Announcer: Coming up on The Whitney Reynolds Show.

My life was turned upside down to quote the show in a different way, when my daughter was diagnosed with epilepsy right at the exact same time as I got the job as Hamilton.

So, I, you know, used the sort of analogy of like, holding onto a parachute and a rocket at the same time.

Announcer: The Whitney Reynolds Show is made possible by... Yates Protect: a minority-owned business focused on protecting communities and providing solutions to safety problems for public and private institutions including air purification, metal detectors, thermal detection, and more.

Safety is a right, not a privilege.

And by, O'Connor Law Firm.

When it comes to your injuries, we take it seriously.

Carrie McCormick, a real estate broker with @Properties.

With more than 20 years of experience, she understands the importance of the customer relationship during your real estate journey.

Theraderm, committed to developing skin products designed to restore and promote natural beauty.

Sciton, because results matter.

Additional funding provided by, Mid-West Moving & Storage, Galileo, The Gumdrop by Delos Therapy, Happy to Meat You, Kevin Kelly with Jameson Sotheby's International Realty, Fresh Dental, Ella's Bubbles, Tutu School Chicago, Hi-Five Sports Camp, and these funders: Today, we are talking about the word "love," and how love carried some of our guests through their most difficult moments.

[theme music] Whitney: It was a hard year.

Ask anyone.

Covid, a virus we were learning about by the day, was impacting every aspect of life.

The virus, for some, became the difference between life or death.

However, for one rural Illinois family, beating Covid was a short victory for what they were about to encounter.

Something doctors are calling "Covid psychosis."

You know, some people do MRIs of the brain, and you can see some white matter lesions after Covid infection, but those do not always translate to the symptoms.

So, there are patients who do have the psychosis, and they never have anything that shows up on imaging.

They really were normal, per se, prior to Covid, and then afterwards it was like night and day.

All of a sudden, they're paranoid, they don't want to go outside, they think someone's after them, they have hallucinations.

So, it's a very clear-cut diagnosis, and the only thing that changed was Covid.

Whitney: And for the Price family, the term "Covid psychosis" would impact them forever.

We were very scared because he, you know, he's a strong, healthy guy.

Very healthy, farmer, he was a linebacker football player, like, just still a really good, healthy guy.

And, so, he just kept saying when he was in the hospital like, "How did this happen?

How did I get this sick?"

But, you know, he was in there, and, you know, nobody even the nurses and doctors don't come in unless it's an emergency because everybody has to mask up and gown up before they come in, so it's a very slow process.

So, he would call in a panic like, "My monitors have been going off for 30 minutes, and nobody's coming in," so, I would call the nurse's station.

And I just have always been a great source of strength for him emotionally, you know, so not being able to be there with him was scary for him.

In going back to that you couldn't be with him, y'all have always been together.

We are with each other all of the time.

College sweethearts.

Whitney: So, there has never been a time, really, that y'all were separated?

No.

Hmm-mm.

You've also had kids that have needed different things at different times.

You've adopted one child.

Jennifer: Yes.

Whitney: You have a kid with special needs.

Jennifer: Yes.

Would you consider your marriage happy and strong?

Very much.

I mean, we always said, "Life is tough, but we are tougher."

And we had weathered so many storms, you know, and not many people-- Even with a child like our son with severe disabilities, he was born in the NICU and stayed there for almost four months, and so just that alone can be so much on a marriage, and we just, we're a great team.

We were the best team, and that's, you know, something we took a lot of pride in.

And, we're very proud of what we had been through.

When people go into the hospital with Covid, and they get released, you see the videos, and it could be a celebration.

They're like, "Yay, I'm out, like, I'm breathing on my own," and little did you know that that's where your real battle was going to begin.

Yeah, we had no idea, and that's why I have gone into this awareness campaign is because had somebody said to me, be aware of neurological symptoms, be aware of change in behavior, you know, none of that.

You get your discharge papers, and it's all about oxygen and breathing and temperatures.

And with each day we would just lay there, and he would be holding my hand just saying, "I'm so scared.

I'm so scared."

Which is not my husband.

When did you see a complete decline in mood and a shift in behavior?

Yeah.

Thursday into Friday, especially.

He just kept pacing the house.

His clothes weren't the way he normally wore them, he wasn't talking like his self.

He would sit in a chair and put his hands to his face and just take deep breaths and wouldn't know, like, to verbalize what was going on.

He would say sometimes that, you know, "I have to get the farming done," and I'm like, "Honey, it's February.

"There's no farming to be done.

You've not lost any time."

Was there a history of mental illness in the family?

No.

Depression?

No.

Uh-uh.

So, all this behavior was very, very uncharacteristic.

Saturday night was really tough.

I made my daughter stay home.

I thought, if anybody could get him to perk up it would be her.

They were best friends, they did everything together.

He never left our home without going into her room in the morning to give her a kiss goodbye.

Ever, never.

And, that night we made his favorite meal, we laid on the couch as a family and snuggled, like, all of his favorite things.

We finally got him to rest and lay down on the couch, and he fell asleep, and we were thinking, victory, you know, we got him to sleep.

And he went to sleep that night and we woke up the next morning.

He got up early.

So, I made him breakfast, and he's like, "I feel better.

I slept better."

And, he just seemed better.

And he's like, you know, "I'm going to go out to the office "and just do some paperwork because, you know, it'll help my mind doing something."

And, you know, that was the plan.

And I was going to feed our son and then head out there.

And he headed out and I texted his mom and sister and I said, "I think we've turned a corner.

He's doing better today."

I was going to leave, and for whatever reason, I looked at "Find My Friends," and noticed he was at our other farm.

He wasn't at the office, which wasn't a red flag because he'd been sick, he hadn't been taking care of the animals out there, so he wanted to go see them.

So, I called him up and just said, "Oh, you know, are you checking everybody out?"

And everything looked good, and he sounded fine.

He was good.

And, within 20 minutes his dad had happened to be driving to check things out as well and couldn't find him, and, you know, again not a red flag.

I'm like he's probably just out looking at the animals and the fencing.

And not long later, I got the call, he was gone.

Whitney: When you say, "gone..." His dad found him.

And he had died by suicide.

Yeah.

My husband had just said two weeks earlier, like, "As tough as life can get," "you just can't do that to your family.

It's devastating."

And, so, I just, I know with all my heart my husband did not take his life, Covid took his life.

And there's no doubt in my mind in just talking with neurologists and doctors and psychiatrists and other families who've gone through this with their loved ones, I know now what was happening, and what they call "command hallucinations."

So, the paranoia and the psychosis is part of it.

And then what often happens is you're hearing voices in your head.

It's telling you what to do and they're very vivid and they're very real.

And so many things if you look up online with Covid psychosis and command hallucinations, are people are being told to take their lives.

What are you doing in hopes that people know more about this?

Like, what are you tangibly doing right now?

I have done everything.

I have talked to small-town newspapers, I put it all over my social media pages.

I did a "change.org" campaign, which is then-- they actually saw it and elevated the campaign and emailed it out, so then it, you know, hit, 20,000 signatures or close to that.

And my daughter and I talk about him and laugh about him and the things he would be saying or doing, and that's important to us knowing he will always be there with us.

It's remarkable to me the faces of inspiration that I can even see in the midst of the tough, and you're one of those faces.

And, so, I know just by hearing this today, you're not stopping.

No.

You're going to change the world.

Absolutely.

Next up, we turn to a mom who has a warning for all parents; one that must be heard.

A mom on a mission to save lives.

A mom that might be a familiar face.

She is known as Dr. Laura, and she has been extending knowledge on TV for years.

However, now, her new message is extremely personal.

Sammy, our middle 16-year-old, was sheltering at home with my 15-year-old as well.

Sammy was always very gregarious, very kind, was a great student, got mostly A's, was getting ready to apply for colleges in the fall.

And my rule with both of them was, as long as you're making good grades, and you're not getting in trouble, you can do as much social media as you want because that was their only way of socializing.

Couldn't play football, he couldn't see his friends, he couldn't do anything.

What I didn't realize was that drug dealers would be looking for our kids online and advertising to them.

He had gone out after we were asleep to meet this dealer.

He had the drugs in his possession without us knowing, and on Sunday, February 7th, I went up and he had taken the drugs that were laced with Fentanyl, and I found him on the floor.

There isn't a kid who is spending time on social media who isn't coming across or being targeted by drug dealers.

Every adolescent does stupid stuff, tries stupid things, and experiments with stupid things.

The problem is, that now, it's going to very likely be fatal.

Fentanyl is a synthetic opioid that's twice as addictive as heroin, and it just takes a few little grains of it to kill you.

The night that Sammy died, I called his best friend who sent me a screenshot that Sammy had sent him of this dealer's ad to him with the guy's Snapchat and Twitter handle, and I went right to the police who were still in our house.

I was like, "We got him.

Here he is.

Here's the ad," and they said, "Sorry," you know, "even if we have their handles, they use the privacy laws not to give us the information."

The most they'll do is take down that person's profile, but they don't care.

They just pop up ten seconds later with a brand-new profile.

So, at that point, I just thought, I got to do something to stop this from happening to other kids.

Whitney: Emboldened by the memory of her son, she created a petition for all social media apps to allow parental monitoring.

So, I've started a petition so that I can put the pressure not only on the social media companies but on the lawmakers.

If we get enough signatures, they will have to listen, and even if they don't want to tackle the privacy laws and the big behemoth that social media is, at the bare minimum, we can let parents protect their kids.

I never anticipated that he would experiment.

I mean, I was worried, I was watching, I was intervening, but I wasn't anticipating.

If at that point I had known, for instance, about Narcan which can save your life if you have a Fentanyl or opioid overdose, I didn't know this.

It's sold over the counter.

You just talk to your pharmacist.

You don't need a prescription.

And every school and camp and infirmary should have Narcan, and if your kid is experimenting with anything, have it.

But if I had had that, he might be alive today.

And this was a great kid with a great life, a community and a family that supported him and adored him with every resource available to him, and made a stupid mistake, and I want families and kids to know how easily this can happen.

Experimentation can very easily be fatal.

From a mom, now turning to a dad who also lost a child.

He's here today to tell us how love has carried him through.

Miguel Cervantes landed the role of a lifetime, the lead in the hit play, "Hamilton."

However, as everything was going right, tragedy was about to strike.

My life was turned upside down to quote the show in a different way, when my daughter was diagnosed with epilepsy right at the exact same time as I got the job as Hamilton.

So, I use the sort of analogy of like holding onto a parachute and a rocket at the same time.

And as Hamilton progressed in Chicago, was an amazing experience for me and my family, so did her condition, and she got sicker and sicker and she died.

We lost her in October of 2019, just two months before, a few weeks before her birthday, her 4th birthday and also a few months before Hamilton closed in Chicago.

So, that was sort of the journey of my family, and the highs and lows that you get as an actor, your job, and also as a parent.

And, so, what my wife and I did is we partnered with an organization called "CURE," Citizens United for Research in Epilepsy, and used the platform that we were given with Hamilton to raise awareness and funds and try to do everything we could, some little thing, to maybe help a family down the road.

Did it take you a second to know there's no accident that I have this platform as well, I need to do something bigger in my daughter's name?

Yeah, you know, I think while it is sort of easy to sort of ride the wave of Hamilton and think about, you know-- Sometimes I kind of thought of maybe we were being cheated out of being able to enjoy this life, this Hamilton life and coming to Chicago and all the things.

And we got to do those things, right.

I got to do the Anthem at Wrigley and the White Sox and the Bears game and all these things, but then sort of were forced into this other life, and rather than get upset, rather than get angry or sort of questioning why it was us, it does kind of immediately pivot to while this is not a club you ever want to be part of, if you're not going to use this platform to try to help, then it feels like a waste.

Whitney: In the memory of his daughter, he continues to use his platform to raise awareness as Hamilton comes back to theaters.

And now that you know that Hamilton's opening back up, what does this feel like after like a year of like-- Like, did you practice your "me-me-mes" in the shower?

Like, what did you do?

You know, it's sort of, talking about going to rehearsals and how to prepare our bodies and our voices to go back into this life.

Do you think you're going to come back with even a higher energy?

-Yeah.

-Yeah.

-Yeah, you know.

-Yeah, heck yeah.

Well, I mean, there's not only the-- I haven't used my voice as much as I normally do, so I can sing a lot better.

I'm not using-- The calluses that built up have sort of eased away.

I'm like, wow, this is great.

So, there's going to be this renewed energy, and not just for Hamilton, not just for us and my job, but it's going to be for like New York City and Broadway and theater and sharing community and sharing space and being people and a renewed and beginning anew in this sort of weird time that we're all living in.

People talk a lot about not going back but going forward, and I think that's really important as we get back into this.

And normally on Broadway, like if you starred in the show, you just jump on the train and you just go and there's the next person in line whether it's Hamilton or Angelica or Aaron Burr, you know, Elphaba in "Wicked," and Glinda or whatever.

You're just the next person who does it, and there's no real fanfare.

Here, all of a sudden, where there's going to be another opening night for these shows that have run for years and years and years, so we are given a kind of energy and like spark that maybe wouldn't have been there before.

It's going to be great.

Next up, we sit own with three people whose lives were saved because of love.

My name is Frank Robb.

I am known as "Alligator Robb."

I have been working with alligators and crocodilians down here in Florida for 26 years now.

I was called to Chicago to catch an alligator in 2019.

Hi, my name is Larissa May, also known as "Larz," and I'm the founder and executive director of "Half the Story."

Hi, I'm Joe Fisher, and I am a recovering lawyer, former president of an insurance company, and currently the co-founder of BIAN, which is a private member club.

Whitney: These three entrepreneurs have something in common.

They listened to love, followed their heart, and pursued their passion.

Because of that, they are all alive today.

I was alone in my dorm room.

I had suicidal thoughts.

I found out in November of 2020 that I needed heart surgery or, you know, I wasn't going to be here anymore.

I had some tingling and numbness in my leg, and the team at BIAN, the massive team of people trying to figure out the why.

Whitney: All three at a different crossroad, at the intersection of self-love and discovery.

Once I was able to fall back in love with myself, both offline and online, I wanted to build a non-profit that I needed as a young person.

The way things have worked out from everything from Chicago is hard to understand at the time why the good Lord put me there, but looking back now, I understand I was sent there so that I would have opportunities to be able to help the surgery be funded.

Without starting BIAN and having this club behind me and the journey, I would have had a terminal diagnosis.

Whitney: Love prevailed and made way for these three.

It is truly a miracle you are in this studio with us today, Joe.

Welcome.

Thank you.

Thank you.

I am in awe of your story, actually, all three stories we just watched because really you had to be doing what you love, and because of that, it saved your life.

A hundred percent, absolutely correct.

But for BIAN and the intervention and the journey I've been on, I would have been like a lot of people, and I would have lived with this situation without knowing it, and I would have had a terminal diagnosis.

At the end of the day, I was just unhappy with the things I was doing.

So I was, you know, president of an insurance company, I was traveling every week, I had two young children.

I wasn't fulfilled.

I wasn't happy from a business perspective, and my life was suffering.

My physical life was suffering.

I felt myself, you know, going in a direction I didn't like, and I sought out, luckily, a healer who led me on ultimately this path to creating BIAN and to then eventually saving my life.

Well, and that's even more ironic because if you were living that life and you had the ache that kind of showed you the way to your cancer, would you have even noticed then?

I certainly would have noticed, but I wouldn't have done any of the steps that I did being in the environment of BIÂN.

I would have done what a lot of people do in this.

What I have essentially is some nerve issue that my nerve is being triggered, so it's something that can actually go away in a couple of months on its own and normally does.

And, so, you know, that's the typical thing is you would have just done that and it would have gone away and you would have gone on with your life.

And, so, there you are surrounded by your team that you created, and they tell you to go get a MRI.

Sadly, for kidney cancer, renal cancer, you either find it because of some other test that finds it as an incidental finding, or you find it when it's too late.

Oh.

You find it with blood in your urine or severe back pain, and by then because the kidney essentially, all the blood of your body goes through your kidney.

Once it spreads out of the kidney, it spreads very rapidly.

And, you know, what the doctor said to me at the time when I was diagnosed and I came in and he confirmed and his view it was cancer was, you would have had a year to live at that point.

And here's the most remarkable part, you've had the surgery and you're here today and they removed the cancer.

Correct.

Yeah.

You're three weeks post-surgery now.

Three weeks, yeah.

How are you feeling?

I feel great.

I mean, on a relative basis, I have to believe that I'm at the high end of people who are trying to recover.

It was a really difficult surgery.

There were some really dark times of pain and discomfort, but there was no way to avoid them.

Ultimately that's the path, and you have to experience that pain to get to the other side.

This show sure touched my heart and hopefully yours, too.

The common thread is the word "love," and that kept all of our guests moving forward.

Remember, your story matters.

[music] Announcer: The Whitney Reynolds Show is made possible by... Yates Protect: a minority-owned business focused on protecting communities and providing solutions to safety problems for public and private institutions including air purification, metal detectors, thermal detection, and more.

Safety is a right, not a privilege.

And by, O'Connor Law Firm.

When it comes to your injuries, we take it seriously.

Carrie McCormick, a real estate broker with @Properties.

With more than 20 years of experience, she understands the importance of the customer relationship during your real estate journey.

Theraderm, committed to developing skin products designed to restore and promote natural beauty.

Sciton, because results matter.

Additional funding provided by, Mid-West Moving & Storage, Galileo, The Gumdrop by Delos Therapy, Happy to Meat You, Kevin Kelly with Jameson Sotheby's International Realty, Fresh Dental, Ella's Bubbles, Tutu School Chicago, Hi-Five Sports Camp, and these funders: Go beyond the interview with Whitney Reynolds and her 52-week guide of inspiration.

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