Sense of Soul - Miguel Sancho: More Than You Can Handle

Episode Date: July 23, 2021

We had the honor of having Miguel Sancho on Sense of Soul Podcast, an Emmy Award-winning television producer and journalist, currently show-running and developing series and specials for A&E. For seven years he helped run the ABC primetime news magazine 20/20. Prior to that, he was an investigative producer at 20/20 and CBS News's 48 Hours. He was an Executive producer The HISTORY Channel's New Series "The Proof Is Out There" Exploring Mysterious Phenomena. He joined us to talk about his new book released called  More Than You Can Handle: A Rare Disease, A Family in Crisis, and the Cutting-Edge Medicine That Cured the Incurable, an incredible story about his families searched for a cure for their son’s deadly immune deficiency. Visit his website to learn more his book. https://miguelsancho.net Visit us at www.mysenseofsoul.com

Welcome to the Sense of Soul podcast. We are your hosts, Shanna and Mandy. Grab your coffee, open your mind, heart and soul. It's time to awaken. Today we have with us Miguel Sancho. He is an Emmy Award winning television producer. For years, he developed series and specials for A&E, and for seven years he helped run the ABC Primetime News Magazine 2020. Prior to that, he was the investigative producer at 2020 and CBS News 48 Hours. He was an executive producer for the History Channel's new series, The Proof is Out There, Exploring Mysterious Phenomena. But he is here today to talk about his new book, More Than You Can Handle a Rare Disease, A Family in Crisis, and the Cutting Edge Medicine that Cured the Incurable, an incredible story

about his family's search for a cure for their son's deadly immune disease. Thank you so very much for joining us today. Well, it's great to meet. Thank you so very much for joining us today. Well, it's great to meet you, and thank you so much for having me on. I was just checking out some episodes of your podcast, and you guys are doing great stuff, so I'm honored to be included. Well, we are more than honored to have you on. We were so excited to see you come across our email. Oh, my pleasure.

So I was able to listen to your book on Audible. That was nice, got to know your voice. And you're funny, and able to listen to your book on Audible. That was nice. Got to know your voice and you're funny. And I got that from your book for sure. Yeah. Well, we try. That's what I always tell people, like reading the books. It's not supposed to be like just eating a bowl of uncooked broccoli. It is the book and the author have a certain obligation to entertain. I don't know yeah, I try to be sometimes, I'm not sure if I succeed every time, but yeah, I'll be serious. You're a great storyteller. Yeah. Is this because you grew up telling a lot of stories or? Well, it's just because I've had

a lot of practice over the years, writing bad scripts for television stories and you just learn the hard way that, you know, some things work and some things don't. I will say this. I think people sometimes mystify the act of storytelling, the act of writing. And I do believe it is a technique that most people can learn if you just, you know, dedicate yourself to it and remember good stuff that you've seen and frankly rip off other good ideas and other you know cute turns of phrase that you can use like like you normally would for you know making cocktail conversation or something it's uh really just a question of like i said making sure that you're not shortchanging the reader you know on every page that you're understanding there's an

obligation to pull the reader across to the end of the book, right? I mean, I don't finish a lot of books for that very reason. I mean, I start a lot of books and if I'm not like totally hooked by like page 75, you know, I'll go do something else. I'll go start another book or I'll, you know, look at my phone. It really is, again, the responsibility of the author to engage the reader in such a way that they want to see what's next. Yeah. You know, I'm a journalist. I've made my living kind of focusing a certain degree of kind of critical facilities and unbiased, somewhat aggressive reporting at times on other people and their faults and their shortcomings. So one of the exercises of the book, both for the sake of the reader and for the sake

of the author in this case, was to see if I could actually train those same unflinching critical facilities on myself and on my own shortcomings, on my own imperfections, and report it honestly in such a way that the reader would know that they're getting an authentic account without trying to be too sentimental. You have wrote so many stories and produced so many things on the world, but this was your story. Have you ever done anything like that before? Excellent question. So the answer is no, I've never published anything before other than, you know, Facebook posts about myself, that is. And I think that's another danger that people sometimes have when they're moving from, say, journaling or blogging or doing Facebook posts, where you just kind of assume that your followers or what have you are going to be interested in

anything about you. When you're writing something for a broader audience, you just have to constantly be taking very humble attitude about the idea that just because a sentence begins with the word I really doesn't mean that it's interesting to anybody else other than yourself. Just because we experienced something doesn't necessarily mean that the whole world is going to want to hear it. And, you know, I've been that guy like at a party who's like running on and on about some story without kind of registering whether or not anybody wants to hear more and so i really wanted to also economize it i have to say one of my greatest pieces of good luck with this thing was a an editor who was of the same mind like you know and i was really happy actually a lot of the things

that she wanted to cut out were just kind of excess navel gazing and talking about myself because yes i'm in the story and the story is told in the first person, but it's not just about me. It's about right. Family dynamics. It's about other families going through similar challenges. It's about, you know, these amazing doctors and nurses who are trying to help these families and solve these intractable medical mysteries. That was kind of the juggling act of this book. Like how much is going to be me

and how much is going to be other people's stories where I can actually give them the voice and give them the attention that they deserve too. Yeah, I mean, that's a massive shift going from writing about the outside world to having to take a moment to go inward and actually expose things about yourself. How did it feel? I'm going to be honest with you, Mandy. There was a fair amount of terror.

There was a fair amount of days when I wanted the book to just go away. And the reason is, you don't know how things are going to be perceived. It's easy to get misinterpreted. It's easy to get willfully misinterpreted these days. And some of the things that happen in the book are pretty embarrassing, let's face it. I was very conscientious of the fact that the audience might not be that sympathetic. And it's, we live in kind of a sharing, perhaps an oversharing kind of culture. So there's a certain tolerance for this kind of thing, but how far does that tolerance go, right? A lot of the time I was thinking to myself, this event in my life, in our lives, in our family's history was important,

and I feel like people should know about it. But on the other hand, it's kind of over, and part of me just wants to be completely done with it and move on and pretend like it never happened, sweep it under the rug. But ultimately, I decided that I would feel much, much worse about not finishing the book than I would feel about finishing the book. And was there some healing in it when you were able to put it out on paper and see all that you'd been through? Were you able to sit with that and surrender to it and let it go, do you feel like? Yeah. And those are some of the best words and kind of languages and terms to apply to this experience, because, of course, there's all sorts of clinical psychological studies about the therapeutic aspects of writing for oneself. So there was that kind of personal part of it. But the other part of it was I do actually think there were things that happened to us that are worth sharing for other families in certain situations.

So the book isn't just a memoir. It really is also supposed to be something of a how-to guide or maybe a guide of do's and don'ts, including some very colorful examples of what happens if you do the don'ts. And I think that some of the best feedback I've received about the book since it was published is from other families who have said, we've been in this situation. We've been the ones staring at the ceiling in a sleepless night. We've been the ones looking in the mirror in the morning of a day that we don't think we can face and say, this is more than I can handle. And just knowing that this book gave some, however marginal, however incremental help to families in those situations meant a lot. It meant that it was worth doing. You talk about being vulnerable, but there's so much value in that. And Mandy and I, that's why we do what we do. You had to implement mindfulness and like the space in your life to be able to get through it.

What was your spirituality like prior? Without belaboring the whole thing and boring you with all the details, I will say that you're absolutely right. The book is in many ways about how people deal with their own vulnerability and embrace it and navigate it. I will say without kind of relying too heavily on gender stereotypes, I think it is the case that many men have a bit more difficulty doing that perhaps than women. And again, I don't want to generalize too much, but it certainly I think the case in my situation where I had, you know, an understanding of what it meant to be a dad, a father, a man, a husband, that didn't allow for much vulnerability or weakness and kind of required a certain kind of stoicism that ended up just overwhelming me when things got too tough.

So to answer the question about the spiritual or personal journey. Yeah, I mean, I kind of went to college and became kind of a strident empiricist and an atheist. When my kids were born, we started going to church primarily to give them some degree of biblical literacy and ethical education, and frankly, just to have them in a place for an hour where they weren't being stimulated by electronics and getting every desire catered to. But I was still pretty cynical about the whole thing. And I didn't really spend that much time on a daily basis tending to my spiritual needs, if you will. I wasn't a very dedicated athlete of the spirit, as Gandhi said at one point. So the crisis hit. My son was diagnosed with this crazy disease.

It threw my whole family, my whole life, you know, overboard into the sea of chaos. And as things were completely slipping out of control and it was affecting, you know, my marriage and my work and, you know, my mental health, I did indeed embrace the practice of meditation. And I'm here to tell you two things. One, meditation definitely helped me. And I think that it would help almost anybody. But it didn't solve all my problems. Sometimes people think of it as a cure-all. And, and you know it feels like anybody who meditates for 20 minutes or more turns around and writes a book about it as you know that it saved their life with me it got the you know part of the way there but not the full way there and ultimately

um you know as crises kept piling up with various flavors i needed to supplement that with therapy with psychotropic medications, and, you know, other kind of basic things like working out and drinking less and all that stuff. And so one of the kind of my personal learning moments was that you can do various forms of self-help or spiritual improvement. You can get hopscotch from one to another from time to time. You don't have to feel like cheating on your girlfriend if you decide to shift from one modality to another. Oh my God, that's funny. Yeah. You just need to be doing something though. Find out what works for you. And I mean, I'd like just marriage counseling, for instance.

I've been to five marriage counselors over the course of my 15-year marriage. I'll probably end up with a sixth before I die. But, you know, people go to marriage counseling, and they try for like two sessions, and they say, this isn't working, I'm done. And maybe they end up just getting divorced. Maybe they end up just sticking in a marriage that could be improved with counseling. You know, I mean, to me, that's kind of heartbreaking.

There's, if you're willing to do the work, or at least some of the work, or at least make an effort, you can, frankly, you can get points for just making an effort. It can make a difference. And I think people kind of give up on themselves a little too easily sometimes because they think that one particular mode of self-help isn't working, or one particular mode of self-help isn't working or one particular mode of spirituality or spirituality practice disillusions them in some way. And so they just get cynical about the whole

thing. Whereas I'm all for hopscotching and web surfing and finding out what works for you and trying something new. If you just kind of get bored with the thing you were doing six months ago yeah totally agree i don't know for you but i know for me as much as you would love to work on your relationships it really starts it's really with that you change you then everything around you kind of changes too sure absolutely you know i mean for me it's just about the basic very basic things in fact i was in a group meditation once sangha and everybody around me was frankly a better meditator i'm it's not hard for me to say they might have been better people okay and what they were talking about was like this you know crusading feeling of that you know how are we going to spread meditation to the world? What should our relationship be with the transcendental meditation people, vis-a-vis the mindfulness people?

They had big, big plans. I just raised my hand and I said, guys, I'm happy to be part of this project to save the world, but I'm ultimately just a guy trying to keep his shit together. My goals here are to try to reduce the frequency and the intensity of my negative interactions with other people around me and with myself. Yeah. So you can start levitating maybe once you get all that together. Yeah. Next week. I really value people that just own their shit.

And I felt like you owned your shit in your book. You're like, I was a total dick. Yeah. I always tell people there's always a blessing in the lesson. And sometimes when we're in the lesson, in the storm, it's really hard to see what the blessing is going to be. And of course, we know that the blessing, ultimately, it was about your son and him finding a cure and being healthy today. But also, it sounds like through your son's illness, you shed a lot of that ego and you really got in tune with your soul. Yes, I appreciate that. I will say that I'm still a work in progress, man.

And I still backslide. Progress, not perfection. We will say that I'm still a work in progress, man. And I still backslide. Progress, not perfection. We all are. I'm still a dick too. Yeah. And the other thing I'll say, and God, you can find plenty of people to agree with me here, is that this being a dick thing wasn't just because I got hit with this crazy diagnosis, right?

It was kind of like, it was always there in some limited capacity. But what the diagnosis did was kind of strip away some of the constraints and etiquette that had kind of kept me in check before and kind of exposed everything, exposed all the cracks, ultimately led me to take the steps I needed to try to address that fact. Again, it was very involved, multifaceted approach. But yeah, I mean, it's very important for people, for me and for people like me to understand that sometimes when I don't even mean it, I can sound like there's kind of a parenthetical, you idiot at the end of every sentence, just because that's the tone of my voice or whatever. And I really don't mean to do that. I, but then can happen anyway. So good news is it's not hard for me to apologize. I've gotten so good at apologizing. I can do it without hesitation.

Professional apologizer. Yeah. Yeah. No, I've got a million of them. We'll add that to your bio. Yeah. Yeah. I should put that on my LinkedIn page. Yeah. But you know what? Oh my gosh. I must say that I totally appreciated you giving Felicia, your wife, the credit that was due. I felt her pain as a mother. And I also love that you really could see that women do have this mother instinct. You know, we do. We're like psychic as shit when it comes to our kids.

And I know for myself too, like you can mess with me, but when it comes to my kids, that mama bear to defend and protect and go to the ends for my children, everything goes out. It's just an instinct. It's primal.

I kind of saw that too, how that would have happened. And that would have also put a strain on your marriage. You're absolutely right. And it's not just my wife, but it is often the case when there's a family that's in a child's health crisis, the mother becomes the primary caregiver and also the primary advocate for the child, the patient, when you're dealing with all the stuff and the paperwork and all the craziness. So she was great at that. And many, it wasn't just once, it was like several steps along the way from kind of insisting that we go to an immunologist to begin with,

to get the proper tests done, to doing most of the research, and then really pushing me, in many cases, even, you you know against my own hesitation resistance and stubbornness that we did indeed have to move from new york to raleigh durham north carolina because that was the duke and free hospital was the best if not the only place where we had a good chance of a successful outcome with our son and bone marrow transplant he got to being there and at his side during some of the toughest moments of the whole process and while at the same time kind of dealing with this husband who I was supporting I mean I wasn't a complete loser okay I did what I needed to do I kept working I kept insurance there I participated quite a bit, but, you know, there was plenty of times where I was adding to her stress as much as supporting her. And, you know, she handled it all well. And I

will say this, she would want me to say this if she were here, you know, she had a whole other layer of strength or a whole other source of strength, which was her faith. She is faithful and religious to a degree that I'm not, although I've kind of evolved in that direction too. But some of what she does is a little bit over the top and kind of created on my nerves at times.

And that's all true. But you can't deny, both in our particular case, but also broadly speaking, many, many people who practice uh religion do find a tremendous source of strength and comfort and solace and and power to accomplish these kind of superhuman things that you wouldn't think normal people under extreme stress would be able to do so that was all one big piece of it and I'm happy to say also that she's kind of refashioned her professional life now to be a leader and a patient advocate for our disease, our disease, the disease my son had, and is launching a very successful nonprofit that's doing wonderful things with the research of patient advocacy.

So I'm really, really proud of her. That is what we love to hear. It's all, you know, Shanna and I love to talk about turning pain into purpose. Yes. You took that pain and so did you. You took that pain and, you know, your purpose was to write this book and to be on this podcast and her was to start that nonprofit. So that's the blessing in that lesson.

I will say I used to work at Children's Hospital. I worked with very ill children. Most of them didn't have a chance of living at all. And every day that I walked into that building, I had to just prepare myself. That energy and that hospital is so loving and so amazing. But at the same time, if you don't protect yourself, it eats you up. Seeing those parents in those units, there's nothing worse than seeing a child sick. There's nothing worse than seeing a parent that feels helpless, watching a child feel so much

pain. I could never make it through, especially like the NIC unit without bawling. And I think every single day that I left that hospital, I cried in my car on the way home or prayed for those kids. Well, Mandy, bless you for the work you did and how you're kind of channeling that now. And I would only hope that you shared whatever, whatever tools you were using with your audience. I'm sure you have. You're absolutely right, Mandy. The nurses that we came across were so just off the charts altruistic. You know, we were in a unit where the patients were there for months. Okay. So it wasn't just like being in an emergency room where, yes,

you see an intense situation, but the patient kind of moves on within, you know, a certain number of hours to the spot. These nurses are there every day bonding very intensely with these children and their families. And they really appreciate those relationships. On the one hand, it makes their work that much more meaningful. But on the other hand, you're absolutely right. There's plenty of times they have to go into the supply closet and bawl their eyes out because you have to be on, right? You have to be able to, I don't know how the people do it. I'd be able to walk into room 15, 14 and share the great news that this child is going to be

released and cured and then walk five feet into the next room and deal with the fact that this child's transplant has failed and we've got to talk about hospice care for a eight-year-old and still be there and be present and not let the one situation bleed into the other and that is yeah i couldn't do it i couldn't do it i'd be crying all day yeah there was one particulars who'd been there quite a while long time who had come from working in a refugee camp in Afghanistan. And prior to that, she had been in war zones in Cambodia. So for her, being on a pediatric bone marrow transplant unit was kind of like

a walk in the park. But there's just amazing people who give of themselves in ways that I just couldn't. I guess I'm just too weak or too selfish or both. God bless them. You know, I wanted to talk about Lydia. So through all this, you had another child who was just a few years older than Sebastian, your son, who was sick. And I loved when you talked about how she too kind of mothered him in some way or cared for him. It's really interesting, both in our situation and in the studies of this.

This isn't just a personal story. We were worried when we had to move down to North Carolina and we knew there was going to be this intense experience coming down the pike would it be too traumatic for our daughter who's only four years older than our son so we're talking at the time he was four she was eight would this be too much to see her brother like this to see us all torn up to possibly deal with a bad outcome okay kids die there it doesn't happen that often but it happens often enough that you have to talk about it. Would it be better if we left her behind with one of her grandmothers?

The doctors who oftentimes give you both sides of an argument or give you qualified answers or disclaimers about everything were unequivocal about this. They said, no, no, no no you want her there we all need to be there she's going to do wonders for him and i thought that was kind of

like yeah okay having the sibling around is good for the kid that kind of sounds like new age stuff but then we saw it in action i'm telling you you, there was a day when he, my son, they have to give you heavy duty chemotherapy for this particular procedure. And he was in the middle of it and he looked like, you know, a wreck lying on that bed. It's hard for me to even talk about it now. And we thought, you know, this is just not, this is, this is, I hope this is the low point because how much lower could it get? And then his sister comes in the room and suddenly he perks up and wants to start playing Hungry Hungry Hippos. And it's like the whole acting sick thing was just, you know, a let's pretend thing.

And there were many, many stories of that where kids are like comatose or just not responding or not, you know, looking really bad. And the doctor, sometimes literally calling for the sibling, get the sister in here. It has this, this really profound effect. So yes, she was wonderful. Perhaps even lifesaving. It's interesting that you share that because I was in a coma in ICU in 2013 from an asthma attack and they didn't let my children come visit me. And then they said that my organs were failing and I was dying and that it was just a matter of time. They brought my children in to visit me. And within hours I was off the ventilator and completely

restored. Yeah. Well, thank you to your family for helping save you. We need you. So I'm glad that you're still here. Yeah, totally agree. Yeah. So we recently had on a Dr. Ross Carter and he is all about stem cell therapy and stem cell nanoparticles. And that's what he's dedicated his life to. And you just happen to fall in synchronicity right with our interview that we just had with him recently yeah it's great the wonderful things about this interview i gotta say guys is that what i'm about to say usually comes within the first 30 seconds it's like the first question but now we've kind of talked and got to know each other a little bit and kind of laid it all out there. We want to know about your soul first. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Well, I hope I've adequately credentialized myself on a spiritual basis.

But yeah, so what happened with our whole thing is that our son was born with a monogenetic mutation on his X chromosome that led to a primary immune deficiency, which meant on a day-to-day basis, on a practical level, that his body couldn't fight off a lot of bacterial and fungal infections that quote-unquote normal people can fight off. As a result, he spent the first six months of his life in and out of hospitals with mystery fevers and infections. And when he was ultimately diagnosed, we got the news that he was either going to have to try to live with this disease through a combination of daily medicines, a combination of that plus environmental restrictions of certain degree. He would indeed still catch potentially lethal infections a couple of times

every few years and be in and out of hospitals. On pretty clear terms that he probably wasn't going to live past 25 or 30. At some point, the medicines weren't going to do the job. His organs were going to take such a beating from the infections. The one and only known curative treatment for this condition, which is called CGD, by the way, don't ask me why. I can answer, but it's just boring, is stem cell transplant, more commonly referred to as a bone marrow transplant. I think better understood as an immune system transplant. Basically, he had to undergo this very intense medical procedure,

which has been around for a while, but not that long, where you basically annihilate the existing immune system with chemotherapy, basically kill off all the white blood cells, plus your other kinds of cells. If you're lucky enough to find a match, you transfuse those into the body. That's the transplant part. And then if everything's been done right, and it's an extraordinarily delicate process, these new donor cells will attach in the bone marrow and start reproducing and engrafting. And over time, painstakingly, a year later, you'll have a new functional immune system. So that basic thing has been how transplants have been done for 30 or 40 years. But with my son's case, we couldn't find a matched donor.

His sister wasn't a match. Be the match database didn't come up with any matches. That had to do in large part with the fact that he was a mixed race, mixed ethnicity. So there's just a much more rare HLA typing. So we had to go this kind of route of last resort, which is one of the most profound and hopeful developments that's taken place in the last few decades, which has been pioneered at Duke, which is a stem cell transplant using unmatched umbilical cord blood. So basically when another child was born, I think in year 2010, the parents had donated the umbilical cord to the Carolina's cord blood bank. And because those umbilical cord blood cells are so incredibly malleable,

even more so than adult stem cell white blood cells, they were able to work even though they weren't nearly as perfect a match as you'd want them to be. And now there's this whole world of umbilical cord blood transplantation that they're exploring for uses with other diseases and other conditions. The technique is being used for potential treatments for disease like cerebral palsy, possibly for autism. Now, these wouldn't necessarily be transplants. They might be using, in many cases, they're using the patient's own umbilical cord blood. But still, the technique and the technology is just breathtaking. Frankly,

that's one of the messages of the book, that we're in an age of just unbelievable progress with medical science, and we should be embracing that and celebrating it. People run down the healthcare system, and of course, there's issues with accessibility and affordability. I'm not saying that's not the case. And people are very cynical about big pharma. I get that. But nevertheless, we really do need to be kind of celebrating and honoring the medical professionals who are making these things happen. I mean, folks, we came up with a very, very functional vaccine for COVID within nine months using this breakthrough technique of messenger RNA.

That is amazing. And I think Dr. Carter, your other guest, would be able to speak much more intelligently and fluently about all these other breakthroughs that we can be expecting to happen. So there's cause for hope. I mean, obviously the world gives you reasons to be disillusioned and disappointed. And oftentimes we give ourselves reasons to be disillusioned and disappointed. And oftentimes we give ourselves reasons to be disillusioned and disappointed. But, you know, one of the really, really inspiring things and one of the things that gave me strength for the journey during this whole thing was just seeing this beautiful process of medical research and science that is changing lives. And saving lives. Absolutely. I mean, it's unbelievable.

And now when we were talking to Dr. Carter, some of it, you know, a lot of insurances don't cover this stuff. Some things are not FDA approved yet. You know, and that is heartbreaking. You know, sometimes I hear like so-and-so is sick and they have to go to Mexico to get healed. You know, stuff like this because of red tape with, you know, FDA or this and that. And that breaks my heart too. the rare disease community and the rare disease population. I am very much in support of more relaxed, compassionate use policies when it comes to patients being able to take more experimental drugs,

just because I know from personal experience, there's plenty of patients who can either make a decision, should I try to live with the disease that's probably going to kill me at some point, or should I try to cure the disease with a treatment that might kill me? And that's a very personal decision. That's a decision that I think every patient or parent of patients should be able to make under informed circumstances. But you're never going to have perfect information with rare diseases because just by definition, they're so rare, there aren't that many patients to study. It's not like lung cancer where the, you know, when the surgeon general came out with their definitive study about

that, there are, you know, thousands and thousands of papers and longitudinal clinical studies. With rare diseases, you don't have a lot of patients. You don't have a lot of data. You don't have a lot of information to based and even an informed decision on. So who takes responsibility for that? And ultimately I think it is your body. Who owns our bodies? We own our bodies and we should be able to make most of the decisions about that. I had this vision while you were talking, like this umbilical cord. It's really, truly like this God line, just full of like the special love. It's so fascinating. I think, unfortunately for me, like my youngest daughter, six, when they brought it to my attention, it was actually going to cost me money to like store it.

And so I was confused about that. And so immediately just I wish I had it had been presented to me for I was in the hospital giving birth because I could have done some research on it. But as soon as I saw the cost, I was like, no, that's like, are you kidding me? Take it home and put it in your freezer. I wanted to, I wanted to take it home and put it in my freezer and make a yummy shake out of that, my placenta, but they wouldn't let me.

So you guys, you're absolutely right though. I mean, people have been into the placenta. People have been talking about placentas and umbilical cords for a long period of modern medicine. And now we are learning not just, you know, powers enough to cure people like my son, but might have all sorts of other amazing potential that we're just starting to explore. It's, I mean, just think about this, right? From an immunological point of view, our immune systems attack foreign things. That's what they do.

They perceive foreign presences and they go and attack them. A baby in a mother's stomach, a mother's uterus, is a foreign presence, right? So the mother should kind of, on a basic level, be attacking the baby,

but they don't. And the baby's immune system doesn't attack the mother's. So what's going on there? And that kind of is the key to some of the mysteries of these umbilical cord stem cells that make them so, again, malleable and amicable, which is one of the reasons why when you're transplanting patients like my son with umbilical cord blood, you have a less incident of this phenomenon called graft versus host disease, which happens with a lot of transplant patients post-transplant, even if it's been a successful transplant. At some point, the new cells will attack the old cells

in the body, and that can lead to very serious complications. That doesn't happen that much with umbilical cord transplants because of the very kind of miraculous, magical thing, wondrous thing of this umbilical cord blood. The only other thing I'll tell you though, is that yes, people these days have an opportunity to kind of store their own kids umbilical cord blood and it costs money. And if people want to do that, that's fine. But one of the things that we're kind of advocating is for the growth of public donated cord blood banks. Our son was saved not from his own umbilical cord that we stored, but because, you know, somebody in North Carolina, because they have one of the most advanced cord blood banks

donated to their kids' cord blood. And the more people who do that, again, the more lives we'd be able to save. I mean, yeah, if we're all going to get storage units for a couch and some dressers and for, you know, 100 bucks a month, I think this is a little bit more important, people. Yeah, exactly. Can anybody donate theirs? It depends on what state you're in. That's a miracle. And the science and the technology today is a miracle. And then like thinking about all the things that you do, you just must think sky's the limit. Again, one of the things that this experience did was humble in a big way,

right? I was kind of like one of the smartest kids in class and I always thought I knew everything and right. But one of the things that this experience taught me was that I didn't know that much. I didn't know much about, you know, the basics of the human body, right? Because my body had been working. So, you know, I, yeah, I treat it like a to my cell phone, like, as long as the thing works, I don't really need to know exactly how it works on my iPhone. I mean, it just works, right? So the immune system, I'd never dealt with any hiccups with an immune system. So I didn't need to know anything about it. But the more I had to learn, the more I became fascinated about it, the more I, again, became humbled by not just how much I didn't know, but how much there is yet to discover. And that's kind of the same sensibility

that we're trying to take with this little TV show, Proof is Out There, on the History Channel. By the way, our second season is going to be debuting at the end of August. So there'll be more episodes for you. All right. You got some proof? Yeah, we got some proof. We need to understand that not everything is known. That most of what was thought to be scientifically

uncontrovertible truth just 30 or 40 years ago has been completely upended. That's what scientific research does, right? It's the overturning of other things because we learn more. We kind of push back the darkness of ignorance, our learning, but we have to have a humble approach to the thing. I like that. A humble approach to it.

But it just seems like the possibilities are endless. Yeah. And I think, I think we need to also remain curious, right? I mean, I'm 50 years old. Okay. But I don't feel like I'm tired of learning or tired of exploring or tired of being surprised by things. In fact, that's the only thing that kind of, you know, keeps me going is the idea that there's so much more out there to learn so many questions to be asked, even if you don't get an answer. Yeah. When's your birthday? Is this one of those social engineering things?

You're going to go steal my bank account now? Don't give me the exact date. No, we'd be like doing astrology. It's more like that. I'm a Libra. I'm a Libra on the cusp of Scorpio. Okay. I like Libras. I have four kids and one in every season. I have a Libra. Yeah. I feel like God tried to like blow, like, you know,

I need burning bushes. I needed burning bushes. I'm like, you know, okay, this faith thing, this God thing. Okay. All right. Maybe, you know, I don't know. And so my whole life I was just like, God would just like, give me a burning bush. And I'm like, no, that's not good enough. It wasn't big enough. It wasn't burning high enough. So then he fricking give me another one. Then he knocked my ass off my pedestal with alcoholism and humbled me greatly. Then he, you know, was like, oh, really? You're still not going to get it. Okay. Well, let me just knock you on your ass again. And another burning bush would come and I'd ignore it. And I feel like my whole life, I had these things presented to me that were like, clearly, Mandy, there's something bigger than you.

There's a higher power out there. There's a source energy. And it took something very, very personal to hit me, to knock me down to a place where I was like, okay, I get it now. I get it. And it put me into a place to realize that science and spirituality are merging and marrying each other. And I was able to put my ego aside and just surrender and say, I am yours. I kind of feel like, and correct me if I'm wrong, but I kind of feel like maybe you could relate to that. I can relate to that, but I would still submit that there's plenty I could learn from you. You have a lot to teach people from what you've been through and what you've kind of devoted yourself to subsequently.

But I also want to ratify what you just said. This whole kind of age-old conflict and juxtaposition that we put between spirituality and science is kind of a fiction that we build in ourselves. And that kind of space is prepared for us, but it's not that impossible to transcend that. You know, I think it was Freeman Dyson, a great scientist and thinker, who said that, you know, God exists and his greatest gift to us is technology. And if you start from that presupposition, a lot of things kind of fall into place. And it helps understand that, again, even though we have all these tools and they're increasing every day and we're putting them to wonderful uses,

there's still so much that we don't know. And I was there at my son's bedside the moment he was getting his transfusion and all the medical professionals said, we've done everything we can, but at this point we think it's going to work. We don't know. Sometimes we think it's going to work and it doesn't. Sometimes we think it doesn't work and it does. And so what are you left with there, right? You could cross your fingers and just kind of be superstitious, or you could try to call on a higher power, whatever name you want to give your spiritual source of strength and try to help get you through to that next phase and kind of stand

on that edge between what's known and what isn't known. This has been a scary moment. Yeah. Thank you for sharing your story. And your book brings so much to the world. I mean, I love that you dedicated it to people that have had it tougher. I feel like it's not just for people that sat in a hospital. I feel like everyone could get something out of it. It's not just for people that have been through something similar. There's something in it for everyone. I want to say also that I think it's so important that you bring to the table through your book that this kind of stuff can cause trauma on marriages and how to handle

that. And it can cause trauma on your physical body and your mental health because you're so focused on that child or that patient that you forget about yourself in it. And it's very stressful and what it's doing to your immune system and what it's doing to your body and your mind and your marriage and your job. I mean, God bless you guys that you made it out on the other side and that you've been vulnerable with sharing that it was, it was really messy and it was really hard and look where you're at at today. Good job. Well, we tried. You know, I don't know. I mean, I tried to put it out there and I tried to make it interesting from the reader's perspective.

But you're right. I mean, the motivation for the whole thing was this. I kind of bristled at this perceived myth that every parent who has a sick kid suddenly becomes a saint. I didn't know how that worked. That's what the motivation was. And you're absolutely right that just like our bodies have immune systems that fight off these constant assault of pathogens and bacteria and viruses, in a similar way, we need to have kind of an analogous immune system for the mind. And that doesn't just mean having one means of coping, right? The body's immune system has hundreds of different kinds of cells to deal with hundreds of different kinds of

pathogens. And in a similar way, that's why I was saying, you know, maybe some, you know, a combination of therapy and exercise and spirituality and meditation and antidepressant medications. Like I do use it all because that's the system. It's not a, it's a, it's not a one turn key solution for anything. How is Sebastian doing? How, where is he at today? Yeah. So if you were to meet him, you'd need to be told three times that he had a life threatening disease. He's perfectly healthy. He doesn't have to take any medications he's uh you know enjoying his life to his fullest and you know he's gotten into theater

uh these days that was his big kick recently so he just played uh president roosevelt in and his musical little production we did so he's he's life. And that's all we ever wanted is to be able to have, for him to have the ability to pursue his dreams and his goals, let him lead his life in his own terms. He has to be monitored annually for checkups to make sure that the chemo hasn't done some sort of long-term organ damage and make sure that his immune system is still functioning like every transplant patient does. But other than that, yeah, he got through COVID just fine. He was not thrilled like most kids to wear a mask at school. And more than most kids for him, it wasn't like one year, it was a seventh year of social distancing and quarantining and masks after, you know, six years of that on and off to certain degrees. So today was actually his last day of school.

And hopefully it'll be his last day of school with a mask. I thought about that during COVID. I thought about, you know, we all wanted to whine and bitch and complain about wearing these masks and social distancing. And I knew families at Children's Hospital who had been doing that their entire lives with their children. So suck it up. Yeah. Welcome to the club. Yeah, no, it's, it was that like at the beginning, you know, kind of like a lot of the people in the immune deficiency world are like, you know, welcome to our world, but you know, ultimately it's not a good thing. You know, welcome to our world. But, you know, ultimately it's not a good thing. You know, nobody should have to do that. And it's just not how we're

meant to interact as a species. I firmly believe we should be socializing. We should be seeing face to face. We should have real interpersonal contact, not just on screens. So the next time you interview me, it's going to be in person. Deal. That's what life is ultimately about is genuine human contact. You want more of that. Absolutely. Speaking of interviews, if your wife ever wants to come on and talk about her nonprofit, she's putting together and her own personal experience around this.

We would love to have her as well. And now it's time for break that shit down. Yeah. Thank you for that opportunity. I first just want to say that I'm in no position to be giving anybody advice. I'm a guy who's just trying to deal with life on its own terms and try to get through the day. We're all struggling. We're all imperfect. We all fail. But we all also have wonderful potential to surprise ourselves and to give and share love

and to appreciate the fact that any given moment has the potential for an eternity of joy. Thanks for sharing your soul and your story with us today. We appreciate it. And if you have any weird UFO stories that you want to share, you can always call it Sense of Soul. Yeah.

Where can our listeners get your book, find your book, learn more about you? Okay. So you can check out my website miguel sancho.net miguel sancho.com i think was taken already by a spanish model who i also recommend you check out but my yes she's cute miguel sancho.net uh the book published by pinklin so it's on amazon it's on barnesandnoble.com in every uh bookstore on the planet earth no that's not true but any good bookstore will be able to order it for you yeah so you know buy it like you buy most books i'm told to

encourage people to not just go to amazon apparently you know there's reasons that we don't want to give amazon every single dollar on planet earth but you know it certainly is available on amazon and uh on audible too You can listen to his lovely voice. Yes. Like the baritone, you can get about six and a half hours of uninterrupted Miguel Sancho baritone reading the book. Yeah.

I'm going to be really vulnerable to wrap this up and tell you that I text Shanna right before we got on and said, I'm nervous. And I'll tell you why. Your resume blew my mind. And I was like, wait, we're going to interview a guy who's been interviewing people forever. And then I heard this voice in my ear that said, just be authentic, just be you. And, and that's what I brought to the table. And we had a beautiful conversation and that was all my ego. And you have been such a pleasure. And Shannon, I feel so blessed every day

to see guests like you come across our email to come on and give us an opportunity to talk with you. So thank you. Absolutely. And don't let that intimidation, I mean, believe me, I've met plenty of people with awesome resumes who are bonafide idiots. So, you know, it doesn't, anything. Yeah, you guys are great.

Thank you so much for coming on Sense of Soul. All right. Lots of love. Thanks for being with us today. We hope you will come back next week. If you like what you hear, don't forget to rate, like, and subscribe. Thank you. We rise to lift you up.

Thanks for listening.