Hello and welcome to the Get to Life podcast where we have conversations about organ tissue and ideonation and transplantation. You can always find us at thegiftedlife.org. I'm Roy Steele. I'm Joey Boudreau.
I'm Sarah Blakemore. Coming up on the Gifted Life today. We'll be bringing you an award-winning gifted musician who uses his transplant story to inspire others. And we're going to talk about how important human touch is to our mental health.
All that and more on this episode, episode 170 of The Gifted Life. Hey guys, here on the Get to Life podcast, we are thrilled to introduce you to our newest friend Paul Cardol. Paul, we just like saying your name. Paul Cardol.
They've got a color of it. The parents were obviously rappers and poets. I love it. I love it.
I love the sound of your voice as well. We know you two have a podcast. So we want to dip into all these things, but you're an award-winning pianist, an entrepreneur, and your heart transplant recipient. And in all of your promotional items, everything out there, you always promote donation, promote health, inspire, education.
And I was like, I already like him, haven't met him? But man, what a cool dude who has lived quite the life. So thanks for joining us here on The Gifted Life. My pleasure.
It's good to be alive. All right. So let's talk about, first of all, we saw you on stage in front of thousands and thousands of people. Everyone knows you.
You're a gospel music association, a award winner for instrumentals. So what's your talent set that you push out there? You know, I've been really blessed because having been born with only half a heart, I couldn't do sports. And I was envious and jealous of everybody out there on the playground.
I was the last kid to get pick. And so I found music and music in a way found me and I found my purpose as a teenager after my third major open-art surgery music. Just I sat at the piano and my parents living room and I had lost a friend who was very healthy and I was trying to figure out like, what's the deal here? Why am I?
Why do I have this part defect? Why am I scarred? Why am I jacked up? And somebody who's perfectly healthy out of nowhere passes.
So I was grieving. I was trying to understand my life. And the piano to me is like the puzzle of life. And I was sitting trying to put the pieces together and this gift of music came.
I could play by ear, I could play songs and it just snowballed into really a means to an end beginning. My heart is being healed spiritually, mentally, emotionally and physically by plain music. And I've been doing it ever since in an effort to try to help heal other hearts. It's funny that you talk about and you open with the fact that you wish you could play basketball and other sports.
And I see that so often that people who are so good and so talented as musicians often like to play sports. And then the athletes often want to get into the dabble into the musician world. It's funny. And actors.
You know, a lot of bad Russell Crowe bands. So can you take us a little bit? You touched on the fact that you had half a heart and then you had surgeries. Obviously, you know, you don't remember your first surgery, but can you take us back and tell us a little bit about what happened at birth and what kind of got you in the situation that you were in?
Yeah, I mean, it was 1973 and heart surgery was still relatively new. And some of the first heart surgeries were on children. And I came into the world. My parents had three older sisters and I'm born and they were confused because I was blue.
And so immediately the cardiologist said, you know, he's a blue baby. He needs some type of surgery. So I wasn't even a day old and they cut me open and discovered I only had a single functioning ventricle and my arteries, my greater arteries were transposed over reverse. So my heart was like in backwards and then I had pulmonary stenosis and all these holes.
So they pretty much wrote me off. There's no way to make it. But the surgeon, I don't know what sprinkler system he had been fixing, but he corrected the flow perfectly so that I could at least be taken home by my parents so they could have me a little longer. That led to a year, another year and I kept living to their surprise.
And I was one of those pioneer kids with congenital heart disease that was surviving long enough for them to experiment even more on me. And as, you know, I think I had a pretty normal childhood. I lived in Utah. We had the mountains.
I was in scouting. I was always the last to get up the hill on a hike. But I was still able to hike a little bit. I had a family of large family, eight brothers and sisters.
And so I was always at the same time kind of that center of attention without wanting that attention. Like the example of what a miracle is, what a, you know, so I was the subject of like faith promoting stories in my religious upbringing, community and Salt Lake City. And so at times it was beautiful. And at the same time it was obnoxious.
It's a lot of pressure for a kid. Yeah. Yeah. Because you think you don't think about retirement because you've heard the doctors say he's probably not even going to college.
So you're thinking, you're thinking eternal retirement and how do you deal with that as a kid? You're thrown into what his life all about. Goodness. So music was your outlet?
Music became an outlet. I became a very spiritual person because I needed to figure out God for me and everybody has their own journey with that. And I need to understand my purpose. And music came in such a powerful way that it was like, okay, your heart is broken.
But I'm going to give you music because music heals. And with that, your heart will be healed. And then you can go out and heal other people's hearts. And that's been pretty much ever since I was 16 years old.
I mean, 17, I wrote my first concert. I performed at high school. It was horrible, but it was a concert. And we're like, what's that exactly?
Well, the program read like Mozart, Beethoven, Cardol, but my music is really bad Nintendo, Russian song. I love it. And I love it. When you Google your name, you like to help others overcome hardships through the power of music and you're reaching more and more people.
I mean, 11 Billboard, number one albums, Joey sat down. He's like, what? Actually, do you know this? And then you start reading a little bit more and you perform with CC Winen, and Steven Archuleta, Thompson Square.
Go on and on and on, all these names. And so all these people love you for your talent and they get to know your journey. And know you as a person. You just sound like a cool dude.
Well, my wife is a reflection. She's amazing. She's made me cool because I understand even but not I'm more of a radio shack. Battery, clothing, market.
Yeah, but music clinically is proven. You know, there's, I've got Harvard Health Studies all over my website about clinical studies showing that if you do listen to certain types of music, we create, you're less likely to have dementia, reduces anxiety, boosting immune system. There's a lot of advantages to even people who play the piano or pick up an instrument. So I'm always encouraging music.
And when did you receive your heart transplant? Oh my gosh, it was, so it was 11 years ago. I had, I started going into heart failure at age 33. I was on oxygen full time.
I got my parking spot, you know, my handicap parking spot at the hospital right in the front. And so the benefits, you got to look at it like that, baseball games, all this stuff. But I was on the transplant list for 385 days and the only place that could actually do my transplant was in a children's hospital because of the congenital cardiologist understood my anatomy, but the cardiologist at any regular hospital did not. And so I had to, we had to, you know, cut a lot of red tape because nobody really had survived in Utah with what I had.
And so what do you do with these people that survived? Because it's called, you know, they practice medicine because they're, they have a number of patients to practice on. But if you've only got one person, it's just, it's Paul Pioneer work. Fortunately, the, you know, I lived in a children's hospital and the sobering experience of that was I was surrounded by kids who were going in for heart surgery or who had heart surgery.
And my surgeon who was this incredible, brilliant, it was now a surgeon who's not Boston Children's. He was his parents are from the, he grew up in Oklahoma, listen to Hank Williams Jr. He's into, and I was like, this is the perfect surgeon. And he was always telling me, listen, you've had a beautiful life.
You go and meet some of these kids and just encourage them and let them know they will grow up. They will fall in love. They will go to college. And so that's what I spent my time in the hospital doing.
And so it was, it was beautiful because it eased my suffering because I was focused on what can I do for them? Yeah, I was going to ask, you know, in the same way that your music has been this incredibly cathartic thing for you was, is giving back and talking to those kids just as healing for you as it is for them. You know, I think it was more for me. I think is a very, it's in a way, it's helpful, but it's a very self-serving thing because that's the key to feeling free and feeling joy.
And it takes a long time for a lot of people to figure that out. But I always send people taking care of me. People, you know, when I was waiting on the art transplant list, my wife was like, Anna, I wish we had a tomato garden. So the neighbors put in a tomato garden.
By the time I got the transplant, the tomatoes were ready to eat. So I mean, simple things like that, it's, you know, it's a homework card, but it's beautiful. When you're in need, you see the character of people come to the surface and the reality. It's just his and my moment.
It's funny because it definitely took a turn for me, at least. I'm thinking of you being able to inspire others through your music all this time. And of course, you know, learning, and I'm imagining these kids, you know, feeling sometimes, like looking for just, you know, kind of grasping sometimes for some semblance of hope. And here you are, you know, having no shot, you know, and I'm assuming you had something like the transposition of the Great Vessels or something, you know, basically flipping, flipping of all your vessels.
And as he said, it's not something that most people even survive immediate, much less, you know, into their teens and twenties. So for someone first, like you that had what many thought of no chance had to be very inspiring to these kids. Like this is an adult, even though it's, you know, so every other person in that hospital pretty much is a kid, you know, and all those around you were, you know, were you 30 years ago, you know, 30 years before, you know, so that's so interesting to me. At the same time, I really want to dig into at what point did you learn about the need for a transplant?
And can you take us a little bit through that transplant journey of how, you know, once you learn that you needed a transplant and then what that actually entailed and then kind of threw your feelings after. I knew since I was a teenager that a transplant was inevitable one day, but that was like the very last option and a scary option. And they were always trying to come up with other solutions. And when I got into heart failure, my cardiologist was recommending a revision of a previous surgery I'd had, but a female doctor had come into Utah and been hired by another hospital and I shopped around cardiologists because I don't believe you should just go to a card dealership and take the car to give you.
I think you need to talk to a couple different people and she basically said, no, no, no, that'll kill you. And so I've had two doctors saying if you do a transplant, it'll kill you. She's saying if you do this, it'll kill you. So that's the predicament and my daughter at the time was three years old.
So my decision making was all about her and I studied the psychology of what happens to a child, but it was apparent at what age. Now it's not easy period to was apparent, but if I forgo during the transplant, she probably would have me a longer, you know, maybe maybe I died when she's eight years old. If I got the revision, I could say scenario, but I had a better chance of living longer with the transplant. And if I died in surgery, she'd be three years old and she wouldn't have much of a memory.
So that was what I chose to do was not mainly for me, but I wanted an impact that wasn't going to be brutal on her. And then it's interesting because we started to wait for our transplant was listed. They weren't sure even if I could be listed because of my anatomy. And you know, why should we have a heart to somebody that's a risk?
And when you have congenital heart disease, it's a pre-existing condition. You don't choose it. I didn't smoke my way to the list or drink my way to the list, read my way to the list and survive to my way to the list. Like I'd make a cut to be able to continue.
And so it was very emotional, very a lot of thought into it. One of the things I did while I was waiting for a transplant that I recommend to people who are waiting is you should keep a blog or a blog. And so I was telling you to know what you're going through. And it is the number one, whether it's public or private, the number one source of therapy is to journal.
So I kept a journal and my audience was like, what's going on? Why are you not pretty now music? Why are you not on tour? And I started sharing what I was going through.
But I wrote the blog like it was to my daughter so that if something happened to me, she would have a memory of me telling her about life and how I'd experienced. So that story and all of that became such an influence on some people. That I ended up meeting all these families and one family had a child named Gracie and Gracie and I had the same medical team. She was a baby that was born with only a damaged heart.
She went for a transplant. She did not survive and out of nowhere. And I hadn't been performing anywhere for almost six months. Her grandfather said, can you please come and play to her funeral?
And I said, well, I can't. I'm in this overstuffed chair watching prices right every day with commercials that actually relate to me now. And you know, so, and I, but then my wife said, you should go do it. Let's figure out how to get the oxygen tank down there.
And I went and I did and I played for people, but that didn't lead to me going to creating Gracie's theme, which has become kind of an anthem for families worldwide affected by illness. And I, and eventually had to move into the hospital because my status, it's so funny the way they manipulate numbers and try to work numbers and, you know, it's such a catch 22. And I was always kind of a positive attitude. So when the browns would happen, they'd come in the hospital and see me.
I'd be like, Hey, how's it going? You know, and with hearts one day, it's a good day and other day it's a bad day. So I happened to be on good days when the rounds would come and then finally the doctors like, listen, you got to act sick because you are insurance is going to kick you out. You're going to not be at the top of the list.
And then so that was just brutal reality is just stop, stop, and start just being explain how you feel. So, so yes, so I'm in there waiting. Then they said, you know, you got home because you're you're getting well, but you still need a heart. So I went home for the holidays in 2008 and on Christmas Eve, where my parents house, all this family.
And at midnight, we go home and then they call and say, Hey, we have a Christmas present for you. It's a heart. And I said, on Christmas, I serious, you're like, yeah, and so I had, you know, I had a couple hours to get ready. You know, and again, what you said, your family, when you're about to go into your heart transplant.
I had written letters to my daughter and family and I think it's interesting to prepare for the surgeries. You're in the hospital and they're preparing to go into the surgical room that they clean your body thoroughly. They scrub it, get rid of all the bacteria that everything you possibly can. And as a Christian, symbolically for me, that was like, I'm going to my, I'm going to my grave.
Am I clean and my whole and my good? And those are things I obsessed about and worried about because of the culture that I grew up in. And then we, I'm on the operating table. And on the operating table, they're about to Dr.
Hawkins is about to do surgery. And I had found out that Dr. Hawkins had just got pancreatic cancer and he didn't want any patients to know. But then at the same time, he came to me and says, we have a heart, we have a heart, but the problem is there's an aneurysm on the heart.
We can put the heart in you and we can continue and then we can do a surgery on the aneurysm in a couple days. And the other surgeon that was there who became my surgeon later was like, no, don't, don't. And so I chose not to do the transplant that day because I was not going to die on Christmas and went home and had sackclaws and opened up presents and went back and waited and waited and waited. And then one more tragic thing happened waiting up to the transplant, my brother Brian.
We talk a lot about this in the broken miracle, but Brian, my brother, he had died and diagnosed with mental illness after he got his master's degree. And he was wrapping up his PhD when his wife were going back to Arizona to Northern Arizona State and he had not taken a saryqual medicine for his being bipolar. And he had an episode and as part of the episode she called 911 to try to get some help, but instead they ended up tasing him and the second taser killed him. And it's ironic because I had also been cardioverted the exact amount of voltage that killed my brother, 55,000 volts.
And my pulm, my pacemaker doctor at the time said, yeah, they tasered him one more time. I was started to start back up again. So I had to go to a funeral for my brother. And it, you know, for years I was like, that should be me.
His wife was pregnant. You know, also had a daughter. And that was the strangest horrific irony because we had to decide if he was an organ donor or not. So we were on the other side.
And then the day of his funeral I made a promise to myself. I said, my mom is not going to lose two sons. I'm going to get this heart and the surgeon's going to come up with a creative way to do the surgery. It's revolutionary to help other people with congenital heart disease because people with congenital heart disease.
It's challenging to get the heart out because we bleed because our hearts are so score and damaged. It's hard to hook up the bypass machine. And so I was like, we're going to figure it out. I was using the power of intention.
Wayne Dyer, if you want to read a great book, Power of intention. And it was, I'm going to get the heart. I'm going to have a successful surgery a year from now on his anniversary. My brother's passing on a climb Mount Olympus.
He always climbed. I never could do it. My brother's always went. I could never go.
And that's what I'm going to do. And I kid you not 90 days later, September, 2009 at 9 a.m. from a 19 year old young man who had signed up to be an organ donor today. After my brother's death in a remote town in the middle of nowhere, I'm related.
They put his heart in my chest after they successfully removed my heart. There was a size of a football by hooking me up to the heart long machine through the femoral artery. They deflated the heart of blood through the femoral artery. Then they could open the chest, no bleeding.
We're played, take the old heart out. Get the new heart in. A profusion is present in there to push about 55 units of blood in a quick process. He said it was very exciting to watch him.
Sure it was. But I ended up becoming a Lazarus. I was raised from the dead by doctors. And that reality is happening all the time.
You're raising people from the dead temporarily. And as a Christian for me, that vindicates a lot of things I believe. I can listen to you all day. Like you're a dynamic story.
I'm like with you and holding my breath and all of these things. And I'm thinking, you know, you said, why am I going through this? You know, when you were little and you were growing teenage years and I'm looking at these stats that we have on you and three billion streams globally, you're playing to these sold out venues. And people are turning to you beyond your music and your blogs or blogs, anything that you do, your podcast, all heart, which we love that with Paul Cardol.
There's that name again. And all the people that you're inspiring, encouraging, educating. Wow. You know, I'm just surviving, adapting and my parents instilling me the formula for happiness, which is to reach out.
You know, like what you guys are doing with this podcast and letting people know more about the experience they'll go through or have gone through. That's really what it's all about. It's just being in the flow with everybody. Right.
Connecting and, you know, sharing your story is healing for everyone. I wanted to ask, have you met your donor's family? It's a unique situation because I got to, I got contacted a couple of weeks after the transplant because my story was on the news. I had a lot of different families, their son or daughter.
And I didn't know what to do with that because it's very humbling. And finally, the donor services told me, confirmed the person who I thought it was. And unfortunately, his family had been sent back to Mexico and his stepfather was so distraught over it. He moved out of the small town.
So I wasn't able to meet any of the family. I was able to write a letter and have it translated into Spanish, and sent to the family in Mexico. So yeah, so I'm very, I'm actually, I feel very proud of my Mexican heritage now. The legacy of your hero, for sure.
You're a pain native, but I've got the blood of Mexico. That's right. So you talked earlier, you'd mentioned, you know, that you were looking to climb Mount Olympus. And two years ago, I was conned by my wife, the climb, the Coors Mountain, Wilson Peak in, in, you know, Colorado.
And I was thinking I would be walking, you know, on a trail and zig zagging up the mountain. And next thing I know, I'm terrified of heights. And next thing I know, I'm scaling the side of it. And it's, you know, so I'll never do that again, first of all.
And second of all, did you get to enjoy that journey? It was unbelievable. We invited all family. We printed two shirts.
And I called the press. So there was no way out of it. I do it. I had to climb.
But here's another crazy thing. We were climbing and obviously everybody got to the top and kept coming down up to the top. And I was with my dad most of the time. He's always been kind of my strength and shouldn't be walking with me.
And as we finally got to the top, we had to send rocks and climb over these boulders to oversee the entire Salt Lake Valley. There was a mailbox. Somebody had put a mailbox there because they had lost a child to cancer whose name was Paul. And there were all these letters in the mailbox that people had lost somebody who had ascended the mountain.
In honor of them. I didn't even know that when I made this decision. But it was the most thrilling thing as you know, miserable. But when you're up on top and it kind of became a symbol of everything we had experienced, you know, and ascending is not as comfortable either.
So you always want to be climbing. Oh my gosh, we could talk to you all day long. How do we follow you? How do we support you?
And we have to have you back on this podcast. I love you. I just started this YouTube channel. I think transplant patients might like all heart adventures.
And I go out and do crazy fun stuff like I became an advanced scuba dive person. Yeah, so there's some fun adventures doing stuff like that. If you go to my website, Paul Cardol dot com. That's kind of the train station to get you to that music.
But I'll put you to sleep. The adventures that will make you laugh and the podcast. Incredible guest like Jonathan Rumi who's playing Jesus in the chosen great conversation with him. if I care to be through other people.
So we were listening to Christmas, your Christmas students yesterday, me and my kids, we were preparing for today. So we think you're great. We love that you choose to share your stories. They probably wanted a candy cane or something.
I know, they're ready to take out the tree. What's going on? What's going on? Come on.
Beautiful work. We appreciate you sharing details of your life with us and continue to do that. We certainly appreciate your work. Well, I appreciate all you're doing.
Thank you so much. And now we take a moment for mental health. Yeah, Sarah, I'm very interested to hear what you have to cover today. OK, guys.
So today we're going to talk about how important human touches not only to our physical health, but also our mental health. So first, the most important thing to know is that human touch is a basic primal need for humans. They've done studies showing that if babies aren't physically touched, their growth is stunted both physically and mentally. So it's incredibly important.
But next, what I want to focus on is how hard the pandemic has been with social distancing and how a lot of people went from hugging their friends and family shaking hands even. And to suddenly lose all that, it's detrimental to our health. It really is. It's like, yeah.
It's the odd thing or a different thing about this pandemic is so basically we did all that. And of course, I'm speaking from a Cajun's perspective where we're touching all the time. And then to go and really never have any of that contact or not have that contact for such a long time. And then things settle down.
And I know here our hospitalizations have been very low, lower than what flu usually is. So everybody kind of got back to normal. We started touching again, hugging again. And then all of a sudden, again, it's ramped up.
And we're back to no one can touch. That part, honestly, for me is the most difficult to be able to handle. Because I'm just, like I said, we're very. Yeah, we shake hands in our culture.
We shake hands when we meet people. We're very dependent on physical touch. So even if you just think about it like that, I mean, it's so vital. And there's tons of literature and research that show that touch deprivation is correlated to negative health outcomes.
And when we're talking about mental health, we're talking about anxiety. We're talking about depression. And we even can talk about our physical health and that's immune system disorders. If we are touched deprived, our immune disorders go up.
I'm apologetic, like, normally, I come in for a hug. Here's an elbow. Here's another brand. But I do notice in my little ones, like even walking out the door today, one more hug.
One more hug. One more hug. Because she knows there's change coming. Everybody's getting ready for school.
Those types of things. So I see all of that coming in to play for sure. Yeah. I have a friend who lives alone.
And the pandemic was so hard for her. And she told me even that there were times where she would just hold her own hand just to have. You don't think about those little things. And it reduces isolation, feelings of loneliness.
And it's so important. So what are ways that we can address that if you're touched deprived? If you live alone, we're getting ready for another wave of COVID happening. We're about to social distance again.
I want to give two things that I think can be really great ways. Number one is pets. If you can have pets, I know some people are allergic. But if you can adopt a foster pet, have something that interacts with you that you can touch.
That's just as great for us as human touch. They look more than you. Yes. Very not gentle dogs.
Not so much cats. My room is a lot better than so I have a golden doodle. No, a year and a half. Actually, we got her the week that the pandemic ramped up.
We were supposed to pick her up two weeks later. But then we recognized that we probably wouldn't be able to get her for a while. So she's, I guess, what, a year and a half now. And she's the best hugging dog.
Not a teen hug other people at home. She comes up to me. She puts her paws up. And she's ready for the big hug.
Y'all, they showed in the pandemic, like foster places for dogs. Like so many people, foster animals, I think that's amazing. So if you have the ability to get an animal a pet, get it if you can. But if you can't, another really great way would be a weighted blanket.
I have a weighted blanket. Oh my gosh, it reduces my stress and anxiety at night. Just sitting under my weighted blanket, it simulates a hug. It really does.
And it doesn't make you too hot. If you can get a weighted blanket, I highly recommend it. I think I ordered it too heavy, though. So you read just because I'm like confined.
But then you can't touch your spouse. Are you significant other or? No, you're stuck on the wall. It's amazing.
And when things settle down again, massages, get a massage therapist, go get a massage. It really will improve. All right. It'll improve your health.
Your mouth. Good stuff. Yes. So those are my recommendations.
I like them. All right. Maybe you have a question for Sarah. Email us info at ThinkItDidLife.org.
And our question and answer segment today, how long can someone live with a transplant? We're tossing this around. Yeah. Well, that's a great question.
And the answer is, right now, we really don't know because we know at least 50 years, because of course, in the 60s, it was more the successful transplants or more those within the family, siblings and things like that, because they didn't have the interrejection medicines back then. So we do have some that are 50 years out. Obviously, we'll really start getting to know a whole lot in the next 10, 20 years, because we've got a ton of people who are still living, still healthy, organ still perfectly normal, functioning, who had it in the 80s, because that's when the interrejection medicine's really started. So that's when the number of transplants went up.
So we really, if I'm sure from a volunteer standpoint, people that you've talked to, the most people who are far out who are long ways out are between 30 and 40 years. But there's no reason why that number can't be eventually get to 7 or 80. Yeah. We get that question a lot.
One of our volunteers is 50 years out. They just had a huge celebration. She actually received her kidney from her sister. And so just a great tale of all these milestones.
She got to raise her daughter, got to see her grandkids being born, just amazing. And so many more stories to come. Yeah. Right.
Good question. If y'all have a question for us, please give us a call at 504-648-3477. In every episode of the Gifted Life, we honor a hero. Today's hero is Joseph Dupuy.
Joseph or as his family calls him, Joey, Dupuy Jr. was a tissue and eye donor. At Loba, we encourage families to tell their stories in many ways. Joey's family chose to honor him on a quilt square.
You can locate all of our quilt squares at lopa.org backslash quilts. We have 15 quilts in total that honor many of our heroes. Joey is on our number 11 quilt. On Joey's quilt, you can see his picture and his love for music.
And now we pause and say thank you to Joey for the gift of life. And that'll do it for episode 170 of the Gifted Life. Thanks for listening, guys. And remember, you can register anytime as an organ and eye and tissue donor at registerme.org.
And the best place to find us on our website, theygiftedlife.org. Special thanks to Paul Cordol for coming on. What a great conversation. I mean, what an inspiration through his music, of course, as we talked about.
But that little twist that he gave us, being in a children's hospital with a bunch of children who basically lived his life 30 years earlier to be able to inspire them, to know that, look, this is not the end for me. It was a great conversation. And a great attitude and says, let me use my journey to try and help others. Yeah, I just love that.
It's amazing. Definitely listen to any of our episodes on the GiftedLife.org or wherever you like to listen, whether it's Apple, Google, Spotify, or iHeartRadio. If you do listen on Apple Podcast, please give us a five star reading so that others can find the podcast. On social, you can like our page on Facebook, the Gifted Life Podcast.
You can also follow us on Twitter and Instagram at GiftedLifePod. Thanks for listening, guys. And we hope that you go out and do something you wouldn't normally do to help us make life happen. Until next time.
This is a production of LOPA, or the Louisiana Organ Procurement Agency. The Gifted Life is hosted by Lori Steele, Joey Boudreau, and Sarah Blakemore, our executive producer is Kirsten Heis, producer Isha Long-Caraway. Intern is Rebecca Rannam, and we are recorded, engineered, and mixed in our Covington, Louisiana studio by Troy Perez.