JJ Virgin was a well-known fitness and nutrition expert and author of several books when her son was hit by a car and severely injured. The doctors told her to prepare for the worst; they didn’t expect him to make it through the night. But, Grant lived. And JJ’s insistence on making sure he had access to both conventional and functional medical care is the reason why. She became an expert on the essential interventions for severe traumatic brain injury and insisted on their use during his recovery. In this podcast, the four-time New York Times bestselling author tells the story of her son’s accident and recovery, talks about her newest book, Miracle Mindset, and shares amazing clinical pearls on treating traumatic brain injury with functional interventions.
In this podcast, you’ll hear
- JJ’s list of essential interventions for severe traumatic brain injury, including
- CBD oil with omega 3’s
- Essential oils, lavender combination (find details at www.grantvirgin.com)
- Autologous stem cell therapy (stem cell revolution)
- Progesterone/hormone balancing
- Prayer
- Diet
- Very high dose omega-3 fatty acids (up to 20 grams)
- Amino acids (higher dose branched-chain amino acids to prevent catabolism)
- Hyperbaric oxygen therapy
- The power of mindset
- Avoiding hospital food
J. J. Virgin graduated from the University of California, Los Angeles. She is a Certified Nutrition Specialist, a Certified Health and Fitness Instructor with advanced certifications in Nutrition, Personal Training and Aging, and Board Certified in Holistic Nutrition. She is recognized as an expert in overcoming weight loss resistance. She has written several books including The Virgin Diet: Drop 7 Foods, Lose 7 Pounds, Just 7 Days; Six Weeks to Sleeveless and Sexy: The 5-Step Plan to Sleek, Strong, and Sculpted Arms; The Virgin Diet Cookbook: 150 Easy and Delicious Recipes to Lose Weight and Feel Better Fast; and JJ Virgin’s Sugar Impact Diet: Drop 7 Hidden Sugars, Lose up to 10 Pounds in Just 2 Weeks.
Recommended links:
- Mindshare Summit
- Brendan Burchard
- You Are Stronger Than You Think
- Dr. Donald Stein
- Dr. Michael Lewis research on fish oil
- Dr. Daniel Amen
- Get the document with her protocol here
- Dr. Ann Meyer (she has the protocol of oils on her website)
- Dr. Elliott Lander – Stem Cell Revolution
- Kevin Pearce
- Dan Engle
- Michael Lewis His book When Brains Collide
- Kirk Parsley
- Brain Recovery Resource Guide key points discussed: (all on the website)
- High Dose Fish Oil
- Essential Oils
- Hyperbaric Oxygen Therapy
- Neurofeedback
- Check Metabolic Dysregulation
- Interthecal Stem Cells
- Nutrition Supplements: Protein shakes, probiotics, Vitamin D, magnesium, blend of amino acids
- Progesterone Cream
- CBD oil
- Exercise, coordination training (Kinetix physical therapy)
- Acupuncture, acupressure
- Music
- Meditation
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Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: Hi, everybody. Welcome to New Frontiers in Functional Medicine. I am your host, Dr. Kara Fitzgerald. We’re interviewing the best minds in functional medicine, and as always, today is no exception. I am delighted to be with JJ Virgin, really kind of an amazing woman in general and certainly one of the pillars of functional medicine. Let me give you a little bit of her background. I received this bio from them that opens with the quote from JJ: “Your body is not a bank account. It’s a chemistry lab.” JJ. That’s a really cool quote.
JJ Virgin: Oh, thank you.
Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: And I like the … this is the first bio I’ve gotten that has a quote up above. Anyway, she’s a celebrity nutritionist and fitness expert. I know you know all that. She teaches clients how to eliminate food and carb intolerances so they can transform their health and their lives. She’s been doing that forever. She’s the co-host of TLC’s Freaky Eaters and health expert on Dr. Phil. She’s a prominent TV and media personality, and she’s been on TV all over the place, from PBS to The Today Show and so on and so forth. I think everything you’ve written basically has become a New York Times bestseller. She’s got five of them here.
We’re going to be talking about her latest book, Miracle Mindset a.k.a. warrior mom, and it shows how warrior mom … and, it shows warrior moms how to be strong, positive leaders for their families while exploring the inspirational lessons that JJ learned as she fought for her own son’s life. She also hosts the popular podcast, JJ Virgin’s Lifestyle Show. She writes for Huffington Post, Rodale, Mindbodygreen, and other blogs.
She’s a business coach, she has the whole Mindshare Summit, which a lot of functional medicine folks are involved with, and you can find, I think, links to all of this, all of the various irons and these myriad flyers at her website, which is jjvirgin.com.
JJ, welcome to New Frontiers.
JJ Virgin: Thank you. Good to be here. I think we planned this, what, a year ago?
Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: Yes, I think that you’re right. It’s finally that it’s actually coming to fruition.
JJ Virgin: Yay!
Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: I’m really excited to talk to you about this really incredibly powerful, important work and just bring it to the professional space, specifically all these various functional medicine clinicians and docs we have. You went through this journey with your son. It’s transformed, I think, your existence on the planet. Can you just talk to me about that?
JJ Virgin: Yeah, and I will tell you that my son is alive today because of this community and that’s what’s super cool. It’s just a reality: I did an SOS email and call out from the hospital, and people came in droves, which I’ll share. That’s why he’s around, and that’s what’s so powerful about what we do and us being a community. That’s the key most important thing.
Right about, gosh, a month before The Virgin Diet was getting ready to come out, and the important piece here is, I had put everything into that book. My friends in the functional medicine work are like, “It’s an elimination diet.” I go, “Yeah, but I made it simple and sexy.” And that’s a key takeaway, is so often, we get bogged down in all the clinical, scientific, et cetera, and we forget that there’s a patient, a client at the end that needs to know what to do and be motivated to do it.
We’re always marketing and selling, if it’s just to get someone to eat their broccoli.
Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: Yes, right, right. Yeah, absolutely.
JJ Virgin: Yeah. So I was getting ready to get that book out, and I had put everything into it. I was coaching with Brendon Burchard. Dr. Daniel Amen had convinced me to do a PBS show, he was spot-on, and I had done that. I had just done everything. I lined up a huge online campaign.
Basically, I took all of the advance, which I consider marketing money … I always consider the book advances to be marketing money. I’d taken all of that, and some, and put it all into this, because I just felt like this could really go out there and make an impact in the world. It was going to be my thing, my big thing. Well, I’m the sole financial support for my kids. My ex-husband doesn’t support us. I support him, which is totally fine, but you know, was a problem at the time. My kids were 15 and 16. There’s the stage that needs to be set.
My son goes out at dusk to go walk I think to a friend’s house. We’re still not really sure, and in crossing the street, he gets hit by a car.
Now, all we know, because it was a hit and run, and this woman gets out of her car, at which point my neighbor drives up and sees this woman standing out, looking back. He heard this impact, saw this woman out of her car, saw this woman get back in her car, and drive off. Fortunately, he pulled up and protected my son against any more oncoming traffic, and called 911. When we stumbled upon the scene, which thank God we did, otherwise he would have died in the hospital as a John Doe.
Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: God, that’s a miracle in itself.
JJ Virgin: There was so many miracles, and that’s what I think … I think in life, you can look at things two different ways: you can look at it as the victim going, oh my gosh, I can’t believe this happened to me. Or it could be, ‘oh my gosh, I can’t believe this happened to me!’ You know?
Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: Yeah.
JJ Virgin: It’s like, I’m looking and go, there were so many things along the way that had to come into play to save him.
Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: Right.
JJ Virgin: This was the first one. My ex-husband and my other son, who’s 15, and… my sons look like Irish twins, right? They were driving down the street, saw this accident, knew my other son was out walking, stopped, and asked the cops what had happened, and the cop literally looked right at my other son, Bryce, the 15-year-old, and said, “A boy was walking. A boy got hit and he looked just like him.”
We rushed to the hospital, but we didn’t know what we were facing. They wouldn’t tell us anything over the phone. We’d called … my ex-husband’s family are both … my brother-in-law and sister-in-law are both doctors. Crazy enough, my sister-in-law had gone to med school with the doctor who saved my son’s life.
It’s just crazy, all the weird little one degrees, right?
Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: Yeah.
JJ Virgin: We get to this first hospital. The doctor … and this is a lesson in how not to behave: worst bedside manner ever. This is an ER doc in the trauma center in the desert. Now, you’ve got to consider, it’s the desert and he’s used to dealing with people 60, 70, 80. Sixteen-year-old kid comes in, torn aorta, multiple brain bleeds, deep coma. Literally, he had 13 fractures. He had bone sticking out of his … I was looking going, oh my gosh, those are bones sticking through his skin. You know? It was covered in road rash. He was raw on one side of his body.
We didn’t see him at first. The doctors brought us into a conference room, sat us down, and proceeded to say, “What happened tonight? Why was your son out walking?” We’re like … Not giving us any information, right? So I stopped that and said, “What is going on?” And he told us that my son had a torn aorta, he needed the surgery because of the brain bleeds. He had to have surgery without blood thinners. They didn’t do it there, and so we were going to have to let him go because … and some time over the next 24 hours, the aorta would rupture and he’d be gone. Right? This is what he’s telling us.
Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
JJ Virgin: It is me, my ex-husband, and my 15-year-old son, who is like Yoda. He’s about 80, you know? He’s 15 going on 80. Now he’s really 80. And we’re listening to this, and the good news is, you know, we got all the scans. We sent them over to John’s brother and sister-in-law, who were standing by, and we come back to the doctor and we’re like, “We want to airlift him to this other doctor we’ve heard about.” And he goes, “Oh, no, no. He’ll never survive an airlift, another one. And even if he were to, he wouldn’t survive the surgery. And even if he survived both of those, the chance that he would be normal are so slim. He’s so brain damaged.“
And my 15-year-old son looks over at this doctor and to me, Kara, this is an amazing thing. Because you know how people put doctors up on a pedestal and blah blah blah. Well, our whole family and friends are all doctors, so I think probably some of this is Bryce’s very left analytical brain, but also that he’s used to being around this community and thinking this way. So he says, “So maybe a .25 percent chance he’d make it?” And the doctor said, “Yeah, that sounds about right, son.” And Bryce looked at this doctor and said, “We’ll take those odds.”
Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: Right.
JJ Virgin: We’ve done a lot of TV shows about this. He said on one of the shows, he goes, “Well, .25 isn’t zero.” Right?
Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: That’s right.
JJ Virgin: I keep thinking about that, Kara. I’m like, how could any parent let their son go, let a child go, let a loved one go if there’s even a .25 percent chance? That’s all you need, is some glimmer of hope, right?
Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: It’s like you were faced with these incredible challenges, and then these miracles, over and over. He is hit in the worst way, by this hit and run. But then this miracle that your ex-husband and your son, and your son happens to look exactly like him, show up and you’re directed to the hospital. You know?
And then you have this doctor, and we could have a whole podcast on bedside manner. And he just throws this serious, painful, difficult wrench into the plans and really doesn’t support you. But then your son rises to this incredible challenge and says no.
JJ Virgin: Yeah. Thankfully, my ex-husband’s a med mal attorney, so we said the right things to get him to get into action.
Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: Good.
JJ Virgin: Yes. But you know, he wrote … it’s interesting, we have the medical report. This doctor was so angry. The things he wrote in there; I told them not to do this; I advised them against this; I told them that he would die. And I’m looking at the doctor … I was like, he’s going to die here no matter what, correct? So he dies on an airlift. I’d rather know I tried.
Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: Yeah.
JJ Virgin: Back off. So we airlift him, and we leave the hospital and grab some stuff from the house and drove separately. My son stayed home, and we drove to the hospital, and it was a two-and-a half-hour drive to this hospital in L.A., Harbor-UCLA, not knowing if we were going there to pick up a corpse or if we were going there and he’d survived the airlift. We walk into the waiting room at Harbor-UCLA, which I didn’t know, it’s where all the homeless people go when it’s cold. It was like the bad bar at Star Wars. It smelled, it was just unbelievable.
We walk in there, don’t know if he’s alive. They usher us into a room. Such a different scene than what we’d seen over at Desert Hospital. It is full court press. What I found out later was, when the doctor in Palm Desert or Palm Springs started sending out the fax about this and requesting that a hospital take the case, the doctor who my sister-in-law knew not only took the case at midnight, right? Accepted the case, cardiothoracic surgeon, he recruited four other teams, he went and got a stent that it was no longer even available. It was part of a study he was doing, but that’s the one he wanted to use. He finds it. Now he’s doing this at 2:00, 3:00 in the morning. He’s finding it. And it’s not supposed to be used in kids. He said, “I figured I’d ask for forgiveness.” He does all of this stuff. Gets the ortho team, he gets the neuro team, he gets the trauma team and the ped trauma team. You know, once a hospital accepts the case, the other hospital is done, washing their hands of it. So they’re accepting a case where there is a .25 percent chance.
Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: Right.
JJ Virgin: He is convincing everybody. I don’t know anything about this when I walk in. This man walks up to me, Dr. Carlos Donayre, he’s the star of You Are Stronger Than You Think. This man is the most amazing man ever, our hero. He walks up and he goes, “You the mom?” You know, of course I’m completely shell-shocked. He goes, “Listen, you do not need to worry. I totally got this. I do this all the time.”
Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: Wow.
JJ Virgin: “I’ve had six of these I’ve done in the last month. I had someone thrown off an overpass, fixed them.” I go … “Let’s go. I’m going to show you where I’m going to do this.” Because he was trying to get me out of the room, because it was five surgical teams prepping him for surgery. It’s 5:00 in the morning. Walks me over to the OR, he goes, “This is where we’re going to be doing it, and I’m going to take you over to the waiting room, and I’ll come get you in a couple hours to tell you everything is fine.”
And I just went … Kara, I’m like, “Okay. That sounds great, I’ll go do that.” You know?
Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: That’s amazing.
JJ Virgin: I know. I said …he goes around the country and teaches how to put in a stent without a blood thinner, but I’m like, “You really need to go around the country and teach people how to have this bedside manner.”
Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: Right.
JJ Virgin: Because he didn’t know if he was going to … what he was going to really be able to do here. I’m sure he had great confidence, but you never know. But what difference would it have made for me, sitting there for two to three hours thinking … preparing for the worst or hoping for the best?
Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: Yes. Yes.
JJ Virgin: Which is going to be better, right?
Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: Yes, right. So empowering … let me just throw out there, before you continue, that You Are Stronger Than You Think is your documentary, which is available. Let’s check it out, folks.
JJ Virgin: Thank you, yeah. I did that with my producer, who’s done all of my public television shows. When I was writing this book, and by the way, I totally didn’t think this one through. I totally didn’t think it through. I’m writing the book, and this is not an easy book to write, and then I decide, I should really do a documentary, because it goes way beyond brain injury. I mean, it’s frustrating enough, the way we treat brain injury – it is absolutely ridiculous. Hopefully I will have some small help in changing that, and I’ll tell you more about that as we go through this. It’s just horrifying, how we handle that.
But the bigger message out there is really around hope and resilience, and how much our mindset has to do with every bit of our life. Tony Robbins says it’s 80%. I think it’s 95%. If you believe you can do something, guess what? And if you believe you can’t, guess what? So, massively. I’m writing this book and doing this movie, and I’m thinking, oh my gosh. I’m reliving it every single minute.
Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: Right.
JJ Virgin: I was like, bad plan. Bad plan. Was not healing. I actually didn’t start to get healing until I started to help other people go through this as well, and go through their own journeys.
But back to Grant is now … survives the surgery. Survives the airlift. He survives the surgery. Dr. Carlos Donayre walks into the waiting room three hours later. He goes, “Okay, I’m done. Stent’s in, it’s fine, everything’s good there.” He goes, “Now, I’m just the plumber. I have no idea if he’ll ever wake up.” You’re like, yay! Oh no! Right?
Yeah. We go in, we get to see him, and it was interesting. We’re standing there in the hospital, in the … First of all, we were in the adult ICU before he got to the ped ICU, and the adult ICU at Harbor-UCLA is a very scary place. There are people handcuffed to the bed, gunshot wounds. I mean, it’s a lot of gang members. It’s really scary.
He was in the corner. We had to mask up, glove up, everything. Huge infection risk. He had tubes out of everywhere. Tube out of the brain, pumping out the pressure, and keeping the pressure steady, and all those bells and alarms and everything going off. I’m standing there, and he’s got one hand and a couple fingers I can actually touch. Everything else is casted, bandaged. You know? Miraculously, his face is fine, too. His face is fine, except he’s super swollen. He looks like the Incredible Hulk.
I held onto his fingers, and I said, “Grant, we love you so much.” No response, you know? It was just the beeping of all the stuff, and the ventilator going. I said, “Grant, your girlfriend, Mackenzie, loves you.” And his little fingers start to squeeze, right? And I’m like … and they’re like, “He’s in a deep coma,” blah blah blah. I’m like, I felt that. I felt that.
So I tested someone I knew wouldn’t mean anything to him, and nothing happened again, and then I said, “Your brother is fighting for you. He says to fight.” And he grabs my fingers and my hand, and he lifts it up. I just stood there and I went, he is in here. And I said, “Grant, your name …” I didn’t know this at the time. “Your name means warrior, and you’ve got to fight. Listen, I’m going to get everybody we need to fix this, and you’re going to be better than before. You’re going to be 110%. But your part … I will fight. We’re all fighting, we’re all here, and I need you to fight. You cannot give up. You have to fight, and just know that you’re going to be better than before.”
And that was how I went through the rest of this, and I’d go through it every day from then, because a brain injury doesn’t end. Right?
Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: Yeah.
JJ Virgin: Is with that total belief and asking the right question of, how do I get my son to be 110%? How do I get this situation that we went through, which is the parents’ worst nightmare, and how do I make it the best thing that ever happened to him, to our family, and then take that out to the world so that this wasn’t just something that happened, and it sucked, you know? Rather, it had a reason that it happened and a purpose, and it did something big for all of us. That’s what I’ve been going out with, and honestly, Kara, that saved me during the really horrific dark times that followed.
Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: You started to … that seed, that transformation of how you were thinking really started from that moment that you felt … when did it kick in? When you felt his finger?
JJ Virgin: Yeah, it kicked in when I started to feel his finger.
Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: Wow.
JJ Virgin: The crazy thing is that it happened right at that same time. I’m a super left-brain person. Just from that quote you heard, “Your body’s not a bank account. It’s a chemistry lab.” Everything is math and chemistry, you know?
Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: Right.
JJ Virgin: I’ve always been super left brain. My son Bryce is super left brain, and so if you couldn’t prove it to me, I was not buying it. I was standing in the hospital and I got a text from a client of mine who didn’t even know I had kids. She said, “Grant came to me in a dream last night and told me to tell my mom not to worry about me. That she needs to fight for me, but to not worry.” She texts me this and she goes … She had seen my post on Facebook where I reached out to everybody for help. She goes, “I didn’t know who he was talking about. I didn’t know who his mom was until I saw the post.” And I’m like, “What?” You know? Again, Kara, this stuff, to me, this sounds ridiculous, except so many of these things happened that I now-
Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: Well, and the timing is crazy.
JJ Virgin: Yeah, I mean, come on.
Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: It’s completely freakish.
JJ Virgin: It’s completely freakish. Want to hear another completely freakish thing?
Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: Yeah, yeah. I do.
JJ Virgin: Let’s go there. Well, first off, I have always been fascinated by all the coma stuff and the near-death experiences. I think they’re so cool. Grant knew nothing about them. Sixteen-year-old kid, he’d never studied any of this stuff, so he didn’t know. There was nothing in there for him to know this stuff. Way after the fact, he said, “You know when you and Dad were in the waiting room and I was in surgery, and Dad was in there and he was wearing that red shirt?” And he’s describing all this, right?
Now, John changed when we went back from the first hospital, so Grant didn’t know what shirt he was wearing. He hadn’t been wearing it earlier that day. He did not know we were in a waiting room. He didn’t know any of this stuff he’s describing. He described places in the hospital that he’d never been to. Crazy stuff. Someone, Stephen Sinatra sent this energy healer who had nearly died and come back, and he was doing things, helping me through this. He said, “He leaves his body. Sometimes he’s there, and sometimes he won’t be there.” And I can tell you, I knew when I’d walk in and I could feel him. And I knew when he wasn’t there.
Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: Wow.
JJ Virgin: Weird, crazy stuff, but you read it too many times, when you start to read these stories of people who are in a coma. I really wasn’t aware of that at the time, but what I did believe at the time, is that he was there, and that he knew everything that was going on, and that he could hear everything. And I made darn sure to manage everything going around him. I’d always done that in my life. I’m a big believer in managing your environment and keeping negativity out, whether it’s people or news or whatever. But I was very careful there.
We had a doctor walk in and he had a crushed heel and the doctor’s like … You know, they were doing all these things to try to fix this crushed heel, and he had a pin sticking out of it, they were hanging it, and he goes, “I’m just trying to get him to be able to walk again.” And I go … I took him out of the room, said, “Don’t talk about that in front of him. I want you to treat him like Kobe Bryant. If Kobe Bryant were in bed right now, you wouldn’t be trying to help him walk again. You would be working on him as an athlete. That’s where I want you to be. And if you can’t be, then you’re not the right doctor for this.”
Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: You go, girl. Okay.
JJ Virgin: Right?
Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: So then what happened? Yeah. It’s very empowering. Yeah, okay, so keep going.
JJ Virgin: He gets transferred to pediatric ICU. He’s in the middle of it. These doctors at Harbor-UCLA, wow. This first doctor stayed there … He was supposed to go home after six hours. He stayed 24 hours, stayed up all night, made sure everything was going fine, because Grant’s kidneys were at risk for failing, and just was incredible. We just had people around 24/7. I knew really quickly, and this was one of my big lessons. I’ve always been one of those people who loves to help everybody else and never wants to ask for help. I think we’re all pretty much like that, especially in the healing professions. Right?
Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: Right.
JJ Virgin: But I knew, looking at Grant, that this was way beyond anything I could ever do and that I needed some help. I literally wrote a letter that is in the movie and in the book, where I explained what was going on. I said, “I’m not looking for sympathy. I’m looking for support. I need to know the latest, greatest quickly as to what we can do here. Hey, pray.” I had every religion represented. I want everything, you know?
Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: Yeah.
JJ Virgin: Who knows? But fortunately for Grant, and I’m kind of on a crusade for this one, he was on higher dose fish oil before the accident, because he’s got bipolar disorder and I’d been working with … the fun thing is, I had SPECT scans with Dr. Daniel Amen. Daniel is a personal friend and his doc, so I had SPECT scans of him before the accident, and now I’ve had follow-up SPECT scans after the accident. But he was also on high dose fish oil. Not high-high. He was only on five grams of fish oil pre-accident, but five grams I think-
Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: That’s a good amount.
JJ Virgin: Yeah, it was, to me, the differentiator. It protects your brain. This is the big challenge, is we don’t know when we’re going to hit our head. How would you know? He wasn’t playing football. He wasn’t doing anything you would think would have been the problem, but who knows when something’s going to happen, you know? I would bet that nearly everybody has had a TBI at some point.
We think of a traumatic brain injury as you had a concussion and you went into a … and you lost consciousness. But you can have a traumatic brain injury when you hit your head. You hit your head, you hurt your brain. Right?
Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: Yup, that’s right. That’s right. Five grams? That’s a really good amount. I mean, when I’m talking at the immune module about where we want to dose it for autoimmunity and so forth, I’m generally saying maybe, two-and-a-half to seven. And I usually go two-and-a-half to three. But five is his …
JJ Virgin: Five was where he was then, but we went up a lot more.
Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: Yes, right, okay, yeah, keep going.
JJ Virgin: Yeah. Here are the challenges that happened. The first thing that we started to do, because we were literally in the middle of the pediatric ICU. We had nurses and doctors there all day, all night, and we had to be gloved, masked, everything. It wasn’t like I could decide what I wanted to do. I had to smuggle.
The first thing that we started to do is I had friends, and I knew nothing about essential oils. Another thing I thought was just silly. However, it was when I first started to notice him really responding to things like wiggling his toes, wiggling his nose, so we started doing some essential oils immediately, because we could do that and the nurses were like, “Well, I have those little oils.” I’m like, “Okay!” You know? So we started doing that. We started rubbing some progesterone cream on, and I didn’t know, honestly … I got some information from my girlfriend, Dr. Anna Cabeca, who had gone to Emory, and that’s where Dr. Donald Stein was who did this research. So I emailed him, because I was like, “All right, it’s-“
Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: On progesterone.
JJ Virgin: Yeah, I emailed him. I was outside of that first window that they’d done the study on, and he goes, “Well, the only reason we didn’t do it longer than that was because we didn’t have the funding.” So I said, “So hypothetically,” because I knew he couldn’t really tell me. I said, “If it was your family member-” He goes, “Oh, I’d have them on it way longer.”
Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: And how would he dose it? Tell me that.
JJ Virgin: We had progesterone cream. Fortunately, I had some of my own. I’m like – I’m like perfect, get it on him. So we just did progesterone cream. We ended up doing about 200 milligrams a day.
Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: Topical.
JJ Virgin: Topical. I had no idea if it would do anything, but I figured at this point … You got someone between life and death. It’s not going to hurt. And that was the tough thing with the hospital. He had been on five grams of fish oil. He was of course at first … before he hacked up his feeding tube and we could actually do something, I couldn’t get them to go past two grams of fish oil. Because they were afraid of bleeding. He was on warfarin. I’m like, “But there are no …” I brought them everything. Dr. Barry Sears sent me the entire research packet, and I … Dr. Michael Lewis. They had all worked together on all of this. They would not … I gave it to them. They would not budge. I said, so once he’s … he hacked up his own feeding tube. The minute that happened, I started bringing up his dose. Every time I knew we were going to run a blood test and look at his bleed times, I’d run up the dose, and nothing would happen.
Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: Right.
JJ Virgin: So I kept running up the dose. When we got to the next hospital, I told them he was on 20 grams, and they didn’t question it. They just did it, because truthfully, he had so many medical records at that point, that … you know.
Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: Yup. They weren’t going to go through it.
JJ Virgin: No.
Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: So 20 grams –
JJ Virgin: They were much more open-minded to it than the first hospital.
Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: Wow.
JJ Virgin: First hospital, I couldn’t get them past two. I probably got him up to about 10 on my own, because I was … the minute he spit his feeding tube out, I had fish oil pudding. I was making him smoothies. You know, I was just dragging in everything. I was like, it’s my turn now. Game on. You know?
Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
JJ Virgin: There was no refrigerator at the hospital, so literally every day I had to lug in this cooler, and the parking lot was under construction, so I’m parking way far away in Torrance, in this really bad neighborhood, dragging coolers. I remember the nurse was like, “No one ever does this.” I’m like, who would feed … When the first words, Kara, that Grant said when he started speaking was, “Disgusting.”
Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: I was going to ask about that. That is so funny. That’s really funny.
JJ Virgin: I was like, yup. I’m like, how could you, if you’re trying to heal your kid – feed him pancakes and Ensure? I deliberately-
Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: Yes.
JJ Virgin: I literally put a sign on the wall that said, “No Ensure.” They wanted to feel him … They’re like, “Well, what should he drink? We’ve got Crystal Light.” I’m like, Crystal Light?
Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: God.
JJ Virgin: He’s got a brain injury! Crystal Light? Oh my gosh.
Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: Yeah, thanks for bringing that up. Just the juxtaposition between hospital food and what you were doing. Just that alone is amazing. You went from energy medicine in the beginning, because that’s what you could do. Everybody’s praying and you have this, and then you’re able to bring in essential oils. You get him on a little bit of fish oil, as much as they’re willing to do, and then you crank that up and you’ve got the progesterone cream.
JJ Virgin: And some progesterone, yeah.
Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: So then … Yeah, keep going.
JJ Virgin: We couldn’t do … you know, I mean, in the hospital, as soon as he was able to eat, I started making him smoothies and throwing in probiotics and vitamin D and magnesium, and aminos. I did some special blended aminos and branched-chain because he was so catabolic. I was like, oh my god, he’s not … He was just losing so much muscle. I wanted to fix that. I had to do … but I had to do the majority of it was food and nutrients.
It was that plus, us being there, us being around him, and I feel so fortunate. I’ll tell you, when I was at Children’s Hospital L.A., which is an amazing hospital. Harbor-UCLA, if you’ve got a life and death injury, that is the hospital to go to. Number two trauma center in the country. I feel so blessed. And then Children’s Hospital, what an amazing facility. We were on the sixth floor rehab center. It was kids with cancer walking around in their, you know, wheeling their chemo carts. All these kids that were in there for months. I was there during Christmas time, and I just remember being there with him. We’d wheel him around.
We weren’t allowed to take him off the floor, because he was so violent as he was coming out of his brain injury. They had a 24/7 security guard next to him, we had him in a zipped-up Posey bed, and we had a cocktail of Haldol, Ativan, and Benadryl. And whenever we saw … and I can see it coming, so I taught the nurses. You would see a little line down between his eyes, and that meant the Incredible Hulk was coming out, and we had literally five minutes to get the cocktail into him or he would go absolutely berserk, and he was dangerous. But if we gave him that too much, his brain wouldn’t heal, so it was a really tight little balance of things to do.
What was helping him the most was, I think, us being able to be around him and be familiar. I just felt so fortunate that I had built a laptop business. I was there with people who had either lost their jobs now and they were staying at the Ronald McDonald House, or people who really couldn’t be there that much, and the parents weren’t there, and the kids were crying. Oh my gosh, broke my heart.
But at some point along the way there, and they had an amazing team of speech pathologists and physical therapists. Speech therapists, physical therapists. They had just this occupational therapist. I mean, an incredible team that we all worked together. But at some point along the way, I knew that if we could get him home, he’d heal even faster, and that he needed to be back home. And I also knew that once I got him home, it was game on, right? That I could really do some things. When we got him home, we started doing hyperbaric oxygen.
Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: Wow.
JJ Virgin: We did some more intense … a lot of coordination training, a lot of exercise training.
Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: Any specific type or program you want to mention?
JJ Virgin: Well, we went to … My buddy has a place called Kinetix, and he is both a physical therapist and a check therapist. He’s just very integrated, so it was a lot of very cool coordination exercises. Daniel Amen had us get a ping-pong table, we were doing that. We did different neuro-feedback stuff. The biggest challenge we had was Grant could only … It’s like having a baby. We had to start all over again. When he first started to come out of coma, which I thought it’d be like the movies, where you come out of coma, wake up, and say, “Hi, Mom.” That is not what happens.
Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: Right.
JJ Virgin: All that I was told at the hospital is that when he came out of the coma, it would be ugly. That was what I was told. It would be ugly.
Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: Jeez.
JJ Virgin: I had no idea that it would be ugly for months, if not years. I didn’t know that. I thought it would be ugly for a minute, he’d scream.
Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: Right, right. So the whole instruction process sounds like it could be bumped up considerably.
JJ Virgin: Oh my god. From the very beginning, and again, no one knows. We had no idea all the way along if this was as far as he would get. When he first came out of the coma, he stared off into space and he moved one arm back and forth. This went on for days, and I thought, oh my gosh. And then I thought I’m going to start … I just started doing, just intuitively thought, I just got to wake up all his senses. We were continuing with the essential oils. I was sneaking in things. He still had a feeding tube at the time, but I was putting popsicles on his lips. I wanted him to feel temperature and taste.
I was doing massage, and we had a girlfriend, an acupuncturist, we were doing acupressure. We were doing music, we were doing everything we could think of to start waking things up. But we had to do it very similar to when you have a baby, where you stimulate them and then you back off, because otherwise if we over-stimulated, it was a problem.
Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: I know somebody’s going to ask about the essential oils that you used. Any particular scents that were clearly …
JJ Virgin: I wrote all about that in –
Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: Oh, in the book, okay.
JJ Virgin: I wrote a document, and it’s old. I really need to, at some point, re-do this. But at grantvirgin.com, we have a document where I wrote down everything. Because we were using all sorts of different blends. I know I did a lot of lavender, but we had a whole blend that this doctor, Dr. Ann Meyer, who works out of the brain trauma center over at Cedar, she came over the first week. She had been at my conferences before, so when she walked in the door, I recognized her, but I really wasn’t sure who the heck she was. And she just became my angel. She’d come over every Friday night, and that was pity party night for me, because you’re in the hospital, no one’s there, it’s … you know. And who knows? I’m now looking at Grant, and he’s not … the progress is like watching grass grow, really.
Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: Right. Right.
JJ Virgin: She’d always tell me what was going on and how great it was, and how positive it was, and everything was going to be great. And I’m like, all right, I’m going to just go with what you said. But she was the one who brought me all the oils, because she had been using them for years in the brain unit. The trauma unit.
Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: Wow.
JJ Virgin: We talked about which ones were in there, so it was a variety that we used.
Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: Okay.
JJ Virgin: Here’s the other part of all that. One of the biggest things, when you’ve got a family member going through something, is feeling like you’ve got to number one, have hope. Number two, have a big goal that … I kept thinking, okay, I’m going to go for 110%. If he makes it to 70, it’s a lot better than where he was. Right?
Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: Yeah. Yeah. That’s right.
JJ Virgin: I’m just going to go for big, and if we don’t quite make it, it’s totally cool. But it gives you something to work for. And then you’ve got to feel like you have things that you can do. That was one of the great things because it was something that I could do right away. I also saw him reacting to it, which was even better.
Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: Yeah.
JJ Virgin: But it gave us something to do. We used a lot of lavender and essential oils on all of his … I mean, he had so many cuts. I was digging glass out of his body for months. We would use it on all the cuts, too, to help with the healing.
Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: That’s the trudging right there, where you’re just watching grass grow. Again, what a really amazing piece, that this woman came to you and said, “Hey –”
JJ Virgin: She’s another angel.
Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: Yes.
JJ Virgin: It’s really made me think, Kara, because I go, gosh, would I do that? These people … I want to be this person. I look at where I want to be in my life, and I want to be that selfless, that generous, that kind.
Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: Wow.
JJ Virgin: There were people that drove for hours to come and visit who we didn’t know, to pray over him. I’m like, oh my gosh. You know? There are people, Dr. Susanne Bennett and Dr. Hyla Cass that just kept coming in and helping out. Just amazing. Amazing people. But once we got him home … I’m really fortunate. I have a buddy who, years ago … he’s a urologist, but he got very interested in stem cells. And he started studying stem cells, and he created this franchise called Stem Cell Revolution, and his office is in Rancho Mirage. When Grant came out, he goes, “Let’s do stem cells on him.”
Now, when we first did them, he drew them and then he did an IV. I started researching and discovered that there were places doing them directly into the spine. We weren’t allowed to do this yet in the U.S. I was actually going to go do this in Mexico. Since then, we’ve been allowed to … we’re part of a study. So what we’ve been doing now for the last two years is we drew his stem cells, we got them from fat, we grew them in New Jersey, and then we had them injected into the spine. Here’s what’s crazy about this: the first time we did it, he went completely off the rails. We actually had to 51-50 him.
Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: Jeez.
JJ Virgin: I’m watching this whole thing and I’m thinking, it was just like when he started to wake up out of the coma and his brain started healing rapidly. It’s really like a baby when you give it too much stimulation, and then they have to cry and throw a tantrum to blow off the steam. It’s very similar to that. I’m watching this, I’m trying to figure it out, and I call up … I send out an SOS email to everybody, to all my friends in the field. All the brain docs. I go, all right, anyone have an idea?
Dr. Cherry Delos Reyes said, “You know, I’ve been using stem cells.” She’s a spinal surgeon. “And at 72 hours,” which is right when it started to happen, “because of them differentiating, we start to see people whose limbs have been dead, they start to scream because the pain’s excruciating.”
Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: Wow.
JJ Virgin: And I went, there it is. That’s it. That’s it. We’ve done it now three times, so I was ready the second time. I’m like, all right, we’re ready. If we had to go in a padded room, we will. But that has been an amazing game changer. I’m so excited about the potential for stem cells here. Here’s what I will tell you that we’ve got to change out there: when Grant was in the hospital, and again, Harbor-UCLA, an amazing trauma center. One of the doctors, this woman doctor of his, said, “There’s nothing you can do to heal the brain.” She says, “It’s just time.” Literally telling you this, he’s in [inaudible].
Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: Wrong, yeah.
JJ Virgin: But he’ll come back and he’ll eat a burger with me, and I’m looking at her, going, “Really? There’s nothing we can do to help him?” She goes, “Nope, not a thing.” Now, Kara, I know hearing this that there’s nothing I can do with her.
Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: Right.
JJ Virgin: The minute I heard that, I’m like, just … this is a door that’s closed. We will just go through the window. Clearly, she doesn’t know what she doesn’t know.
Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
JJ Virgin: I was like, all right. Well, if that’s your belief, I’m just going to go around you. But that’s the common belief out there. And I remember I had a really bad car accident and passed out, hit my head, and the doctor just said, “It’s just a tincture of time, that’s all you can do. A tincture of time.” But that’s the reigning thought out there is that it’s all you can do. It’s just time. And, wherever you get to in the first three years is as far as you’re going. Both those things are absolutely so ridiculously wrong.
Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: Right.
JJ Virgin: You know?
Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: It’s a product of a very limited toolkit. An essential toolkit, obviously, for the emergency component, but then beyond that, it’s so limited.
JJ Virgin: Yeah, but they’re not even doing the emergency … The emergency component, first thing should be fish oil. Emergency – now we’ve seen enough. First thing is fish oil, you know? And then … damn, I’d be doing stem cells right off the bat.
Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: Right, and the progesterone. Yeah, you’re right. You’re right. Yup.
JJ Virgin: Hit it … you’ve got a fire. Put it out. That’s got to be –
Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: And no Crystal Light. Skip the Crystal Light.
JJ Virgin: And let’s just not do the Crystal Light. I don’t know, call me crazy that we shouldn’t have aspartame with an unstable brain. It’s amazing to me. Here’s the sad part. Why is Crystal Light in the hospital?
Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: Right, yeah.
JJ Virgin: Why? And it’s a children’s hospital. I don’t know any kid that would benefit from that. I don’t know any human that would benefit from it, but especially sick kids. Really, really sad. But those are the things that we can do that are game changers. And then long-term, Grant’s actually intuitively done stuff that this was not who he was before the accident. He started working with plants and getting out in the dirt.
Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: Oh, wow. Isn’t that interesting?
JJ Virgin: Amazing. Built all these hydroponic things. But all, he self-studied it. He’s in the dirt.
Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: Who was he before? Just a real little snapshot. Juxtapose it. I’m curious.
JJ Virgin: He was a pretty typical teenager with a girlfriend, playing video games.
Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: Okay.
JJ Virgin: He wasn’t my kid that put me through it, you know? He was my … I have one kid who was the kid who gets the straight A’s and never has gotten in trouble and tells mommy she’s such a good mommy. Then I had the other one, who’s like, “You’re a bad mom!” You know?
Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: Right.
JJ Virgin: He was being that kind of a … he was alternating between sweet and bratty teenager and, you know, going off with his friends and playing video games. Kind of typical.
Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: Yeah, typical.
JJ Virgin: Typical teenager. He wasn’t out building hydroponic setups all over the backyard. This backyard at this house that he lives in with my ex-husband, I just kind of had to let it go. I would go in there, I’m like, oh my god.
Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: Wow.
JJ Virgin: The backyard … they decided they were going to dig a big pond in the backyard. They just dug up the grass. I went, you know what? This actually doesn’t matter. He’s alive. He can dig in the dirt. So he does that, and he also does a lot of meditation.
Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: Wow.
JJ Virgin: Again, so he does that, and he also does a lot of meditation. Again, he doesn’t play video games at all. Not at all. He does meditation, he reads, he does plants. The biggest challenge I see, that I see across the board: Brain injuries, there’s something like five million people at any time every year who are suffering from symptoms. Some will be for the rest of their life, some are transient. But the biggest challenge is isolation. I think actually the biggest challenge to our health right now, it’s toxicity, stress, and isolation. That trifecta is going to take us down. I think you’ve heard the study about social isolation being the equivalent of smoking a pack of cigarettes a day.
That’s the one I worry about the most with, with him, is that piece of it. And I haven’t been able to crack how to fix that one yet, but … Because it’s hard to put them all in a support group, because they’re all a little bit challenged right now, coming through a brain injury. That is the biggest tough piece of it. Hopefully … Kevin Pearce has done a lot with the Love Your Brain Foundation, really helping with that through yoga.
Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: Okay. Well, keep us posted, because I’m really confident you guys are going to crack this one.
JJ Virgin: We’re trying. I’ve got a cool … Between Kevin and Adam, and then I’ve been working with Dan Engle and Michael Lewis, trying to bring a lot of us together so we can do something. But I think the most important piece of this is to realize that this is, it’s something that once you have it, your body’s a history book, so you need to know it. It was very interesting, Kara, you’ll appreciate this. I thought, this doctor … I’m like, I can’t believe he said this to me. Grant gained 30 pounds in two months, and I had been out of town. I come back, I’m like, “What happened here?” And I sent him in to get some labs, and I send him to our local integrative … this is the guy who heads up our local integrative functional medicine department, sadly enough, in the desert.
I send him in to him, and he says to me, “He just needs to …” You’re going to … I hope you’re sitting down. Don’t fall off your chair. He says, “JJ, he just needs to eat less and exercise more.” Now, I said, “Well, he has not changed his diet, which is super healthy. Gluten free, dairy free, he eats the way I teach him to and he’s active, and he hasn’t changed that in two months but he’s gained 30 pounds.” Said his insulin was 19.
Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: Jeez.
JJ Virgin: His testosterone, for a 20-year-old, was 300. A couple other markers like this. I go, “I think that he’s got a brain injury, like your son does, and I think he probably has hormonal dysregulation,” which happens. And he goes, “No, it’s just a calorie thing.” I’m like, all right. So we went and worked with this really great Navy SEAL now doc working with PTSD and brain injuries, Dr. Kirk Parsley, and got his hormones back on track, and everything …
Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: Everything normalized.
JJ Virgin: Everything normalized. But you know, these are just things we need to know, is that brain injuries – there’s amazing things you can do. You can be, I think, better because of all this, our whole family is. But it’s not something that you just throw to time to heal.
Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: Right. Absolutely not. It’s extremely active. You have given us so many resources. You’re just throwing names out and ideas, and I just want to assure everybody that we are going to harvest these and we’ll make sure they’re in the show notes.
JJ Virgin: Oh, great. And one more, Kara, one more.
Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: Yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah, tell me.
JJ Virgin: Last one, I promise.
Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: Yeah. No, no, well, actually, tell me. We’ll give them the website, your website, the grantvirgin.com website, Stem Cell Revolution. We’ll just harvest them, and I’ll just be in contact with you.
JJ Virgin: Yeah, because Michael Lewis has a great book, When Brains Collide.
Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: Okay.
JJ Virgin: And then Dan Engle has Concussion Repair Manual. But one more, I’d be so remiss if I …
Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
JJ Virgin: If I didn’t name, talk about, CBD. Because …
Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: Oh, okay, yeah.
JJ Virgin: Yeah, he’s on CBD. Has been on CBD for-
Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: And where are you getting it? What’s your CBD source?
JJ Virgin: I actually …
Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: Can you share that?
JJ Virgin: Yes. I will have it all dialed in, because we found an amazing CBD source and we’re actually now putting it together with Omega-3s and then we are bringing it out through Designs for Health.
Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: Oh, you are?
JJ Virgin: Yeah, because we were having so much trouble finding really good sources. We’ve been doing this for years, and it got very challenging, and then I met someone who has a direct source, and I was working between him and Jonathan Lizotte. Let’s put together a CBD Omega-3 product. So that’s what we’re coming out with.
Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: Awesome. I’m totally, totally stoked.
JJ Virgin: I know, right?
Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: The thing is, is with you that you’re observing his response. It sounds like even now, there’s a fairly clear observable shift.
JJ Virgin: Oh, yeah.
Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: And you can tell is this working or is it not, and you’re going to know pretty quickly, so you’re vetting all of this. So I appreciate the product that you’ve found. If it’s working for him, that it’s going to work for us.
Okay, so listen. You write this whole book, you develop this … You’re calling it the Miracle Mindset or the warrior mom. I think the warrior human, I would expand it out. Just this really amazing way to harness what you’ve been through and put it out there. And you actually mentioned early on in passing that that was your healing process. You know? I mean, I can’t … Listening to you tell this story, and I listened to an interview earlier where you were talking this through again, and I’m like, damn. Just the fact that you’re moving through such a huge experience. But I hear you bring in levity, I hear you bring in this insight, and this wisdom. So, this has been a very deeply transformative process, and you’ve harnessed this and put it out there, and I just … I asked you earlier to talk a little bit about how we as clinicians can bring this into our healing space with our clients, with our patients. But just also some of the key things about practicing this ourselves, just bringing this into existence.
JJ Virgin: Here’s where I lucked up. When I was 30, I was in I think grad school number three, right?
Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: You’re in functional medicine for sure, if you were in grad school number three.
JJ Virgin: Forever.
Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: Right?
JJ Virgin: And I kept jumping schools. I started out in exercise science, I was all the way up in doctoral school in exercise science, took a nutrition class, went oh my gosh. Jumped over to that. I think I was in sports med at University of Miami at the time. I was personal training my way through school, and I was walking down the beach with a client, and she goes, “What are you going to do after grad school?” And I go, “Well, I’ll go …” Oh, no, first she goes, “Why are you in graduate school?” And I go, “Well, I want to make a bigger impact. I want to help more people.” And she goes, “Huh.”
Now, this is a self-made multi-millionaire woman. She goes, “Huh. So what are you going to do when you graduate?” I go, “I’m going to go get my PhD.” She’s like, “Huh. Why are you going to do that?” I go, “So I can help more people.” She goes, “You know, that doesn’t necessarily correlate.” I go, “It doesn’t?” She goes, “No.” She goes, “If you want to be successful, I’ll teach you how.” Okay, so self-made multi-millionaire woman. Unicorn, right?
Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: Yeah.
JJ Virgin: I’m like, awesome, I’m in! I literally dropped out of my grad school at that time, went over, moved into her house, sold my business.
Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: Jeez.
JJ Virgin: Sold my personal training business, and I’m all in. This is my personality type. I’m an all-in person. So I’m all in, and I think she’s going to teach me how to be a successful businesswoman. I am so ready, day one. And day one, she has me put a rubber band around my wrist and every time I think a negative or limiting thought, I have to snap it. And I’m thinking, I have made a big mistake here. You know?
Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: Were you red and raw, or was it not so …
JJ Virgin: Oh yeah, trust me. One of her important things was really manage your environment. You’ve heard me talk about this.
Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: Yeah.
JJ Virgin: For six months, she taught me mindset. She was my Mr. Miyagi. You know? Here I am, I’m, “I want to learn the business strategies.” It’s like, “You’re not ready. You’re not ready.” What was so crazy is, I went through this whole situation with Grant where I managed my environment. Where I got up every morning and I went through it, I was grateful for every night I would walk out of the hospital and I go, “What went well today?” I managed my mindset. I managed my environment. I never focused on the limitations. She always taught me your limitations would become your life. I never looked at him as a victim. She always said, “There are no victims; only volunteers.” I just had all this stuff so deep in me that I forgot where it came from, because it became me.
Until I was doing an interview a year ago, and someone said, “How did you get all of this stuff in you?” And I’m like, “Um …” And all of a sudden, I went, “Oh my gosh.” That was how. The big thing, I would say, is at first when I was going through this and I was in the hospital … You know, when your kid’s in the ICU, you can’t go in if you’re sick. I decided that first day that the only way I was going to be able to take care of my son, take care of my other son, and make that book go, because it had to go to pay for all of this, was to make my health and put myself first, which sounds selfish, but is really selfless. I thought it was because I was so healthy, right? But that was a mindset move, too.
I would tell you that the single biggest thing that you can do to help your patient is to help them have the belief in themselves, help them look past the limitations, understand the limitations are in their minds. Help them start to have little wins every single day, and to focus on those little wins. Help them get into action. I just coached, we created an academy to help people with this, and I had a woman say, “I’ve been in this job for 20 years and I really want to move into the functional medicine field.” I go, “You can’t do this staying at your job. You can’t course correct standing still. You’ve got to get moving.”
Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: Right.
JJ Virgin: To look at all these things and go, wow. I don’t know, Kara, one person in my life who I admire who hasn’t gone through some serious crap. And I also don’t know one time in my life where things were easy and going really well and I grew. I became a better person because of it. You know? The day my book hit New York Times status, I didn’t become a better person. I became a better person when my son got hit and I decided to stand up and fight for him. I became a better person when he had bipolar disorder and I remember first, I told the doctor, “I’m not strong enough to handle this.” He goes, “Well, you better get stronger.” And when I made that mindset of things aren’t going to be easier. The big fat lie is that as you do more in life, it gets easier. It doesn’t get easier. It never gets easier. But if you look at the most successful people in life, they’re resilient. They’ve gone through it, and they’ve gotten stronger. That’s it.
Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: That’s just … I mean, I want to give you a round of applause.
JJ Virgin: Got nothing to say.
Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: It’s so funny. I know, I’m just taking it all in. I just really feel like our conversation today, quite frankly, has been a real gift, and I appreciate it. I just really appreciate you. I’m glad we hung in there and got our schedules … it took us over a year. And I just so appreciate all that you’ve offered today. I appreciate your journey and just your honesty and your courage. The folks listening to it, the clinicians listening to this, will really be appreciative of this list of incredible, incredible tools that we can bring forward from the psychic transformation to the recommendation of CBD and the stem cells and on.
JJ Virgin: And anything I can do to help out with this, I’m all in. We have tons of great resources and I’m easy to find through Mindshare. I just want to get this message out. This happened and become a bigger purpose when it can help others.
Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: Yeah, I get it. I get it, I can really feel it. Thank you so much for joining me today on New Frontiers, JJ. It’s been great to have you.
JJ Virgin: Thank you.