Show Transcript

Well, I want to welcome you to a very inspirational edition of learn from people who lived it.

You're about to sit down with me, doctor David Lykin, and a guy named Kevin Low, who is going to blow your mind.

His story is so incredible.

At 17 years old, he discovers he has a benign brain tumor.

And when they remove the tumor, they also remove his ability to see.

No shapes, no shadows, just darkness.

But the way that Kevin has been able to step into the light is the thing I really want you to pay attention to today.

He's a religious guy, and so you're going to hear us reference God and Jesus throughout this interview.

And there's one moment where I ask him if he ever was angry with God about this whole thing and listen to his answer.

The thing is about anger.

There were times when I'd be sobbing when I would get angry with God, because no matter how hard I prayed, every morning, I'd wake up and I'd open my eyes, and I'd see the same thing I did when they were closed.

And all I wanted so bad was for God just to let me see again.

And a lot of times, I remember even saying, God, just let me see nothing else but just my family.

I just want to be able to see them.

And it never.

It never would come true.

And I would get angry with him, but it would never be for more than a minute, because I would always end by asking God for his forgiveness, because I knew that I couldn't do this without him.

That's just a snapshot at what you're about to experience if you spend the next 45 minutes with us here on learn from people who lived it.

I'm incredibly grateful that you stopped by with us every single week to listen to these episodes.

I sincerely hope that they're helping you move through the tough stuff in your own life and step into a better future for you and your family and everyone around you.

Let's jump off into today's episode with Kevin Lowe on learn from people who lived it.

Find learn from people who lived it.

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Learn from people who lived it.

People who lived it.

What's up?

This is Kevin Low coming to you from east central Florida.

Look at this guy.

Lots of energy today.

Kevin, welcome to the show.

Who.

What story are you here to share today, man?

I am here to share.

I call it my story, but really, my hope is that it relates to other people.

It's a story of love and loss, a story of basically life being turned upside down unexpected events.

But it's that single moment in time that changes everything.

That's the story I'm here to share, is that story of my life in the hope that it can be an inspiration to somebody else.

Love that man.

Who do you hope hears this man?

My hope always is somebody on the other side of the earth who I'll never meet and I'll never hear from, but I hope that that person, they hear something I say today and it gives them that little bit of inspiration to just keep going one more day.

Love it.

Well, listen, welcome to learn from people who lived it.

We are joined as always, Kevin, with, by our buddy doctor David Lycan, resident psychiatrist and all around goodfella.

How are you today, pal?

Hey, it's a pleasure to be here as always, Matthew.

Yeah, we got a great podcast today.

I'm excited about this because, Kevin, you actually represent the first person that we have brought on who is without sight.

You are blind.

And I know we're going to talk about some of those things, but if I can, I would love to just jump right into our your story a little bit today, Kevin, by asking you this question.

In 2003, everything changed for you.

Can you give me a sense of what was happening leading up to 2003 and then help our audience understand what happened in 2003?

Yeah, absolutely.

So, 2003, I turned 17 years old.

Um, so that was the start of my junior year of high school.

Um, life was at a point where, I mean, it was going really good, man.

I, I finally kind of had that core group of good friends who I really enjoyed doing stuff outside of school.

Um, when I turned 16, that sweet 16, I got my dream truck.

It was a, a 96 forest green Ford f 154 by four, and saw her on the side of old Dixie highway on the way to Publix grocery store with my mom one Saturday.

And that was when I was 15, all excited about looking for a truck.

And I saw that thing and baby, it was like love at first sight.

And next thing you know, I had my dad picking me up and me and him going to look at it and it was, it was the one.

And so turning 16 was, was a big moment for me, getting that truck, man.

I love being with my buddies, you know, out in the woods, mudding and having fun, but it was also just a sense of freedom.

Literally just driving windows down, country music blaring on the radio, cb whip antenna whipping in the wind, and of course, big 38 inch TSL super swamp or mud tires humming like nobody's business.

And, uh, so life, life was good.

Um, I really grew up, um, honestly, with a good life.

Um, I mean, I have been lucky that I have an amazing family.

Um, family.

Family is.

Is really a part of my story from the very beginning.

Um, and I, you know, family, you know, my parents, my, my sister, my grandparents, aunts and uncles, um, really blessed to have everybody living right here in, in the same town.

And, um, anyways, coming back, you know, full circle back to 2003, um, as I said, everything was going great.

And, uh, I always say it's kind of like that scene in the movie, you know, like, wherever everything's going perfect.

It's like, it's like the swimmers out there doing the backstroke in the ocean, but, you know, something's coming.

And for me, that came with news that I had a brain tumor.

I had been having some issues that my pediatrician kept blowing off pretty much my entire life.

And basically my mom and my grandmother, they were at a point when they had had enough, and they both had decided that they had to get me to a different doctor because they weren't getting the answers they needed.

I, at that time, 17 years old, I still hadn't gone through puberty.

I was only five foot three, had migraine headaches every day of my life, which, I mean, those started when I was only, gosh, probably about four or five years old.

Um, I had all these different things.

I.

My mom would tell the doctor that I drank more than any human you ever seen.

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

My normal night sleep was to literally wake up every single hour throughout the night, get a drink of water, go back to bed, wake up, pee, get a drink of water, go back to bed.

Um, and so, um, it would take a doctor who would actually really look at everything from the big picture and realize, yeah, there's definitely something wrong.

So that would be kind of the first domino to fall.

And, um, my mom was on her way to meet me and my stepdad and, I think step brother.

Um, we were going to take our boat, um, out for the weekend, um, up the Internet, intercoastal waterway, up to St.

Augustine, Florida, one of my favorite trips.

And, uh, my mom got a call from the doctor, um, uh, the endocrinologist on her way to meet us, and he had asked her, you know, to pull over, and she did.

And he gave her the news that it was worse than he could have ever expected.

Um, we would come to find out that I had a thankfully non cancerous, uh, brain tumor.

Uh, they compared it to the size of a plum basically positioned right in the center of my head.

So if you basically went to the bridge of your nose, right in between your eyes, and went straight back, that's where this tumor was.

It was.

It had completely encased my pituitary gland, was in the crosshairs of the optic nerve, and was now pressing against my carotid artery.

And I remember my mom, she made the decision to wait to tell me till we got up to St.

Augustine, to the marina.

And, you know, it's funny sometimes how memory works.

It's kind of like, I guess, snapshots of this time.

And I remember being down in the cabin of her boat, flipping through a magazine, when my mom came down and sat down across from me, and she told me the news that she had gotten.

And next thing that my snapshot goes to is me running up the dock as fast as I could and going all the way up to the top of the stairs to the top of the marina.

And then it flashes to me, just standing with my arms crossed, leaning against the railing, looking out at the marina.

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

You always think it's just going to be something simple, not this.

And yet, that would be the start of this whole new chapter of my life that never, never knew was going to hit me.

So I have a question, and, Dave, if you have a question, please feel free to jump in.

But when you get news like that, I can only imagine, Kevin, obviously, all of us humans only have the capacity to put ourselves in that position and be like, well, what would we do?

Or what do we think we would do?

That's probably a better way to say it.

And I would think when you hear those two words, brain tumor man, it would be really easy to think the worst.

And so I think my question is, at 17, did you go there, or did you have some string of hope in there that it was going to be okay?

Um, I did.

I mean, the initial shock of it was indeed just that shock.

Sure.

But I had the leading pediatric neurosurgeon an hour from my home over in Orlando, Florida, and he assured us that it was no problem.

He literally said.

He said, listen, I take these out all the time.

In which they wanted me to get in for surgery pretty soon, because they literally said that I was six months away from dying with this tumor.

Oh, my God.

And, um.

And he told us.

He told me, he said, kevin, he said, we're going to go in.

He said, we'll make a cut, basically, kind of removing like the front, like, kind of quadrant of my skull, and they'll go in there and take out the tumor.

And he told me that I'd be back to school in three weeks.

The worst news of all is that I had to stay off of my four wheeler for six months, which I thought was a bit excessive.

But me and my personality at that moment in time, I remember the appointment.

I can remember me and my mom, my dad, probably my sister, um, grandparents, all in, all in the hospital room, uh, with that first appointment with the.

With the neurosurgeon.

And I remember him showing the Mri up on.

Up on the wall, um, and right there, plain as day man, in the center of my head was this big white blob.

And, um, I remember it was emotional.

I can remember crying the entire way home, um, and again crying just at the.

It being scary of being a shock.

But again, we never thought anything was going to go wrong.

This was literally the answer to prayers.

We figured out what was wrong, right.

And that was the entire mindset going into surgery.

So when did you ultimately get on the table and have that surgery?

How long after finding out?

Um, it was only.

I'm thinking it was close to probably about two weeks.

Um, so not a long time at all.

No, not.

Not long at all.

Um, it was long enough that we were able to, um, have a going away bob party.

As I said, I named my tumor Bob.

Bob the tumor.

So we had a going away bob party.

Um, and, uh, and I I can remember going back to school, and of course, um, it must have maybe even been a little bit more than two weeks, because I remember that I.

I dropped out of trigonometry, um, and became an office aide and for my guidance counselor, because we knew that that class.

I mean, heck, I was no fan of trigonometry to begin with, much less going to miss a bunch of it.

Figured that would be pretty hard for me to keep up with.

Um, and I remember, you know, man, it was.

It was all kind of fun.

I mean, I remember telling all my friends, you know, like, see you later, suckers.

I'm out of here for a couple of weeks.

And, um.

And that was the mindset.

Surgery was set for October 28, 2003.

And literally, I went into the operating room.

I remember my mom and dad.

They were the ones who followed me back as they wheeled me in the bed.

And what I say is, if I knew then what I know now, I don't know that I could have allowed them to push me through those doors, really, because I don't know that I could have stopped staring at the faces of my family, because once I went through the doors, everything I ever knew, everything I loved, it was taken from me in an instant.

That was me waking from surgery to be left completely blind.

It took everyone by surprise.

Now my memory stops at that point going into the operating room, and my memory doesnt actually come back till probably a good month or two later back at home.

But I ended up remaining in the ICU for two weeks.

Nothing was going right.

I mean, the loss of vision was just one thing.

It was all kind of issues related to my sodium levels, my endocrine levels, um, literally my entire family, both my.

My mom's side of the family, my dad's side of the family, they were all there.

Basically overtook the pediatric ICU at Arnold Palmer Children's Hospital.

And literally, it would take my family, they would do shifts of, I think, four or five people, and they would last like ten minutes because I was super combative.

I was trying to pull out every port.

And they.

My family's so amazing.

They.

They didn't want the hospital to strap me down, so instead they would take the time to have groups of them be in there with me to try to just keep me.

Okay.

And they did that for basically two weeks.

And how long does it take you to accept your fate that you're not going to see again?

Is that a gradual process?

Is that something that you're still dealing with?

Can you help me understand that?

Um.

I would tell you that it took pretty much the better part of ten years.

Ten years?

Yeah.

I never stopped moving forward.

I always.

I mean, that happened the beginning of my junior year of high school.

I never went back to school the rest of my junior year.

But one thing that was kind of remarkable about my story is, I mean, I was a kid who, honestly, I hated school.

I mean, if I could be sick with the flu, that was.

That was a plus.

And yet, for some reason, which now I believe it was nothing, but, God, I had this desire.

And my family will tell you that.

As soon as this happened to me, I just kept saying, I still want to be able to graduate with my class, but I.

But I would graduate.

I literally walked across the stage of my high school graduation.

Um, I found myself wanting to ask you this question, and it's so irrelevant and who cares?

But you made such a big deal about it.

It's.

It's coming to the forefront.

Whatever happened to this truck you bought, man?

Um, my dad kept it for a long time.

That's great.

Everybody dealt with it in their own way.

Um, my dad was one who.

He was keeping it for when I could see again, I always thought that I would see again because there's a medical procedure, there's trials happening in China, there.

There's.

We grow up in a world expecting that everything is fixable.

Yes.

That was a big lesson to learn is that that's not the case.

And I finally, my.

In regards to the truck, I.

I mean, literally, my four wheeler, we would end up selling the four wheeler.

Um, I finally told my dad, um, one day, and it was probably, gosh, I would say a couple of years later, I finally told him.

I said, Dad, I said, I said, let's sell my truck.

I said, because if I ever get my sight back, I want a brand new truck.

Yeah, that's great.

Okay, so.

So I have so many questions, but I don't want to interrupt you because you're, you're, you're really great at communicating this story, but.

So it takes you ten years to come to terms of it, with it.

What is that ten years filled with?

Because this is where we really, I believe, have such an opportunity to learn from you, Kevin.

None.

Most of us don't know what it's like to not be able to see.

And from what I understand, you don't see shapes, shadows, light.

It's just dark.

Correct.

Yeah.

And so, you know, you think about, like, what is the average 17 year old doing in today's world?

And it's filled with activities.

It's filled with the endless death scroll on their TikTok and Instagram feeds.

It's filled with all of these things that are so visual and, you know, from video games to YouTube to social media to email to learning your schoolwork.

And you would have to learn a different way to kind of approach those things.

Right, exactly.

And that's coming from a, from a person who was a total visual learner all growing up.

Yeah.

Okay, so walk us through that a little bit.

Yeah.

So I.

I call the first 1st probably year or so was nothing but survival mode.

Trying to get past all the different medical complications, getting used to all these new medications, because now, you know, my pituitary have no pituitary function.

So now I'm taking all these new hormone medications to replace all the stuff that my body should be producing naturally.

All of those medications I still take today.

Um, so learning that I had short term memory loss for six months, um, I would end up also losing my ability to smell was another weird thing.

Um, so survival mode, the rest of that ten year period, I would tell you, was learning how to love life again, even though I couldn't see it.

Um, it was a lot of trial and error.

And, um, my parents, the.

They would never say it to me, but they would often say it to my mom or my grandmother is.

We were fortunate enough that right where I live, there's actually a big center for the.

For the blind.

They have different organizations, center for the visually impaired, division of blind services.

All these kind of near our local community college.

And that was amazing for me to have that resource right here where I live.

But I can remember the counselors there.

They would often tell, you know, my mom that, you know, I.

That, you know, Kevin, he needs to.

He needs to accept this and he needs to get moving on with life.

And my mom, thank goodness, was.

Was really amazing.

And she would let them know that Kevin will do it when Kevin is ready.

Um, and she knew me.

She knew who the person I was, my personality.

She knew.

You're not going to push him.

Um, I can remember going there, uh, one time my mom dropped me off, um, which I remember feeling.

I felt really, really tricked, um, because I thought I was going for one little class, and instead I was being dropped off for, like, the whole afternoon, um, and they wanted me to do classes, like learning how to do laundry and cook.

And I remember saying, but my friends don't even do this stuff.

Um, you know, and, uh, um, it was.

It was.

It was tough.

Um, a big part, though, of that first ten years was, was my nana.

When you look at things now, you can