#1655 - Sebastian Junger

Joe Rogan (0:03)

The Joe Rogan Experience. Good to see you, man, how are you?

Sebastian Junger (0:16)

Really good, very good to see you too.

Joe Rogan (0:18)

I see you're very prepared.

Sebastian Junger (0:21)

Yeah, look at all those notes on those note cards, yeah.

Joe Rogan (0:24)

Serious stuff.

Sebastian Junger (0:24)

Yeah.

Joe Rogan (0:25)

We were talking before, there's so much to talk about, but we were talking before, and you were saying that over the last year, you almost died because you had some crazy internal, you had an aneurysm in your pancreas, is that what you said it was?

Sebastian Junger (0:40)

Yeah, I had an undiagnosed asymptomatic aneurysm, which is a sort of ballooning in the blood vessel in the artery, in my pancreatic artery, and out of the blue, it was a congenital thing. Like I apparently had developed during my whole life, it was just from a structural problem, and one afternoon, one beautiful June afternoon last year it burst. And I just felt this pain shoot through my stomach. I was like, damn, what is that? Within a few minutes, I couldn't stand up, and within about 10 minutes, I was starting to go blind.

And my wife called the ambulance, and those guys got there, and I was tanking really fast. And the hospital is an hour away.

And by a miracle, I don't even think the doctors understand it, but by a miracle, I was still alive when I got to the hospital. I lost 90% of my blood into my abdomen.

And I didn't know I was dying, but I was dying. And I was right in that sort of twilight zone.

And a black pit opened up underneath me and I felt myself starting to get pulled down into it. And I didn't want to go. Like it was cold and dark and black and bottomless. And I just knew, like, do not go down there. I was getting pulled down into it. And right at that moment, my father, who passed away in 2012, my father sort of appeared next to me and started trying to communicate, trying to communicate with me and comforting me. And I sort of waved him away. And the last thing I remember saying to the doctor, I was sort of losing consciousness. And the last thing I said to the doctor was, you're losing me right now. You gotta hurry. He was trying to put a, he'd cut my neck open. He was trying to put a line into my neck to, you know, they pumped 10 units of blood into me. And that's what brought me back. It was really close.

Joe Rogan (2:39)

When you say you felt you were sinking into a pit, like, were you seeing this?

Sebastian Junger (2:44)

I, yeah, I mean, you know, your perceptions are very weird because I, you know, there's very little oxygen in the brain. I had a hemoglobin count of 1.2. If you're a doctor, you know what that is. It's almost unheard of. And so I just felt this pit underneath me and it was pulling me into it and I didn't want to go.

Joe Rogan (3:00)

And you can see a pit?

Sebastian Junger (3:02)

Yeah, I mean, again, see slash feel. Your perceptions are very weird when you're like that. And then my father also was sort of floating above me. He was a presence.

I don't know if seeing him is quite the word. It's another perception.

Joe Rogan (3:15)

Wow.

Sebastian Junger (3:18)

Yeah.

Joe Rogan (3:19)

So coming out of that, once you regained your health, you must have had an incredible newfound appreciation for all the people in your life and just everything.

Sebastian Junger (3:29)

It was a long path. I mean, I'm a really healthy guy. Later, the doctor said, I was a marathon runner when I was young, and I don't drink. I'm athletic, and I use my body pretty vigorously. And he said, that saved your life.

Like you didn't have a heart attack. Like you owe your life to that. Oh, wow. But the next morning, I didn't know that I'd almost died. I had no idea. I have two little girls. I have a four-year-old and a one-and-a-half-year-old, and the most precious things to me, I mean, I can't even describe it, obviously.

And the fact that they almost lost their dad was just devastating when the ICU nurse came in and said, How are you doing, Mr. Junger?

You're one lucky guy. You almost died yesterday. I had no idea. And then she came back an hour later, and she said, How are you doing? And I said, you know, physically, and I was throwing up blood. I was not doing very well physically, but I said I was. I said, but you know, I'm really struggling with what you told me.