June 18, 2025 • 40 mins
How should we view life’s greatest challenges? To find the answer, we tell the story of one of our family’s most trying moments.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
This is red Pilled America. So you're going through life,
trying to make the best of it, treating others as
you would like to be treated, carefully, making decisions, raising
a family, trying to get ahead, and then out of nowhere,
you're hit with a bombshell, something so unexpected that it
(00:23):
takes your breath away, and you may begin to think,
why me, Why is this happening to me? I think
we've all faced this moment, including Adriana.
Speaker 2 (00:33):
And I, And all of a sudden she said to me, hmm,
did you know that you have a lesion on your liver?
Speaker 3 (00:40):
You know?
Speaker 2 (00:40):
She continues to ruffle through the papers. Then she said,
and it's grown. I'm Patrick Carelci and I'm Adriana Cortes.
Speaker 1 (00:52):
And this is Red Pilled America. A storytelling show.
Speaker 2 (00:56):
This is not another talk show covering the day's news.
We're all about telling stories.
Speaker 1 (01:02):
Stories. Hollywood doesn't want you to hear stories.
Speaker 2 (01:05):
The media mocks stories about everyday Americans at the Globalist ignore.
Speaker 1 (01:10):
You can think of Red Pilled America as audio documentaries,
and we promise only one thing, the truth. Welcome to
Red Pilled America. The nightmare started for us on December
(01:32):
twenty eighth, two thousand and nine. We just didn't know
it yet. That Monday morning had actually been a victory
lap of sorts. I just got off of guest hosting
the Dennis Miller Radio Show with rising conservative star Andrew
Breitbart and Larry O'Connor, a big time theater man who
just came out as conservative. Andrew's team of renegade citizen
(01:54):
journalists had had quite a stretch of breaking stories, Andrew
himself had become a national figure, and we were all
using the guest hosting spot to sell Larry's coming out
as well as the end of a year full of accomplishments.
It was an exciting time. It seemed like the start
of something new. But it's funny how sometimes in those
moments of triumph, big troubles lurked just around the corner.
(02:18):
I was scheduled to co host the following day, and
then that night a few of us were going to
go out for dinner to celebrate our stellar year. But
my plans were about to drastically change because by the
time I got home, something was happening with my wife, Adriana.
Speaker 2 (02:37):
I started to get a very sharp pain in my abdomen,
but it was almost as if I could not locate
exactly where the pain was, but it was incredibly intense.
I was doubled over in pain.
Speaker 1 (02:56):
At first, I didn't take the situation seriously. Adriana sometimes
has a flair for the dramatic. But as a few
minutes when by in another wave of pain hitter, I
could see that something serious was happening. So where mother
Glorious stayed with our little girl, who was just a
baby at the time, and I rushed Adriana off to
the hospital.
Speaker 2 (03:14):
We went to the emergency room and everything was fine
in terms of my vitals. I was just experiencing a
ton of pain, and so they took me. They didn't
have a room for me, so I don't know if
you remember this, but they just put me in the hallway.
And at this point I was definitely I was definitely
starting to become a little bit incoherent from the pain.
(03:42):
It came in episodes. It came in short episodes, but
it was coming frequently. But when it would hit me,
all of a sudden, I would get a very very
very sharp, intense pain. All of a sudden, I would
get the sharp pain. I would say oh, I was
screaming in agony.
Speaker 1 (04:00):
We felt a bit helpless because they couldn't get a
handle on what was going on. It was like we
were living a scene from Aliens where the person is
belting an excruciating pain as a creature tries to force
its way out of the victim's body.
Speaker 2 (04:14):
So they gave me morphine, and the morphine did not work.
It was not working, it was not helping my pain,
and eventually they took me in to do an X ray.
Speaker 1 (04:24):
They performed scans of Adriana's abdomen.
Speaker 2 (04:26):
And I think that I mentioned to the doctors that
I thought maybe it was a ruptured syst on an
ovary because I had had those before, and so they
that's what they were looking for. And what ended up
happening is that they didn't see anything.
Speaker 1 (04:41):
Adriana spent the next few days in the hospital and
the pain slowly subsided.
Speaker 2 (04:46):
They were able to control the pain. What I thought
was I thought they were able to control the pain,
But now I know that that's not entirely what happened.
Speaker 1 (04:53):
The unsettling thing was that at the time they never
identified the problem. It was a big mystery and it
wasn't like we were at some RinkyDink facility. It was
Cedars SINAI thought to be one of the best hospitals
in Los Angeles. A good friend was a surgeon there,
and he made sure we were being taken care of.
It was baffling to everyone. We reluctantly went home, hoping
(05:15):
that the pain episodes wouldn't spring up again.
Speaker 2 (05:18):
And you fast forward to a couple of weeks later,
and I went to go see my gynecologist, doctor Frankel,
And when doctor Frankel looked at the skin, he said,
I don't think it was a ruptured cyst because there
was no fluid in your uterus. I guess typically when
there's a ruptured cyst in the uterus, you see fluid,
(05:38):
and there was nothing there. And they never figured out
what it was.
Speaker 1 (05:44):
Her gynecologists figured that Adriana seemed to fine, the episode
was behind her, so if it happened again, she should
just go back to the emergency room.
Speaker 2 (05:52):
It was a great, great doctor. He was a great gynecologist,
but he ended up passing away from cancer about two
years after that. He was already sick. He was pretty old,
and I looked good to him. I looked healthy. You
know he was a very, very practical man, but we
never we never looked into it. But it's still just
it didn't sit well with me. I felt I felt tired.
Speaker 1 (06:22):
Ever since we had our daughter. Adriana was plagued with fatigue.
I didn't think much of it at the time. Anyone
that knows Adriana knows that she loves to sleep and
that I frequently get in the way of her favorite pastime.
There's even a family legend that she was born napping.
I actually used to poke fun of her on this
topic because, aside from being married, we've always worked together.
(06:43):
So when she was too tired to deal with work issues,
I'd give her a good ribbing about being quote unquote lazy.
But this unsolved pain mystery was something different. So her
friend told her about a concept that we weren't familiar
with in medical care, but it is quite common in
elite circles. Adriana was turned on to something called a
concierge doctor.
Speaker 2 (07:02):
Well, when you have a sierge doctor, they're at your
disposal all the time. If you need an appointment for anything,
you can always get in. You have their personal phone number,
they can email them. You can get a hold of
your concierge doctor at any time, as opposed to your
normal doctor that you have via insurance, you have to
go through their practice. When you pay a concierge doctor directly,
(07:25):
you have access to that doctor, real access. I have
a very sensitive system, and for a long time after
I gave birth, I just didn't feel one hundred percent,
So I sought out a concierge doctor because I just
felt as if I needed better care. We never really
(07:45):
discovered why I had gone to the hospital in two
thousand and nine. We never came to a conclusion, so.
Speaker 1 (07:51):
We thought this was a good avenue to pursue. A
doctor was recommended to her, and for several years he
was her primary physician. We paid her a yearly fee.
She saw him as needed, including a once a year exam,
and any tests that needed to be done were done
through insurance. But when the effects of Obamacare hit her
concierge doctor saw an opportunity to go even higher end
(08:12):
and his fees skyrocketed.
Speaker 2 (08:14):
And so I think he wanted less patience for more money,
and then according to him, he was going to give
them better service. He ended up going to very high end,
high end to concierge service, which we could not afford.
Speaker 1 (08:26):
So around the end of twenty thirteen, he and Essence
sold the group of patients that couldn't make the jump
to another concierge doctor, doctor Chang.
Speaker 2 (08:34):
When the first time I ever went to go see
her after doctor after my original concierge doctor sold his
practice to her. We sat down together for an hour
and she went over all of my medical charts. She
wanted to get to know me. She was fantastic. We
immediately had a great rapport. So we're sitting there in
the doctor's office and she's looking through all of my paperwork,
and all of a sudden, she said to me, hmm,
(08:57):
did you know that you have a lesion on your liver?
And I thought, allesion, Like when I think of alesion.
I don't know why, but the first thing that entered
my mind was a scab. It must be like some
sort of a scab my liver allsion. And you know,
she continues to ruffle through the papers and she said, hmm,
(09:18):
and it's grown, And then I sort of perked up
a little. Then I, you know, immediately thought, wait a minute,
what do you mean allsion? Do you mean a tumor,
and she said, well, I don't know. We don't know
what it is. And I said, could it be cancer?
I mean, immediately, you know, my heart is beating, I'm nervous.
(09:40):
I have something in my liver that's growing, and I
don't know what it is. And she said, let's get
an MRI of this right away.
Speaker 1 (09:49):
A chance. A few years after the two thousand and
nine pain incident, Adriana had some scans done of her
abdomen for another reason. That scan also showed a spot
in her liver, and the spot appeared larger than the
one in the earlier scans they measure.
Speaker 2 (10:03):
When they took the measurement, they could see that it
You could see from the images alone, just by looking
at the liver that it had grown. It had grown
a lot.
Speaker 1 (10:14):
Folks, we are seeing something truly disturbing. Anti Semitism is
on the rise around the world, and sadly, right here
in America, Jewish schools being targeted, synagogues threatened, families living
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in our lifetime. And let me say this, now is
not the time to be silent. This is the moment
to take a stand. That's why I want to tell
(10:35):
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They are on the front lines providing real help where
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(10:56):
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(11:18):
Every dollar helps. Don't wait, be the difference. Visit IFCJ
dot org or call eight eight eight four eight eight IFCJ.
Do it now. Welcome back to red Pilled America. So
Adriana's fancy concierge doctor missed the growth of allsion in
her liver, but in one visit her new physician, doctor Chang,
(11:41):
caught it.
Speaker 2 (11:45):
After Doctor Chang told me that I had allsion, I
went home and I was so worried about myself with
I don't know, I'm definitely dying, definitely not good. How
am I going to tell my loving husband about my
impending debt? All day I just contemplated how I was
(12:05):
going to break the news to you that I was dying.
I was surely dying. Finally, we were getting into bed
that night. Before I got into bed, I just blurted
out to you, I said, honey.
Speaker 3 (12:19):
I have a lesion on my liver.
Speaker 2 (12:21):
And you were looking at your iPad and you just
kind of nodded, just sort of ignored me. And of
course I immediately got hot. I was furious because here
I am, you know, near death, and you're ignoring me.
And I said, did you not just hear what I said?
I have a lesion on my liver? And then you go,
(12:46):
what does that mean?
Speaker 3 (12:47):
You mean like a tumor?
Speaker 2 (12:47):
And I said, well, we don't know. So I basically
said to you, it was there in two thousand and
nine when I the time we went to the hospital,
and it's grown. Since then, we know that it's grown.
And you said, well, it's probably not cancer, because if
it were cancer, you would probably be dead by now.
You're very logical. You thought, well, we know it's been
(13:10):
there for five years and you're still here yelling at me,
so you're gonna be just fine. It's not a big deal.
And that sort of did make me feel better. I thought,
you know what, that's true. Of course, I then called
doctor Chang and I said, well, if it were cancer,
don't you think i'd be dead by now? And she said, yeah,
(13:30):
if it were cancer, you'd probably be very sick by now.
I agree with that.
Speaker 1 (13:35):
At the time, we had a lot going on. We'd
just come off a long struggle with parents at our
daughter's school. A creepy father was getting into bed with
other people's kids and we called them out. That turned
into a nearly nine month long ordeal.
Speaker 2 (13:48):
When we found out that I had the tumors in
my liver, we were just coming off of the creepy stuff.
We were in the thick of the situation with the creepies,
but at that point we had to shift focus. We
also knew that we had done everything we could possibly
do it with that particular situation, and it was trying
for us to move on and to focus on my health.
Speaker 1 (14:08):
We also had some uncommon struggles with work. Shortly After
Adrianna's pain incident, business began to pick up for our
small marketing firm. We stepped away from the citizen journalism
to take on the incoming work, but were still involved
in the culture war. We played behind the scenes role
producing a national touring global warming debate, working with our
(14:30):
friends in the media to open up the discussion and
tone down the apocalyptic rhetoric. The campaigns had been so
successful that by the beginning of twenty thirteen, we sold
our biggest project ever to an enormous global brand. Our
business model was a bit abnormal. We were kind of
creative hired guns. When a client needed an out of
ordinary marketing idea, they'd come to us to develop something,
(14:54):
and if they signed on to the project, we made
a percentage of the overall budget what's considered a creative fee.
It was always a bit of a gamble. Put hundreds,
even thousands of hours into proposal and nothing would come
of it. But with the right project it could be
very lucrative, and this was one of those times. Our
client was one of the largest companies in the world
(15:16):
and the project we sold to them became so hot
that they were gearing up to put an extraordinary amount
of money into it. Our idea was becoming a mega
project for one of the biggest brands on the planet,
and as a result, our fees were going to be
life changing. But amazing projects are few and far between.
There was a bit of a power struggle over who
was going to run it, which was new for us,
(15:37):
because one hundred percent of the time, over a decade
long relationship, our company managed the projects we sold to
our clients. In the end, they promised we'd run it
and would sort out the details later, But when it
came time to announce the project to the world, they
refused to follow through on their promise. An ambitious young
brand manager wanted to control the production for this sexy
(15:59):
new concept, so they terminated our involvement in the project.
The problem was, they still owed us our creative feet,
and by this time the project had grown exponentially think
blockbuster movie size budget. So what did they do? They
denied they owed us anything. Large global brands know they
(16:27):
can pull this off on the little guy For obvious reasons.
Going up against the behemoth is an uphill task, whether
you're right or wrong, So we began politely negotiating with
them in hopes that we could come to an agreement
and avoid any legal process. This was all in play
when Adriana's doctor found the spot on her liver, and
so she was hesitant to take on any additional.
Speaker 2 (16:49):
Stress, and so I put off the MRI for five months.
But every single day it haunted me, and I thought,
I'm a mom, I have a responsibility to get to
the bar of this. But the truth is there was
a part of me that didn't want to deal with it.
I just I knew in my gut that it was
(17:10):
not good. I really, I believe so strongly in an intuition,
and you know when something's wrong with you, and I
just I knew it. I knew it. Finally, five months later,
I went to get the MRI. So after I got
the MRI, I went to see doctor Chang. My mom
went with me, and she confirmed that it was a
(17:32):
tumor and that there was also a second tumor, and
the original tumor was very large.
Speaker 1 (17:44):
The tumor was taking up an entire side of her liver.
Speaker 2 (17:48):
So at that point doctor Chang said, you have to
go see a liver specialist.
Speaker 1 (17:53):
We all remember those big traumatic moments in life. The
first time you broke a bone or your first car accident,
but the first time you hear someone close to you
dies forever seared in our minds. When Adriana walked in
from the doctor's office, this was one of those moments.
Our young daughter was in the kitchen with me, and
Adriana came in, shaking her head and looking me dead
(18:14):
in the eyes while mouthing not good, not good. Up
until then, the whole thing was theoretical. We actually tried
to play it down as much as possible. We were young,
too young to be dealing with a life threatening illness
in anyways, this spot had been there for years, and
(18:36):
most of the time she was still just normal, o'd Adriana.
But the look she gave me changed all that. Her
difficulty getting pregnant, the pain incident that sent her to
the hospital, the fatigue she'd been experiencing for years, my
joking with her about being lazy, it all came rushing back.
This lingering unease that she'd been feeling going back at
least seven years, was because of this foreign object growing
(18:59):
inside her body. Doctor Chang connected us with the most
celebrated surgeon in this arena, the man that pioneered the
liver transplant. When any major health concern develops, physicians typically
pull up the entire medical history of a patient looking
for the first sign of the problem, and ultimately we
learned from an image Adriana had done during her pregnancy
(19:20):
that the spot first showed up in her medical history
in two thousand and seven. Needless to say, we were
incredibly nervous. I'd recently lost a childhood friend, Lewis, to
pancreatic cancer. It was stunning to everyone that knew him.
Speaker 2 (19:33):
We also started to learn that just because a tumor
started off benign didn't mean that it was going to
stay that way. We also learned that in two thousand
and nine, what happened is that the larger of the
two tumors had mutated, and that what I had experienced
(19:57):
was some sort of a burst of the tumor, and
that I was actually very lucky to have survived that.
Speaker 1 (20:04):
So we went to see the doctor that pioneered liver transplants,
and he presented us with one of the most challenging
dilemmas in our lives.
Speaker 2 (20:13):
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Join today and help us save America one story at
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Speaker 1 (20:29):
Welcome back to Red Pilled America. So when Adriana learned
that her tumor had grown, she initially held off from
getting another MRI. We were going through a challenging time
and she didn't want to add to the stress. But
she ultimately came to the conclusion that she was a
mother and needed to deal with the issue head on
for the sake of the family. So we went to
(20:50):
the doctor that pioneered liver transplants.
Speaker 2 (20:53):
And he looks at the scans. He says to us,
this looks like an FnH tumor.
Speaker 1 (20:59):
To me an FnH tumor is basically a benign tumor,
not yet cancerous. The doctor continued, but I.
Speaker 2 (21:06):
Don't know for sure because there is a portion of
the larger tumor that looks a little different than we
typically see. It looks benign to me, but I can't
tell you it is for sure. But we know it's
been there since two thousand and nine and you're still alive,
so you're probably okay. If I were you, I would
watch it for a while. I would just sit back,
(21:27):
don't do anything, leave the tumors alone, and let's wait
and see if they continue to grow. Because you'll need
a liver resection. We'll have to take out a portion
of your liver, a third of your liver. And he
said this surgery can kill you. And I thought, I
(21:49):
don't like that. I don't like that answer. I don't
want to just sit and wait. He was like, Eh,
you're young, you're alive, You're fine right now, Let's just
wait and see what happens. And that did not work
for me at all. I'm the very beginning, I knew
that I wanted to get the tumor out. I wanted
to take the tumor out. I felt like I was young,
I was healthy, I could survive the surgery. So I said,
(22:12):
we're getting a second opinion. So I went back to
doctor Chang and I told her what happened. I told
her I did not like what he said at all.
So she found me another doctor, and this time this
doctor was out of Cedars Cedar Sinai in Los Angeles.
He was a young Indian doctor, surgeon, doctor Animali. And
we got an appointment to see him. He saw us
(22:32):
right away. He looked at everything. He said, I can't
tell you this is not cancer. And he said to me, listen,
if you were my wife, I would advise you to
get it out. And so many people advised me against that,
and I thought, I've given birth. What could be harder
than giving birth.
Speaker 1 (22:53):
What we didn't know until learning about the surgery was
that the liver is the only organ in the human
body that can actually regenerate. Once a portion is cut out,
it grows back to its original size. As we probed
more about how the surgery would be done, a picture
of the path ahead began to appear. This was not
(23:14):
going to be a walk in the park. The surgeon
illustrated with a marker the incision that need to be
made to open up her body to get access to
the organ. It was basically a large reversed l shape
that started at the bottom middle of a rib cage,
down over her stomach, then to the left along her
waistline and.
Speaker 2 (23:32):
Up and then you flap the skin over. I thought,
that doesn't sound fun. Hmmm, this might be worse than
giving birth.
Speaker 1 (23:45):
Ultimately, we decided we were going to move forward with
the surgery, so we needed to get some things in order.
Speaker 2 (23:50):
Because we knew that there was a possibility that I
was not going to make it through surgery.
Speaker 1 (23:55):
We made sure our will was squared away, and we
also wanted to get a plan in place to make
things as easy as possible for our daughter during the
surgery and God willing, the recovery. We wanted life to
go on for her as normal as possible because as
an early grade schooler, she was just too young to
feel the weight of these events. She also wasn't going
to be able to see or visit Adriana while she
(24:17):
was in the hospital, so Adriana asked the parents of
our daughter's friends to set up playdates, and they really
came through. For roughly two weeks, our girl had a
full schedule. We also enlisted our moms to help. The
plan was my mom would watch our daughter, stay with
her at night and get her to summer school and
her playdates, and me and Adriana's mom, Gloria, would alternate,
(24:40):
one watching Adriana in post operation recovery and the other
relieving my mom as needed. Our daughter's playdates kicked off
at Disneyland with her best friend's family.
Speaker 2 (24:50):
I wanted her to be at the happiest place on earth.
If I was going to die in that moment, I
wanted her to remember being it.
Speaker 3 (25:02):
Sorry, that makes me sad. I wanted her, you know,
to to have a good memory at that moment, you know,
to remember that day just being her being in a
good place.
Speaker 1 (25:26):
We had everything in place, and the date was set
for early July to get this thing out of her body.
The morning of the surgery, we arrived at five am
so that they could prep her for the procedure.
Speaker 2 (25:37):
When surgery day came along, I was ready. I felt strong.
You were nervous. You were not in the best shape
that day. You were very, very nervous. My mom, she
was handling things pretty well, but come surgery day, she
was she was starting to break. And we had I
had a good friend of mine, Melissa, was there with us.
(25:58):
We got to the hospital, they took me back, They
prepped me. I remember sitting on the gurney. They gave
me something to relax. You walked in with my mom
and Melissa.
Speaker 1 (26:07):
The doctor told us the surgery would last about three hours.
To keep us abreast of the progress, he'd give us
an update every hour. Or so, everyone left to give
us a moment alone. Adriana and I kissed, said our goodbyes,
and I quietly prayed her life was now in his hands.
I went back to the waiting room, and shortly after
(26:28):
a friend of my mother in law's joined us. I
must have been driving everyone crazy because I couldn't stop talking.
There wasn't a thought that came to mind that I
didn't verbalize. The first hour came along, and the surgeon
gave us an update, as promised, things were progressing. Then
the second hour came and again they updated us with
a simple things are going fine kind of message. But
(26:50):
it was the third hour that things began to unravel
in more ways than one. He may recall that our
former client owed us a nice chunk of money for
a creative fee that they were now trying to stiff
us on.
Speaker 3 (27:01):
Well.
Speaker 1 (27:02):
The negotiations said been carrying on right up until the surgery,
and they weren't going so well. If you've ever been
drawn into a legal dispute with an enormous fortune ten company,
you know that they have extraordinary power beyond mere mortals.
Disputes like ours become a long, methodical chess match. One
that they have perfected over decades. What you learn is
(27:23):
that they're not only in the business of hawking whatever
product or service they sell, They're also in the business
of winning in court. Our former client was so adept
at this game that they pulled strings to force our
lawyer of ten years to step away from representing us
in the dispute because of an alleged conflict of interest. Apparently,
someone in our lawyer's firm represented our former client in
(27:44):
the past, giving them the option to disqualify the firm
from representing us. They wanted us to start over with
new counsel, so we relied on a lawyer friend, Devin,
to get us through the hump until we could secure
an alternative lawyer. Well. As Adriana was on the cutting
board in our three, our former client pulled a fast one,
(28:05):
claiming through some twisted reading of our contract that we
had to file paperwork that day to start the legal
process to resolve our dispute. If not, they were going
to file a motion that would block us from ever
pursuing our payment in the future and our creative fee
would be lost forever. So as an enormous section of
my wife's liver was being removed. I was forced to
(28:27):
make the decision right then and there on, taking one
of the largest companies on the planet to court. This
was not the type of major business decision I made
without my better half. After some guidance from Devon for
who I'll be indebted to for life, I decided to
file the paperwork to initiate the mediation process. But as
this decision was being made, the third hour came and
(28:49):
went with no update from the surgeon. As the fourth
hour approached, there was still no word, and by now
the surgery was supposed to have been done. I asked
for a status and there was none. The surgeon was busy,
was the response. Then the fifth and sixth hour came
and went still nothing. What I didn't know was that
Adriana was fighting for her life. Apparently the tumor was
(29:12):
in the worst possible spot. What the MRI scans didn't
show was that the tumor was almost blocking the main
artery into her liver, called the portal vein. So to
cut out the mass, the surgeons had to carefully shave
away at the liver to avoid cutting the main artery,
an act that would have led to almost certain death
(29:36):
In fact. On three separate occasions, they had to stop
the surgery, pack her with ice, and give Adriana blood transfusion.
As hour seven arrived, the tension in the waiting room
became almost unbearable. I'd shifted from chaddy to complete silence.
But then, finally, as despair started to seep in, the
(29:57):
doctor came out of the surgery room. Had survived barely,
and the initial word was that there was no cancer.
Adriana was moved into intensive care.
Speaker 2 (30:13):
I remember I couldn't open my eyes, but I was
happy to be alive. I knew that I had I
had survived the surgery, and that was step one. Just
survived the surgery great because there was a chance that
I wasn't going to live, and I actually came very
close to dying on the table. So I'm like, yeah,
I'm alive, I'm alive, I'm a lot.
Speaker 1 (30:34):
I finally got to see my girl, and to my surprise,
she was jovial. We dodged a bullet. If Adriana hadn't
gone with her gut and instead listened to the original,
world renowned doctor, the tumor would have likely blocked her portal.
Speaker 2 (30:48):
Vein, and they realized that there was a mutation that
had occurred. Had it been left in, it would have
probably mutated very very soon to cancer.
Speaker 1 (31:00):
We thought the rough patch was behind us. Little did
we know that the ride was just getting started.
Speaker 2 (31:06):
And when they took me into the recovery room in
the ICU, I was having a very hard time swallowing,
and so I kept calling the nurse over and I
would say in a whisper to him, I can't swallow,
I can't swallow, and he said, it's just because your
throat is dry, because you had a tube in your throat.
So I kept saying, to you, I feel like something's wrong,
(31:29):
something's wrong, and the nurse said, no, no, it's the
anesthesia talking. I see this all the time. So I said,
to you, call my mom because I felt like no
one was listening to me. I knew there was something wrong, so.
Speaker 1 (31:41):
I called her mom, Gloria, to come help out. Gloria,
who I typically call mom as well, had been through
major surgeries herself and by now was slightly more arrested
than both Adrianna and I, who've been up for roughly
twenty four hours. Gloria was by far more equipped to
deal with the situation.
Speaker 2 (31:58):
My mom got there lickety split. She walked into the room.
She looked at me and she said, she's having an
allergic reaction, and I was. I was having an allergic
reaction to morphine and my throat was actually swelling shot
and they immediately took me off of the morphine and
it scared them and it was a big deal. I
remember that. So at this point then the nursing staff
(32:19):
didn't know what to do. It's like four in the morning.
They take me off all of the pain meds, and
within a couple of hours I was in the most
excruciating pain that I had ever been in. The doctor
came in to do his rounds very early morning, and
I couldn't speak from the pain, and when he realized
that they had taken me off of all the pain meds,
(32:41):
he he was furious. So they finally were able to
get the pain under control, but it took a while.
Speaker 1 (32:49):
We had a major hiccup, but now everything was back
on track. It was the morning my mom dropped our
daughter off for summer school, and the doctors had finally
figured out a cocktail that lowered the pain enough to
get Adriana to sleep as I looked at her lying there,
a sense of comfort rolled over me. Things had stabilized,
she was now on the road to recovery. But at
(33:10):
around noon, as I sat there with my mother in
law watching Adriana sleep, my cell phone rang. It was
my mom. I didn't know this in the moment, but
apparently she'd been concerned when my brother, who suffers from
mental illness, wasn't answering her calls. So after dropping off
my daughter at summer school, she went to check on him,
(33:32):
and when she did, she found him unconscious in the
living room. Apparently he'd attempted to end it all and
was now clinging to life in an emergency room. I
can't imagine what my mother must have gone through when
she found him, but in the midst of the worst
moment in her life, her voice was calm, almost comforting.
Speaker 3 (33:51):
To me.
Speaker 1 (33:52):
She must have known it was an extraordinary moment for everyone.
She told me she'd have to stay at the hospital
with him. She said goodbye, and I hung up. The
news was devastating. My wife was in one hospital recovering
from major organ surgery, my baby brother was clinging to
life in another. It was a surreal moment. The kind
of thing that would be unbelievable if put in a
(34:14):
Hollywood script. I couldn't help but feel some guilt for
pulling my mom away from her son to help me
with my daughter. I gathered myself and re entered the
recovery room and asked Gloria to join me in the hallway.
Adriana was asleep when I told her what had happened.
It was the first and only time that I had
(34:35):
ever seen her cry. After we allowed ourselves a few
moments to grieve, we quickly recomposed ourselves because we had
to come up with a new plan. We were down
a man. We agreed that there was no need to
tell Adriana what had happened. She was in no shape
to take that on emotionally. I would have to go
and pick up our daughter from summer school, and Gloria
(34:55):
would call my brother in law, her son Jay, to
see if he could briefly babysit my daughter, so I
could rush to the ICU to comfort my mother and
potentially say goodbye to my brother. If all this wasn't enough.
As I was walking my daughter out from summer school,
(35:18):
I received an email notification to my disbelief a recently
acquired client was suing our company over a contract dispute.
Early in the year, we signed an agreement to execute
a brief marketing campaign for a relatively young company, but
as we were producing the project per the contract, the
client wanted to make material changes to the campaign, ones
(35:38):
that would substantially change the budget of the project. When
I informed them that this would increase the cost, they
declined the budget increase and swiftly terminated the contract, demanding
we pay back the initial fees. We, of course refused,
so they decided to sue us in hopes of getting
their money back. It was shocking. After almost twenty years
of business, we'd never been in a single lawsuit, nor
(36:02):
even been close to entering one. Now, in less than
forty eight hours, we'd been forced into two during the
most trying personal time in our lives. I took my
daughter home and was met soon after by my brother
in law, who came through when we needed him. I
went to the hospital to check on my wife, and
she was sleeping with my mother in law by her side.
(36:23):
Once I knew her situation was stabilized, I jumped back
in the car and began the trek to the other hospital.
To say I was a wreck would be the understatement
of the year. I was practically drunk with grief and exhaustion.
The weight of the situation was overwhelming driving that car,
(36:44):
I never wailed so hard in my life. Why us?
Why was this happening to us? What did we do
to deserve this? Why were we being tested? As I
drove down the four or five freeway, desperately trying to
stay on the road, the last word tested repair hed
in my head and I said out loud, You're being tested,
(37:07):
your being tested right now. As bad as that moment was,
if I didn't keep it together while I was flying
down the fast lane, things could even be worse. I
could crash and die right now. Get it together, I thought,
your brother is still alive, your wife is still alive.
The lawsuits mean nothing. And in that despair, I had
(37:31):
a moment of clarity, Why is this happening to me?
In those trying times? Your being tested? Things can always
be worse than they are right now, even in moments
of great despair. I pulled myself together and was thankful
for what I had. I was blessed we were all
still in the game. In the end, My brother survived.
(37:53):
He's still struggling with mental illness, but he's alive. It
was a long battle, but we also won the lawsuit
with one of the biggest companies on the planet. It
didn't turn out as we hoped, but they were still
forced to meet their obligation to our tiny, little firm,
but that's a story for another time. After a few
months of back and forth, the second company that suited
(38:15):
us smartly decided to drop their case, and most importantly,
my Adriana, as you know, is still here with us today.
Her struggle went on for quite some time. After about
ten days, she was released from the hospital, but about
a month and a half later she was readmitted. She'd
gone septic, which is a life threatening illness where the
(38:37):
body fights off an infection that spreads through the bloodstream.
But my little fighter survived that as well, and honestly,
we may be facing this health struggle for the rest
of our lives, but right now we're still in the game.
We tell you this story because if you two are
going through a rough patch and it feels like the
(38:57):
ceiling is caving in, like your world is coming to
an end, please realize that you are being tested as
bad as the moment may seem, you are blessed to
have what you have. Find solace in that undeniable fact.
Don't let the despair take you out. You have the
strength within you to pass the test. Look around you
(39:21):
and hug everyone a little harder, Tell them you love them,
and apologize for the mistakes you may have made in
this short but fantastic journey we call life. And now
I want to take my own advice to Adriana. We've
been through so much and I'm blessed to have gone
(39:44):
through it all with you by my side. I'm sorry
I didn't see your fatigue for what it was. I
promise I'll never make that mistake again. I love you, honey.
Speaker 2 (39:54):
Red Pilled America is an iHeartRadio original podcast. It's owned
and produced by Patrick Carrelci and me Adriana Cortes of
Informed Ventures. Now. You can get add free access to
our entire archive of episodes by becoming a backstage subscriber.
To subscribe, visit Redpilled America dot com and click join
in the topmenu. Thanks for listening.
This is red Pilled America. So you're going through life,
trying to make the best of it, treating others as
you would like to be treated, carefully, making decisions, raising
a family, trying to get ahead, and then out of nowhere,
you're hit with a bombshell, something so unexpected that it
(00:23):
takes your breath away, and you may begin to think,
why me, Why is this happening to me? I think
we've all faced this moment, including Adriana.
Speaker 2 (00:33):
And I, And all of a sudden she said to me, hmm,
did you know that you have a lesion on your liver?
Speaker 3 (00:40):
You know?
Speaker 2 (00:40):
She continues to ruffle through the papers. Then she said,
and it's grown. I'm Patrick Carelci and I'm Adriana Cortes.
Speaker 1 (00:52):
And this is Red Pilled America. A storytelling show.
Speaker 2 (00:56):
This is not another talk show covering the day's news.
We're all about telling stories.
Speaker 1 (01:02):
Stories. Hollywood doesn't want you to hear stories.
Speaker 2 (01:05):
The media mocks stories about everyday Americans at the Globalist ignore.
Speaker 1 (01:10):
You can think of Red Pilled America as audio documentaries,
and we promise only one thing, the truth. Welcome to
Red Pilled America. The nightmare started for us on December
(01:32):
twenty eighth, two thousand and nine. We just didn't know
it yet. That Monday morning had actually been a victory
lap of sorts. I just got off of guest hosting
the Dennis Miller Radio Show with rising conservative star Andrew
Breitbart and Larry O'Connor, a big time theater man who
just came out as conservative. Andrew's team of renegade citizen
(01:54):
journalists had had quite a stretch of breaking stories, Andrew
himself had become a national figure, and we were all
using the guest hosting spot to sell Larry's coming out
as well as the end of a year full of accomplishments.
It was an exciting time. It seemed like the start
of something new. But it's funny how sometimes in those
moments of triumph, big troubles lurked just around the corner.
(02:18):
I was scheduled to co host the following day, and
then that night a few of us were going to
go out for dinner to celebrate our stellar year. But
my plans were about to drastically change because by the
time I got home, something was happening with my wife, Adriana.
Speaker 2 (02:37):
I started to get a very sharp pain in my abdomen,
but it was almost as if I could not locate
exactly where the pain was, but it was incredibly intense.
I was doubled over in pain.
Speaker 1 (02:56):
At first, I didn't take the situation seriously. Adriana sometimes
has a flair for the dramatic. But as a few
minutes when by in another wave of pain hitter, I
could see that something serious was happening. So where mother
Glorious stayed with our little girl, who was just a
baby at the time, and I rushed Adriana off to
the hospital.
Speaker 2 (03:14):
We went to the emergency room and everything was fine
in terms of my vitals. I was just experiencing a
ton of pain, and so they took me. They didn't
have a room for me, so I don't know if
you remember this, but they just put me in the hallway.
And at this point I was definitely I was definitely
starting to become a little bit incoherent from the pain.
(03:42):
It came in episodes. It came in short episodes, but
it was coming frequently. But when it would hit me,
all of a sudden, I would get a very very
very sharp, intense pain. All of a sudden, I would
get the sharp pain. I would say oh, I was
screaming in agony.
Speaker 1 (04:00):
We felt a bit helpless because they couldn't get a
handle on what was going on. It was like we
were living a scene from Aliens where the person is
belting an excruciating pain as a creature tries to force
its way out of the victim's body.
Speaker 2 (04:14):
So they gave me morphine, and the morphine did not work.
It was not working, it was not helping my pain,
and eventually they took me in to do an X ray.
Speaker 1 (04:24):
They performed scans of Adriana's abdomen.
Speaker 2 (04:26):
And I think that I mentioned to the doctors that
I thought maybe it was a ruptured syst on an
ovary because I had had those before, and so they
that's what they were looking for. And what ended up
happening is that they didn't see anything.
Speaker 1 (04:41):
Adriana spent the next few days in the hospital and
the pain slowly subsided.
Speaker 2 (04:46):
They were able to control the pain. What I thought
was I thought they were able to control the pain,
But now I know that that's not entirely what happened.
Speaker 1 (04:53):
The unsettling thing was that at the time they never
identified the problem. It was a big mystery and it
wasn't like we were at some RinkyDink facility. It was
Cedars SINAI thought to be one of the best hospitals
in Los Angeles. A good friend was a surgeon there,
and he made sure we were being taken care of.
It was baffling to everyone. We reluctantly went home, hoping
(05:15):
that the pain episodes wouldn't spring up again.
Speaker 2 (05:18):
And you fast forward to a couple of weeks later,
and I went to go see my gynecologist, doctor Frankel,
And when doctor Frankel looked at the skin, he said,
I don't think it was a ruptured cyst because there
was no fluid in your uterus. I guess typically when
there's a ruptured cyst in the uterus, you see fluid,
(05:38):
and there was nothing there. And they never figured out
what it was.
Speaker 1 (05:44):
Her gynecologists figured that Adriana seemed to fine, the episode
was behind her, so if it happened again, she should
just go back to the emergency room.
Speaker 2 (05:52):
It was a great, great doctor. He was a great gynecologist,
but he ended up passing away from cancer about two
years after that. He was already sick. He was pretty old,
and I looked good to him. I looked healthy. You
know he was a very, very practical man, but we
never we never looked into it. But it's still just
it didn't sit well with me. I felt I felt tired.
Speaker 1 (06:22):
Ever since we had our daughter. Adriana was plagued with fatigue.
I didn't think much of it at the time. Anyone
that knows Adriana knows that she loves to sleep and
that I frequently get in the way of her favorite pastime.
There's even a family legend that she was born napping.
I actually used to poke fun of her on this
topic because, aside from being married, we've always worked together.
(06:43):
So when she was too tired to deal with work issues,
I'd give her a good ribbing about being quote unquote lazy.
But this unsolved pain mystery was something different. So her
friend told her about a concept that we weren't familiar
with in medical care, but it is quite common in
elite circles. Adriana was turned on to something called a
concierge doctor.
Speaker 2 (07:02):
Well, when you have a sierge doctor, they're at your
disposal all the time. If you need an appointment for anything,
you can always get in. You have their personal phone number,
they can email them. You can get a hold of
your concierge doctor at any time, as opposed to your
normal doctor that you have via insurance, you have to
go through their practice. When you pay a concierge doctor directly,
(07:25):
you have access to that doctor, real access. I have
a very sensitive system, and for a long time after
I gave birth, I just didn't feel one hundred percent,
So I sought out a concierge doctor because I just
felt as if I needed better care. We never really
(07:45):
discovered why I had gone to the hospital in two
thousand and nine. We never came to a conclusion, so.
Speaker 1 (07:51):
We thought this was a good avenue to pursue. A
doctor was recommended to her, and for several years he
was her primary physician. We paid her a yearly fee.
She saw him as needed, including a once a year exam,
and any tests that needed to be done were done
through insurance. But when the effects of Obamacare hit her
concierge doctor saw an opportunity to go even higher end
(08:12):
and his fees skyrocketed.
Speaker 2 (08:14):
And so I think he wanted less patience for more money,
and then according to him, he was going to give
them better service. He ended up going to very high end,
high end to concierge service, which we could not afford.
Speaker 1 (08:26):
So around the end of twenty thirteen, he and Essence
sold the group of patients that couldn't make the jump
to another concierge doctor, doctor Chang.
Speaker 2 (08:34):
When the first time I ever went to go see
her after doctor after my original concierge doctor sold his
practice to her. We sat down together for an hour
and she went over all of my medical charts. She
wanted to get to know me. She was fantastic. We
immediately had a great rapport. So we're sitting there in
the doctor's office and she's looking through all of my paperwork,
and all of a sudden, she said to me, hmm,
(08:57):
did you know that you have a lesion on your liver?
And I thought, allesion, Like when I think of alesion.
I don't know why, but the first thing that entered
my mind was a scab. It must be like some
sort of a scab my liver allsion. And you know,
she continues to ruffle through the papers and she said, hmm,
(09:18):
and it's grown, And then I sort of perked up
a little. Then I, you know, immediately thought, wait a minute,
what do you mean allsion? Do you mean a tumor,
and she said, well, I don't know. We don't know
what it is. And I said, could it be cancer?
I mean, immediately, you know, my heart is beating, I'm nervous.
(09:40):
I have something in my liver that's growing, and I
don't know what it is. And she said, let's get
an MRI of this right away.
Speaker 1 (09:49):
A chance. A few years after the two thousand and
nine pain incident, Adriana had some scans done of her
abdomen for another reason. That scan also showed a spot
in her liver, and the spot appeared larger than the
one in the earlier scans they measure.
Speaker 2 (10:03):
When they took the measurement, they could see that it
You could see from the images alone, just by looking
at the liver that it had grown. It had grown
a lot.
Speaker 1 (10:14):
Folks, we are seeing something truly disturbing. Anti Semitism is
on the rise around the world, and sadly, right here
in America, Jewish schools being targeted, synagogues threatened, families living
in fear. It's something we hoped we'd never see again
in our lifetime. And let me say this, now is
not the time to be silent. This is the moment
to take a stand. That's why I want to tell
(10:35):
you about the International Fellowship of Christians and Jews or IFCJ.
They are on the front lines providing real help where
it's needed most. They're giving food and shelter to Jewish
families under threat, building bomb shelters for children, helping survivors
of hate rebuild their lives. And they don't just respond
to crisis, they work every day to prevent it. Your
(10:56):
gift of only forty five dollars will help support their
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Your gift is urgently needed. Please call eight eight eight
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(11:18):
Every dollar helps. Don't wait, be the difference. Visit IFCJ
dot org or call eight eight eight four eight eight IFCJ.
Do it now. Welcome back to red Pilled America. So
Adriana's fancy concierge doctor missed the growth of allsion in
her liver, but in one visit her new physician, doctor Chang,
(11:41):
caught it.
Speaker 2 (11:45):
After Doctor Chang told me that I had allsion, I
went home and I was so worried about myself with
I don't know, I'm definitely dying, definitely not good. How
am I going to tell my loving husband about my
impending debt? All day I just contemplated how I was
(12:05):
going to break the news to you that I was dying.
I was surely dying. Finally, we were getting into bed
that night. Before I got into bed, I just blurted
out to you, I said, honey.
Speaker 3 (12:19):
I have a lesion on my liver.
Speaker 2 (12:21):
And you were looking at your iPad and you just
kind of nodded, just sort of ignored me. And of
course I immediately got hot. I was furious because here
I am, you know, near death, and you're ignoring me.
And I said, did you not just hear what I said?
I have a lesion on my liver? And then you go,
(12:46):
what does that mean?
Speaker 3 (12:47):
You mean like a tumor?
Speaker 2 (12:47):
And I said, well, we don't know. So I basically
said to you, it was there in two thousand and
nine when I the time we went to the hospital,
and it's grown. Since then, we know that it's grown.
And you said, well, it's probably not cancer, because if
it were cancer, you would probably be dead by now.
You're very logical. You thought, well, we know it's been
(13:10):
there for five years and you're still here yelling at me,
so you're gonna be just fine. It's not a big deal.
And that sort of did make me feel better. I thought,
you know what, that's true. Of course, I then called
doctor Chang and I said, well, if it were cancer,
don't you think i'd be dead by now? And she said, yeah,
(13:30):
if it were cancer, you'd probably be very sick by now.
I agree with that.
Speaker 1 (13:35):
At the time, we had a lot going on. We'd
just come off a long struggle with parents at our
daughter's school. A creepy father was getting into bed with
other people's kids and we called them out. That turned
into a nearly nine month long ordeal.
Speaker 2 (13:48):
When we found out that I had the tumors in
my liver, we were just coming off of the creepy stuff.
We were in the thick of the situation with the creepies,
but at that point we had to shift focus. We
also knew that we had done everything we could possibly
do it with that particular situation, and it was trying
for us to move on and to focus on my health.
Speaker 1 (14:08):
We also had some uncommon struggles with work. Shortly After
Adrianna's pain incident, business began to pick up for our
small marketing firm. We stepped away from the citizen journalism
to take on the incoming work, but were still involved
in the culture war. We played behind the scenes role
producing a national touring global warming debate, working with our
(14:30):
friends in the media to open up the discussion and
tone down the apocalyptic rhetoric. The campaigns had been so
successful that by the beginning of twenty thirteen, we sold
our biggest project ever to an enormous global brand. Our
business model was a bit abnormal. We were kind of
creative hired guns. When a client needed an out of
ordinary marketing idea, they'd come to us to develop something,
(14:54):
and if they signed on to the project, we made
a percentage of the overall budget what's considered a creative fee.
It was always a bit of a gamble. Put hundreds,
even thousands of hours into proposal and nothing would come
of it. But with the right project it could be
very lucrative, and this was one of those times. Our
client was one of the largest companies in the world
(15:16):
and the project we sold to them became so hot
that they were gearing up to put an extraordinary amount
of money into it. Our idea was becoming a mega
project for one of the biggest brands on the planet,
and as a result, our fees were going to be
life changing. But amazing projects are few and far between.
There was a bit of a power struggle over who
was going to run it, which was new for us,
(15:37):
because one hundred percent of the time, over a decade
long relationship, our company managed the projects we sold to
our clients. In the end, they promised we'd run it
and would sort out the details later, But when it
came time to announce the project to the world, they
refused to follow through on their promise. An ambitious young
brand manager wanted to control the production for this sexy
(15:59):
new concept, so they terminated our involvement in the project.
The problem was, they still owed us our creative feet,
and by this time the project had grown exponentially think
blockbuster movie size budget. So what did they do? They
denied they owed us anything. Large global brands know they
(16:27):
can pull this off on the little guy For obvious reasons.
Going up against the behemoth is an uphill task, whether
you're right or wrong, So we began politely negotiating with
them in hopes that we could come to an agreement
and avoid any legal process. This was all in play
when Adriana's doctor found the spot on her liver, and
so she was hesitant to take on any additional.
Speaker 2 (16:49):
Stress, and so I put off the MRI for five months.
But every single day it haunted me, and I thought,
I'm a mom, I have a responsibility to get to
the bar of this. But the truth is there was
a part of me that didn't want to deal with it.
I just I knew in my gut that it was
(17:10):
not good. I really, I believe so strongly in an intuition,
and you know when something's wrong with you, and I
just I knew it. I knew it. Finally, five months later,
I went to get the MRI. So after I got
the MRI, I went to see doctor Chang. My mom
went with me, and she confirmed that it was a
(17:32):
tumor and that there was also a second tumor, and
the original tumor was very large.
Speaker 1 (17:44):
The tumor was taking up an entire side of her liver.
Speaker 2 (17:48):
So at that point doctor Chang said, you have to
go see a liver specialist.
Speaker 1 (17:53):
We all remember those big traumatic moments in life. The
first time you broke a bone or your first car accident,
but the first time you hear someone close to you
dies forever seared in our minds. When Adriana walked in
from the doctor's office, this was one of those moments.
Our young daughter was in the kitchen with me, and
Adriana came in, shaking her head and looking me dead
(18:14):
in the eyes while mouthing not good, not good. Up
until then, the whole thing was theoretical. We actually tried
to play it down as much as possible. We were young,
too young to be dealing with a life threatening illness
in anyways, this spot had been there for years, and
(18:36):
most of the time she was still just normal, o'd Adriana.
But the look she gave me changed all that. Her
difficulty getting pregnant, the pain incident that sent her to
the hospital, the fatigue she'd been experiencing for years, my
joking with her about being lazy, it all came rushing back.
This lingering unease that she'd been feeling going back at
least seven years, was because of this foreign object growing
(18:59):
inside her body. Doctor Chang connected us with the most
celebrated surgeon in this arena, the man that pioneered the
liver transplant. When any major health concern develops, physicians typically
pull up the entire medical history of a patient looking
for the first sign of the problem, and ultimately we
learned from an image Adriana had done during her pregnancy
(19:20):
that the spot first showed up in her medical history
in two thousand and seven. Needless to say, we were
incredibly nervous. I'd recently lost a childhood friend, Lewis, to
pancreatic cancer. It was stunning to everyone that knew him.
Speaker 2 (19:33):
We also started to learn that just because a tumor
started off benign didn't mean that it was going to
stay that way. We also learned that in two thousand
and nine, what happened is that the larger of the
two tumors had mutated, and that what I had experienced
(19:57):
was some sort of a burst of the tumor, and
that I was actually very lucky to have survived that.
Speaker 1 (20:04):
So we went to see the doctor that pioneered liver transplants,
and he presented us with one of the most challenging
dilemmas in our lives.
Speaker 2 (20:13):
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Speaker 1 (20:29):
Welcome back to Red Pilled America. So when Adriana learned
that her tumor had grown, she initially held off from
getting another MRI. We were going through a challenging time
and she didn't want to add to the stress. But
she ultimately came to the conclusion that she was a
mother and needed to deal with the issue head on
for the sake of the family. So we went to
(20:50):
the doctor that pioneered liver transplants.
Speaker 2 (20:53):
And he looks at the scans. He says to us,
this looks like an FnH tumor.
Speaker 1 (20:59):
To me an FnH tumor is basically a benign tumor,
not yet cancerous. The doctor continued, but I.
Speaker 2 (21:06):
Don't know for sure because there is a portion of
the larger tumor that looks a little different than we
typically see. It looks benign to me, but I can't
tell you it is for sure. But we know it's
been there since two thousand and nine and you're still alive,
so you're probably okay. If I were you, I would
watch it for a while. I would just sit back,
(21:27):
don't do anything, leave the tumors alone, and let's wait
and see if they continue to grow. Because you'll need
a liver resection. We'll have to take out a portion
of your liver, a third of your liver. And he
said this surgery can kill you. And I thought, I
(21:49):
don't like that. I don't like that answer. I don't
want to just sit and wait. He was like, Eh,
you're young, you're alive, You're fine right now, Let's just
wait and see what happens. And that did not work
for me at all. I'm the very beginning, I knew
that I wanted to get the tumor out. I wanted
to take the tumor out. I felt like I was young,
I was healthy, I could survive the surgery. So I said,
(22:12):
we're getting a second opinion. So I went back to
doctor Chang and I told her what happened. I told
her I did not like what he said at all.
So she found me another doctor, and this time this
doctor was out of Cedars Cedar Sinai in Los Angeles.
He was a young Indian doctor, surgeon, doctor Animali. And
we got an appointment to see him. He saw us
(22:32):
right away. He looked at everything. He said, I can't
tell you this is not cancer. And he said to me, listen,
if you were my wife, I would advise you to
get it out. And so many people advised me against that,
and I thought, I've given birth. What could be harder
than giving birth.
Speaker 1 (22:53):
What we didn't know until learning about the surgery was
that the liver is the only organ in the human
body that can actually regenerate. Once a portion is cut out,
it grows back to its original size. As we probed
more about how the surgery would be done, a picture
of the path ahead began to appear. This was not
(23:14):
going to be a walk in the park. The surgeon
illustrated with a marker the incision that need to be
made to open up her body to get access to
the organ. It was basically a large reversed l shape
that started at the bottom middle of a rib cage,
down over her stomach, then to the left along her
waistline and.
Speaker 2 (23:32):
Up and then you flap the skin over. I thought,
that doesn't sound fun. Hmmm, this might be worse than
giving birth.
Speaker 1 (23:45):
Ultimately, we decided we were going to move forward with
the surgery, so we needed to get some things in order.
Speaker 2 (23:50):
Because we knew that there was a possibility that I
was not going to make it through surgery.
Speaker 1 (23:55):
We made sure our will was squared away, and we
also wanted to get a plan in place to make
things as easy as possible for our daughter during the
surgery and God willing, the recovery. We wanted life to
go on for her as normal as possible because as
an early grade schooler, she was just too young to
feel the weight of these events. She also wasn't going
to be able to see or visit Adriana while she
(24:17):
was in the hospital, so Adriana asked the parents of
our daughter's friends to set up playdates, and they really
came through. For roughly two weeks, our girl had a
full schedule. We also enlisted our moms to help. The
plan was my mom would watch our daughter, stay with
her at night and get her to summer school and
her playdates, and me and Adriana's mom, Gloria, would alternate,
(24:40):
one watching Adriana in post operation recovery and the other
relieving my mom as needed. Our daughter's playdates kicked off
at Disneyland with her best friend's family.
Speaker 2 (24:50):
I wanted her to be at the happiest place on earth.
If I was going to die in that moment, I
wanted her to remember being it.
Speaker 3 (25:02):
Sorry, that makes me sad. I wanted her, you know,
to to have a good memory at that moment, you know,
to remember that day just being her being in a
good place.
Speaker 1 (25:26):
We had everything in place, and the date was set
for early July to get this thing out of her body.
The morning of the surgery, we arrived at five am
so that they could prep her for the procedure.
Speaker 2 (25:37):
When surgery day came along, I was ready. I felt strong.
You were nervous. You were not in the best shape
that day. You were very, very nervous. My mom, she
was handling things pretty well, but come surgery day, she
was she was starting to break. And we had I
had a good friend of mine, Melissa, was there with us.
(25:58):
We got to the hospital, they took me back, They
prepped me. I remember sitting on the gurney. They gave
me something to relax. You walked in with my mom
and Melissa.
Speaker 1 (26:07):
The doctor told us the surgery would last about three hours.
To keep us abreast of the progress, he'd give us
an update every hour. Or so, everyone left to give
us a moment alone. Adriana and I kissed, said our goodbyes,
and I quietly prayed her life was now in his hands.
I went back to the waiting room, and shortly after
(26:28):
a friend of my mother in law's joined us. I
must have been driving everyone crazy because I couldn't stop talking.
There wasn't a thought that came to mind that I
didn't verbalize. The first hour came along, and the surgeon
gave us an update, as promised, things were progressing. Then
the second hour came and again they updated us with
a simple things are going fine kind of message. But
(26:50):
it was the third hour that things began to unravel
in more ways than one. He may recall that our
former client owed us a nice chunk of money for
a creative fee that they were now trying to stiff
us on.
Speaker 3 (27:01):
Well.
Speaker 1 (27:02):
The negotiations said been carrying on right up until the surgery,
and they weren't going so well. If you've ever been
drawn into a legal dispute with an enormous fortune ten company,
you know that they have extraordinary power beyond mere mortals.
Disputes like ours become a long, methodical chess match. One
that they have perfected over decades. What you learn is
(27:23):
that they're not only in the business of hawking whatever
product or service they sell, They're also in the business
of winning in court. Our former client was so adept
at this game that they pulled strings to force our
lawyer of ten years to step away from representing us
in the dispute because of an alleged conflict of interest. Apparently,
someone in our lawyer's firm represented our former client in
(27:44):
the past, giving them the option to disqualify the firm
from representing us. They wanted us to start over with
new counsel, so we relied on a lawyer friend, Devin,
to get us through the hump until we could secure
an alternative lawyer. Well. As Adriana was on the cutting
board in our three, our former client pulled a fast one,
(28:05):
claiming through some twisted reading of our contract that we
had to file paperwork that day to start the legal
process to resolve our dispute. If not, they were going
to file a motion that would block us from ever
pursuing our payment in the future and our creative fee
would be lost forever. So as an enormous section of
my wife's liver was being removed. I was forced to
(28:27):
make the decision right then and there on, taking one
of the largest companies on the planet to court. This
was not the type of major business decision I made
without my better half. After some guidance from Devon for
who I'll be indebted to for life, I decided to
file the paperwork to initiate the mediation process. But as
this decision was being made, the third hour came and
(28:49):
went with no update from the surgeon. As the fourth
hour approached, there was still no word, and by now
the surgery was supposed to have been done. I asked
for a status and there was none. The surgeon was busy,
was the response. Then the fifth and sixth hour came
and went still nothing. What I didn't know was that
Adriana was fighting for her life. Apparently the tumor was
(29:12):
in the worst possible spot. What the MRI scans didn't
show was that the tumor was almost blocking the main
artery into her liver, called the portal vein. So to
cut out the mass, the surgeons had to carefully shave
away at the liver to avoid cutting the main artery,
an act that would have led to almost certain death
(29:36):
In fact. On three separate occasions, they had to stop
the surgery, pack her with ice, and give Adriana blood transfusion.
As hour seven arrived, the tension in the waiting room
became almost unbearable. I'd shifted from chaddy to complete silence.
But then, finally, as despair started to seep in, the
(29:57):
doctor came out of the surgery room. Had survived barely,
and the initial word was that there was no cancer.
Adriana was moved into intensive care.
Speaker 2 (30:13):
I remember I couldn't open my eyes, but I was
happy to be alive. I knew that I had I
had survived the surgery, and that was step one. Just
survived the surgery great because there was a chance that
I wasn't going to live, and I actually came very
close to dying on the table. So I'm like, yeah,
I'm alive, I'm alive, I'm a lot.
Speaker 1 (30:34):
I finally got to see my girl, and to my surprise,
she was jovial. We dodged a bullet. If Adriana hadn't
gone with her gut and instead listened to the original,
world renowned doctor, the tumor would have likely blocked her portal.
Speaker 2 (30:48):
Vein, and they realized that there was a mutation that
had occurred. Had it been left in, it would have
probably mutated very very soon to cancer.
Speaker 1 (31:00):
We thought the rough patch was behind us. Little did
we know that the ride was just getting started.
Speaker 2 (31:06):
And when they took me into the recovery room in
the ICU, I was having a very hard time swallowing,
and so I kept calling the nurse over and I
would say in a whisper to him, I can't swallow,
I can't swallow, and he said, it's just because your
throat is dry, because you had a tube in your throat.
So I kept saying, to you, I feel like something's wrong,
(31:29):
something's wrong, and the nurse said, no, no, it's the
anesthesia talking. I see this all the time. So I said,
to you, call my mom because I felt like no
one was listening to me. I knew there was something wrong, so.
Speaker 1 (31:41):
I called her mom, Gloria, to come help out. Gloria,
who I typically call mom as well, had been through
major surgeries herself and by now was slightly more arrested
than both Adrianna and I, who've been up for roughly
twenty four hours. Gloria was by far more equipped to
deal with the situation.
Speaker 2 (31:58):
My mom got there lickety split. She walked into the room.
She looked at me and she said, she's having an
allergic reaction, and I was. I was having an allergic
reaction to morphine and my throat was actually swelling shot
and they immediately took me off of the morphine and
it scared them and it was a big deal. I
remember that. So at this point then the nursing staff
(32:19):
didn't know what to do. It's like four in the morning.
They take me off all of the pain meds, and
within a couple of hours I was in the most
excruciating pain that I had ever been in. The doctor
came in to do his rounds very early morning, and
I couldn't speak from the pain, and when he realized
that they had taken me off of all the pain meds,
(32:41):
he he was furious. So they finally were able to
get the pain under control, but it took a while.
Speaker 1 (32:49):
We had a major hiccup, but now everything was back
on track. It was the morning my mom dropped our
daughter off for summer school, and the doctors had finally
figured out a cocktail that lowered the pain enough to
get Adriana to sleep as I looked at her lying there,
a sense of comfort rolled over me. Things had stabilized,
she was now on the road to recovery. But at
(33:10):
around noon, as I sat there with my mother in
law watching Adriana sleep, my cell phone rang. It was
my mom. I didn't know this in the moment, but
apparently she'd been concerned when my brother, who suffers from
mental illness, wasn't answering her calls. So after dropping off
my daughter at summer school, she went to check on him,
(33:32):
and when she did, she found him unconscious in the
living room. Apparently he'd attempted to end it all and
was now clinging to life in an emergency room. I
can't imagine what my mother must have gone through when
she found him, but in the midst of the worst
moment in her life, her voice was calm, almost comforting.
Speaker 3 (33:51):
To me.
Speaker 1 (33:52):
She must have known it was an extraordinary moment for everyone.
She told me she'd have to stay at the hospital
with him. She said goodbye, and I hung up. The
news was devastating. My wife was in one hospital recovering
from major organ surgery, my baby brother was clinging to
life in another. It was a surreal moment. The kind
of thing that would be unbelievable if put in a
(34:14):
Hollywood script. I couldn't help but feel some guilt for
pulling my mom away from her son to help me
with my daughter. I gathered myself and re entered the
recovery room and asked Gloria to join me in the hallway.
Adriana was asleep when I told her what had happened.
It was the first and only time that I had
(34:35):
ever seen her cry. After we allowed ourselves a few
moments to grieve, we quickly recomposed ourselves because we had
to come up with a new plan. We were down
a man. We agreed that there was no need to
tell Adriana what had happened. She was in no shape
to take that on emotionally. I would have to go
and pick up our daughter from summer school, and Gloria
(34:55):
would call my brother in law, her son Jay, to
see if he could briefly babysit my daughter, so I
could rush to the ICU to comfort my mother and
potentially say goodbye to my brother. If all this wasn't enough.
As I was walking my daughter out from summer school,
(35:18):
I received an email notification to my disbelief a recently
acquired client was suing our company over a contract dispute.
Early in the year, we signed an agreement to execute
a brief marketing campaign for a relatively young company, but
as we were producing the project per the contract, the
client wanted to make material changes to the campaign, ones
(35:38):
that would substantially change the budget of the project. When
I informed them that this would increase the cost, they
declined the budget increase and swiftly terminated the contract, demanding
we pay back the initial fees. We, of course refused,
so they decided to sue us in hopes of getting
their money back. It was shocking. After almost twenty years
of business, we'd never been in a single lawsuit, nor
(36:02):
even been close to entering one. Now, in less than
forty eight hours, we'd been forced into two during the
most trying personal time in our lives. I took my
daughter home and was met soon after by my brother
in law, who came through when we needed him. I
went to the hospital to check on my wife, and
she was sleeping with my mother in law by her side.
(36:23):
Once I knew her situation was stabilized, I jumped back
in the car and began the trek to the other hospital.
To say I was a wreck would be the understatement
of the year. I was practically drunk with grief and exhaustion.
The weight of the situation was overwhelming driving that car,
(36:44):
I never wailed so hard in my life. Why us?
Why was this happening to us? What did we do
to deserve this? Why were we being tested? As I
drove down the four or five freeway, desperately trying to
stay on the road, the last word tested repair hed
in my head and I said out loud, You're being tested,
(37:07):
your being tested right now. As bad as that moment was,
if I didn't keep it together while I was flying
down the fast lane, things could even be worse. I
could crash and die right now. Get it together, I thought,
your brother is still alive, your wife is still alive.
The lawsuits mean nothing. And in that despair, I had
(37:31):
a moment of clarity, Why is this happening to me?
In those trying times? Your being tested? Things can always
be worse than they are right now, even in moments
of great despair. I pulled myself together and was thankful
for what I had. I was blessed we were all
still in the game. In the end, My brother survived.
(37:53):
He's still struggling with mental illness, but he's alive. It
was a long battle, but we also won the lawsuit
with one of the biggest companies on the planet. It
didn't turn out as we hoped, but they were still
forced to meet their obligation to our tiny, little firm,
but that's a story for another time. After a few
months of back and forth, the second company that suited
(38:15):
us smartly decided to drop their case, and most importantly,
my Adriana, as you know, is still here with us today.
Her struggle went on for quite some time. After about
ten days, she was released from the hospital, but about
a month and a half later she was readmitted. She'd
gone septic, which is a life threatening illness where the
(38:37):
body fights off an infection that spreads through the bloodstream.
But my little fighter survived that as well, and honestly,
we may be facing this health struggle for the rest
of our lives, but right now we're still in the game.
We tell you this story because if you two are
going through a rough patch and it feels like the
(38:57):
ceiling is caving in, like your world is coming to
an end, please realize that you are being tested as
bad as the moment may seem, you are blessed to
have what you have. Find solace in that undeniable fact.
Don't let the despair take you out. You have the
strength within you to pass the test. Look around you
(39:21):
and hug everyone a little harder, Tell them you love them,
and apologize for the mistakes you may have made in
this short but fantastic journey we call life. And now
I want to take my own advice to Adriana. We've
been through so much and I'm blessed to have gone
(39:44):
through it all with you by my side. I'm sorry
I didn't see your fatigue for what it was. I
promise I'll never make that mistake again. I love you, honey.
Speaker 2 (39:54):
Red Pilled America is an iHeartRadio original podcast. It's owned
and produced by Patrick Carrelci and me Adriana Cortes of
Informed Ventures. Now. You can get add free access to
our entire archive of episodes by becoming a backstage subscriber.
To subscribe, visit Redpilled America dot com and click join
in the topmenu. Thanks for listening.
Hosts And Creators
Adryana Cortez
Patrick Courrielche
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