Show Transcript

Welcome back to Grit, Grace, and Inspiration.

I bet you're wondering why Kevin, your host, suddenly sounds like a woman.

This is Kaylee Z.

And I'm taking over the podcast.

Today.

I have the distinct honor of getting to interview the creator and host of Grit, Grace, and Inspiration, Kevin Lo.

I'm sure all of you know this by now.

Kevin is truly a gift to the world.

He is the quintessential symbol of strength and resilience.

And as you will hear in this episode, today is a very special occasion, and I felt it was important for all of Kevin's listeners to get a deep dive into his journey and story.

Today we will learn how, in fact, Kevin became the beacon of hope and strength that he is and how he created this space for inspiration and transformation, which is really what the podcast is.

I'm really excited to guide all of us on this journey together today.

So please join me in welcoming our very special guest host, Kevin Lowe.

Yo.

Are you ready to flip the script on life?

Cause those bad days, they're just doors to better days.

And that's exactly what we do here at Grit, Grace, and Inspiration.

Your host, Kevin Lowe, he's been flipping the script on his own life, turning over 20 years of being completely blind into straight up inspiration, motivation, and encouragement just for you.

So kick back, relax, and let me introduce you to your host, Kevin Lowe.

Wow.

Well, I feel so honored today to get to interview you, Kevin, so I'll just let everyone know.

My name is Kaylee, and this is the greatest honor.

I put Kevin on the spot all of a sudden and said, wait a second.

Have you been interviewed?

Maybe you should be interviewed.

So today we are doing this very special interview in honor of your anniversary.

So why don't you get us started there, Kevin?

What does it mean that this is your anniversary?

Yeah.

So October 28th of this year was my 21st anniversary of, as I say, the day that both my life was saved and the anniversary of the day that my life was forever changed because of that marking.

Also, the day that I became completely blind.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And, you know, obviously, I have so many questions.

I feel I'm the one being interviewed a lot.

This is very different for me to get to interview you.

And I just want to say, in preparation for this, it was extremely humbling to realize that.

First of all, there's so much I hope that we'll be able to share today.

But just in hearing you talk about this anniversary, you were pretty young, right?

How old were you?

I was.

I was 17.

So I was in my junior year of high school.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Which for all of us listening, you know, you can only imagine what that's like.

And.

And it's bittersweet, in a sense.

Your life was saved.

And did you know when you went into this, this all unfolded from a surgery?

Correct, Correct.

So we found out that I had a brain tumor.

It was non cancerous, thank goodness.

But yeah.

So this all relates to me going in to have this brain tumor removed that they literally, at the time that we had found it, they gave me only six months to live if it wasn't removed.

Wow.

So here we are celebrating.

And, you know, if everyone could see me right now, I'd be, you know, lifting a glass for you and toasting to your life.

We're celebrating your life.

And yet that surgery did not go as planned.

Did you know what?

Like, was this a risk?

Were you told that this could be a risk?

Yes.

So if anybody's ever had any type of procedure before, you know that like the doctors, they always go through, like, all the big, long list of possible risks, you know, and it's ironic now when I think back on it, because I always remember the last one, he said, and it was a 1% possibility of becoming blind.

Oh, I'm covered in chills.

That was the last risk you were told, and it was 1%?

Yes.

Yeah.

So I say you can decide how you want to look at it.

I'm either the most unlucky or the luckiest person alive.

Oh, gosh.

See, Kevin, this is why I feel so honored to interview you.

Because you just said that.

That.

Of course he would say that.

Yeah.

So, I mean, you.

You've already opened so much I want to ask you about when you found out that.

Go back a little bit.

When you found out that there was a brain tumor, your mom.

Your.

I actually got a chance to talk to your mom.

That was the coolest thing ever, by the way.

She's so special.

She told me about that moment and how she just.

She just sort of was frozen, staring, and she just said, I just kept staring.

And I just kept staring at him, at the doctor.

What was that moment like for you?

The moment when.

When you found out there was a tumor.

When you were told there was a tumor.

So we had went to a doctor.

So when all of this, this whole kind of ball got rolling, basically all started by me going to a new family doctor.

And that doctor basically was the one who put all the pieces together of all these different symptoms I was having.

I had.

I had always had, like, migraine headaches you know, I wasn't growing.

I mean, 17 years old, I hadn't gone through puberty.

All these things that my pediatrician always just kept blowing off, basically that I was just a late bloomer, you know, that I'm just gonna be short, you know, all this stuff.

So frustrating.

And so.

Exactly.

And so when we went to this new doctor and he was just a new family doctor in town, and he immediately.

He was the one who told my mom out in the hallway, like, listen, I.

We need to get him to a specialist.

And so that then brings up the first time that the term brain tumor was ever said was in the doctor's office of the endocrinologist.

But you had now spent not just years, like your entire childhood.

Right.

Going through different symptoms that they were just ignoring.

Kind of like, he'll grow out of it.

Yes, yes, absolutely.

Yeah.

My entire childhood was.

When you look at it now from the big picture, it was just textbook symptoms that should never have been missed.

Oh, my gosh, Kevin, like, what?

Tell us about those symptoms.

What was your childhood like?

So I think it was maybe in kindergarten is when I failed the eye exam at school.

And so that started my journey of getting glasses.

Then, as I would continue to grow up and keep going to eye doctors, all of the eye doctors I went to, they always found it strange that they could never get my vision to perfectly correct, even with glasses.

So there was always sort of something off.

Yes, yes.

Same thing with my mom.

She would tell the pediatrician, she's like, you don't understand.

She's like, he drinks more than any human you've ever seen.

I mean, Kaylee, I didn't know what a night's sleep was because I literally.

When I would go to bed at night, I would wake up every single hour.

And I would wake up, I would use the bathroom, I'd get a drink of water, go back to bed, and repeat.

Oh, my gosh.

And so we.

Another textbook symptom of what was going on.

And so when I would go to school, I wouldn't be able to drink enough.

And so at the end of every school day, especially starting in middle school, is when it got really bad.

I would come home every day with a raging migraine headache.

It was because I was totally dehydrated.

Oh, my God.

And literally, I remember my.

Yeah, my Nana, she would pick me up from school, and I'd come home, and I would literally drink an entire pitcher of tea, just dying of thirst.

So you're describing just one component of this.

What we're talking about.

I didn't say this earlier.

We're talking about a tumor on the pituitary gland.

I don't know, you know that this is my field.

So, I mean, the pituitary gland is responsible for so much.

I don't think a lot of people understand the implications.

You're describing one mechanism.

Tell us more about, if you want to, the pituitary gland.

And it feels like the impact could be endless.

Yeah, basically.

So, basically my understanding, basically, the pituitary is.

It's just like the powerhouse of controlling all of your body's hormones.

And so unbeknownst to us, I had this brain tumor that was slowly either encasing or pressing against whatever it was interfering with the pituitary gland.

And so that's why me talking about drinking.

It was the thirst hormone, you know, it was testosterone, growth hormone.

The drinking, you know, they ended up giving me a thing called, like, diabetes insipidus.

And it's not that I have diabetes, but it's this condition that is related to the pituitary with my thirst hormone.

Wow.

And so all of this stuff and.

Yeah.

And so every symptom I had was all related back to the fact that a brain tumor was basically killing off my pituitary.

And it's.

It's so easy.

I know it wasn't.

It now probably is very clear, but for any of us listening, I think it's.

You could see it's like a doctor is going to just look at that one aspect and what's so important when we look at the body, we have to look at the whole organism.

I can only imagine what it feels like to you.

It's like, well, if one doctor had just picked up on that sooner.

Does that ever cross your mind, like, how different your life would have looked?

I don't let myself.

Sorry to bring it up.

Yeah, no, no, no, no, no.

Honestly, no.

I mean, it's a good question.

And it is a question that I think me and my whole family have thought about many times.

And I've learned in life that you can literally drive yourself insane if you get stuck in the trap of what ifs.

Totally.

Yes.

Yeah.

I learned that.

I learned that when I married now.

I was engaged with once before.

I don't remember if we spoke about this, you and I, but my first fiance died.

And.

And of course, like, all the what ifs went through my mind.

You know, what if I had been there?

What if, you know, he had called me first, like, maybe like anything, because I was out of town at the time.

And a good friend taught me, he said, you cannot do the what ifs.

Anytime a what if pops into your head, you have to just shut it down, change the subject, think something else.

Because you can't know.

If you say, like, well, what if I had been there?

Or what if.

What if a doctor saw it sooner?

We don't know how that would have played out.

So I really value you sharing this.

I think it's one of the greatest lessons that anyone listening can hear.

Because you kind of lose out on your life when you play the what if game.

Yes, absolutely.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Okay.

So I took us back.

So I just wanted to get a better sense.

So you talked about the thirst.

Anything, like, what other symptoms were you going through?

Were you experiencing as a child?

Basically, the most like, say, like, impactful were the migraine headaches.

Always going to the eye doctor, always getting different glasses and such.

But the most debilitating would be the migraine headache.

Sure.

Just the thirst factor, which, I mean, it was such, like, a slow, gradual process that, I mean, I didn't think anything weird about it.

You know what I mean?

It wasn't like I didn't realize, honestly, it was just part of my life that I woke up every hour during the night.

Whoa.

That was just life for me.

And that is why when we finally got the diagnosis, that it just took me by complete shock.

Wow.

Wow.

When all of this started happening and went to the new family doctor, and then he referred to the endocrinologist, and they sent me to the neurosurgeon and MRI and all that stuff.

I never thought it was going to be something like.

Like a brain tumor.

Wow.

Wow.

Yeah.

Wow.

Wow.

I can only imagine that kind of surprise.

Yeah.

Yes.

Wow.

Especially after years of sort of these things being dismissed or taken as, like, piecemeal.

Exactly.

Exactly.

Wow.

How soon after discovering that it was a brain tumor, was there a plan in place to have surgery?

So I can remember when we.

When we got to meet with the pediatric neurosurgeon, and I remember that we were there the first day that we met with him.

And when he went over everything, he had the results of the mri, of course, and he actually had an opening.

I think it was the next day.

Oh, my gosh.

And my mom, she wanted me to take it.

I did not want to.

And, you know, she.

You know, she was scared.

Yeah.

Everybody.

Everybody was dealing with their own emotions.

And ultimately, though, we decided to wait.

And I think it was maybe somewhere around maybe, like two weeks later, maybe two, three Weeks later, something like that.

When I would go back in for surgery.

Wow.

You said, everybody's emotions.

We're in a different place.

Where were your emotions?

So when my mom told me about the news that she.

So she had gotten the call on, like, a Friday evening.

Oh, wow.

With the results of the mri.

And so she was the one who would tell me.

And we had taken our boat that evening up the Intracoastal waterway up to St.

Augustine, Florida, and we were staying there for the weekend.

It was one of my favorite trips that we would take on our boat.

And my mom, she waited to tell me till we got up there.

Oh, my God.

And so I was down in the cabin of the boat.

I always say that, like, this part of my story is always weird because it's like, I just remember, like, photographs, like, snapshots.

The first snapshot being down in the boat, sitting there, flipping through a magazine.

And that's when my mom came down and she told me.

And the next snapshot is me getting out of the boat and just running.

Running up the dock.

Oh, wow.

And the next snapshot is me up at the top of the marina, leaning against the railing, looking out at the marina.

I didn't know why I was upset.

I guess it was just the simple fact of.

I never thought it was going to be something like a brain tumor.

You always just think it's going to be something easy.

Especially then.

I mean, I never.

You never even heard of anybody having a brain tumor, let alone that I would be the one.

And so after that initial shock wore off, and after I would get confirmation, you know, from the doctor, from the neurosurgeon, that everything was gonna be okay.

He literally told me.

He's like, I do these surgeries all the time.

Whoa.

And he, you know, he let me know.

He's like, kevin.

He's like, it's gonna be no big deal.

He said, we'll go in.

We'll remove the tumor.

Basically, they had to kind of remove, like, the front quadrant of my skull.

Yeah.

When you said, no big deal, I was like, I'm sorry.

Didn't they open your skull?

Like, didn't they have to, like, remove.

I mean.

Sorry, this is graphic.

But, like, your forehead, like, what?

No big deal.

Y.

It was.

Yeah, it was no big deal to the nurse.

Oh, my God.

But honestly, you know, like, for me.

And so, you know, literally, I mean, he told me, and he told me, you know, I'd be back to school in three weeks.

And so I've always had a really good Personality.

And so I immediately realized the positives.

Yeah.

I got to get out of school for three weeks.

Yeah.

Your mom mentioned you really didn't like school.

You mentioned you were highly intelligent.

Did well, always got straight A's.

But didn't like it.

No.

So literally, as soon as I got this news, first day back at school, went into my guidance counselor.

Amazing.

Ms.

Tully told her.

Ms.

Tully, I've got to drop out of trigonometry.

Much to my disappointment.

And so that was literally the greatest day of my life when I got to walk into class and see all my friends, and I got to hand a slip to the teacher and say, see you later, suckers.

I'm going to be an office aide, you know.

Oh, wow.

And so you're seeing all the pros.

All the pros.

And to the point that I even.

I named my tumor Bob.

Bob the Tumor.

And literally, like our whole family, before surgery, we had a going away Bob party.