Written by Christopher Kelly
March 13, 2024
Chris:
Hello and welcome to the Nourish Balance Thrive podcast. My name is Christopher Kelly. Today I'm delighted to present to you Kagan Smurf Gill, a former US FA 18e pilot whose life took a dramatic turn following a near fatal high speed ejection at 695 miles per hour. Kagan's story is not just about survival, it's a profound narrative of overcoming life altering injuries, battling and defeating prescription drug addiction, and enduring a grueling 2 year recovery process. His triumphant return to flying super hornets symbolizes a victory over adversity that few can imagine yet many can draw inspiration from.
Kagan's tale however unfolds further as he confronts delayed onset PTSD and cognitive issues from a traumatic brain injury. A battle that traditional pharmaceutical treatments only worsened leading to his hospitalization. Faced with the limitations of the VA healthcare system and a daunting mental health struggle, Kagan embarked on a quest for healing beyond conventional medicine. His transformational experiences with alternative therapies including indigenous medicine are pivotal in his journey towards holistic healing. Now medication free and a competitor in ultra endurance events, Kagan advocates for chronic health.
Join us as he shares his inspiring story of recovery, resilience and the relentless pursuit of wellness, all while raising a family and giving back through speaking and writing about his life changing experiences. Well, Kegan, thank you so much for joining me this evening. How are
Kegan:
you doing? I'm doing well, Chris. Thanks for having me.
Chris:
I am so excited to have just met you here at La Eco Villa. What are the chances Right. You would meet a pilot who had crashed that well, you bet. Just do go go straight into the story. Tell us the story.
Kegan:
Yeah. So I was serving as a US naval pilot with VFA 143 Puking Dogs out of Virginia Beach, Virginia at NA Asociana. You know, I'd completed all flight training. I earned my wings of gold. I'd gone through a year of training in the Super Hornet, specifically, and then I had been So
Chris:
explain to us what the Super Hornet is.
Kegan:
So for anybody who's seen the new Top Gun Maverick movie, that's the primary aircraft featured in that. It's a a twin engine gray generation 4 fighter jet. It's the navy's jack of all trades master of none fighter aircraft capable of doing everything from fighting air to air combat to air to ground employment electronic attack. It has a wide variety of skill sets that it can do, including landing and launching off an aircraft carrier in day or night, which to my knowledge, I think the United States Navy is the only one who will still do that in nighttime because just incredibly silly and scary.
Chris:
And how did you become a pilot?
Kegan:
So I graduated high school and I didn't really know what I wanted to do with my life, but there was a little aviation college called Northwestern Michigan College right where I grew up in Traverse City, Michigan, and they had a relatively affordable flight program there. And so I started taking flight lessons
Speaker 2:
Mhmm.
Kegan:
While I went to college. And by the time I was a junior, I was a certified flight instructor, and I started teaching people
Chris:
Wow. To
Kegan:
make a little money and to build flight hours, thinking I was potentially gonna maybe have my own charter company or maybe fly for the airlines. And after I got through college and graduated with a 4 year degree, I ended up getting hired by a small business to be a corporate pilot for about a year after college
Chris:
Okay.
Kegan:
And flew all over the country and got some great experience, a lot of single pilot time flying in crazy bad weather and making a lot of decisions that were maybe above my ability levels at times, but figured it out. And after about a year of that, I had a friend who was applying to go to Navy OCS, which you can apparently, I didn't realize at the time, you can just apply after you have a 4 year degree and go right into the Navy for potentially a pilot slot if you qualify.
Chris:
Mhmm. And
Kegan:
what does OCS stand for? Officer Candidate School.
Chris:
Okay.
Kegan:
So it's basically boot camp, but in order to be a naval pilot, you have to be an officer first. I see. So they send you through officer training which is you have marine drill instructors yelling at you and doing a lot of push ups and PT dress uniforms and inspections and a little bit of academics, but made it through all of that and ended up with flight school. I already had flight experience, so it helped at least initially because I knew the basic stick and rudder skills of flying an aircraft and talking on the radio. But pretty quickly the playing field became very level.
Especially by the time I got to intermediate to advanced jet training, it became very level ground. Some of these guys, you know, that I was sort of in competition with for pilot slots were valedictorians and division 1 athletes and just superhumans with photographic memories and mental abilities well above myself, but I was fortunate to have a hard work ethic and that flight experience, I think, helped me get through and select Super Hornets.
Speaker 2:
So did
Kegan:
you have to work your way up to the Super Hornet? So you start in the t 34 Charlie turbo mentor. At the time, it's a turbine prop aircraft. They now transition to the t 6, and then you do about a year in that aircraft doing what's called primary flight training. Then if you graduate in the top half of your class, you can put jets on your selection sheet.
And they can also say, hey, great. You did good, but we don't have any JET slots right now, so it's really luck of the draw in a big part. But you have to at least be in the top half of your class to even select the JET training pipeline. I selected that, and I was fortunate there were the slots. I got a a slot for the t 45 Charlie Goshawk, which is a small single engine jet that we do intermediate and advanced training in.
Once I completed that pipeline, I winged as a naval aviator and selected the Super Hornet in Virginia Beach, Virginia.
Chris:
And what does that mean to wing?
Kegan:
Wing is a warfare insignia device. So it's like, basically, they pin this gold crest on your chest.
Chris:
I see.
Kegan:
That means you are now a naval aviator. Depending on what airframe you fly, some people will go directly into the fleet into an active role, But for the jet training pipeline, you then go and you complete a year at the FRS or also used to be called the RAG, which is training in the specific aircraft. For us was the Super
Chris:
Hornet.
Kegan:
Okay. So I selected that, did another year of the most intense challenging training that I've ever done in my life. I mean, a lot of people don't make it through that. It's extremely strict and difficult and challenge. Like, every day, you're drinking out of a fire hose of knowledge and trying to put that into practical application and knowledge, doing something extremely technical and difficult under high g physical stress, but made it through that, and I ended up being stationed with VFA 143, the puking dogs in Virginia Beach for my first sea tour.
Chris:
Okay.
Kegan:
We were attached to the USS Eisenhower at the time, but it was in the dry dock getting some repairs before our next deployment. So I had about 8 months where I was still doing a lot of flight training, but we are land based out of NAS Oceania at the time. And on this particular day, I came into the squadron. It was January 15, 2014. And on that particular day, my buddy, Fisty, was at the squadron duty desk.
So the pilots rotate out who's standing duty each day where you're basically sitting at a desk answering the radio, answering the phone, and 50 is this larger than life character kinda like Chris Pratt became a naval aviator. You know, he's just always has something funny, which is much needed in that high stress environment of naval aviation where you're constantly under pressure and busy in life and death scenario every day essentially. But on this particular day to to lighten the mood, he had put up on the whiteboard behind him. He had drawn out all the airspace that we were gonna utilize that day out over the Atlantic Ocean. And underneath it, he used the shark tracker app off his phone to mark all these GPS shark locations.
So you're talking about So researchers go out and they tag these big sharks, and then you can track them real time on on
Speaker 2:
this app.
Kegan:
So it just so happened on this day, there was a 35 100 pound 16 foot great white shark named Mary Lee directly underneath the airspace I was gonna be at. And it was January in Virginia Beach, and we had a really cold winter that year, and the water temperature at the nearby buoy was at 37 degrees Fahrenheit. So he kinda jokingly was like, hey, it would be a bad day to eject the shark and the cold water temps. Also, as I was walking out of the ready room for my flight, one of the more senior pilots in the squadron, Basil, came up to me. And there were maybe 5 or 6 newer guys than me in the squadron at this point.
And on the whiteboard the other whiteboard in the ready room, they had all the newer guys' names and then a whole list of potential call signs. And it was unusual that I hadn't gotten a call sign yet, and I've been in the squadron for almost a year. 50 had already gotten a call sign and my friend doctor AP had already gotten a call sign. So the guys that had joined with me had already gotten call signs, but I had been very much a small mouth, big ears and I hadn't really done anything to stand out in any way that was embarrassing enough to earn a call sign. So typically, the tradition in the Navy is you typically get a call sign that is off of some sort of blunder or embarrassing fact about you that comes out.
Chris:
So this is to, like, control your ego presumably to constantly remind you of that.
Kegan:
Exactly. And the more you hate it, the more it's gonna stick. Yeah. But they just didn't really have much for me. I I hadn't really stuck out in that way.
And so right before this flight also, Basil comes up and says, you just haven't done anything dumb enough yet to turn a call sign. And so I go out, get in my dry suit, my g suit, harness, all my gear, take off, fly out to over the Atlantic Ocean with my flight lead. Initially, we did some air to air refueling, which is another Super Hornet with a squadron mate buddy was flying that. He had big ARS and aerial refueling I
Chris:
said transfer fuel between the same planes. It's not
Kegan:
Yes. Yeah. And you can also tank off of, Air Force aircraft like the KC 135 tanker or c one thirties. But when you put a fuel pod on a Super Hornet, it's called organic tanking, and it's used a lot around the aircraft carrier. So it's a skill set we try to practice when we can, and we had this ARS refueling pod just come out of maintenance that needed to get checked.
So they stuck it on Buddy's jet, my flight lead who happened to be my commanding officer that day and I flew out. We did some air air refueling, put out a little fuel probe on the nose of the jet, and that all went great. And with extra airspace and time and fuel, we decided to set up and do BFM or basic fighter maneuvering, which is probably the epitome of what people think of when they think fighter pilot. It's 2 or more aircraft trying to shoot each other down within visual range. Obviously, for training in this case, but when we train, we do it as close to the real thing as we can.
Chris:
So how
Kegan:
do you know if you've
Chris:
been successful in shooting down the other plane?
Kegan:
So there's a number of different ways to use the weapon systems and radar and also a number of techniques in the debrief that we can see, you know, if someone's got a shot that's valid or not.
Chris:
I see.
Kegan:
So we have very good ways of simulating gunfire or the missile fire so that we can determine when we get back if it's valid or not.
Chris:
Okay.
Kegan:
But it's BFM is was my favorite thing to do in the aircraft. It's you're operating a weapon system, radar system, defensive systems. You are under high g. You're flying this aircraft at the limits of its performance capability, so you're ripping around all over the place. You're up and down and upside down, and it's as much fun as you can have on the government's dollar, I think.
And we did several sets of BFM, and we got towards the end of our flight. We hit what's called joker fuel. So we had just enough fuel to knock out maybe one short set of fighting with one another before we had to return to base at Oceania. So we ended up setting up, calling the fights on, and as we pitched in at each other and we merged, which is where we cross each other's paths
Chris:
I see.
Kegan:
Very close to each other, I opted to roll the aircraft inverted in what's called a split s maneuver, so it dive down at the ocean. Yep. And as I dove the aircraft down towards the ocean, I had to stick all the way back in my lap commanding the aircraft to turn at, in this case, 7 and a half g's. So what that feels like is, say, my head and my Gehemix helmet, which is this really cool sort of space visor on my head that wherever I turn my head, my weapons displays would go.
Chris:
I see. Do not looking at an instrument panel. It's
Kegan:
always It's right in your helmet in this case. And so say that helmet in my head at 1g on the ground weighs about £20. Now at nearly 8g's, that's like having a 150 plus pounds on my head when I'm under 7 and a half g's of force, and my body now weighs about £1400. How do
Chris:
you not just black out then? What how many g's it takes to black out?
Kegan:
You can definitely black out at that g. What you do is, 1, you have a g suit on,
Speaker 2:
which
Kegan:
is sort of like a pair of stirrups that you plug into the aircraft and it inflates. Okay. And that gives you about 1 g of compensation.
Chris:
Okay.
Kegan:
But the majority of it is just training your legs and your core to squeeze the blood back into your brain.
Chris:
Okay.
Kegan:
Fortunately for me, I'm a short fairly or at the time, especially, I was a stockier dude. I did a lot of weight training. So that blood was a lot easier for me to keep up my head than it would be for somebody who's 6 foot plus and lean because that distance between your heart and your head is greater, making it more difficult. But with practice, you also build up a tolerance to it as well. So at this point, I could just kinda squeeze my legs and my core a little bit, and it would I had no problem under high g.
You also do what's called the the HIC maneuver, the anti g straining maneuver, which is the special breathing technique that can kinda help you force the blood into your head and still breathe
Speaker 2:
Wow.
Kegan:
While keeping all that tension in
Chris:
your body. You're doing all of this whilst flying a
Speaker 2:
fighter jet like that. There's
Chris:
a lot
Kegan:
going on. There's a lot
Chris:
going on. So what happens? You pulled this 7 g turn and then
Kegan:
So yeah. So back to kind of that dive. I'm in the steep dive with the aircraft. I can feel that force of 7a half g's on my body as I described all that weight. And then all of a sudden as I hit about bull's eye nose low pointed straight down at the ocean and accelerating, the aircraft kicked in what's called the g bucket, which is a feature on the aircraft that helps to limit the g available when there is a load out on the aircraft of bombs.
Now the aircraft had been programmed that had bombs on it even though they weren't there. The aircraft still treated it as if they were. And what this effectively did was it would be like going around a sharp corner in a sports car and then having the steering wheel kick back halfway. Yeah. And so instead of skidding off the road, I'm now stuck in a dive at the ocean.
Chris:
So you're understeering almost.
Kegan:
Right. So it eased up now to around 4 and a half 5 g's which drastically impacted the turn performance. So instead of being able to come out the bottom of this turn nice and easy, I was just stuck in a dive. And this all just happens in a few seconds and I didn't fully comprehend all of this real time.
Speaker 2:
And you
Chris:
said something earlier which I think was important and that's the, you know, you're pulling back on the stick. It's not directly controlled to the connected to the flight services. Right? You said that you're a you're Like a voting in a system.
Kegan:
Yeah. You're you're a voting member of the flight control system. So there's, air data computer and these flight control computers, and then there's your input. So you tell the jet, hey, I want you to pull as hard as you can, and the jet goes, okay, guy. Here's the air speed we're at.
Here's the altitude. Here's the air pressure and all these other factors, and then it actually manipulates the control system based off of this very complex algorithm that it goes through. So I'm telling it, yeah, just turn as hard as you can. And it's going, okay. Well, wait a second.
There's this thing, and then we think there's bombs on the wings, and so it limited that at a very untimely point.
Chris:
What could be possibly worse than ditching the aircraft into the ocean? I'm just thinking about it from the algorithm's perspective. Okay. Or what if I mean, even if you, like, the airframe, like, disintegrates under the g force, like, isn't that still better than just flying the thing straight into the ocean?
Kegan:
Right. And most other generation 4 and generation 5 aircraft, they have a system that communicates with the ground proximity warning system I see. So that it knows if there's a pending collision. And, actually, a lot of them now, if they have a pending collision, it'll override whatever the pilot's doing, it'll pull them out and over g the aircraft oftentimes.
Speaker 2:
But
Chris:
this particular aircraft didn't
Kegan:
It did not. And, you know, it was in part my fault that I really aggressively maneuvered this aircraft nose low at a higher airspeed than it was tactically advantageous, but it took what was a tactical blunder and turned it into a catastrophic event. So I was pointed at the ocean, and this all just
Speaker 2:
happens in a few seconds, that I went from
Kegan:
almost 2 nautical miles above the which is, 0.95 indicated Mach 95% the speed of sound. The sense of the ocean rushing up at me was just overwhelming. I had pulled the throttle to idle and I put out the speed brake in a desperate attempt to slow down, but it was too little too late. And right before I impacted the ocean, I pulled the ejection handle. And a normal ejection when you come out it will, you know, compress your spine and guys get flail injuries from their arms hitting a high airspeed airflow.
This ejection in particular is the fastest survived ejection in the history of naval aviation, and it just destroyed my body. I impacted the sound barrier with my body, and doing so, it ripped my helmet off my head, smashed my head into the seat causing a traumatic brain injury, just battered my face. It looked like I had lost after 15 rounds of boxing. I broke my c one in my neck, I broke my left scapula, Bilateral humorous fractures, my right humerus tore through my right brachial artery causing internal bleeding. My left radius and ulna shattered in my left forearm and severed the median nerve, which controls most of my hand in that on that side.
I had a brachial plexus injury, which is a nerve injury that controls a lot of your upper body. My legs were flailing a lot around so violently in that transonic airflow that my steel toed boots essentially became like maces on my legs
Chris:
Oh, my God.
Kegan:
Smashing open my tibia fibula on both lower legs with open fractures. I'd ejected so fast that the dry suit I was wearing to protect me from the cold water, should this happen, shredded open, and the survival gear on my vest all ripped off. My radio, my signaling equipment, not that I could have really used any of it because my arms were destroyed. And this all happens in about a second and a half.
Chris:
That's insane.
Kegan:
Just rip my body apart, impacted, and then the parachute deployed with just enough time to stop me from dying with impact on the ocean. Very quickly after, I was submerged in that 37 degree Fahrenheit water which for anybody likes to cold plunge, you know what that feels like on your skin.
Chris:
It's really cold. Like, anything below 50 degrees c is cold. Right? And you're talking about 0 degrees c.
Kegan:
Yeah. It was pretty nippy, you know. It feels like needles going into your skin and then that parachute that had just saved my life sunk under the ocean current. I'm out in the open Atlantic Ocean with churning swell and currents, and that just started to drag me under the ocean. We have a system on our harness called the SeaWRS, which is a saltwater activated explosive device that actually connects your harness to your parachute risers, and what that's supposed to do is when you go into salt water, it activates an explosive that disconnects your parachute
Chris:
I see.
Kegan:
Automatically just because upper body injuries are so common in jet ejections that you can't manually reach up and disconnect your your parachute. Unfortunately, one of them fired, but didn't disconnect, and the other one didn't even fire at all. So that parachute remained connected to me and just started to drag me under. And as we talked earlier, like, if you're a surfer and you get dragged under by a wave and you're trying to get back up to get a breath of air and then smash back under, you know that feeling of tear. And at this point for the next hour and a half, that's basically where I was just getting drowned alive by this parachute, bleeding out, knowing there's a massive white shark that could come and finish me off.
Chris:
Did you really think about that, the shark? Yeah. No way.
Kegan:
But, I mean, I was in full up survival mode, and I don't have a linear memory from the point where I pulled the ejection handle until a couple weeks later, but I've gotten a lot of this back, one through the investigation and the rescue swimmers and the on scene folks, but also through for a while, I was having a lot of night terrors where I'd get clips of it back, like, real time and reliving it.
Chris:
At what point do you realize I'm ejecting here?
Kegan:
It was a decision to make within a couple seconds, and it was just And so
Chris:
it, like, kind of reflect, like, subconscious almost. Like, did you I was wondering how much it was in your conscious work. It was
Kegan:
just I could sense the way the aircraft was pointed at the ocean and how fast the ocean was rushing up at the
Chris:
There was no way.
Kegan:
It was the only option, and it was just instinctual. But fortunately, my flight lead, very experienced pilot, he spotted my parachute opening. He was able to quickly coordinate with air traffic control, and he's essentially running on fumes of fuel right now because we're about to RTB. And now he's trying to coordinate this before they lose sight of me and lose my position. My beacon had also failed, so I didn't have a locating beacon that was working anymore.
Quickly he was able to spot a fishing vessel that was about a mile away from my position where this jet had just impacted the water and vaporized. They were completely unaware that it just happened. The aircraft impacted the water so quickly it just turned into nothing except this sort of film of jet fuel that is spread out on the water surface. And I think about the largest pieces they were finding of it were like the size of an envelope or a license plate. But he quickly he got down really low and really fast and thumped their bow, which means come really low and really fast over a boat.
Chris:
Imagine it's like some fishing boat that, like, sat there, like, watching TV or something. But then this f a t comes over and creates a Wake up. Shockwave over the boat. Can you imagine it?
Kegan:
It must have been really loud, but it worked. And they switched up to maritime guard and he was able to communicate my position. And they got over to my position and they spotted me and threw a rope out to me, but all it did was ended up getting tangled in all the paracord that was around me. And while they weren't able to get me out, which actually ended up being a good thing, had they pulled me on to the fishing vessel, they said likely that trauma of pulling me out of the water, and then they would have had to put me back in when a helicopter arrived. That would have probably killed me.
But they at least provided a visual reference point for where I was at. I see.
Chris:
Because at
Kegan:
this point I'm, my helmet had ripped off, my beacon wasn't working, and I was spending the majority of my time submerged underneath the water. So had they not been there to provide a rough location, I would have drifted out to sea well before any rescue helicopter got there.
Chris:
Wow.
Kegan:
Meanwhile, there was a air traffic control coordinating a rescue effort. There was a Navy H60 Seahawk helicopter diverted off of a nearby aircraft carrier, and there was also a Navy H60 coming from shore that was actually about to go do a weapons exercise. And it just so happened that the rescue swimmer on that second helicopter
Chris:
So explain to us what that means, a rescue swimmer. Is it someone swimming in the water? Is it the type of vessel?
Kegan:
A rescue swimmer is an individual who jumps in the water with you
Chris:
when you Wow. It really is somebody They'll
Kegan:
take them out in a helicopter and they'll jump out and get people out of the water. So, yeah, they literally swim in some pretty gnarly conditions
Chris:
With that.
Kegan:
To save people. And this particular rescue swimmer, call sign Cheech, he the week prior, there had been a Navy H 53 Seadragon, one of these big heavy lift helicopters, had crashed nearby the same location I was at on this day. And in that crash, due to an onboard fire, I think the majority of the crew survived the initial impact, but once they got in that freezing cold ocean water, the policy at the time for the Navy was if there's ever anybody in an aircraft accident, you have to put them on a back board before you lift them into the helicopter in case they have a spinal injury, which is a valid concern. However, it took so long to put each crew member individually onto that that several of them perished from hypothermia. Wow.
And so Cheech coming off of basically the worst week in his career because of that, Showed up to work. He didn't get any time off, and he's back out there to come save my ass out of the freezing cold Atlantic Ocean.
Chris:
Oh my.
Kegan:
As they were getting ready to go do this, one of their crew members, Joey, was eating a meatball sub that he gotten with marinara and everything on it. And in the castle of it all, he had thrown it back in the remnants of the wrapper, and it got kinda tossed into the corner of the cabin of the helicopter. And these guys end up getting out to my position, and Cheech ends up seeing the other helicopter. They had a miscommunication thinking I was on the fishing vessel when in fact I wasn't on the fishing vessel. And their rescue swimmer jumped in and swam to the fishing boat, and the other helicopter saw that and ended up sending Cheech in.
He jumped in, swam up to me. He said he hooked into my titanium d ring on my harness and he said the force of that parachute, even with him being a highly trained rescue swimmer at peak fitness with fins and everything swimming as hard as he could not fight that force of the parachute dragging us under. And he said it just drag us down and he had trained like that in a pool, but he said it was very different looking down at the bottom of a pool in a lit pool and then being in the dark blue abyss of the Atlantic with that thing in this massive paracord yanking us down into the abyss. But in that he was able to have a moment of clarity, cut us loose, got us to the surface and then they lifted me up into the helicopter. Now had the other helicopter me up, it was another wild twist in fate, but they were had been directed to bring me back to the aircraft carrier.
So had the first helicopter gotten me out of the water sooner That's
Chris:
wild.
Kegan:
I would have likely perished on the aircraft carrier because they didn't have Yeah. A trauma center to care for me.
Chris:
I need you to
Kegan:
Not realizing, the level of damage. And so, luckily, these guys got me in. The flight was about 30 to 40 minutes to Norfolk General, which is a level 1 trauma center. And on that flight, I coded several times. They were doing everything they could to resuscitate me time and time again.
And meanwhile, Joey's meatball sub had broken free from its wrapper, and meatball and marinara had gotten, like, coated all over me that looked just like blood and gore.
Chris:
Are you serious?
Kegan:
And so they eventually got me to the hospital, and they got me onto a gurney. And as they're wheeling me into the hospital, they are explaining to the medical staff like, hey, he's in bad shape, but all that gore all over him, that's just his lunch. So they get me It's wild. They get me into this trauma center. They treat me for severe hypothermia.
My core body temperature was at 87 degrees Fahrenheit, so I should have been dead from hypothermia. But they said had my dry suit actually function and not ripped open, I would have bled to death way before anybody got there. I had to have, blood transfusion treated for hypothermia. The water had to be pumped out of my lungs that I had inhaled. And once I was semi stable, they rushed me into trauma surgery, and luckily they had the surgical dream team on that day.
I had fasciotomies or limb salvage procedures performed on all four extremities for compartment syndrome, which, you know, not that long ago had you had the damage that I had, I would have just been they would have chopped all my limbs off essentially.
Chris:
So it's strange to do you understand what it is? Like, I have some, like, vague understanding of it. Right? Let's see. You've done some damage to the belly of the muscle, but the muscles encased in a fascia.
Exactly. And as the belly of the muscle expands, that can create a life threatening situation.
Kegan:
Right. It cuts off of the blood flow.
Speaker 2:
Yeah.
Kegan:
And so before the fasciotomy procedure was So they're just cutting open the fascia. Have to cover open that fascia that covers the muscle as you described it, and that relieves the pressure enough so that the blood can begin to flow. And so they had to do that on both my arms and both my legs. They did a brachial artery bypass in my right arm to repair that artery damage, and then they proceeded to reconstruct my skeleton with titanium rods and steel plates. So now I have an x-ray that looks like Wolverine from X Men,
Chris:
which is cool.
Kegan:
They had me in that induced coma for a week, and it after the all those surgeries, they were trying to get me out of the coma for another week after in a non induced coma. And a lot of my squadron mates were in the ICU waiting room along with my family and friends that were all there. And, their mood was pretty grim. Like, is this guy gonna live? Is he gonna be a paraplegic?
Is is, you know, is he gonna be brain dead? And Basil, the guy who had jinxed me right before this flight, saying I hadn't done anything to earn a call sign yet, kinda piped up and he said, he's a scrappy motherfucker. He'll be fine. And so it kinda lifted the mood, and they took scrappy motherfucker and they shortened it into a makeshift acronym of Smurf. And because it's the military, you have to have a politically correct cover story for your call signs.
So Smurf is officially because I was a short guy that turned blue from hypothermia, but now, you know, the real story behind it.
Chris:
Okay.
Kegan:
And so at least I got a call sign out of all this. And after another week in that coma, I started to come to and I could hear voices.
Chris:
No brain damage. Like, I worry about, you know, if you've inhaled a bunch of seawater.
Kegan:
Yeah. I mean, there was definitely brain damage. I had a TBI from just the impact and not to mention whatever all of that did to my brain and body. I was a mess.
Chris:
For the listener that a TBI is a traumatic brain injury?
Kegan:
Yes. Yes. So a concussion, essentially. My brains had been smashed around pretty good through everything and then the trauma of everything on my body on top of that. Combined with all the drugs they were giving me from Fentanyl and Dilaudid and oxycodone, I was pretty out of it mentally.
Speaker 2:
Mhmm.
Kegan:
Maybe for the better, you know, at that point. But as I came to, I had no memory of what had happened. I had no idea. It was like waking up from a dream and being, for some reason, in this brightly lit beeping room Mhmm. In the ICU and not realizing why you're there.
The first thing I really thought was why did they tie me down to this bed? Because I was trying to move, but I couldn't. But it wasn't because they tie me down. It was because I was paralyzed.
Chris:
Oh, wow.
Kegan:
Eventually, the medical staff came in and said, hey. We just wanna lay it to you straight. They weren't trying to be cruel, I don't think, but they're they basically told me you you're never gonna walk again. You're never gonna use your arms again, and your flying career is over. But in the back of my mind, I was just thinking, alright.
I'm gonna prove you guys wrong. And so it became my mission every day to just try to do whatever I could. And it was just little steps of what I could do in front of me, and it started with just, like, trying to wiggle my hips. And just kinda being determined with that after another couple weeks in the ICU, the nurse came in one day and I was sitting up on the foot of the bed and she was kinda startled that I was able to do that.
Chris:
So how did you know? At what point did you realize that you weren't paralyzed? I mean, there must have been a point where you thought shit am I, like, done for here. I'm never gonna be able to move from some point of my spine downwards presumably. Yeah.
Are you actually better at some point?
Kegan:
Fortunately, the break in my neck hadn't caused I see. Damage to the spinal cord, but I still had quite a bit of local nerve damage to the brachial plexus, to the median nerve, a nerve in my leg was severed. So I had quite a bit of localized, and the reason I was so paralyzed initially was just because of the overwhelming trauma to my whole body and everything had just shut down. But little by little I started to gain more function, and they ended up transferring me to the Polytrauma Center in Richmond, Virginia, which is at a VA hospital there. And I started to undergo basically every kind of conventional therapy available every day, all day.
I was doing speech therapy, vision therapy, occupational therapy, physical therapy, kinesio therapy, aquatherapy, recreational therapy, and every day was structured around that. And while the staff there was excellent and was there and caring and loving and capable, And the facility was newly renovated, you know. Each room was nicely done and there was a TV in each room. And so comparatively to where guys were coming back from the Vietnam War and being shoved 12 dudes in a room covered in bloodshed and vomit and maybe getting to see a nurse once a day to administer their morphine while they all just sat in there moaning, you know, into a war that they hadn't even signed up to fight if they were drafted and now wheeled out onto the streets with nothing more than a wheelchair and a morphine addiction, that was a pretty grim time. So things have definitely come leaps and bounds for the VA since then, but there were absolutely some massive shortcomings.
One of the biggest ones was the nutrition in the VA hospital was abysmal. I mean, it was highly processed junk food that was prepared in Hampton Roads, which is like an hour to an hour and a half drive from Hampton Roads to Richmond depending on the traffic. So they basically preheat these highly processed meals, shove them in a metal box, load them in a truck, drive them all the way to Richmond, and by the time you're getting it, it is just completely nutrient lacking nasty food. Yeah. One of the examples I, like, jokingly call the holiday feast was this meal that they gave us that was it was sliced it looked like it had come off like the rancid meat section, like, half off special at a deli.
It was the sliced deli meat turkey that was kind of shimmery and slimy. And on the plate was also a stack of mashed potatoes clearly from a box. You could see the dried chunks in them. On top was a thing of gravy, but it come out of a can. So it still had can rings in it, so it looked like a thing of canned dog food plopped right on top of it.
And on the side was this white generic jelly packet labeled cranberry that was just high fructose corn syrup and artificial colors. And so they're spending all this money on
Chris:
how to consume it. Like how much did it cost to
Kegan:
all of them? Medications that they're giving you. But then when it comes to giving you the most basic part of healing and recovery which is nourishment with your food and then adequate sleep, which all night they wake you up all night to take your vitals and to give you more medication to help you sleep. One thing that there was not a shortage of was medications. At this point, they had me on pretty high doses of oxycodone, oxycontin, tramadol, trazodone, amitriptyline, than using opioids.
However, that stuff became much more miserable for me than the opioids. But despite all of that, I fortunately had friends and family bringing me in some real nutrition which made a drastic difference for me. And I could see other guys in there that were working just as hard with potentially less complex injuries than me that were not getting better. Their body just is not getting the fuel to heal, and they're not sleeping hardly. But eventually after 3 months I was able to get around on a walker well enough that I was able to be discharged, and I continued therapy as an outpatient.
More surgeries, more drugs, and I got to the point where I was just really fed up with the medications I was on. And when I saw counseling at the pain management clinic, their advice was just continue to take what we're giving you. It seems to be working. And I didn't like that answer, so I proceeded to wean myself off all that stuff. Just 1 by 1, I would remove a medication little by little.
And it took a few weeks to get through everything including the oxycodone, but then it took me months to wean myself off of the gabapentin, which was supposed to be much less addictive. But that was Did
Chris:
you not have help from a physician in getting off the meds?
Kegan:
No. No. Because their advice was to just keep taking them and don't get off them. Yeah.
Speaker 2:
But I
Kegan:
knew if I ever wanted a chance to go back to flying that I had to get off that stuff. And I also You were still
Chris:
thinking that. At what point do you think, you know what? I guess you already told me that. You're like, oh, yeah. No.
I am gonna go
Kegan:
back to flying. Yeah. I mean, from You must have doubted at some point, like Oh, yeah. There is definitely moments of depression and doubt and, you know, I had the whole weight of this aircraft crash over me, you know, like, how much was I at fault? Was I gonna lose my wings just because of the accident?
My life had just been it fallen apart. I had lost my physical health. My mental health was scattered from all the medications and the brain injury, and I was in a very dark place for a while. I mean, there were days I was sitting, you know, I had a big thing of whiskey and a bunch of oxycodone, and I would just melt into the full. And that was kinda where I can see why people would just be stuck there the rest of their lives.
Yeah. But I I had a I don't know. I had one of those days when I just sort of melted into this lawn chair and I was like, I don't want this to be the end of my story. And I continued to push forward. Fortunately, one of my squadron mate's wives, affectionately known as Aunt Smuggs, she's a physical therapist.
And she volunteered to work with me outside of the clinical setting. And she showed up the 1st day and I was walking with a cane at this this point. She snatched away the cane and chucked it. And she said, I never wanna see you walking with that again. And she had a Nalgene bottle labeled patient's tears on it.
And she proceeded to just kick my ass into shape. From the school department, Hawks. Yeah. And and I loved it though. You know, I had I'd already been in fitness prior before this whole thing and I loved a good ass kicking.
Chris:
Yeah.
Kegan:
And so she proceeded to deal that to me.
Speaker 2:
Do do you
Chris:
think she knew that you would respond well to that? Was that just her only style? Or do you think she had other styles that would like, she would use in other you know, for other people that perhaps would respond better to those?
Kegan:
I think she was typically trapped working in a typical physical therapy clinic working with very unmotivated people
Chris:
I see.
Kegan:
Coming in, you know, on the exercise bike, checking their phones, going, oh, yeah. 10 the pain's 10 out of 10 today. So I think she was very sick of that type of patient. And she knew with me that she could kinda Yeah.
Chris:
Happy to work with.
Kegan:
It was refresh. I think it was as therapeutic for her as it was for me in some ways Mhmm. Because she really enjoyed it, and I really enjoyed it. And after 2 years of more surgeries and overcoming all those drugs, I was able to max out the Navy's physical fitness test again, and I was literally running circles around the vast majority of the people in my command. And
Chris:
That's amazing.
Kegan:
You know, I had to go through a FINAB investigation, which is a field naval aviator investigation board, and that's something that if you ever have a a mishap where you do more than $1,000,000 of damage to an aircraft that you have to do. And so And this is quite a lot
Chris:
more than that, wasn't it?
Kegan:
Yeah. This was a big deal. And, you know, luckily, the mistake I had made had been a fairly common and understandable one, especially considering my experience level. And that same mistake had been exacerbated by that g limiter feature on pilots much more experienced than I both before me. And I know at least one pilot who is a top gun instructor that perished because of that same system after me.
So is that fixed now? So they've they've done some changes to the software so that you can edit what the load out is from within the cockpit rather than before it was under a side panel that you could only access if the engines were shut off, which you don't always do as you switch out of the aircraft. So they have done some improvements, but they have not changed that feature to acknowledge the ground proximity warning system like so many other fighters do. But I'm sure it's a tremendous amount of money. Mhmm.
And for whatever reason, there's just not money in that bucket to fix that problem.
Chris:
Sure. It was an interesting philosophical difference though.
Speaker 2:
You know,
Chris:
I read a book. I think it was called Black Box Thinking by Matthew Syed. And he differentiates between aviation and medicine. Now in medicine, there's this kind of trying not to get sued. These things happen.
You know, somebody dies. These things happen. We did everything we could. There's this sort of trying to push off the blame. Right?
And let's not get sued here. Whereas in aviation, when something goes wrong, rather than blaming the pilot, you blame the system they were operating in. Oh, let's make this different next time so that, you know, it's not the pilot that's the problem. It's the system that you're saying.
Kegan:
It's all the above. It's all the above, you know. And everything is investigated very thoroughly. And so there was absolutely there was a the human factor of me that was a factor. And so there were changes made as well in training so that people were more aware of the situation that could happen.
Chris:
Yeah. Do you see what I mean though? So the title of the book is quite clever, Black Box Thinking. Yeah. It what it's referring to is a literal black box that goes into an aircraft.
Yeah. And when it goes down, you take out the black box and you figure out exactly what went wrong. Yeah.
Speaker 2:
Yep.
Chris:
And then you change the system so it doesn't happen again. Yeah. Hopefully. Yeah. Versus in medicine where you just say well, you know, these things happen.
There's no black box in medicine. Right? Right. Somebody dies on the operating table, like, they they may not even do, you know, I've had friends die and they're not even do an autopsy. A friend in the early thirties, they didn't
Kegan:
do an autopsy. I would think that there would be a equally thorough investigation and video footage and all the stuff
Speaker 2:
of that kind
Kegan:
of Yeah.
Chris:
I know. But apparently not. So what happened after the investigation? What did they find?
Kegan:
So, you know, this is a process that took months and was incredibly stressful, you know.
Chris:
Of course. Not knowing
Kegan:
what was gonna happen and
Chris:
Lot of uncertainty.
Kegan:
And every aspect of my life was really torn apart and looked at. Everything from, you know, what had I been eating, what I've been, you know, doing the day before. And if you have a mishap like that and you were doing something illegal or blatantly stupid or you were under the influence of a drug or alcohol or something and that happened, you would be done for. In my case, I ended up going all the way up to the point where I had to walk into this big boardroom, flanked on either side of this huge wooden table by other experienced aviators and in walks an admiral. And, you know, we all stand up and he says be seated.
I'm sat at the opposite end of this huge long wooden table with all these pilots on either side. And the admiral himself is a former fighter pilot himself and now an admiral. And so these guys all have a massive amount of experience, and they're seeing it through the lens of an aviator. And, anyways, this admiral looks across the table at me and he goes, lieutenant Gill, are you fearless? And I just thought for a moment and I said, sir, I don't remember some things from the ejection, but I'm certain what little seat cushion there is on the ejection seat was puckered up inside me real tight.
And he didn't laugh, didn't smile at my half ass attempt to the joke, and he just left the room. And so I was sitting there like, oh, no. Maybe that's not the answer I should have said. Maybe I should have taken that more seriously. But a few minutes later, one of the more senior pilots called me into his office, and he hands me a big glass jar of lifesaver mints.
I take one out and pop it in my mouth, and he pops one in his mouth, and he goes, congratulations, lieutenant Gill. You're gonna get the chance to go back to fly if you can ever get your body working again. Wow. And that was hugely motivating for me, because, you know, that decision could have gone a very different way. But fortunately, in the world of naval aviation, when there is a mishap, the primary goal is to figure out what happened like you had said with the black box and figure out what went wrong.
So how do we prevent this from happening again? And, you know, it's not a witch hunt against the pilot. And sometimes, you know, FNAB cases don't go in the pilot's favor and the pilot doesn't get the opportunity to fly.
Chris:
So at that point, you just dismiss. You're not, obviously, not liable for damages and stuff like that, but you have definitely lost your job.
Kegan:
But you'll typically lose your wings and you'll you won't be able to be in that profession anymore in the military. You'll be sitting at a desk or doing something very different. But I was fortunate that it worked out in my favor and got the opportunity. But it was still a long road from there to to get my body back.
Chris:
So how long does it take before you flew again?
Kegan:
It took 2 full years of recovery. And almost exactly 2 years, I got invited back and back to fly the Super Hornet. Wow.
Chris:
The same aircraft. How many of these things have they got? Seriously.
Speaker 2:
There's Is
Chris:
there really?
Kegan:
I mean, there's hundreds of them. And I think the Navy I could be wrong in this, but I think the Navy actually has more fighter aircraft than the Air Force does. So the Navy has a tremendous amount of Super Hornets, but I ended up going back through training. I had to do like a refresher course essentially. I graduated at the top of my class.
I was crushing it again. And I ended up joining VFA 136, the Nighthawks out in Lamar, California, the story gets way crazier after that than all the stuff I just told you, literally crazier. I had received a traumatic brain injury from that ejection, and it seemed that I had gotten a lot better. There were still little mental things that I noticed from time to time, but just kinda brushed them off and ignored them. But I had gone out of flight.
We were on a detachment at Tyndall Air Force Base doing a live fire missile exercise with the air force, where you shoot a I got to shoot a live heat seeking missile at a drone. And then I got to break off and fight an F 22 Raptor in what's called DACT or dissimilar air combat training. And I came back from that flight and I remembered vividly getting to fight the Raptor because that was, I mean, it was incredible. That was, like, being a little kid who was at air shows, like, seeing those for the first time. It was, like, the spaceship and actually be up in the air getting to fight 1 was incredible.
But I realized I couldn't remember a vast majority of the missile shoot as I was watching the tapes and the debrief. And so I was kinda like, this is a little concerning, and I kept it to myself that day. The next day, I was just on duty, so I was answering the radio and the phones, and I wasn't flying. So I just kind of toughed it out that day. But by that next evening, I was starting to get these panic attacks and when I got back to my hotel room, I sat on the end of the bed and I just felt like the whole room was tumbling from vertigo.
I couldn't sleep. My insomnia was spiked for 2 nights in a row now, and I was going to set my alarm for the time I had to get up the next morning to go fly, thinking maybe I can just sleep this off. And I could not do the math to set my phone alarm.
Chris:
Wow.
Kegan:
And that's when I called the squadron safety officer and said
Chris:
I'm having a start.
Kegan:
Something's wrong.
Chris:
Yeah.
Kegan:
And there had been a number of issues in the Hornet especially and also the Super Hornet at that time where the environmental control system was causing a malfunction that was causing the cabin pressure to rapidly fluctuate. And it gotten to the point in the Hornet especially, the predecessor to the Super Hornet, that aircraft carriers started putting hyperbaric chambers on to treat decompression sickness.
Chris:
Wow.
Kegan:
And for those that don't know, decompression sickness is essentially when you change pressure very quickly, like if you come up from a scuba dive too quickly, the nitrogen in your blood can come out of solution and cause little fizzy bubbles. And if those little fizzy bubbles get in your joints, it's type 1 DCS which is very uncomfortable and painful called the bends. If those little tiny bubbles get in your brain, however, it can cause serious dysfunction from symptoms of a stroke or aneurysm to even death. And so the thought was maybe on that flight, I had a DCS issue. So they rushed me to Mayport dive base, put me in a hyperbaric chamber that evening.
It seemed to relieve some of the issues I was having, but I got out and the next day went back in to see the doc there. And he said, you know, considering your history of all the stuff that's happened to your body, I really want you to see the flight surgeon when you get back to Lemoore. And so reluctantly, I did, you know, after being through all of that and spending 2 years, not only getting my health back.
Chris:
Up now. Yeah.
Kegan:
Cleared, you know. And then I had a stack of medical waivers so that I could fly because there's a whole process just to get all the injuries I had waived so that I could fly. And so the last thing I wanted to have to do was go in and jeopardize all of that. And I did, though. I went in and talked to the flight surgeon, and their advice was okay.
It seems like you're having all these cognitive issues. We should have you go see psychology. And so I went into the psychologist department, and initially they gave me a handful of different applications to use on my phone. There was like a CBT app, a CPT app, so cognitive processing therapy, cognitive behavioral therapy. Yeah.
But it was really frustrating because it's, like, I'm having a very real issue Yeah. Right. And all you're doing is giving me an application on my phone that I'm supposed to just do in my free time and then come in and talk to you about how the app's going.
Chris:
That's bizarre.
Kegan:
And it was not working. And before I'm not
Chris:
saying that those apps don't have merit and that doesn't seem like the implication to me. I don't know. I'm a psychologist.
Kegan:
It was only frustrating to me.
Speaker 2:
Yeah.
Chris:
You know?
Kegan:
And maybe there at some point that kind of therapy would help, but there was a lot more going on with me.
Chris:
It's all denial that there's anything that there are nitrogen bubbles and that they may be having an impact on the way that your brain works.
Kegan:
The whole TBI aspect of it all was completely overlooked. Yeah. And granted at the time, I don't think TBI was as well understood as it has. I think there's been a lot of information coming out recently that's really shed a lot of light on that. But at the time, the whole TBI piece was completely overlooked, and the whole focus went to my behavior.
Okay. You're having behavioral issues. And before long, I ended up getting a delayed onset PTSD diagnosis for post traumatic stress disorder, now called PTS, post traumatic stress. They took the d off of it. But with that, it pretty quickly led to psychotropic drugs.
Chris:
So what did you go and see a psychiatrist? What happened? They referred you to someone? So I
Kegan:
saw the psychology team first, and then the psychology ended up having me see the psychiatrist there. Okay. And so there was a base psychologist and psychiatrist that kinda worked in tandem with one another. And I started working with them and pretty quickly was put onto the medication called Seroquel or quetiapine. It's a anti
Chris:
semicolon good at remembering all these, man. It's blimey. I
Kegan:
Yeah. I had to live with them for a long time. Yeah. So I got to know them pretty well. But this one in particular was given to me to help treat my insomnia.
And the thought was, you know, if we can just get this guy some sleep, he's gonna heal.
Chris:
Makes sense.
Kegan:
I think was a valid approach. It wasn't necessarily restful sleep. It was putting me in some form of drug induced form of unconsciousness.
Chris:
We're talking about we've got a mutual friend in Kurt Parsley, and he's talked a lot about that. The a lot of the drugs that are prescribed for insomnia, they don't induce restful sleep. It's more like being unconscious, you know, like someone's hit you over the head with a hammer. You can't easily be woken from the type of sleep that's induced by some of the drugs.
Kegan:
Yeah. And he's incredibly knowledgeable on that subject and ahead of his time. I hope the naval strike fighter community will start to adapt some of the techniques with sort of the optimization of health ahead of this curve for that he's done with the SEAL teams. I mean, the strike fighter community could absolutely use that. But that was the approach at the time for me was just take these pills and maybe that'll help.
And initially, yeah, I knocked out, conked out. I was unconscious. I'm not sure I was getting restful sleep, but it seemed to be helping a little bit. But as time goes on, the same as what had happened with those pain medications was you build up a tolerance and then they have to give you more. Mhmm.
With the more of the medication comes more of the side effects. And as time went on I went from being sort of hyper vigilant and having these panic attacks and some paranoia, developing into feeling like I was in the Truman Show, like everybody was watching me and listening me, and every TV channel I turned on or radio station was tuned to me. And then that that started to progress into full up, psychoses. And the treatment was this sort of insane cycle of, oh, you're getting worse. Take more of this medication.
And the things just kept getting worse and staying out
Speaker 2:
of control.
Chris:
At some point, you lose the ability to fly. Like, when do they take you off the Yeah.
Kegan:
So as soon as they started doing treatment with the quetiapine, it was pretty much it was pretty much ending my flying career.
Chris:
Yeah.
Kegan:
And I kinda knew that at the time, but it was painted as the only option for getting better. There was no other alternative. It was you gotta take this pill and this is the pill that's gonna save you. And unfortunately, that couldn't have been further from the truth. I spiraled into a psychosis.
My wife had just had our little boy, Leo, who's running around with your son right now.
Chris:
They're like 2 peas in a pod. It's like so touching to see them together.
Kegan:
They got the same flowing golden locks.
Chris:
Yeah. I know.
Kegan:
The fincher spirits. But she had just given birth to him. He was not even couple months old. And she's dealing with all the responsibilities of being a new mother. And now she's got me, a grown adult in the house who Wow.
One minute thinks I'm being hunted by the government. I'm hiding underneath the tables. I'm closing all the windows and the blinds. I stopped eating and drinking because I thought I was being poisoned in my food and water.
Chris:
Wow.
Kegan:
While in fact, I was being poisoned by the federal government, but it was Not
Chris:
the way that you think.
Kegan:
FDA approved pills that I was taking. And this progressed, I ended up going through a medical board, which is the bureaucratic equivalent of the Indiana Jones Temple of Doom to go through. I mean, the whole process is it's something that in the corporate world would take, like, 2 weeks, and it would be done properly. In the military, it's drawn out over months. It's supposed to take 6 months.
My medical board took almost 2 years to go through. That whole time battling in and out of psychosis, more Seroquel, a lot of burden on my wife having to deal with all of that. But eventually, I was medically retired from the military. We moved back to Northern Michigan, and that cycle continued at the VA with the quetiapine, which was it's getting worse, let's give him more quetiapine. And it was within 2 days of going from a dose of 300 milligrams a night up to 450 milligrams a night.
My wife came back home from a job interview and she heard me rustling around upstairs, and when she walked in I was pretty much completely naked, except I had a black plastic garbage bag tied around my neck like a cape. I had shaved off my eyebrows. I had shaved off most of my hair in chunks, and I thought I was gonna go out into the Northern Michigan snowy weather and fight crime like a superhero.
Chris:
Wow.
Kegan:
And so she ended up calling the VA. They ended up calling the police. A police car showed up at our house. They wanted to handcuff me and put me in the back of the squad car. And my wife was like, we're not doing that to him in the state.
And so she ended up loading up Leo. My mom happened to be visiting luckily, and so she came with us and she drove me to the emergency room, which was about an hour away. And on that ride, I was having a crazy psychotic experience. I thought a nuclear explosion had gone off behind us and that there was this mushroom cloud chasing us down as we drove through the winding woods of Michigan. There were vehicles and boats and animals flying through the air.
I mean, as vivid as day. And you can recall that
Chris:
now and so.
Kegan:
And it was so real, But, obviously, I was in a very serious psychosis. We got to the ER, and that mushroom cloud kinda settled out and the dust settled in in my mind, and we walked into the ER. I ended up going into this plexiglass room and having a full on out of body experience over the next night. I think I was in there at least 1 night if not 2. I think my soul left my potty and was just traveling unrestrained through space and time.
And I went back through through the ages into the future. And my mom said she'd come in to check on me once they allowed visitors. And I was sitting in a chair, and they had a TV in the room, and it was just on static, just black and white fuzz, and I was clicking the remote furiously and I was going she said I didn't even sound like myself or look like myself. And in this very staccato, choppy voice, I was going, do you see that? Do you see that?
Do you see that? With this really creepy look on my face. And in my mind, I was able to click forward on click up on the channel and I could go into the future, or I could click down on the channel and I could go into the past. In my mind, I'm having this cool experience of the TV going from the dinosaurs into this apocalyptic future where Jeff Bezos has taken over the world and everybody's just drowning in all their own garbage and everybody's gone crazy. And, anyways, they ended up transferring me down to Battle Creek VA inpatient psych facility.
I end up waking up inside this room, and eventually, I started to become more lucid, and still in out of psychosis at times. But the things that I saw going on there that were absolutely real, that I was able to verify after the fact were, one, you're confined in the small area. We were barely able to go outside more than once a week. And when we did go outside, it was into a concrete courtyard with metal gates and buildings on each side of it. So there was no contact with nature.
You're confined in a small building. The food that they're giving you is completely nutrient deprived garbage that sucks from your nutrients more so than it nourishes you. The water that we're drinking is so bad out of the tap that the only way to really have any fluid is to drink this either. You can have the yellow drink or the red drink. The yellow one is artificial lemonade with artificial colors and flavors, and the red one's like a raspberry lemonade with artificial colors and flavors.
And then you're also dressed like a prisoner. You have to wear scrubs that are the same scrubs they issue to prisoners. Because of the dynamics of it, the staff members all wear white lab coats. So for anybody who's familiar with the Stanford prisoner experiments, the Stanford prison experience where they had people just labeled guards and then they had people labeled the prisoners. There was very much that same dynamic happening here.
Chris:
I'm familiar with that.
Kegan:
It's a really interesting study they did where these people were just volunteers and they all knew it. But what they saw happen very quickly was the people that were the guards started to become abusive towards the prisoners and the whole thing spun out of control. There's a really good documentary on it. I think it's called the Stanford Prison Experience.
Chris:
Okay. I'll do that.
Kegan:
But just the dynamic of having some people in a uniform that are supposedly in a superior position to some other person in there.
Chris:
Some weird hierarchy dynamic.
Kegan:
It creates this thing. And it was very much happening there where a lot of the staff there was very caring and kind, but there were also the people there that took this as a position of authority. And they used it and abused it. And they would treat a lot of us like we were prisoners. And these are all American veterans, you know, going through a hard time in their life.
And and
Chris:
Do they not know your background? You you know, what's happened to you and how you ended up there?
Kegan:
I mean, I think some of the staff eventually does, but a lot of them
Chris:
They don't know. Don't and
Kegan:
they don't care, and they don't treat you very well. And so you're confined. And, oh, and one of the biggest things that was a problem was when you're on 1 to 1 care like I was because I was coming out of a serious psychosis, there is a policy that every 15 minutes they have to wake you up with a flashlight in your face to check and make sure that you're safe. So you're sleep deprived, you're nutrient deprived, you're confined, and you're treated less than human. Now in the military, if you go through survival training, they put you in a prisoner of war situation, which is very much all those same four things.
Chris:
It's literally torture.
Kegan:
And if you take a person in perfect physical health and you do that to him for even just a few days, people will start to have visual and auditory hallucinations. And now you take guys coming from rock bottom dealing with psychoses or coming off to the streets from being homeless and drug addicted, and you throw them into the same situation where you're sleep deprived, malnourished, and confined. I mean, it's a recipe for disaster, and the only remedy is all to funnel you on to medications. And there's plenty of those that are effectively mandatory. I had been voluntarily admitted into this facility.
And so you would think when I came to and said, hey. I'm ready to go home. This is not where I wanna be. They would let me go, but they wouldn't let me go. All they did was continue to force more drugs on me.
And when I decided not to take them, I ended up planning an escape. Late one night, I went out and pulled the fire alarm thinking that they would evacuate the building, and those of us that were still with it enough could make a run for it. I mean, a lot of the guys in the facility are, like, zombies, you know, from all the drugs that
Chris:
they're on.
Kegan:
They're just they walk up and down the hallways all night pacing and moaning and grumbling to themselves. But some of us in there were lucid enough that I think we could have made a run for it. However, somebody apparently had already tried this trick, and so they just put us back on lockdown. The base police showed up, and then I was forcibly injected with a medication called Haldol. And what that did to me was it felt like I had been injected with insects that were underneath my skin trying to gnaw their way out from underneath my skin.
All I wanted to do was tear my own skin off and run and scream. And this lasted for about 45 minutes to an hour of this extreme discomfort and pain. The next day, I kind of came to. I don't know what all they gave me when I was out, but I was drugged out of my mind, literally drooling on myself. And they brought me into a room with this woman who was supposed to be my attorney.
And she sat me across from her and she handed me a stack of paperwork and a pen. And while I couldn't hardly even say my name, she had me scribbling on all these papers saying that these are important legal documents I needed to sign. It was for my benefit. And what those documents did was they declared me permanently mentally defective. They committed me to the facility, meaning now I definitely couldn't leave
Speaker 2:
and I
Kegan:
had to do whatever they said, whatever drug regiment they gave me, I had to take it. It also stripped me of my constitutional right to bear arms. So here I am, an American veteran, going in to get help in the worst condition I've ever been in my life, or nearly the worst condition at least worst condition mentally. And instead, I am confined, effectively tortured, and have my constitutional rights stripped
Chris:
from me.
Kegan:
And there's guys in that same exact scenario now. In both the VA hospital and mental health in general in the United States, this is how the facilities operate. And it's all in my mind is to to direct you and make it mandatory for you to be, on these pharmaceutical regimes.
Chris:
Yeah. You see it's it's that black box thinking again. You know, the navy's thinking, okay. So there's a problem with this aircraft. Maybe we could make this better.
This has happened before to other pilots. It's not the pilot that's the problem. It's the system we're using. And yet medicine, like Yeah. This guy's clearly not getting better, and they're just doing more of the same.
There's not really that same black box thinking, is there?
Kegan:
And over the past few years, I've had the opportunity to meet a very senior flight surgeon who's been at the top meetings for the VA to figure out why are these policies like this? Why can't this be changed? And he said that no matter how well intended the staff is at the top of the VA making those decisions,
Speaker 2:
at the
Kegan:
end of the day, the pharmaceutical industry's influence is so powerful over the policy making Mhmm. That they get to set the policies. And, of course, the policies that they set are designed to favor their business model, and their business model is to put you on a medication that you have to take for the remainder of your existence. And and that's the way the whole system there was funneled. Now fortunately, I had my family advocating for me.
My wife is a nurse, my mother was a physician, my dad was in health care, and they all came in and they advocated to get me released into their care. And only because they had a health care background and were extremely aggressive in their support for me were they eventually able to release me from that facility. Otherwise, I would probably be dead or in prison or just completely out of my mind still in that facility. But once they got me back home, I was broken. I was a broken human being.
Between the drugs that they had me on and then just the betrayal that I felt from being in that facility and seeing what they were doing to all these these guys that deserve a hell of a lot better than what they're getting. The only emotion I experienced at that point was just anger and just nothingness. My little boy, Leo, would come up to me and ask me to play and I would just tell him to leave me alone. I could barely do the dishes. My cognitive functioning had decreased so much that I could barely read a paragraph in a book and remember anything that I had just read.
I was still trying to be a little bit active, but I could barely go out and run a 11 minute mile. And I had been somebody before that could run a a 5 minute mile, and now I can barely run 11 minutes. And it was like my body and my brain and everything was shutting down. And eventually, I had a friend come in and he gave me the book Finding Ultra by Rich Roll.
Chris:
Yeah. I know Rich. Yeah. Listings to podcasts a lot.
Kegan:
Yeah. He's got a
Chris:
great podcast. Yeah.
Kegan:
Nice. That book kinda opened my eyes to the industrial food system and how broken that is. And I I went full up vegan initially. I read Michael Pollan's How to Change Your Mind. And and by read I like I both had the text and I had the audio book, and I would have to do about a chapter or a paragraph at a time to digest it.
But slowly I was able to work my way through these books. And changing my diet, I completely removed alcohol and caffeine. I read Why We Sleep by doctor Matthew Walker
Speaker 2:
Yeah.
Kegan:
And the importance of getting restful sleep. And I started to change these little foundations in my health. I had already been fairly health conscious, but these little things helped to give me a little bit more step in the right direction. And I still continued to struggle for years. I was still on Seroquel.
They had me on a bunch of other psych meds after I came out of the VA hospital that I eventually just went back to just Seroquel, but my life was still a mess. Even eating very optimally, even exercising regularly, I was still getting slower. I was still getting sicker, and mentally, I was just deteriorating slowly, even with all that help of that sort of nutrition and everything. And then I came across I had read Michael Pollan's In Defense of Food Mhmm. And then I found his book How to Change Your Mind, which is about the use of psychedelic
Chris:
Oh, I see. Yeah. So
Kegan:
you said How to Change
Chris:
Your Mind earlier. So you said In Defense of Food was the first book you read and then you read How to Change Your Mind. Yeah. I read that book too.
Kegan:
That was sort of my gateway was Rich Roll's book, then Michael Pollan's Into Food and then that I see. And and then when I read How to Change Your Mind, it opened up this whole doorway of there's another way to deal with mental health that's not a pill. And I told my wife and my family about it, and they thought I was kinda nuts. Like, this could drive you into another psychosis and deeper psychosis.
Chris:
Have had that. Right? Like, you've had this moment where you realize just how tenuous your grip on reality really is. Right? Like Yeah.
I mean, you've already experienced that altered state of consciousness. Right? Like, is that are you not worried about going back there?
Kegan:
I was, but I was more worried about being trapped where I was at, which was just full of anger
Chris:
Interesting.
Kegan:
And numbness. And no my body was just falling apart. Like, I didn't want that to be, because I could see where that was headed. That was heading to me just putting a gun in my mouth. And so I was, like, I gotta try to do this somehow.
And I was able to find a guide locally, and I did a psilocybin mushroom ceremony. And while that didn't fix everything, it was to use Michael Pollan's analogy, it was like a fresh snowfall over all these ruts of negative emotions.
Chris:
Yeah. You got the ski tracks. You're going down the same ski tracks. And then You get stuck in the rut.
Kegan:
And my ruts were freaking anger and rage and betrayal, and that was just where I lived. That was like the only emotion I could feel anymore. And after that it kind of filled in those ruts a bit. Yeah.
Chris:
So that
Kegan:
I could take a new track in my life. And I also, at that point, made the connection between this insane cycle of the Seroquel, which was you gotta take this drug, and the more I had taken, the worst things had got. And I recognize that, and I go, this is just like those pain meds they had me on. They weren't doing anything to really help me in the long term. They were maybe a band aid for the short term, but I started to wean myself off of Seroquel after that first psilocybin.
And again, everybody's like, don't do that. I stopped seeing the VA psychiatrist, they were not happy about that, but I knew I could not go down that path anymore. I ended up reaching out to an organization called Vet Solutions, run by Marcus and Amber Capone. Marcus is a former Navy SEAL. I think he did, like, something like 20 years with SEAL Team 6, you know, in the front lines kicking down doors of crazy combat.
And once he got out, he struggled with a lot of the things I was just describing, you know, having physical and mental injuries and PTSD and this sort of darkness that destroys your life and destroys your family. And he ended up finding the help of psychedelic medications and founded Vet Solutions to give veterans access to psychedelic healing. Because a lot of these psychedelic meds are still schedule 1 drugs in the United States, you know, you can go to prison for using them. They found ways to get guys funding so they can fly them to other countries and get them access. So pretty wild in the land of the free that you have to travel to a different country
Chris:
to get help. Presumably take part in a study. If you're a participant in a study, then that would be another one.
Kegan:
But a lot of times you'll be on the placebo side and you can't control. There's only so many slots.
Chris:
And I hope, you know, I've done you know, I've mentioned this to you earlier. I did an interview with Dan Engle.
Kegan:
Yeah. He wrote a
Chris:
book called A Dose of Hope, and it seems like but it's just been really close. Like, it's gonna be this year, but it seems like it's been a couple of years now that people have been saying, this year, they're gonna
Kegan:
Yeah.
Chris:
You know, deschedule MDMA. It's gonna be FDFA approved this, that, and the other indication, you know, PTSD, whatever it is. And Yeah. And I think it just happened yet.
Kegan:
I don't know if there's a lot of pushback for a a lot of pushback from the pharmaceutical industry. If people start getting real help with these things, and they don't have to be in a pill the rest of their lives, that's gonna crush their mental health industry of all this, you know, SSRIs and antipsychotic medications that they're making a lot of money off of. And so they're using their sway at the FDA, Their business I
Chris:
hope you're wrong. I really do.
Kegan:
I wish I was making all that up, but really think I don't think they're doing it out of evil. I think they're doing it out of being business conscious. Yeah. But it seems that they care more about yeah. I mean, legally, they have that legal obligation to their shareholder.
And that comes above all else. And that includes, you know, knocking out the competition. Even if your competition is health care that works. Mhmm.
Chris:
So what do you do? Okay. So you did that first mushroom shirt, but now it's like it's like a sitter. So it's not talk therapy. So what Dan Engle talks about on the podcast was so psychedelic assisted psychotherapy.
So they're actually doing talk I mean, that's the interesting thing about MDMA is you're still lucid whilst you're taking the drug. So they can do talk therapy whilst you're in that altered state of consciousness. But when you're on mushrooms, it's kinda not like that. You're kind of out of it. Right?
Kegan:
This my initial one was more of a ceremonial Okay. Experience than, like, a clinical work, which I think had a lot of value to it. Okay. And then I reached out to vet solutions. I didn't necessarily qualify for their program.
They're focused on multi time combat veterans from the Special Forces community, which I was not that. However, they put me in contact with, organization called Warrior Angels Foundation. And they were doing an event at their ranch in Texas called the 4 by 48 challenge from the minds of David Goggins. Yeah.
Chris:
He's read his books. Yeah.
Kegan:
So you know exactly what I'm talking about. He put together this idea, you gotta run 4 miles every 4 hours for 48 hours straight.
Chris:
Oh, my.
Kegan:
And so Warrior Angel Foundation was doing a fundraiser for that event. And for whatever reason, it clicked to me, like, why don't I start a fundraiser page with my story? And at this point, I hadn't talked about any of this stuff publicly at all. I had been, like, hiding from the world. I had been paranoid and hyper created a shell around myself from almost all my friends and my family.
I mean, I was on the verge of divorce. I was a mess. But I was, like, I should share my story a little bit, and maybe people will listen to this. And for the first time, I didn't have any social media at the time, but I ended up putting up a little blurb about this. And the fundraiser page within a week had raised over $10,000 or nearly $10,000.
Wow. And so the founders of that organization gave me a call and said, hey, we wanna get you a flight and have you come down and join us for the event. So I ended up going down, and it was incredible in that I found this whole community of other veterans like me, largely a special forces members. There were Marcus and Amber Capone were there. So Navy SEALs, there were MARSOC marines, special forces, marines, army rangers, green berets.
There were guys that were in the military that couldn't talk about what they did, and there was even the secretary of defense, Christopher Miller, was there, lieutenant general Christopher Miller. And I found this whole community of people that had been through, you know, different than mine, but same in that we all had physical injuries. We all had PTSD diagnoses, and we had all been given massive amounts of psychotropic medications that had torn our lives apart. And that was when I realized I was on the right path, because there were all these other guys seeking an alternative to that and trying to fight for that. And the alternative is largely, well, one, addressing TBI in a completely different manner and also the use of psychedelic therapy.
And we completed that run along with a peyote ceremony while we were there, which was incredibly powerful. And at the end, we have this big staking ceremony, and there's all these big burly tattooed guys crying their eyes out because we had just had the spiritual experience together, and we had this community. And it felt like we had just sparked this light of hope that was gonna help to guide other people, other veterans maybe initially, and then the rest of the society that's just stuck in this broken mental health and health care system. But I left there with a whole lot of hope. I ended up going down to Peru with Heroic Hearts Project.
Jesse Gould, the founder of that organization was at this event doing the run with me. He invited me down to Peru through Heroic Hearts and I did 3 nights of Ayahuasca ceremony there.
Chris:
Wow. You've done them all at this point.
Kegan:
Yeah. I over the several years, I ended up getting a number of experiences.
Chris:
Yeah. And so were you going back to Michael Pollan's book where he talks about all these different substances and their potential? You're thinking, okay, I'm gonna try that one. I'm gonna try that one.
Kegan:
Well, I
Chris:
It's like a venue.
Kegan:
I really know. I thought maybe I was just gonna do one and then that would be done. Yeah. And I think I kinda did one and then I would integrate the experience and adapt changes in my behavior and lifestyle that were positive. And I think you can go and do these substances or indigenous medicines as they prefer to call them.
I can go and have that experience, but if you don't do a lot of work when you're done
Chris:
I see.
Kegan:
To change your behavior, to change your mindset, to change your lifestyle, you can go right back to where you started. And so for me, that aperture of the sort of spiritual awakening that it had caused, I found benefit into every 3 to 6 months, I kind of have had this calling to go back and try try it again. And some people, they'll just do it once they're like, alright, I'm good.
Chris:
I'm done. Yeah.
Kegan:
But for me, I've been doing the experience. I come back. I integrate those changes. Integrate, you know, a meditation practice. Integrate new health things I learn.
Chris:
So is that who's helping you with the integration? You do it by yourself or
Kegan:
So for Heroic Hearts Project, they they give you an integration coach both before and after. And I got paired up with this former seal Moose. This is his name. Great dude. He ended up teaching me some basic meditation techniques.
Chris:
Is this someone you can really relate to then?
Kegan:
Yeah. Do
Chris:
you think that's important? If it was just like some random therapist, they might be very good at what they do, but maybe you can't connect with them on quite the
Kegan:
same level. Yeah. I think that helped a lot to have another guy like that, especially to be like, okay. Well, if this Navy Seal is using meditation, maybe there's something more to it than I realized before. Because I had tried it before and I hadn't really gotten anywhere with it.
But from having especially that heavy Ayahuasca experience kind of opened my aperture into this whole other realm of this quantum field around us or whatever you wanna call that, God or divinity Yeah. That, you know, the energy that connects us all. And it's seeing a different perspective on what all that is, you know, even if it was just a glimpse of understanding into that whole realm, but it opened that door and made me realize there was more there. And I just started to pursue a very different path. And not only do these indigenous medicines or psychedelics help, I think, heal on a spiritual level, there's a lot of research coming out showing how powerfully beneficial they are for neuro regeneration, for healing brain injury.
And whether you're a person who's been through a serious trauma like I'm talking about or even just people in the daily ground of Western society lifestyle where you're getting sleep deprived, you're constantly stressed out, you're on your phone, you're eating maybe not the greatest foods because you're busy, and drinking alcohol and caffeine and smoking, like, all these things cause essentially a brain injury over time, but these medicines absolutely help to fix that. And along with that, I also started to go to brain injury clinics. There's an organization called Defenders of Freedom run by Donna Cranston down in Dallas, Texas, And they invited me down to resiliency brain clinic, where I underwent 2 weeks of brain injury therapy. And initially they do a full neurological assessment to see where you're at, and then throughout the 2 weeks they do all these alternative modalities to help heal brain injury. And a lot of them are very simple, like a popsicle stick with a little sticker on it that you follow with your eyes because it helps to include increase blood flow with your eyes essentially being an extension of your brain.
There's a machine that flips you upside down. There's a lot of it was really simple, like standing on one foot and, you know, reciting your favorite category of vehicles or beers and hitting lighted panels. So there's all these brain games that they have you do, balance exercises. But after 2 weeks of these sort of alternative off the beaten path modalities, I had drastic improvement in my cognitive functioning from when I had come in there. Not only, like, my mental functioning but my balance and physically my body was working better.
It was just regrowing all these neural pathways.
Chris:
I think about this a lot how we make this artificial separation between mind and body.
Kegan:
I know.
Chris:
It doesn't make any sense. Right?
Kegan:
It's your body. Your brain is your body.
Chris:
I mean, exactly. And, you know, all this incredible surgery that they did to bring you back from life after you've been smashed into a 1000000 pieces in an aircraft disaster. And then, like, how primitive the psychiatry is by comparison.
Speaker 2:
Oh. And Yeah.
Kegan:
It's unfortunate.
Speaker 2:
It's And the
Chris:
guy they don't make that connection between, oh, this guy's been smashed into a 1000000 pieces. Maybe there's, like, something wrong with it's crazy.
Kegan:
I know. And fortunately, there's guys like doc Parsley
Chris:
Yeah.
Kegan:
And folks doing podcast like yours that are shedding light on this issue, which is the brain can be healed. And if you give it the right conditions, if you have a nutritious lifestyle, if you nourish it with good food Right. And hydration, and you're not doing the things that damage it regularly. You're not Yeah. Pounding tequila shots, you know, on a regular basis.
Yeah.
Chris:
I mean, I think a lot about environmental exposures as well, you know, like environmental pollutants that we're all exposed to and micro plastics and god knows what else. And Yeah. You mean the nutrients are important. So what I mean, so I don't think you're vegan anymore. You gotta tell us about that.
I'm thinking about, you know, I've said this before on the podcast, but 70% of the dry weight of the brain is this long chain omega 3 fatty acid called DHA.
Kegan:
Right. You
Chris:
only get it from eating fish or the brains of another animal. And people don't generally eat brains of other animals, so you get it from fish and maybe fish oil, really.
Speaker 2:
Yeah.
Chris:
And so what I mean, how do you get that on a vegan diet? I mean, suppose could supplement it somehow.
Kegan:
So I I was vegan for 1 year fully, like Okay. Pretty strictly. And then I started to incorporate wild game. I'm a hunter, so I can go out and hunt deer. And, you know, I think pretty humanely harvest an animal that can feed my family for a year in a way that I was fine with and Yeah.
Chris:
And it's important to separate the ethical concern. Ethical and moral concerns are one thing, but then there's the nutritional concerns.
Kegan:
I I found I was starting to have a lot more injuries when I was full vegan. In part, it's likely my heritage, you know. I'm from Northern European heritage where I think meat was a much bigger part of those diets Right. Because you're not gonna be able to grow.
Chris:
The growing seasons.
Kegan:
Shorter growing seasons. And so I think I there are people that do vegan and they do great with it.
Chris:
Live racers are good at some point.
Kegan:
Yeah. They're super athletes and it works for them. For me, it wasn't giving me everything I felt I needed. And so I started to incorporate wild game and fish caught from the local lakes back into my diet. And then when I got involved with Warrior Angel Foundation, I got put in touch with a doctor Michael Lewis.
He has a book called When Brains Collide. And his solution to treating brain injury, he found was using high doses of fish oil. Okay. And so he worked me up to about 3,000 milligrams a day of high quality fish oil.
Chris:
Okay.
Kegan:
He also the Warrior Angel Foundation also works with doctor Mark Gordon, who's been on the Rogan podcast a couple times with Andrew Marr. He's a Green Beret who founded Warrior Angel Foundation with his brother, Adam Marr. But doctor Mark Gordon also has taken a similar approach as doctor Michael Lewis in treating brain injury, which is recognizing that the brain can heal. It's made of cells like like so many other parts of your body. Exactly.
And if you give it what it needs, which in like you mentioned with the brain, it's these DHA or these fatty acids. When you give it that and you give it the proper environment, it can heal itself. Mhmm. And so through nutraceutical supplementation as well as incorporating some more meat, my
Chris:
diet taken shit tons of supplements. You must have tried everything at this point. Right? People use it all the time they
Kegan:
get here. I have tried quite a few because also that brain injury clinic in Dallas, they they did a full extensive lab on me and gave me even more insight than Warrior Angels had, but the big takeaway was, okay, you go to the VA and you get a blood test, and they maybe check a couple things, and they're also comparing you to a population of largely, like, 80 plus year old guys. Yeah. You're not getting a good understanding of your physiology from that shallow of a check. But what these other organizations or doc Parsley are doing, and it sounds like your organization as well, is you do a comprehensive lab.
Chris:
Yeah. Much deeper dive. Yeah.
Kegan:
And again, it's not to understand what's really happening on a physiological a psychology clinic and going, okay, how do you feel? What's actually going on to your physiology, and how can we address those imbalances? Those a very common thing with brain injury is you get these hormonal imbalances
Speaker 2:
Right.
Kegan:
Low testosterone Exactly. And that alone can make you have all these mood issues. Yeah. And when they start to address those things, not only do you feel better, look better, and your mental functioning comes back. I think that is the future of health care is Yeah.
Chris:
It's a tough situation,
Kegan:
you know? They're really here.
Chris:
Yeah. They really are. They would love to spend 90 minutes with you talking about your diet and your sleep and how you manage stress and the way you move your body and your level of social connection and all of that, but they're seeing 30 patients this morning. Right? They just can't do that with each person.
So it's kinda again, it's like that system that's not working very well for them. But I'm so glad that you managed to find care that worked much better for you. So the psychedelic assisted psychotherapy was obviously really important and continues to be really important. The diet, it's not like it was ever terrible before, but you do feel like part of your recovery was optimizing your diet. Thinking about It was.
Kegan:
Macro and micronutrients. Largely, you know, I would I wasn't a big drinker, but I would have, you know You think alcohol was? Beers, but cutting out alcohol completely. And Okay. I'll still it's a special occasion.
I'll have a beer or something. Yeah.
Chris:
But And caffeine as well, you think?
Kegan:
Caffeine, I cut out caffeine. Interesting. Those things all after reading Why We Sleep by doctor Matthew Walker, I really recognized how impactful those things are on your night's sleep. And if you're doing them, even if you're just having a beer or 2 with dinner, that
Chris:
is Exactly.
Kegan:
You're not getting as restful as sleep.
Chris:
I know. And it's embarrassing. Like, we've worked with thousands of clients over the past 10 years. And on several occasions we've done that, like, gone deep on every, like, no left no rock unturned. And you'd know that caffeine was part of the picture right from the outset.
And then eventually, the client would make the decision for themselves that they were gonna try going without caffeine. And they come back and say, you know what? That was it. That's all I needed to do. Stop drinking coffee.
And I'm sure the other stuff they did helped. It's just that that was the one thing we dare not talk about because it's so bloody hard to change. And it's the alcohol is kinda the same, actually. Right. It doesn't work in quite
Speaker 2:
the same way. It kinda makes you run hot. Right? You sleep
Chris:
hot and you're kinda restless and Yeah. It alters sleep architecture. And you can feel it the next day, but, goddamn, it's a health coach. You're not telling people to stop drinking if that's one
Speaker 2:
of the
Chris:
few ways they've got to unwind and manage stress in the evening.
Kegan:
I know. And then once you do and you feel the burden that's lifted and when you're getting a better night's sleep, you don't need the caffeine anymore. I feel fully energized in the day. I don't have those slouches like I did when I was on caffeine because I wasn't getting restful sleep and it was this vicious cycle of
Chris:
okay, now
Kegan:
I need my coffee to function.
Chris:
Yeah. I'm sure it doesn't give it like, I'm a coffee drinker. I'm pretty sure it's not giving me a boost. It's just returning me to a baseline. And if I was to I've done it before in the past, you know, you don't drink caffeine for a while.
You get back to that thing.
Kegan:
So good here too.
Chris:
I know. I've been getting
Kegan:
the decaf here because it's even the decaf here
Chris:
is delicious. So what else? The community. Is it were it just your family? And you've got is this the family it's stemmed beyond that?
I mean, you didn't really do this alone. Right? I'm just wondering I mean,
Kegan:
my family has been crucial in all of this, getting me through those hard times and being by my side even though I was a crazy person. The community of veterans that I've come across and integrated with and met along the process, I mean, that's been huge. It's led to just incredible life experiences and connections. And even after the Ayahuasca ceremony, I ended up through another organization called No Fallen Heroes.
Chris:
I'm gonna link to all these, by the way. You've mentioned a lot of names. So I have a wonderful colleague. Her name is Elaine, and she makes incredible show notes and with a timeline or a link to everything that you mentioned, it's, like, super helpful for finding things afterwards.
Kegan:
So No Fallen Heroes was founded by Matthew Wizz Buckley. He's actually another f 18 pilot. And I actually I forget how we came across each other, but I shared my story. He has a podcast and I shared my story. What's
Chris:
the merch podcast?
Kegan:
No. That's Ryan Graves.
Chris:
Okay.
Kegan:
He's also f 18 pilot. Wiz Buckley's podcast is called Max Afterburner podcast, but he had me on his podcast sharing the story. And he is ended up starting a nonprofit organization called No Falling Heroes, and he helps to get veterans access to psychedelic healing.
Chris:
Oh, wow.
Kegan:
And he actually funded me on a trip to go down here to Costa Rica, not far from here, to awaken your soul where I did 2 nights a ceremony with Iboga, which is basically, I think, about the most potent psychedelic there is. It was a 16 hour journey. But when I was in that medicine, I worked with a psychotherapist named Troy Valencia, an extremely talented not only has he been initiated by the Bewidi in Gabon Africa in the use of Iboga, but he's also a trained psychotherapist. And with that combination, he was able to, 1, work with me to get me into this sort of ceremonial space with the indigenous medicine. But then once there, he was able to work with me as a psychotherapist.
And he was really good at balancing this too. We worked through childhood trauma from the moment I was born. I was able to relive traumas in my life.
Chris:
And you think that's important as well even though, like, the elephant in the room is the is the air flight accident.
Kegan:
Yeah. I mean, that's absolutely was an elephant, but there is so much more underneath that I didn't even realize was there. And once we uncovered it and I addressed it and I relived them, I was able to forgive and let it go. And after that night, I mean, it was a extremely challenging night going through all of these things. But afterwards, by the next day, I well, the next day, I felt like I had the worst hangover in my life, which is common with Iboga.
But once I started to recover, I had never felt so light and full of love and connected to everything around me. That's amazing. And I haven't felt this clarity of my mind. Amazing. And I haven't felt this clarity of my mind since before the accident.
Chris:
Wow. And so what was the Iboga set and setting? Is that you mentioned talk therapy there. Was that happening in the jungle? Was you in a clinic?
Or
Kegan:
Yeah. We're in the jungle very similar to this place. You're in the mountains of Costa Rica.
Chris:
Okay.
Kegan:
And you're in a open air setting on this outdoor porch looking up at the stars. They play traditional bbuedi music, which you can look it up on Spotify. Things that you're consciously cannot remember and connects you to, you know, divinity or quantum field or whatever you wanna call all the stuff around us that we can't proceed
Chris:
with our 5 senses. So here in Costa Rica and you're looking great. You speak so eloquently. You organize your thoughts. I mean, it's like I wouldn't have known that any of this had happened to you had it not been I did know when we first started talking by the pool, I noticed the scars on your arms.
Yeah. Other than that, I mean, that's Yeah.
Kegan:
It's it's pretty incredible the way the human body can
Chris:
heal and recover
Kegan:
physically and mentally and spiritually when given the right tools and support and community and the right mindset to go after and the discipline to incorporate what you learn and to change the things that are broken in a life. But it's sort of been this very holistic approach
Chris:
Oh, definitely.
Kegan:
Yeah. That's worked and it's you know, I think people may if you think you can just go into clinic and get a pill and it's gonna be the easy pill and you're gonna get better, I'm sorry. That just doesn't work. No. That's what I You might feel a little better for a little while.
It's gonna maybe work for you short term, but to really heal, it takes a lot of work. It takes a lot.
Chris:
So where is that next week? I know you're going for another experience next week.
Kegan:
I'm actually going back to Awaken Your Soul. Okay.
Chris:
And where about in Costa Rica is it?
Kegan:
It's about 40 minutes from here. I actually have to look up the address. Okay. It's pretty close to here.
Chris:
Okay. It's not too far.
Kegan:
Yeah. That's great.
Chris:
And then so it was really your wife that brought you here to La Liga Villa. Right? It wasn't she did most of the research.
Kegan:
She had been wanting to do this trip for a while. So we've been pretty frugal in order to do this and make this happen. And she saw a documentary with Zac Efron, and
Chris:
he
Kegan:
was talking all about it. And when
Chris:
he wanted to come back to this ecovilla and it sounds like I think it's called.
Kegan:
Okay. Yeah. That's the one. I haven't actually watched it, but she was all about it and talked it up and
Chris:
I think, you know, blast have been here for a month now and it's just I mean, the kids are happy, you're happy. Right? And there's, like, millions of kids everywhere and there's the pool and
Speaker 2:
just
Chris:
the kids are just having a laugh.
Kegan:
It's the best place to be a kid and a very relaxing place to be adult, the food and I mean, just the produce here is so fresh
Chris:
and delicious.
Kegan:
I feel like you're getting so much nutrient from every little bite of food here. And so what you do with your time now? So I've been doing a lot of speaking over this past year through, you know, friends I've made through some of these, you know, a lot of these veteran groups and organizations. I've made a lot of connections that have put me in contact with people. Actually, last spring, I went through what's called the I went I was invited on what's called the 7 x project.
My good friend, Vinnie, who was an F 18 pilot with me and kinda took me in under his wing along with FISTI after my ejection, He now runs an aircraft management company, and they were helping to get the 7 x project, which is a group of veterans trying to raise awareness and funding for treating mental health in veteran community and ending veteran suicide. And they put together this idea from the mind of Ryan Birdman Parrot. He's a navy seal or former navy seal. He put together this idea which was go to 7 continents in 7 days, and on each continent do a skydive, run a marathon, and do a cold plunge. And so, Vinnie was, I think, involved in maybe trying to get these guys an aircraft, and they were looking for other veterans to share their story to help with the fundraiser.
And so Vinny and his business partner Garrett helped me put together a fundraiser for explaining my story again, And it got a lot of attention and raised a bunch of money for this trip. And so Ryan ended up inviting me to come along with him. And so last year, we weren't able to make it to Antarctica, but the trip got to every other continent. We actually just went to Antarctica just a few weeks ago, and that was a pretty wild experience in itself. But the reason I'm telling you all this is I met a contact through that named Chris Hoth, who's actually Rich Roll's friend and trainer.
And he works with Jesse Ischler, who he's a pretty well known entrepreneur, runs Marquis Jet. He's a I think he described himself as a serial entrepreneur, but he's this dude who basically came from the streets. I think he had a hotdog stand or something at one point, and now he's a highly successful entrepreneur. And he puts together these events where he has people come out. They're called Jesse Ischler 365 challenge events.
And entrepreneurs will come out and pay to spend a few days with them. And they do all sorts of activities and training, and it's largely, I think he's just giving them a different view point mindset. But he invited me through Chris Hoth, who I met on one of these trips to come and speak at one of their events. And so I got to do the speaking event through them. And since then, I've started to get more and more of these speaking engagements.
Chris:
That's great. Nothing succeeds like success. Right? You get one opportunity and then more come from that.
Kegan:
Yeah. And each one I meet people that want me to come speak at their events
Chris:
and it's
Kegan:
just kind of it's just on the ground and I have a I'm also gonna oh,
Chris:
you've got a book. Can you tell us about the
Speaker 2:
book?
Chris:
But I really wanna know, like, what's your goal? You know, is it to advocate for the use of psychedelics in overcoming PTSD in veterans? Or is it all of like all of the diet? Because there's much more to it than that. Right?
Yeah. It's diet and sleep.
Kegan:
It's really I just I want to give people hope. I want this message to be so common that people know Mhmm. That you don't have to be trapped in this world of pharmaceuticals and chronic illness. And, yeah, I think a big focus is the veteran community, especially knowing the guys that are stuck in these inpatient psych facilities and the treatment that's going on to this day, ending that, making the public aware of this sort of stuff so that there can be change, but also inspiring hope in those guys that were just like me who were told, no, this is your your only option. Just take this pill.
This is gonna be your miserable life for the remainder of your existence that it doesn't have to be like that. So the more I can share this story and even if it's just 1 or 2 guys that hear it from this podcast and they go, yes, like and they can make changes in their lives and then giving them a pathway to do so. Giving them the knowledge and the confidence that if they could just instill some discipline and and will power that they can they too can heal from whatever they're having to deal with and turn their lives back around.
Speaker 2:
Well, how
Chris:
could you object to that? I'm sure everyone listening will be right there with you and try to make that happen.
Kegan:
Well, thank you for being on this journey with me and this fight that I think is going on, this revolution that's going on towards a different approach to health Yeah. In the world.
Chris:
Absolutely. So tell us about the book. So you publishing a book is a little bit more complicated than if I tried to publish
Kegan:
a book. Right? So because it deals with matters while I was in the military, I have to go through what's called DOPCER, which is the Department of Defense review process. Mhmm. They're basically just checking it to make sure there's not any operational security threats where, something that could harm somebody that's still active duty.
But my book right now is with them. It's been with them since July. So but the process can take anywhere from 6 to 12, 14 months.
Chris:
Okay.
Kegan:
For that review, I have You got a title yet? Phoenix revival.
Chris:
Okay. Like Phoenix rising from the ashes.
Kegan:
Yeah. Exactly. Which I feel as kind of been what I did.
Chris:
I know. You I feel like you should have that tattoo somewhere. You're not a tattoo kinda guy.
Kegan:
Well, I need to my friend my friend Sam might be able to hook me up with one of those. But, yeah, I'm trying to get that published. I I have a publishing company called Dead Reckoning Collective.
Chris:
Okay.
Kegan:
They do a lot of other veteran works. Yeah. They actually published my favorite author. His name is Leo Jenkins. Okay.
If you're looking for a good book, he's got one called The First Train Out of Denver, I believe. And it's a pretty awesome story about just a different perspective on the world that we live in and all these artificial borders and nonsense that are kind of trapping us from just being the wild free creatures that we are in the world. But anyways, I'm excited to work with those guys and get the editing done and get a get the book made here once we get it back from the DOD.
Chris:
That's fabulous. Congratulations on everything you achieved. That's such an incredible story. Yeah. It's an absolute honor to meet you and it's awesome that
Kegan:
we just happen to run into each other.
Speaker 2:
I know.
Chris:
It's so wild. I feel like that's like how life works though, isn't it? It's kinda what you might call, it's like dumb luck, like you buy a lottery ticket and you win, and then there's the kind of luck that you make things more likely to happen by going to interesting places and getting yourself out there. And I think I've learned that here at Laetica Villa as well. You know, they have this Google Calendar and it's like stuff that happens every morning at the yoga shala.
And you kinda gotta get out of bed early and get yourself down there before it gets too hot and
Speaker 2:
Yeah.
Chris:
Enjoy what they got going on there even if it's not your usual cup of tea. I don't really think of myself as anything to do with yoga, but I've really enjoyed acro yoga over the last
Speaker 2:
I'd rather
Kegan:
come check it out. I haven't I'm just getting on all these WhatsApps. So
Chris:
Yeah. It's like a whole thing. Yeah. Trying to understand what's going on here at La Iquivilla, but there's a lot going on. Yeah.
Thank you very much for taking time away for your family. I'm really grateful.
Speaker 2:
Thank you.
Kegan:
My pleasure. The it's great to speak with you, Chris, and
Speaker 2:
Yeah.
Kegan:
Really appreciate what you're doing. Sharing messages like this.
Chris:
One last thing, where can people find you online? What's the best place?
Kegan:
You can find me on LinkedIn, Kegan Gill.
Chris:
Okay.
Kegan:
It's just k e g a n. My last name is Gill like the fish, g I l l. Okay. You can also find me on Instagram, kegan smurf gill. Soon, I'll have a website up and running.
And if you follow Dead Reckoning Collective as well on social media, you'll be able to follow the release of my book here. And hopefully, I'll have a website to share here soon as well. Okay. Yeah. Look me up and shoot me a message if you have any questions or if I can be of any assistance or whatever.
You'll find me on those guys.
Chris:
That's very generous of you. Thank you.
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