Jonathan endurance athlete fear of being homebound

Well, here's what's interesting about you and I talking right now. I had heard about you when I was in the hospital, but didn't know who you were. I just knew that an NFL athlete, a kicker, had played in the NFL with an ostomy. And the reason I knew that is because I started to talk to the wound ostomy nurses about the fear I was having, about being stuck at home and not being able to live a productive life.

And this nurse said, Jonathan, are you crazy? There's stories of people that have done some amazing things and she pulled out, I forgot what it was, it was some like poster or magazine or something, and there was some article and it was about you. There was about a guy who, who rides bulls. There was a guy who does like, uh, martial arts professionally, and I was like, wait, you can't do all this stuff.

And she's like, you can, you can do all of it. You're, you're only limited by what your mind tells you you're limited by. And so that, that was the first experience outside of, of the surgery where I really realized that there, there were opportunities, there was, there was life beyond, uh, this, this surgery. And so I started to kind of seek out more information and read a lot.

So I, I started to look for a lot of information. I still was not mentally prepared to share my story with the world, so I still didn't tell a lot of people, but I was searching for motivation in others.