Bank Robbery, Wildfire, Cancer—and How Dan Reilly Chose to Live Again

Dan Reilly Interview

Tiff Carson: There’s a moment in every life where the ground gives out. You didn’t plan for it. You didn’t see it coming, but in an instant, everything shifts. And in that pause right after the news, the diagnosis, the fire, the loss, you get to choose who you become next. That’s what today’s conversation is about. I’m sitting down with someone I’ve never met before, Dan Riley, and maybe that’s exactly what makes this so powerful I get to be curious alongside you. Dan’s story includes some wild chapters. A bank robbery, escaping California wildfires and a cancer diagnosis that changed his life. But what struck me most was what he chose to do with all of it. He didn’t just survive, he transformed. So I want to ask you something as we begin. What’s the thing life handed you that you never asked for, but might just be the invitation to finally come home to yourself? This is about second chances about telling the truth, finding meaning in the mess. So let’s dive in. Welcome to the podcast, Dan. How are you? 

Dan Reilly: Good morning. Thank you so much for that introduction. I really appreciate being here.

Tiff Carson: I am really looking forward to our conversation, and you have described yourself as a pretty ordinary guy, a banker, a husband, a dad, but your story is anything but ordinary. Can you take us back to who you were before that first major life shakeup and how you see that version of yourself now?

Dan Reilly: Hmm.  Wow. Great question. I’m 55 years old. I live in Santa Rosa, California. We’re a blended family. My wife and I, we’ve been together two and a half, excuse me, we’ve been married for two and a half years, but been together 14 years.  And prior to that, I would say that I was years old. I was out of shape. I was overweight. I was definitely not taking care of myself. I was, I was living like a lot of people that I knew, under a lot of stress, under a lot of pressure.  And one of the things that I definitely did not do very well is take care of my health. There were signs along the way when I was younger that there were things that I should have paid more attention to. Signs like heartburn, acid reflux, were, you know, I come from a very large Italian family and that was just part of, everything that we did within our, yeah. Life within our, within our culture and, and eating and everything.  And so, looking back down where I am compared to where I was, I don’t see myself even as the same person, not just physically, but emotionally. I’d say I’m more bold, boldly confident in being able to have conversations openly about some of the things that I’ve gone through in my life.  But today it’s really about not just taking care of myself, but taking care of the people around me. I really want, I see myself as a better husband, as a better friend, as a better father, and I have a purpose in my life that’s driving me forward every day.

Tiff Carson: Looking back, what was that first real crack in the foundation, that big one that made you realize that life wasn’t as safe or stable as you thought it was?

Dan Reilly: Yeah. Wow, that goes back to September of 2017, what I call one of my first wake up calls, and there was a series of three that came in rapid succession. And the first one in September, 2017, I went to work that Saturday morning, in retail banking like I had for so many years. I’ve been in retail banking now for about 22 years. And there was just before closing time, someone came into the bank, and I greeted that person at the door. And, it turned out that it was actually an armed bank robbery. They pulled a gun out of a paper, took it out of a paper bag, and pointed it directly at my chest, arms length away. And so during that moment, your mind freezes, you don’t really think that this could possibly be reality. 

Dan Reilly: And in that moment, things moved almost as in slow motion, but very rapidly.  And I went home later on that evening. The house was cleared. My wife went to go visit family that night.  The kids were out of the house and I didn’t go to bed till 4:30 that morning, just reliving those moments in my head and that conversation that I had with that person in my head and thinking how things could have gone differently had I made different decisions or if he made different choices. And in that moment I realized, number one, he didn’t shoot me.

Tiff Carson: Mm-hmm.

Dan Reilly: I’m still alive, so I’m here for a reason. Is that a reason I asked God that night? is that reason?

Tiff Carson: Mm-hmm.

Dan Reilly: I didn’t come up with any answers. I think I had to go through this journey first to really find that answer.

Tiff Carson: Hmm.

Dan Reilly: But that was the first time that I realized if he didn’t shoot me, if I’m not dead, then why am I killing myself? I think I need to make different choices. Now, that didn’t happen immediately. It was eight months later, so it took some time. That was really the first moment that I realized I gotta do something different in life. 

Tiff Carson: That’s so powerful that you said to yourself, “so if he didn’t kill you, why are you killing yourself?” It’s a big aha. So what was the next of the three that happened for you?

Dan Reilly: Yeah, so after the bank robbery and I had spent hours afterwards with law enforcement and FBI, and so while that was underway, the investigation was underway, the intruder was apprehended at that time, so there was a still a lot of anxiety and whether or not it was still safe to go out.

Dan Reilly: Three weeks later, my wife and I were awakened in the middle of the night, about 1:30 in the morning with neighbors driving up and down the street, honking their horns. Couldn’t really figure out why, but it was Labor Day, excuse me, not Labor Day weekend. It was Columbus Day weekend, and we were being warned and alarmed that there was a fire over the ridge. Now my wife was very alarmed that the fire was nearer than we anticipated. It was high winds that night. I’m not really a, it’s very difficult for me to wake up in the middle of the night. So she ran outside to find out what was going on with all the car horns blaring. Finds out that there were other neighbors outside and they had all decided that it was time to evacuate the neighborhood, and that’s what the neighbors were trying to get our attention. So she runs upstairs, she shakes me awake, gets the kids awake. Before you know it, we’re grabbing whatever we possibly can and shoving them in the car. We’re making sure that our kids are safe and we find ourselves in a very long line in traffic at a quarter to two in the morning trying to get out of our community, and so it turned out that the fires had, they were enclosing around us.

Fire travels very rapidly, it started just north of us, but within just a few hours it was within our town, our city, and in our community. So we fled. Yeah, we fled to my in-laws house, which they lived several miles away, but within a few hours, that area was no longer safe either, and you could hear the explosions of propane tanks that gas stations exploding. And then later on that afternoon just ash just fell from the sky as like snowflakes and just covered the ground. 

Tiff Carson: So how is it like seeing them happen, like the one that happened in Pasadena in January? How does that affect you now when you see it happening again and again?

Dan Reilly: Well, it happened to us four years out of five. And so it wasn’t just that first fire in 2017, it was the fires thereafter as well. And one of the things that I’m reminded about, is during that time while the the air was full of smoke and soot, it was very difficult to breathe.  It was during that time I ended up in the emergency room because I was having a hard time to breathe.

Tiff Carson: Mm-hmm.

Dan Reilly: And so it turned out that eventually when I was diagnosed with COPD. Didn’t even know that I had it until, during the fires, it inflamed my respiratory system. So the area now, years later, eight years later, there are still areas that are still scorched. But I no longer see those as damaged lots or houses or things that we lost because we can rebuild those things.

Tiff Carson: Mm-hmm.

Dan Reilly: Now there is new growth in those areas, and it’s a reminder for me that transformation occurs everywhere in nature, not just in ourselves and tragedy can be very beautiful, but not in the moment that you’re experiencing it of course.

Tiff Carson: So what was the third event?

Dan Reilly: Yeah. The third event was a cancer diagnosis. I ended up in the emergency room in June of ‘22 having dinner late at night, and got some food, stuck in my chest area. That really hurt and I’d been going to the gym 4 days a week for the last three or four years. And so I just felt they were just muscle aches and pains that I was experiencing. But the restriction in my chest and numbness in my left arm alarmed me enough to ask my wife to take me to the emergency room. And so I spent the night there, with no diagnosis, no prognosis of what that occurrence really was. About five months later, I ended up in my doctor’s office and I was being treated for acid reflux and GERD and I was just prescribed, PPIs, which are proton pump inhibitors, which are basically over the counter. 

Dan Reilly: And so, I was on that for 30 days at a time with no relief. They suggested that I increase my diagnosis to twice a day instead of once a day. So after about 90 days of going through this at the February of ‘23, end of February of ‘23, I was diagnosed with GERD, which is Gastroesophageal Reflux Disease. It’s the natural progression of heartburn. Acid reflux occurred before precancerous and cancerous conditions could possibly be in effect.

Tiff Carson: Mm-hmm.

Dan Reilly: So by the end of February, early March, I was on a liquid diet only. I had a lot of trouble during that time, swallowing and keeping food down. So foods became very difficult to eat and keep down. So luckily, because I had gone through a physical transformation of losing about 75 pounds over a couple years, and I worked with a physical trainer, a fitness trainer and a health coach, that helped me build routines in place, including meal prepping and exercise. I had some tools in my toolkit that I could utilize and rely on, and one of them was meal prepping with homemade protein shakes, and that got me through a couple months. By April, I went to my doctor again and I said, ’cause we’ve been communicating online, and I told him, something’s really wrong.

I really need to come in and see you. I can no longer consume solid foods. So he scheduled a colonoscopy and endoscopy. He didn’t even schedule the endoscopy right away. I actually had to advocate and fight for that.

Tiff Carson: Mm.

Dan Reilly: His comment to me was, if you don’t take these PPIs, the proton pump inhibitors, we’re gonna be forced to put a scope down your throat. It’s gonna be invasive and you’re not gonna like that. I looked straight at him at that doctor’s appointment in April and I said, that is exactly what I’m asking you to do. Something’s wrong and it’s not okay to continue just to take these over the counter pills.

Tiff Carson: Yeah.

Dan Reilly: And so I said, you have to put me out for the colonoscopy anyway. Just schedule it on the same day. And so he did and that was May 4th. On May 4th, I was diagnosed with stage three esophageal cancer. They found a four inch tumor at the lower end of my esophagus, just above my esophageal junction which goes right into the stomach. And the gastroenterologist said that day that it looks like it had been there for one to two years.

Tiff Carson: Oh my goodness. So, wow.  There’s a moment in your book where you laugh after your diagnosis while your father was weeping, but what was really going on inside of you at that moment, and what did that laughter mean for your healing?

Dan Reilly: Hmm. I came home from that endoscopy procedure, still partially sedated and I had not grasped the news that we were just delivered. Thank goodness my wife was there so she was able to then translate what the doctor had said afterwards. And so we came home. We sat a moment. We had a quiet moment with each other. But my dad has always been my biggest hero, so I always have reached out to him. And we talk about everything. I still call him, every weekend, even today. And so this was one of those moments that I knew, this was a phone call to dad. And so he was waiting on the procedure to be over.

And so I gave him a call. And we chatted for a little bit and I said, you know, dad, the doctor said it looks like it had been there for a while, and I didn’t realize the gravity of what I just said at that moment. It was dad. The doctor said it’s been there for a while, and my father then broke down thinking, oh no, it might be too late to do anything. 

Dan Reilly: I have this nervous tendency that I laugh when I get nervous and that’s what I did. I wasn’t laughing at my father’s sadness. I was laughing at Holy Toledo, what kind of situation am I really in and is it real? Can I get out of it? And then at that moment, I was already in the middle of writing this book and I said, you know, dad, what another great chapter in the book. And you know, I laughed thinking, wow, I have another 40,000 words I have to go and write, which will complete this book, and now it’s gonna be really good. 

Dan Reilly: But I didn’t really take into account what my father was going through. And later on that evening, I had finally went to bed, but it was the next day that reality set in and I realized that this was not funny. And that was the first day I planned my funeral.

Tiff Carson: Oh my gosh. So first off, as an author myself, I appreciate that realization that you might have another chapter. But I also appreciate the after when you have time to really think about seriousness of it and the gravity of it. So what ended up happening with your diagnosis and your treatment?

Dan Reilly: Yeah, so May 4th, I was diagnosed. I was then rushed into ameeting with an oncologist and PET scans. My first chemo treatment was on June 5th, so almost a month later. We started with treatment plan was four cycles of FLOT, which is a combination of four different types of chemo and then a short pause to have surgery. And then another four cycles of FLOT and a cycle is, for me it was 48 hours of being on chemo every two weeks. So I would go in on a Thursday morning, and I had a port installed. So they would attach the chemo pump right to my port and I would be there until about five in the evening, and then before I left the hospital, they had this small little pump that was in the form of a of a ball. And it was a, I wore in a little fanny pack. And that dripped overnight, from the time I left the hospital on Thursday evening. Then I would go back again Friday evening to have it all removed. So I wore that even while I was sleeping.

Tiff Carson: Mm-hmm.

Dan Reilly: And so that was every two weeks. So by Friday afternoon or evening, I’d go back in, I’d have it removed. And then Saturday, Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, I was in bed. Blackout curtains on the windows. I didn’t eat. I barely hydrated. Everybody in the house kind of knew that that was just dad’s time to just recoup. And about on the third day, I would start to get a little hungry later on that evening. We eventually did five cycles of FLOT before surgery. Surgery was then in August, I think it was August 25th of ‘23, after a pause of about three weeks of chemo and then I had an esophagectomy. They removed a third of my stomach. They removed two thirds of my esophagus, so now my stomach and the bottom of my throat meet in my chest.

Tiff Carson: Hmm.

Dan Reilly: And after about five weeks of recouping from surgery, I was in the hospital for seven days. Surgery took about a little bit more than six hours. We started another three cycles of FLOT between September and November 2nd. So November 2nd was my last chemo cycle.

Tiff Carson: Mm-hmm. And are you cancer free now or in remission?

Dan Reilly: So as of now, I’m cancer free. I actually go in for a CT scan and blood work tomorrow.  Actually, so right now, every six months, the last time I went in six months ago, the scans and everything looked clear. They did remove lymph nodes during surgery. But I was fortunate because in my situation I didn’t have to have a feeding tube either before surgery or after surgery and that’s kind of a big deal. They stick a tube into your small intestine in case you can’t eat or get in enough nutrients. 

Dan Reilly: I didn’t have that situation because one of the things that prepared me for this journey, for this treatment and this diagnosis, was the years that I spent prior to that, those four years. When I said, when I was at a crossroads and I said I could either give up or I could either wake up and I chose to make a difference in my life and spend four years really working on me emotionally and physically, but that physical transformation of losing 75 pounds, going to the gym, for about 45 minutes, four days a week meal, prepping on weekends so that I know exactly what I was going to eat throughout the week and how many calories I was gonna take in and weighing myself every day, and meditating and praying and spending time outdoors and being with family and those that you love, that’s what I did during that time.  I just didn’t know I was preparing for cancer diagnosis.  But my thoracic surgeons told me that’s likely what saved my life.

Tiff Carson: Oh my goodness. That is so beautiful that were given that gift of knowing what your body, your spirit, everything needed before you really knew what you needed.  So the subtitle of your book is “A Midlife Memoir of Resilience, Rediscovery, and Getting it Right”. What does “getting it right” mean to you now?

Dan Reilly: What a great question. Very emotional for me too.

Tiff Carson: Take your time. I’m here. 

Dan Reilly: Getting it right is about progress, not perfection. It’s about doing the things that you love the most and being with the people that you love the most. It’s about not having regrets at the end of your life or even during your life. I realized that there were so many things that I regretted doing wrong, or incorrectly in the past. And so what I realized through this journey was none of that matters when I thought that I was not gonna make it to my golden years, when I thought about my children and the nightmares and the panic attacks that I went through. There were so many things that were a burden through this diagnosis and through this journey, I realized that the most important things to me in my life were the people around me. The things that mattered the most were things that were simple, not the things that we go out to hustle in the world for. And so getting it right meant being a better husband, being a better father, being a better friend, finding something that that drives me every single day. Wanting to help other people, wanting to be a good person.

You know, I look at the intruder in the bank that day, and it was a terrifying experience. If he would’ve sneezed and accidentally pulled the trigger, he would not have missed, he couldn’t.

Tiff Carson: Mm-hmm.

Dan Reilly: So when I look at things like that, when I look at the nightmares that I was having because of that or the anxiety of a cancer diagnosis and not knowing whether or not you’re gonna be able to come out of treatment because of it, what I realized was I have an opportunity to be better than I was. And for me that didn’t really take a lot. All I had to do was really focus on me and love the people around me. So getting it right at this point now is waking up every day with the purpose of just trying to be better than I was yesterday. 

What drives me today now is when my gastroenterologist told me that it most likely that tumor had been there for one to two years. I was told by another doctor if I had waited another four to six months, I could have possibly have been diagnosed at stage four. At stage four, you don’t get treatment for this cancer. I was very fortunate to have this surgery. I had met others in the infusion center that couldn’t have surgery, and I had those conversations with those people and they were just so happy for me. I tell a story of an elderly lady that I met in the infusion center in the book, and she was just so happy for me that I could have surgery because she couldn’t. And I realized there’s an opportunity for me that other people don’t. And so if I have a second chance to live a better life to do something different, to make an impact on someone else’s life, then just do it the best I can. 

Dan Reilly: And really the message to my children in this book.  What really started out as a letter to my children evolved into this book, and it was really that life is tough, but whatever you do, do it to the best of your ability.

Tiff Carson: Mm-hmm. So let’s talk about those very important people in your life. What role did your wife, your family and your community play in your recovery and your rediscovery.

Dan Reilly: Wow. My wife is my strength. Without a doubt. My family is the foundation, my children, most importantly, in my life.  They’re the ones that I was constantly thinking about during this entire journey that if I was no longer here, what would I miss and what would I leave behind? ’cause I had gone through loss in my life and knowing what they would’ve gone through, I was trying to find ways of easing that. And so my family, without a doubt is the core of everything that I do. My father and I are very, very close. My biological mother died when I was very young, so that’s one of the things that bonded us together. I’m the oldest of six kids. He loves all six of his kids and I’m very close with my brothers and sisters. We live in six different states. And so as I was going through this, we constantly kept in touch. My wife and I, this is our second marriage. When I first got divorced, my father flew out to California and lived with me for three months. I had my elderly grandfather with me.  I had both kids with me, and he came out and he was there and incredibly supportive. When I was diagnosed, and just before going into surgery, my father came out for three weeks. He wanted to be there for surgery with me, the week prior to surgery, and after surgery. He was in the hospital every single day.

Tiff Carson: So much love. 

Dan Reilly: I had surgery up in Sacramento. It’s a couple hours away, but I had family that came to Sacramento and we stayed in Sacramento and rented a house up there for a week so that family could all stay together. I have a very large family on the East coast. My Aunt Mary, she’s 95 years old, she calls me every day. I have an incredible network of friends in the area and during treatment we had a food train. Like every couple days we’d have food dropped off. My wife’s family is here in California and so they organized and made sure that if there was something that I needed, if my wife couldn’t stay home that day, that there were other people there that were so supportive. Incredible generosity that others have shown. I write in the book How Cancer Creates Community. It really, really does. There’s a bond and a network of people with so much love and kindness and hope.

Tiff Carson: Mm-hmm.

Dan Reilly: And so now that I’m through what I’m through and I have unpacked that backpack of heavy burdens in my life, and looked at each one of those burdens and they were rocks. And then when I sat that backpack down and examined each one of those rocks and realized that none of it was important. I realized I can let it go. I now have the capacity and that’s what drives me every day. That’s what I want to do. That’s my purpose, because I have that capacity. I have that energy. To try to light the way for somebody else who maybe is just going through their treatment, maybe who is just diagnosed, maybe somebody who’s at risk and doesn’t know it, or just somebody who needs a little extra hand throughout the day. The lady that lives across the street lost her son and her husband within just a few months. She’s widowed and lives across the street making dinner for her. On the holiday or on a weekend or taking her trash out every week. Those are small little things that have opened up my world and now the family’s involved, the family helps with little things like that. So there’s a positive impact from all this, and my family starting to see it and starting to mimic some of that kindness and goodness that I received during a very dark time.

Tiff Carson: So, you’ve shown it today. You are a man who is willing to talk about vulnerability and fear and show emotion. Talk about emotion, that many men have been taught to avoid. What helped you finally break that silence and use your voice?

Dan Reilly: Yeah, I would say…I would say two things. One, I had a clear message, a clear message that it is important that others hear, and that is you gotta take care of yourself. Your health should be number one because you can’t take care of your family if you’re not in a healthy position to do so. You can’t take care of yourself. You’re not gonna be able to get through your day if you are not healthy, whether that’s physical, mental or spiritual. For me, it was all of ’em. I had to find components in each one. And so that message being somewhat bold, I thought esophageal cancer and the risks of that, gave me that confidence to step forward and speak to those who wanna listen. I would say that the second thing is I don’t care what other people think. And what I mean by that, I don’t mean to sound cruel, but there are things within maybe my message of, you know, taking better care of yourself, don’t drink, don’t smoke, go see your doctor regularly, doesn’t always resonate with people. I was talking to a colleague of mine who’s a 13 year cancer survivor, and he’s out advocating for the same message that I am, which is, early detection and early screening.  It helps with diagnosis, preventing this kind of cancer. One of the things that he found in in his study is that when a primary care physician tells their patient to go get screened, most of the time they don’t even bother to do that out of fear of.

Tiff Carson: Finding something.

Dan Reilly: Maybe, yeah. Finding something, or going under sedation, not wanting to face reality. Maybe reality is you just have some really bad GERD and you need to monitor that. You need to take care of that.

Dan Reilly: But I feel I have a strong message, to others like myself who avoided certain risks, and didn’t take care of themselves. But at the same time, I have that confidence to step forward. To say, there are so many things that are important in life. That going to the doctor shouldn’t be one of them that should be so terrifying and scary.

Tiff Carson: So this is something that I believe in so deeply, is that memoirs can be medicine. How has the process of writing your book help you heal and make sense of your journey?

Dan Reilly: In the book, I talk about writing to heal. There’s a chapter in there, and the first challenge that I actually had was writing this stuff in my own journal to myself. First, there were things that I talk about in the book that at the time that I was writing it, I had never spoken about before. One of the things I mentioned a little bit ago was that my biological mother had passed away when I was very young. She died at 22 years old. I was six months, my mother was 25. That was a story that was really between my father and I, one of the things that we shared between us, but through writing, what I learned, the things that I don’t want to say I suffered from, suffering maybe too strong of a word, but there were things that I missed throughout my life that I didn’t realize stemmed from early childhood.

Tiff Carson: Mm-hmm.

Dan Reilly: The connection with my first wife and the financial issues that we had when we owned our own business.  These were all things that writing down made them real that I didn’t want to accept. It was writing them down and then having to read them back or even have somebody else read them was very almost like intruding, like invasive that I was sharing things that I shouldn’t have, because there was a sense of comfort holding onto that.  It was just mine and I wasn’t putting it out and sharing it into the world. But I realized that in order to connect with people, in order to really share my story, I needed to be honest with myself, and there’s a chapter in the book about self-honesty and that chapter is really about facing these things that were so daunting and terrifying in the past. And so writing them down made them real. But writing them down also allowed me to let them go, and so I can talk about them now because they’re out in the world. They’re no longer a hidden secret. I went through things like losing a business, filing bankruptcy, losing my job the morning of my grandfather’s funeral is when I got the call.  And so all these things, writing them down, I was embarrassed because of that, but I no longer care about them any longer.

So writing them down, I was able to let them go. I now share them with my children and others as life lessons of. Here’s what, not just what happened to me. Here’s what happened, but here’s what I learned from it. I hope it inspires you and allows you to have some sort of takeaway from the decisions that I made in life.

Tiff Carson: So your book “Seize Your Second Chance” releases today, Tuesday, May 20th. If someone is holding it in their hands for the first time, what do you hope that it awakens for them?

Dan Reilly: Wow. I hope that it inspires them. I would say if I had to say anything about what this book really means to me, I would say it’s about overcoming remarkable odds in the face of adversity while embracing vulnerabilities. For me that helped me get through a diagnosis. So I hope that it inspires them to embrace their own vulnerabilities and get them through whatever challenges that they’re looking to get through in life.  But at the end of the day, it’s a story about family, it’s a story about love, it’s a story about connection and the things that we go through in life and for me it was about what mattered most and what mattered most was my children and my family. And I wanted to leave that story behind for them in case something did happen to me.  But again, at the end of the day, it’s just a story about people being people and that human connection that we have.

Tiff Carson: Mm-hmm. So for the listener that is out there who feels like life has knocked them down one too many times, what would you say to help them believe in a second chance?

Dan Reilly: First thing I would say is don’t give up. Second chances are beautiful. It’s okay to.  For me, I failed multiple times before I found sea legs, before I found where I really belong in life and where I fit best in every day. So if you’re struggling right now, if you are feeling like you’re on a runaway horse, if you are feeling stuck, if you’re feeling defeated, if you’re struggling, we’ve all been there. I have very dear friends of mine, that we talk all the time, and they’re like, it’s part of life, you know what? If you don’t give up, if you keep pushing forward, remember, small steps will get you forward. 

Dan Reilly: The way to get through a thousand mile journey is by taking that first step. And if you just do that each day, try to be a little bit better than you were yesterday, not who someone else was, you can do it. Just keep moving forward, keep pushing forward, be persistent.  Don’t give up.

Tiff Carson: Here is Dan’s book cover and it is called Seize Your Second Chance, and you can find Dan at his website, which is www.danielpriley.com and he’s also on Facebook @dan.riley.773.  I know you have talked about this backpack, but can you give us a little bit more insight into what that backpack represents for you?

Dan Reilly: Sure. So that backpack is more than just a design on the book cover. It’s actually, it represents, a symbol, and that symbol represented those heavy burdens that I carried around for so many years, those burdens that were in the form of rocks. And it became a very heavy sack to carry around until I could no longer bare the heaviness, the burden. 

Dan Reilly: And I sat that down, I put that down. I went to therapy I pulled out each rock and examined each one. Now what I carry around is a set of survival skills, some of the things that I learned along this journey that I wanted to leave behind for my children.

And so on the backpack, there’s this little first aid logo. Part of that is a tribute to my grandparents because they volunteered for the first aid squad for 50 years in their hometown. It’s kind of like the first responders out here in California.  But that logo, that first aid symbol image now shows that it is not a backpack of burns, it’s a survival kit. It’s the things that I now store, like ways of taking care of myself, through meditation and eating right, and things like that. That’s what I carry around in that backpack now. The writing journal there is what allowed me to write, to heal, to release all those burdens, that heaviness that I carried around, put it down on paper and then set it aside. So that backpack now is my life support. It’s no longer a burden. It’s a ballast.

Tiff Carson: Mm-hmm. I absolutely love that. So this podcast Dan, is rooted in healing and gratitude. Can you tell us one thing that you are deeply grateful for in this exact season of your life?

Dan Reilly: I am very grateful for every moment that I have, when overcoming challenges and embracing opportunities and making the most of life. I feel like that’s the reason why I’m here right now, and I hope by sharing my story with people maybe who have other similar experiences or, other experiences that resonate with them, who are looking for a little bit of hope.

I absolutely believe now and so grateful for all of it. I wouldn’t have changed any of it. Not the intruder, not the fires, not the diagnosis because all of those components together is who I am right now, and I’m a much better person today than I was prior to my diagnosis or any of those occurrences. So what I’m so grateful for is this moment right now.

Tiff Carson: Awesome. Thank you so much. 

Tiff Carson: So Dan’s story reminds us that we can’t always choose what happens to us. But we can choose how we respond we can choose to begin again. We can choose to ask for help, take care of our bodies, to tell the truth about our pain, and believe that even in the hardest moments, that life must be offering us a second chance. Or a third chance. 

So if this conversation stirred something in you, please don’t ignore it. Let it move you and let it soften something in you and let it be the beginning of something new.  If you want to take the next step toward healing, you can join me for my first Healing Heart Workshop, which is on Tuesday, May 20th at 7:00pm  MST, or download my free guided meditation to start coming home to yourself again, all of that can be found on my website, www.tiffcarson.com. Please don’t forget to go and check out Dan’s new book, and until next time, just remember that your heart is wiser than your fear, so you need to trust it. Thank you Dan, so much for being here today and sharing your journey with us, and I am grateful for your vulnerability and your heart. Thank you.

Dan Reilly: Thank you so much. It was such a pleasure to be a part of your podcast, it’s so lovely to meet you. Thank you.

Tiff Carson: Thank you! 

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