like go for it every single day, then I'll just
keep being able to do that. And somehow, in spite
of all of this doctors telling me that I have
this long to live or that I could lose these functions.
(21:45):
I skateboard every single day. I could do a backflip
right now, I could do a pool though. Um I
lived a dream man. Buddha said, our life is shipped
(22:07):
by our mind. We've become what we think. Joy follows
a pure thought, like a shadow that never leaves. Am
I right in assuming you would attribute a lot of
your ability and kicking concerts us to your positive attitude,
I mean without a doubt, I without like even remote
question that, Like if you ask me what what is work?
(22:30):
The best? Was it the gam and if was it
the op tune. Was it chemo? Was it radiation? Like, no,
it's my attitude straight up, like, and that's not easy
for me to say. I'm not gonna lie like DJ.
Pre all of this ship, I would have been like,
you're a dork, dude, Like no, if you got shipped,
(22:50):
you got shipped, like because I've just been used to
like breaking bones, you know stuff that like, Okay, I
didn't understand, like, oh, I would have. I would have
liked laughed. I would have been like, man, that's great
that you feel like that, but you know, I doubt
that's what's happening. And now that it's actually happening, without
(23:11):
a doubt, I think that the best medicine that I've
had has been the fact that I want to keep going.
You have this kind of idliar personality. I mean, it's infactious.
Where did that come from? That's that answer would be
twofold my mom with out of doubt. My mom was
(23:36):
very young when she had me. She was sixteen, she
was a baby, and she's a fucking gangster like she
is the smartest, strongest woman I've ever met in my
entire life. Followed directly by my badass wife but my
(23:56):
mom went through ship. We had. Ship happened when I
was a kid. That was terrible, but I never knew
it until like later times. My mom busted her asked
to give me an absolutely amazing life. She instilled a
(24:19):
work ethic in me. She treated me like not only
like her baby, but like an adult at such a
young age that like she get. She gave me everything.
My attitude on how you just fight until you win
comes from her without a doubt. Uh. Then when I
(24:41):
was like thirteen, early thirteen, I made the psychotic choice
to fall in love with skateboarding. And I say that
because skateboarding, like I said, not only to give me everything,
but it taught me so much to be a lifelong
(25:03):
skateboarder and to pursue it with everything. Like I can
look at skateboard and be like, all right, I gave
that everything. Like you have to be kind of out
there because you just have to fall a thousand fucking times.
There's no way around it. There. It's one thing in
(25:23):
life that there is just no shortcut to whatsoever. Sure
somebody might be you know, naturally gifted or whatever, but
there's nobody that's not out there punishing themselves. It is
a a flat out ridiculous thing to do. I was
talking to a buddy about this last night, and he's
(25:43):
a wrestler, and I was like, dude, do you realize
that if aliens came down saw us, they saw you
like with the fake fight in your underwear, but beating
the hell out of your body. And then they saw
me jumping a wooden toy down stairs or trying to
land it onto rails and then land back on it,
(26:04):
They'd be like, oh my god, those things are broken.
There's something wrong with them. Like what what is that
we would look and be looked at is like this
weird low life form because it's psychotic to do what
we do. And so I just carried that over. I
just carried over like, all right, you get your asked,
(26:24):
be you get back up, and you go again, and
you go again and you go again. Well, when you
say you live with cancer, I'm not in it. And
I think that's kind of a skill set in of itself,
Like what got you to the place of being able
to sort of categorize high consortable play a part in
(26:48):
your life? Damn that's a good question. Um, I like that.
So I think A big part of it is it
would be like I kind of like alluded to it
or said it earlier. I would be in my eyes,
I would be selfish to let that ruin everything else
that I have. Like when I was I don't know,
(27:12):
probably like fifteen sixteen, I met all the dudes in
Kansas City that skateboarders that red like I start, you know,
I was getting kind of good and and they would
start saying, what's up to me at the park, and
that's when I like fifteen sixteen is when they really
started talking to me, and I remember wanting so bad
(27:35):
to be like part of that crew. And and then
seeing like going to one of the first times where
I was hanging out with them outside of just like
the park, and then you know they're their chicks were
all friends with like the other skateboarders chicks, and like
Ken's City just had this crazy, weird scene of skateboarding
(27:56):
and people that I was like, man, that would be
amazing to be like in on and and then like
at the same time, the I'm a kid and I
go home and after skating and I watched pro wrestling
for Goofy Ship like that, like Nerdy Star Wars is
(28:17):
like a passion of mine. Um And now I look
back on all those sort of things I look back
at like, you know, thirteen, fourteen, fifteen, sixteen, seventeen, eighteen, whatever,
all young me. I have every damn thing that I
like wanted. I all those guys that I like grew
(28:39):
up idolizing, even though they were just about the same
age as me. I just got back from Mexico with
literally all of them. I've gotten to travel the country with.
I can't even remember how Like I couldn't put a
number on how many of my friends because of a
wooden toy, because of a damn skateboard. I own a
professional wrestling company. I'm in the process right now. I've
(29:01):
I've opened a professional wrestling school so that people can
come and learn how to do this insanity that we do.
Ah right now, I'm opening my own venue, to host
my own events, to host charity events, to host concerts
and fundraisers, and all of this epic ship. And I
do all of that. I have all of that. I
(29:22):
have so much ship that people would kill for. And
I happened to also have a brain tune. I happen
to have to go to the doctor a lot more
than your standard everyday person. But when somebody meets me,
they don't know that. Now that I don't have to
wear the optune thing, nobody knows it. And that's the
(29:44):
fucking highest compliment in the world. When I tell people,
they're like, wait, what, Um, do you have any advice
for someone that just got diagnosed with concert? Fuck? Yeah,
I absolutely have one. Um, if you're diagnosed with anything,
if you just in a shitty day, if you're whatever,
like whether it's a diagnosis or not. But you said,
(30:05):
you know, you dove through my instagram a little bit
um the like one of the early on videos I
said it, And I don't remember exactly which one, but
I do remember it was around the time where I
was starting to realize like, huh, I still feel all right, Like,
you know, it's a few months after brain surgery and
I'm on chemo and I'm in radiation and all this,
(30:26):
and I'm like, man, I feel like they made it
seem like I was gonna be some like decrepit piece
of ship. And I'm like I'm tired, but like, okay,
fuck you guys kind of thing. Um. And And around
that time is when I started getting like responses on
social media from people that might have been going through
(30:46):
stuff and that found it through like a GBM hashtag
or whatever, and they would send me like, hey man,
thanks for like smiling and making like making not making
jokes out of it, but like smiling with it and
and that sort of thing. And so I I always
try to like build some hype in those videos, and
so in one of them, I just like blurt it out,
(31:09):
like don't let your circumstances control your life, or like,
don't let your diagnosis control your life. The obvious take
away from DJ's life with cancer is his point of view.
(31:31):
He chooses to kick cancers ass every day. He chooses
to live not die. Every day. DJ's existence is a
testament to choosing life. He's not merely surviving. He keeps
kicking concerts ass. And I've got a tremendous amount of
respect for that. You've just listened to the unimaginable. I'm
(31:55):
your host, James Brian, until next time you're writing for
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