but shown really he was adorable i mean shawn was had charisma from when he was a little boy and he was the devil i remember the first time i took him out a little try sicko and there were three steps and he decided to his tries to go down the steps well that was kind of the story of his life he was always doing things that were fun that were kind of pushing the edge a little bit he was a lovely person you know he's a he's a very handsome guy and people often say to me showing is so handsome and i say to them he was this beautiful inside as he is outside well where was he born he was born in queens or queens boy he go to school but we moved to westchester and he grew up in croton new york he went to elementary middle and high school here he was voted best looking in his senior year of high school and never think of your kid that way you know i was really surprised he was just my son he was also very smart he did very well he and his friend rob seaver who has been so i could brother to him they were brothers and rob has worked with foundation for all these years he got an athlete scholar award in high school and went to colgate university for one year in which he wrote a sports column calling this line and when i look at it now it was very professional he was always a good writer in high school he would have a paper due and he'd pull pieces of little little pieces of paper out of his pocket and the next thing i knew the next morning there was a beautiful paper they're written and he was a wonderful writer so he went to colgate for a year and then he transferred to georgetown he graduated from georgetown ninth in this class magna cum loud people in political science and then he ca me and said mom i'm not going for a lot of recruiters a here and he could have gotten at that time you know a very good job he said i mean i want to be a sports journalist a sports broadcaster and he went to hawaii for a year he did all kinds of things like that and then he he went to u s c on partial scholarship as to broadcasting communications and then he loaded up his car with tapes edition tapes and actually went cross country stopping in tiny little towns where he could stop big cities little towns where if he could get in let his audition tape and he ended up with a job in a little town of texas when his friends came to visit and he was the whole when his friends came to visit him he would interview them like new york people he had the camera he had i mean he just did everything there but it was right across the border from oklahoma and he was seen oklahoma's a very big sports market and he was seen in oklahoma and he was recruited to come to oklahoma which he loved and then from there he came to new york to pics eleven and he was the weekend sports  welcome what do you have forced and i were all there must have known i was coming home to new york because a good day for the local team he did stories during the week and he did the pre game show for the mets with seaver that's a big that's a big time in new york yes yes and what happened yes he was always an athlete he went to the gym he lifted weights he was very conscious of eating healthy i mean all of that so he actually felt something in his testicles about fifteen months before he was diagnosed and went to a local internist just a regular doctor had a son a gram and the doctor said there's nothing there unfortunately he didn't go to the euro it just who is a specialist in testicular cancer and he let it go he didn't even tell us i mean he was a man you know in his thirty's and then over the next couple of years he had back pain well over the next fifteen months he had back pain he had had back pain before from from playing golf from other sports injuries and he assumed that's what it was and actually testicular cancer gets a little more advanced back pain is one of the symptoms and we never knew it the other thing is that one of child and now they do operations with kids because they know this can be a problem and they correct it when they're babies but when he was born they did not and i think that connection between look cancer and descended testicle was not really known it was just starting to they were just starting to think there was some connection so once a doctor mentioned something to us about it when he was a teenager and didn't didn't suggest we correct it didn't suggest we go to your allergist and it was so casual that we just didn't follow up on it doctor said this morning i knew from when he was a baby that he had been an distended test talking and the doctor said oh i was reading a journal and maybe some connection between testicular cancer and you know we kind of thought well if he has pain or he has you know this is what he was when he was a teenager show and said he wanted to do something when he was in the hospital and we were really fulfilling his wish he was going to make this is cause he was going to get out there he would have had a great platform of course cystic you know a cancer one it's the highest cancer in young men fifteen to forty so it can hit you very young you're vulnerable if you are between fifteen and forty although it can occur in people older it's also has a very high so we have survivors that work with us that have had a testicle removed and then had nothing or had a testicle removed and had some radiation but nothing else so you want to catch it as early as you common cancer found in young men today generally strikes men aged fifteen to forty you should check your test for any changes at least once a month carefully examine them for any  bumps on the test if you feel any abnormalities or swelling a pain in the groin or lower back contact your doctor immediately only a doctor make an accurate diagnosis minute there is anything you go and check it out probably a lot of times it will be nothing but this is no time for being quiet and being like thinking you're involved in a book right notorious for waiting a small foundation that's why we dedicate ourselves to awareness you raise awareness you have a good chance of ok so what's the name of this works i think it's called running the ball running of the ball yes so we started the running of the bulls last year was a sixty here we do it new york city we're on this produces it great organised yes and it's been a great partnership and this year we're looking at a possibility of governor's island at this race which i'm very excited that i haven't been there yet but i can say it now yes and people love the name and it's a fun race and we've been very successful last year we had over nine hundred people registered almost eight hundred people that completed it and most hold on on roosevelt island be doing races we were didn't get a permit yet we use we used to do june every year in june around father's day it's father small this day father's day race so i think we're going to be in august and govern this island this year and we started the second running of the balls in washington d c show and went to georgetown university and we thought that would be good on spot to do it that's going to be in september the end of september twenty eighth twenty nineteen twenty nine so   so that's your passion yeah yeah i'm very passionate about you know helping people manage their way through chronic illness chronic disease it was something i had to put my body back together after the cancer and about five surgeries and chemotherapy and my immune system shut down so i really always wanted this guy to show up with all this information and pain a path that was very simple for me and i never found that so the website was born out of i'm going to do that for somebody else you created your own job and i did yeah tell us you know how did it how did it happen and how did you discover it was it was a quick call was it you know what was the story behind sure so i was working my other life is broadway performer music theater performer in the city so i was working in a show and i was playing a character that where we're very small very small underwear production of the full monty and i started to have pain in my left testicle and i figured it was related to the costume and made sense because it was a tight the take classes and so i went and saw a doctor and the doctor told me that because it hurt that it wasn't cancer that cancer is a normal cell what kind of doses at a normal rate i just went so i went to a clinic it was pretty much a walk in clinic i don't want to name the clinic but you know he told me that cancer didn't hurt and that cancer is really a normal cell it just grows faster which is true but if you have excel multiplying very quickly in a sensitive area of course you're going to have pain so i left it i probably left it for three three and a half months ok how long ago was that that was two thousand and six when i went to that doctor and it was probably three or four months later that i finally went to the emergency room because i got to the point i could barely stand up or walk straight you know i was just hunched over pain the last thing you think about so i was just you know pushing through any now until just literally thinking in my head that i had worked out too hard or i'm just pushing it but never in a million years that i think that something like information and taking some proactive method so right on to do you have a positive in terms of your experience with doctors host that well the me learning that i had cancer was was very dramatic in the true sense of any broadway show you know i was sitting in a waiting room after diagnostic testing and ultrasound the neurology departments and emergency rooms and a doctor had walked in with about eleven med students and turned his back to me and started to say this is a male with advance so that is how i heard it and i just you know i just had the lights the lights the lights went out it was just like two minutes of me just kind of spinning and you know i got my senses and i quickly got on a plane and went home and  know into the university of rochester rochester medical center and rochester because your family with family live there and i just you know i knew i was i was done with new york city hospitals at that point and i was like oh i knew i was ready to go and just be with my family and i made the right choice amazing hospital amazing cancer center tom golisano the golf channel children's hospital is there so i was just on like four star care service beautiful doctors and i went primary tumor and they're going to remove that tumor and what they're going to do is they're going to see what happens to the markers in your blood because that tumor is producing usually like a protein or a hormone often very similar to a hormone i think it's h c g that a woman makes and she's pregnant to secure a cancer if it's of the right cellular makeup is going to produce that hormone or a protein alpha feta protein and they look at those levels to see if they drop or they go up when they bring out the primary tumor w my primary tumor waited two weeks in the levels kept they now and then it really started to go up so we knew that this is an aggressive growing cancer that had metastasized to another part of the body and so they that's usually what happens and then they can either you know there's eight different ways this could go really depends on your cancer in your body you know my path was chemo they said we're going to do four rounds of chemo which is primarily all they do that's the most they do for testicular cancer but they because it is fast growing they hit it five hours a day five times a week and then you get two weeks off to recuperate and you start another round and i completed the chemotherapy and the funny thing about to secure cancer is the chemotherapy drugs that they use are very very effective to top a side and cisplatin for most types of the cancer and two things happen that tumor either evaporates it's gone or it burns it down like a marshmallow like it almost looks like a marshmallow in testicles to lymphatic the lymphatic nodules in the abdomen and then it usually goes to lungs and then it's going to go to brain a classic example of somebody everybody might have heard of this very famous is lance armstrong that's the progression of his  by but i would imagine that emotionally you must have been a wreck so how did you keep your spirits how did you keep your mental facilities were going crazy i think that's probably just genetics and disposition you know i'm a very positive person i i was i was had just been cast in a big show broadway bound show my first that was it was going to go to the you know great going today was actually going to start in d c at the kennedy center and i was so excited so for me week one was just heart breaks i did not want to lose that job you know how hard you work as an actor to get those get those roles that paid good money and that was the hardest thing but once i accepted that that was the path i was and i was in it to to that that voice in your body that's that's connected with something bigger than you you know but but just really yeah and that head of all you know i would say post treatment and post cancer my connection with  the earth and spirituality and higher power is just grown and grown and grown and then because of that experience you also besides being a broadway star or broadway dietician although i'm very extensively well read and studied and been certified as a functional health coach for the institute of functional health coaching and a reiki healer because i believe in energy work and a positivity coach and you  know the power of words how we construct our own reality through the words we use right down to the little pronouns in verbs that all matters every single word clear we are with our tax but to be able to paint a path for somebody you know yes very very passionate about that and then very passionate about patient advocacy and you know the perfect story with testicular cancer is you could go like we heard you would go and you could have a surgery and you can remove that tumor and you could be done you could be done that magical to my areas so i had probably five or six surgeries from two thousand and six to two thousand and fifteen just taking out additional scar tissue i lost a couple feet of intestine so the surgeries surgery you know it's going it's going pelvis to sternum and taking out all the organs in the parent in the am and then putting everything back so you know it's not going to go back and like god put it in there or whoever all right but but you're looking very cagney the musical here off broadway which is going to go to broadway in two thousand and twenty you know you have very active lots of energy lots of passion ok so before the cancer yeah after are you a better person now and you were before the cancer oh i don't say that the disease what it would was turned out to be a gift because to live with that much better and after because state discovered strength within themselves they didn't know they had and they used not only to young when young men get diagnosed with cancer even if it's quite quickly and they're the lucky ones you know fairly quickly curable it's devastating because you don't expect you feel you don't expect to get that kind of diagnosis we have a number of young men who who work with us with our foundation there are survivors and people want to do something and give back you know and it also is very if it helps to have  of people who say you can get through this and here's something you can do with the with the fear with the energy turn it into something positive so we have brian harrington survivor who goes and speaks to students in a high school and t a it's a very common topic for content i'll create on social media or you tube i'll often go to you know cancer and you know these topics of chronic illness how we find ourselves there in this modern world that we've designed ok well this is a running show we talk about devoting culture and one of the montrose to runners or hear about it this listen to your body and and it's a second part to it that check it out your body's your body's sending you these like divine little whispers that you've got to listen to and it but it's a skill it's a skill to be able to listen to your body to hear what it's really asking is he got to check and it's just like a relationship you can't just wait to the person's angry and screaming and slamming doors and get a chair and all the time at the bottom with your body although i must admit i've never had i never took my ball so i don't remember the last time i did check it every year now because i see him for my prostate condition what you could do is you could grab that shower card right there in about two minutes you can learn how to do your own self exam and really the magic is to do it in the shower when you're when your testicles are warm and you're relaxed you're really going to be able to feel the variation on on what it feels like ok well there's the scroll there's the test the call there's a tube that pumps in the top you're going to know what your testicles feel like and if you check in every week every