This is an episode that promises to test your own willingness to survive, challenge your perspective on adversity, and to inspire you to embrace resilience in your own life.
In a world where adversity and challenges seem ever-present, learning how to cultivate resilience and find meaning in our struggles is more relevant than ever. This episode provides not just inspiration but practical insights into navigating life’s toughest moments, something we all can relate to or might face in the future.
A Masterclass in Resilience::
Prepare to embark on a riveting episode that takes you on a journey through the life of Dr. Nina Cerfolio, a woman who embodies the essence of resilience. Faced with challenges that would crumble many, including surviving terrorist attacks, battling breast cancer, and overcoming being poisoned with Anthrax, Dr. Cerfolio’s story is a beacon of hope and strength for anyone facing life’s challenges.
This episode is more than just a narrative of survival; it’s a deep dive into the human spirit’s capacity to overcome seemingly insurmountable obstacles. Dr. Cerfolio shares her personal philosophy on resilience, the power of support and empathy, and how she turned her darkest moments into opportunities for growth and healing.
LINKS & RESOURCES
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- BUY Dr. Nina Cerfolio’s Book on Amazon
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Transcript
How many terrorist attacks have you survived? What about breast cancer?
What about being poisoned by anthrax?
I'm hoping that you said no to all of the above.
But for today's guest, Dr. Nina Cerfolio, she can check off each of those.
You can basically say that this woman is about to present you with a masterclass in resilience.
I welcome you to episode 274.
What's up, my friend, and welcome to Grit, Grace, and Inspiration.
I am your host, Kevin Lowe. 20 years ago, I awoke from a life-saving surgery
only to find that I was left completely blind.
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Because, friend, if you are still searching for your purpose,
still trying to understand why or still left searching for that next right path to take,
we'll consider this to be your stepping stone to get you from where you are to where you want to be.
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It's time that you start sleeping like a baby too.
I'm a psychiatrist and I am actually a mass shooting terrorist trauma expert.
So early in childhood, I think I always was interested in understanding myself
and other people and what made them do the things they did.
So I always think I was very psychologically minded and motivated in terms of
understanding human behavior.
But more recently in my adulthood, I survived two terrorist attacks.
One was I was a first responder down to 9-11.
I made a conscious decision to go down there and to help survivors.
And what it turned out being was helping other first responders and family members
that had somehow gotten down there. You know, they had lost loved ones.
And then as a consequence of
being a first responder, I developed breast cancer and had a mastectomy.
And continue to be a patient as a breast cancer patient under guidance of a
great, great oncologist, actually. I'm very blessed.
And then in 2005, I chose to go into the second Chechen war and genocide.
So just to give a brief background of Chechnya, because people often don't know
where it is or its history, which is very complicated, but Chechnya is a part of Russia.
It's in the North Caucasus, which has the tallest Mount Elbrus is the tallest
mountain range in Europe.
And it's very rich with oils and minerals.
And the Chechens have been trying to be independent from Russia since Catherine the Great.
And they're often portrayed by Russians as being terrorists,
even though, in my experience, they're Muslim and there are these farmers who
are loving and would give you the shirt off their back.
They're just the most loving, loyal people.
And I chose to go into the Second Chechen War.
So Putin had waged war with Chechnya in the early 90s, and this is what brought him into power.
And there was an incident called the apartment building bombings in Russia,
where in seven cities, apartment buildings were demolished by bombs that were planted.
Hundreds were killed, thousands were injured.
And Putin blamed these bombings on the Chechens.
And it turned out that Putin actually was the KGB was the one who planted them.
I don't know if you remember Alexander Leventenko, but he was the defected KGB
agent who went to London and was killed by radioactive iodine.
And he basically came forth and said that he and others were the ones that,
as a KGB agent, planted bombs, which was blamed on Chechens.
And also, there was the last apartment bombing.
There were people that were community members that were being hyper-vigilant
and checking for bombs at this point.
And these community members found bombs underneath an apartment building.
Building, they were found to
only have been, the materials could only have been put there by the KGB.
They obviously disassembled them. And then Putin said that this was an exercise
that the KGB were practicing.
But it's a long story and it's very complicated.
But to make it short, he went into Chechnya and started bombing civilians and
killed probably over 200,000 civilians.
And I chose to go there at the time in 2005.
It was the most dangerous place on earth. It was largely internationally ignored.
And America actually joined forces with Putin in the war against terrorism.
So as a consequence of that war, he's just continued on because there was no
protest really by the West or by the world.
And he did the same thing in Syria and Georgia and now in Ukraine.
Although the world has, at least for a moment, seemingly woke up with Ukraine
and the West has given a lot of money for ammunition and backing for Ukraine.
So that is at least good. But when I was in Chechnya, it was a total genocide.
It was it was Gaza Strip times 100.
Yeah. Wow. So so back up a ways for me, though, back to 9-11 was this this first big event.
And so my understanding when you talked about with your your career as a psychiatrist,
you were really in the field of dealing with this type of situation, if I'm not mistaken.
Yes. So I had been in academic medicine. I ran the psychiatric emergency room
and walk in clinic. So for about five years, I taught residents and medical students.
So I always was really in the trenches and dealing with people that had been
arrested or murderers or psychotic people often that didn't get proper psychiatric
treatment that then became violent.
Yes. So although I've always had a private practice as well,
but my expertise is in trauma.
Yes. Yeah. So I'm curious, when 9-11 happened, would you mind sharing with me
a little bit about that story as far as your experience?
Where were you and what you were able to do?
Yes, I would love to. So the day of 9-11, I'll never forget it.
There wasn't a cloud in the sky in Manhattan.
I was walking to see a patient.
At 8 a.m., the first tower was already hit and on fire.
And there were rumors that there was a plane, like a small plane that went in,
but it was like an accident.
And I'll never forget, my patient said, this was a terrorist attack.
And then throughout the day, most of my patients canceled because public transport
was stopped. So they couldn't get to me.
A few of my patients I did see on that day. And we shared the trauma together.
Other, but I was literally in the street in front of my office.
So my office was on University Place and that's about a mile away from the towers.
And I was an elite endurance athlete at the time. I was running marathons.
I ran my first marathon in 2001.
So my training route actually was to run down the West side highway,
past the towers, the tip of Manhattan to the East side and back.
It was about a 10-mile loop.
And the towers really, for me, were a symbol of resilience and strength.
They had been bombed earlier in, I think, in 1993.
And they withstood that bombing. A bomb was placed in the parking lot.
But to me, they were also my running companions. I always looked to them in
terms of getting a sense of direction. And they always seemed to instill energy
in me when I was really tired from a full day of patience.
So I saw the towers, both the towers come down when I was standing on University
Place, which was a suite in front of my office. I...
Saw people walking away from the towers covered in dust.
They looked like ghosts. They were in shock. I witnessed people were trying
to get news what was going on.
You couldn't really get a dial
on your cell phone because it was so overwhelmed with all the calling.
So people were trying to call loved ones. They couldn't get through.
So people were listening on the radios for news as is what had happened.
And then we learned that there was also the attack on our, on our Capitol in DC.
And it was, I can't even really put it in words.
It was a horror film, you know, to see the towers come down.
And literally there were a hundred people gathered on the street and we all
collectively gasped. Like we all couldn't believe what we saw.
It was really mind boggling because I never thought the towers would come,
come to like, they literally came down like pancakes, floor by floor,
like they enveloped, enveloped inwards.
And the next day I decided that because a lot of my patients also had canceled
because they couldn't come to me, I decided that I would go down and help people.
So I packed a lunch, I packed water, also extra water for people,
blankets for people that needed them, and put on my work boots and went down
there and And getting down there, I had to cross several checkpoints.
And really, the only time I processed any fear was after I passed a checkpoint in Soho.
And initially, the police didn't want to believe I was dead.
A doctor at the time I was in my forties and I looked very young and I had to
prove to them that I was a doctor.
So they let me through and Soho was a ghost town there. You could literally hear a pin drop.
I've never heard New York city. So quiet. It was quiet after Trump won, but not like this.
This was like a vacuum of silence.
And a voice said to me, you know, turn around and run because everyone had left Soho.
Most people had evacuated. But I continued down and then I started moving debris.
It was unrecognizable down there.
It was fires going on and stacks of debris, like 10, 12 stories high.
There was ash raining. I don't even remember the color of the the ash.
There was a toxic, noxious smell to your eyes, to your skin.
It was hard to breathe down there. Someone handed me work gloves and a surgical mask.
And just spontaneously, the people that had gone down there formed a bucket
brigade and started moving debris along the line.
We handed it off to the next person in an attempt to look for victims under all the debris.
And then And eventually, I was down there the first day for about 16 hours.
And there was a medical triage unit that was just spontaneously formed with other doctors.
I was the only psychiatrist that went down there then.
And we helped provide medical and psychiatric aid to people.
I dealt with a construction worker who was having anxiety because he had built
the World Trade Center and then he had gone down with his crane and couldn't find any survivors.
He was having extreme anxiety. And actually, somehow we had medication there.
I was able to give him some Ativan.
And to talk to him for a while. And eventually he was able to go back and go
back to work to look for survivors.
I also was asked to see family members who were disturbing the rescue process.
They were insisting that their loved one, they had last spoken to them at a
certain point under the World Trade Center and they wanted rescuers to go look for them.
So I had to work with them to try to support them so that they would be better
able to really accept that most likely they weren't going to find their loved
one at this point, which they didn't.
Other like firemen getting them medical help as well.
So yeah, it was really a radically unifying experience of all these first responders
who came together to help our brothers and sisters.
And we really rose rose above the horror, the devastation, the death,
the loss, the injury, the sorrow, and,
And it was, for me, a very spiritual experience.
Yeah, absolutely. One question that I am wondering about is,
here you are, a psychiatrist, you're there to help others.
Was there a moment in time, whether down at ground zero or maybe back at home
when you broke down yourself?
That's a great question. So I was brought up to not show any emotion, to super perform.
I was expected to be a good little Catholic girl, not express my feelings,
but super perform in sports.
And luckily, I was a natural athlete. A lot of people in my family are natural athletes,
but I was expected to super perform at sports, often not being given the proper
tools to do so as well, but to rise above that. and at school as well.
It's sort of my parents' motto was, you know, we're going to break you down,
but then they never really built us back up.
Kind of like in the military, they break you down, but then they build you back up.
My parents would break us down, but not really build us back up.
So I was a person that grew up, it's called counterphobia in psychiatry,
which is where where you go into your fears and you overcome them.
So because I felt unseen, unloved, unworthy in my childhood.
I felt that I needed to constantly super perform or super achieve to overcome those feelings.
So to answer your question, no, I never really had a breakdown or processed or cried.
What I did have was recurrent nightmares of planes flying into buildings,
buildings collapsing, collapsing, people jumping out of burning buildings.
These things, I did have recurrent nightmares, but I never had a breakdown or...
Cried or processed my sorrow there.
I mean, I have subsequently, I think, in my own therapy, but not like,
I know some people that went down there who were psychologists started having
a breakdown there. They couldn't process and they had to leave.
I very much was brought up, up, so to speak, in an emotional war.
So going into a war for me was a reflex.
It was something that I knew too well.
So it wasn't unfamiliar to me at all. It was how I was brought up.
So no, no, to answer your question, no.
Other than with flashbacks and nightmares, yes. Yes. Yeah. Yeah.
Understandable. My other question is, is did you find yourself in the years
after 9-11 working with a lot of people who were directly impacted by the terrorist
attacks, whether by losing a loved one or were they or themselves? himself?
Absolutely. I had many patients that worked down there.
I had a lovely female patient who had just gotten married.
She didn't like New York City, who hated working in the World Trade Center buildings.
She was trapped in the second building and was told to stay at her desk.
And luckily she didn't listen.
She hated the World Trade Building. She found them really claustrophobic and hated working in them.
And luckily, she didn't listen to what she was told and her and her co-workers
left and narrowly escaped the second building collapsing.
And then I also had patients who lost their father who worked for...
So Cantor Fitzgerald was a Wall Street investment firm and it was impacted.
The first plane literally flew into the floor that the Cantor Fitzgerald was on.
So no one was ever found from that firm who worked there on that day.
My patient's father, they never found his body.
And I worked with her for many, many years. And 12 years after 9-11.
They found a humerus on top, like the bone in the arm, the humerus,
on top of a building, A high storied building in Manhattan downtown.
And it turned out to be her father's bone, like DNA.
So, you know, most people that lost loved ones down there did not receive a
body or a bone or anything.
Any remnants of their loved ones. Yes, I had many patients that either were
down there that escaped,
that lost loved ones or that worked down there and were just so traumatized by the whole event.
Yes. Yeah, absolutely.
My last question with direct, you know, related to 9-11 is, is I know that a
lot of people in the years after had medical issues.
Did you experience anything yourself? Yeah. So I have difficulties breathing.
I've been told that I developed asthma recently. And I wonder if it's not.
I know that several, many people have developed asthma from being down there.
I guess I just don't even really want to know.
I developed breast cancer as a result of being down there and my work down there
in 2017. and I'm followed by the World Health Trade Center Insurance and they're wonderful actually.
And they basically provide care to people who have 9-11 related diseases.
Many people who have developed cancer like me from being a first responder down
there and many people have died.
So now there are many more people that have actually died from cancer related
9-11 disorders than actual people who died during that horrible day on terrorists. Yes.
Wow. Yeah. Yes. Wow, wow, wow. Isn't that almost hard to believe?
It is. It's so hard to believe. And it's such a testament to how human spirit
is so interconnected and beautiful that we're all so willing to,
you know, firemen, policemen, doctors, contractors,
construction workers, really put our own life on the line to go down there to
help our brothers and sisters who were vulnerable and in a horrible situation and needed our help.
It really is a testament to human kindness and love and interconnectedness.
Yeah, absolutely.
So my next Next question is, you go through this experience during 9-11.
What then makes you want to go over to Russia, over out of the country to pursue other endeavors?
I almost would feel like you might have been like, okay, it's time for me to play it safe.
But you kept going. And so I'm kind of curious what led to that.
That's a great question. So I think it would have been wise for me to process
that or to think that, but at the time...
I was an elite endurance athlete. I was actually winning some ultra marathons
and, you know, overall, not just even in my age group.
And I had won the half marathon on the China wall in Beijing.
I had placed second overall of women in the Kurt Steiner.
It's a 32 mile race. And that's, you know, normal marathon is 26.2.
So this is longer than that. in Central Park, the woman that beat me was a pro
when she was 10 years younger than me.
So I was really running sort of in this invincible, macho, I call it the warrior queen.
Which is very much, you know, that was my defense growing up because I really
felt unseen, unworthy, unloved. And I felt like I had to super perform.
And if I won a race, I was loved for like 10 seconds and then it would go away.
So I very much was in this warrior queen mode where I was overcoming my fears
with Ironman and ultra marathons and, and sometimes, you know,
winning them or placing overall.
And I always have identified with marginalized people.
I felt I felt marginalized growing up. I always have been the champion of people
that have been bullied or ostracized or marginalized.
So I felt a calling to go to Chechnya.
I went there with the man who started this disabled running track club.
And I had worked with blind people.
Actually, I led a blind climber to the summit of Mount Kilimanjaro.
I had also led people in the New York City Marathon who were in wheelchairs.
So I had done a lot of work with disabled people.
And I felt a calling, not only to go to Chechnya to help people medically,
psychologically, psychiatrically, but we also started a running club there for
the disabled kids as well. Well, so for me, it was just reflex.
You know, my family didn't want me to go. A lot of people said,
why am I going to help terrorists?
And then I eventually did work to bring three of the boys back to get medical
care who had lost arms, legs, part of their penises blown off,
horrible, horrible, horrible injuries as a result of being in the second Chechen War.
I had people say to me, why are you bringing terrorists here?
You know, they're not going to want to leave. And these, these were like salt
of the earth, kind, simple, loving farm people.
They all had farms and they came here and they got their medical care and they
wanted to go back home and they were, they were not terrorists, you know?
So for me, it's just, it was reflex.
I know it's maybe hard to understand, but for me, it was just like going home.
You know, going home to me was a war of avoiding where the next explosion was.
And in Chechnya, it was no different. So for me, it was going home in a lot of ways.
Yeah, yeah. Understandable. How long were you over there?
So I was only there 10 days and we were constantly the only reason we got in
was because a KGB agent was with us.
He he was with us. He shadowed us the whole time. he basically hated me because
I did care about the Chechens and I did provide medical and psychiatric and
psychological care to them.
And he poisoned me probably like the fifth day I was there.
And I knew pretty much immediately as if I was my own emergency room patient
that I had been poisoned.
And given the severity of my symptoms, I was in bed for three days.
If I I tried to get up out of bed. I fell.
I never had falling issues or balance issues.
I had projectile vomiting of blood and diarrhea with blood.
I had really high fever. I couldn't eat for at least three days. I lost 10 pounds.
And at that time, I was in incredible shape. I'm 5'6". Then I weighed 110 pounds.
I got down to 100 pounds then.
I almost died there. And there There was no international doctors.
Doctors Without Borders had been there.
And one of their female physicians had been kidnapped and killed. So they left.
So I was the only help that was really there. You know, it was a genocide.
People were just as sick as me.
So I have to stop real quick and ask you.
So you're saying the guy who was hired to help you was the same guy who poisoned you?
Yeah. So, I mean, help, quote unquote.
I mean. Yes. Yes. He wasn't there to help us. He basically stole all our money.
I had brought $3,000 to give to the Chechens to try and help them.
At one point, the person I was with started protecting him.
He stole clothes that we brought for the Chechens. and then the person I was
with started protecting our passports because that was the next that was going
to go, but he wasn't there to protect us.
So, I mean, this is the game that Putin plays, right?
So the man that I was with has had a long relationship with this KGB agent and
I didn't, I didn't know he was a KGB agent until I figured it out myself.
So he, he was presented to me as a sports Reuters journalist,
which is what he was, but he also was a KGB agent and they had a long long embedded
relationship that I don't even know about.
But I do know that the man that I went with to Chechnya, who was the head of
this disabled running club, helped this person get into,
college in America, Queens, helped him get housing in Coney Island and,
you know, facilitated what I'm sure is spying on our country.
I mean, this is what he did. He was a professional killer.
I And I figured out really quickly because I've dealt with people that kill
people and are sociopaths that this was a professional killer and he was not
interested in our helping people.
He was not interested in any of it.
He was there really to supervise us and to make sure that we did,
I think, as little as we could do.
So it's complicated. It is very complicated, but no, he was there very much
to try to minimize our impact.
And one day we met this lovely Chechen deaf refugee who had started this school.
She had literally a mud room. It was like a house built of mud and it was one room.
And this KGB agent was with us when she served us tea and she was so proud that
she had built the school for other deaf Chechen refugees.
We started a race there.
It was the first, what we believe is the first time Muslims ran against terrorism. Right.
And this woman was one of the Chechens who ran this race. It was a 5K and a government car.
And I wasn't in the country at this time. This was reported to me.
A government car rolled over her and killed her.
And the message was to the Chechens, never have this race again. And they never did.
So, I mean, this very much was orchestrated by the person that I was with.
This was his amount. So, yeah.
Wow. Now, just for context, can you explain to me?
A KGB agent. What is that? So KGB agent is like a CIA agent.
They're basically, so it's like Putin. So I can look there in my book,
there's a whole chapter on Putin called Victim, Morrison to Perpetrator.
He aspired to be a KGB agent. He went to KGB school. You go to KGB school.
So first he became a lawyer, just a little, I can give a little background of
Putin, Putin, which is, it's a very complicated story.
There's two stories. One was that he was born out of wedlock.
And then this woman married a man who was abusive.
And then she sent Putin back to her parents.
And then her parents couldn't deal with him.
So they gave him to this couple who had lost two children during the siege of Leningrad.
And those are actually Putin's parents today.
And that here is this man that is abandoned, betrayed, handed off like a football, right?
That is not wanted, has a mother who's ambivalent, then is given to this family.
So the family that he was given to, they had survived the siege of Leningrad,
which was in World War II.
And the mother almost died from starvation.
The father had been on the front and came home to find her body,
her corpse on a wheelbarrow with other dead people. And he said,
wait, she's still breathing.
And he took her body and resuscitated her and she eventually survived.
But then one of their biological sons died from starvation and diphtheria and
another son died and then they were given Putin.
And then he grew up in this horrible, horrible post-war environment in Leningrad.
He grew up in a one-room apartment with like 12 other families.
He was a skinny, scrawny kid. He was bullied, made fun of.
He was a hooligan. He would fight people on the subway.
And it was very much about him having this macho bravado to cover up his vulnerabilities
and his sense of loss and not being wanted as a child. And he eventually went
to law school, then KGB school.
He wanted to be a KGB agent internationally, but apparently he wasn't that good
of a student at KGB school.
So he stayed in Russia and then he was brought into amazing power. hour.
And so that just gives you a background of what a KGB agent is.
And they're basically taught to kill people.
I believe I was poisoned with manmade anthrax and both Russia and America had
stockpiled manmade anthrax for biological warfare.
And they agreed to stop, but Russia continued to stockpile it.
And this is, you know, what you learn in KGB school. Wow, wow, wow. So insane.
So insane. Yes. Now, when you were poisoned, how long did it take you to get
over being poisoned with anthrax?
I'm still dealing with the consequences of being poisoned. When someone's poisoned,
there's always sequelae. But really for three years.
So I was I went there in 2005, almost died there. But for three years,
from 2005 to 2008, I lived in a liminal space closer to death than life.
I couldn't get out of bed. I could barely lift my head.
Because I'm a really resilient, determined person, somehow I got myself to work.
It was a block away, like just walking a block.
Here's this ultra endurance athlete that couldn't walk a block.
Like I would walk a block and have to rest for like an hour.
It had tremendous, I had pneumonia a hundred times.
I had GI parasitic infections for 12 years. I developed 20 food allergies,
never had a food allergy in my life.
And then developed a chronic immunosuppressive disorder, which I still have.
And I have consequences from that as well. But, you know, I'm a very determined person.
I'll leave no rock unturned. So I had to do a lot of alternative medicine that's
actually illegal in this country.
But through my education with being poisoned and other people that had been
poisoned, like the post office people here in New York City who were poisoned
with anthrax, I learned how to fight it.
You know, with thieves as an example, it's an essential oil that kills anthrax.
And I did many, many detoxes. But one of them was a heavy, heavy,
high dose detox with thieves, which is an essential oil.
Yes. So no, it's, it's had ramifications that I still live with today.
Although I would say right today, I'm probably 80% better, but really for three
years, I was closer to death than life.
Wow. Has that experience alone made you bitter, angry at the Russians who did this to you?
I mean, like, I'm just trying to understand like your mindset and getting through
this and even where you are today.
So I think I was very upset with this particular person, especially when I heard
that he killed the salt of this earth death Chechen refugee who started a school
for other other deaf Chechen refugees and brutalized her,
like run over her body when she's running a race against terrorists.
I mean, it's just like outrageous.
I certainly was enraged and angry with what he did to me as well for a long time.
But I feel that my work here in the world and in my life is to overcome this
type of tragedy and this type of darkness that I think we're all all capable of, unfortunately,
but that I want to help people that are marginalized and ostracized and often
suffer from undiagnosed psychiatric illness to get the psychiatric illness that
they deserve and not to resort to retaliation and violence.
Like I could have tried to retaliate and I didn't. I mean, you know,
I mean, I did have an encounter with him, I should say, where he walked in on me in the bathroom.
So we were sharing a house. It was a general's house in Ingushetia,
which is the neighboring province from Chechnya.
And I was in the bathroom. He walked in on me in the bathroom and he told me to get out.
And I told him, don't talk to me like that. If you talk to me, you show me respect.
You don't talk that way. That's embarrassing.
And, you know, I refused to get out of the bathroom.
Yeah. So, I mean, I'm the type, probably not the wisest move.
You know, this man was barely five foot tall. He was like a Napoleon.
He's barely five foot tall.
He had an issue with his height. He was very angry.
He was very angry with the Chechens. They also project and complicate things.
For instance, he had told the man that I was with that the Chechens hated me.
And the Chechens loved me. Like I was always playing with the Chechen girls
and giving them like clothes and gifts and they were teaching me Russian lessons and Chechen lessons.
And so it's always like a projection. It's a denial, deflection and projection.
And I knew that Chechens knew exactly who he was. I could see it in their eyes.
And we had an interpreter, but I could see how they recoiled from him.
They knew exactly who he was and why it was there.
So, yeah, no. No, but he was telling the person I was with that they didn't
like me when they didn't like him.
So this is what they very much do. It's all projection and deflection, but...
No, I feel like I can't, I won't live my life with bitterness.
I feel like the paradox is that I had the spiritual awakening from being poisoned.
And what I learned was to slow down, to accept my vulnerabilities,
to accept that my body's aging and it's not perfect,
to accept that I am a human human being with frailties, but,
but yet I am interconnected to, to everyone in the world and what we do or don't do has consequences.
And I feel impassioned to try to decrease the gun violence that's happening in our world.
Just yesterday, I was on script news with the Kansas city Superbowl championship parade, mass shooting.
And, you know, ironically it was the six year year anniversary of the Parkland
shooting where 17 students and teachers were killed.
And that Parkland shooter suffered from hearing voices and was bullied and ostracized,
was given up by his, so his parents had died and he was adopted.
And here again is a kid who's unwanted, shuffled around and his biological mother
was the only one who stabilized him.
I mean, this is a kid that was was completely isolated and alone and bullied
and ostracized his stepbrother, also bullied him.
And in a moment, he chooses to
retaliate and, you know, probably regrets that for the rest of his life.
I mean, he, I listened to the videotape of him after the shooting, he did regret it.
So no, I just feel impassioned, more impassioned to, to help people in that
I won't live my life with bitterness or anger, because in my mind,
that's what this person wanted. I mean, he clearly wanted me dead.
And I think because I was in such incredible physical health and also because
I'm a medical doctor, I could put the medical pieces of the puzzle together.
I mean, it took me, so I was poisoned in 2005. 2010,
I had enough strength to begin to sit up in my computer and start investigating
my symptoms and then symptoms of people that had been poisoned with Anthrax. So our military.
Was vaccinated with anthrax. And many of the men died from heart attacks.
Many of the women developed very similar symptoms to me with chronic immunosuppression symptoms.
I had weird rash, horrible rashes, not feeling, you know, feeling like a car had hit you.
I mean, just devastatingly, no energy.
Many of my symptoms were similar. And yeah, I just, he had probably put the
poison in my food or drink.
So, yeah. And at the time I developed flu-like symptoms.
And then three days later I developed these severe symptoms and that's characteristic
of anthrax poisoning, which is you develop flu-like symptoms.
And then three days later, most people die.
And then it looks like food poisoning because by the time you think of anthrax,
so that's the other story here,
which which is anthrax, because it has now become a biological weapon.
Anthrax is a simple bacteria that is in the ground and that's found in sheep.
So often sheep herders get it from handling sheep, their skin.
And when people are diagnosed with anthrax poisoning, there currently is no test as a sequelae.
So it's only if you're acutely infected when you're septic, which means you
have an infection in your blood.
So that would have been when I was in Chechnya, you have to think about it,
which is most people aren't going to think about it unless you're in Russia
or in the Middle East where it's more endemic to the soil.
And then you have to draw the blood and culture the blood to look for anthrax.
So I actually found someone at the NIH in Bethesda, Maryland,
who was trying to get a blood test to detect anthrax many years after being poisoned.
And she said, after three years, you no longer had antibodies.
And I think by the time I found her, it was 2012.
And I didn't have antibodies for it. So, but I don't even know if she has marketed
that. This was all like research.
She was doing research with people who had been poisoned with anthrax,
like the post office people and myself.
Yes. You know, and Western doctors are ignorant with anthrax.
They don't know about it.
They misinformed me. I had the leading GI infectious specialist in Manhattan
say, oh, come into my office.
I'll test for it. And then he said, oh, wait, there is no test for it.
And so things like that, which was there.
Western doctors are ignorant when it comes to anthrax. And I really had to do
all this digging and research.
And it's in my book. And I published medical papers on it as well,
where I put the pieces of the puzzle together. And I realized the best medical
guess that was manmade anthrax. I should also say I had Rife testing.
So a Rife machine works on energy. So everything has energy.
Certain bacteria have a certain vibrational frequency.
So I had biological testing on a Rife machine, meaning from my hair,
morning sputum, and fingernails.
And she's the one that detected I had man-made anthrax all throughout my body.
And that was in, I believe that was in 2010. and 10.
So, and then I did more research to make sure that that was accurate.
Wow. Wow. You have definitely been through a lot because it was after that,
that you ended up having breast cancer, correct?
Yes. Yes. Yes. So 2001, I was a first responder.
2005, I was poisoned with anthrax, I believe. And then 2017,
yes, I developed breast cancer.
Yes. Yeah. And had a mastectomy. Yes.
Yeah. My goodness. My goodness. All of this then is what inspired you to write
the book that has brought us here today.
Yes, very much so. Tell me about the book.
Yes, I would love to. It's my baby. It's my labor of love.
I, you know, as a doctor, I didn't really know how to write.
So it was my passion. I could write psychoanalytically, which is very different
writing and medically, but not, not creative writing or for lay people writing.
It's an art. And so I went back to school.
I took classes at Sarah Lawrence, which is here in New York,
to write and learned how to write.
Initially, I didn't even know how to type or use the computer.
I remember I would handwrite everything and send it to this lovely man in the
Philippines who would type things for me.
So that's where I began which is at the very like basics here and I was determined
to write this book because like you and your story which is so inspiring and
has such grit and perseverance.
And love I wanted to write my book just to inspire one person to say look if
I can go through all of this and I have and I'm I'm still you know I'm not a
perfect person but I I'm a loving person I try to help my brothers and sisters.
I try to make a difference in the world.
And you can use adversity to transcend it to make you a better person.
And I really feel like, ironically, being poisoned was this paradoxical gift
where I changed as a person.
I couldn't push my body anymore the way I used to.
I couldn't super achieve anymore, really.
So really, I went from living in the phenomenal world, which is the materialistic
transactional world, more into the noumenal world,
which is more of the spiritual invisible world where what matters to me is being
connected with other people.
What matters to me is helping other people with depression or psychosis or loss
to transcend those feelings into joy, harmony, and bliss.
I found those things as a result of being poisoned. And I certainly didn't have
those, not harmony and joy.
I didn't really have those feelings before I was poisoned.
What I had was super achieving, feeling worthy, and then it all very quickly dissolving.
And I wrote my book to try to say, if you're suffering from mental illness, please get help.
Please get help. There are people that care like me.
Leave no rock unturned. Get help. There is a TED Talk.
Aaron Stark has this TED Talk called I Was Almost a School Mass Shooter.
And it talks about how he was bullied, ostracized. He was made fun of because
he was overweight. weight.
He had a family that constantly dislocated and he had to move from school to
school to school. So he couldn't make friends if he wanted to.
And his family didn't have the means to feed him well or to dress him in proper clothing.
He felt bitter and enraged and angry as we all were.
But then poor decision was planning to go to his high school and be a school
shooter. He went next door to say goodbye to his neighbor.
His neighbor looked in his eyes, saw something was really off,
said, hey, something's not right here. Come in.
I want to talk to you. Fed him food.
And this is his TED talk, Aaron Stark.
He said, because of that kindness, one simple act of kindness,
loving kindness, he didn't go to school and wasn't a mass shooter.
And this is what my book is about, how all of us in society are responsible
for every mass shooting, for any gun violence.
What we do or don't do has ramifications. If we worry about our personal safety,
and if we see someone who's being ostracized, shot, and bullied,
and don't reach out to that person, all you have to do is say, hi, how are you, smile,
show some just human kindness.
It doesn't have to be a lot that this can make the difference in someone's world
from making a really poor impulsive decision.
Yeah, absolutely. Remind us where we can find your book at.
Where's the best place for us to send anybody interested and remind us of the title.
Yeah. So the title is a mouthful. I tried to get it changed,
but my academic publishers Rutledge wouldn't let me change it.
But I'll say the whole title.
But if you remember Desire for Destruction and my name, Nina Serfolio on Amazon, it comes right up.
The name is Psychoanalytic and Spiritual Perspectives on Terrorism,
Desire for Destruction.
And if you remember Desire for Destruction, Nina Serfolio on Amazon, it comes right up.
OK, OK, perfect. Well, I will be sure that a link to directly to your book on
Amazon is left in the show notes for anybody interested.
Thank you, Kevin. Yeah, of course, of course.
And, you know, honestly, thank you so much for being here today,
for sharing your story and all the absolute just craziness that has comprised
your story. I mean, my goodness.
I mean, I listen to you think of it and I'm like, this sounds like some type
of diehard movie or something.
But, you know, it's just so it's your amazing outlook on life and the way that you see people,
the way that you see all the situation that makes you so amazing.
And I just appreciate you being here.
Well, thank you so much, Kevin. And I say right back at you because I'm inspired
by your incredible grit, perseverance, beauty, humanity, and everyone can learn as well.
To be inspired to overcome such incredible adversity that I can't even imagine, actually.
Like you just, you astound me. Your beauty, your love, your kindness,
what you're doing on your podcast.
If we have one person today, I'm honored. People like you is what inspires me and keeps me going.
Oh, well, thank you so much. That honestly, honestly means so much to me. coming from you.
I appreciate that so much.
Again, thank you so much for being here. Thank you, Kevin. I hope you have a
beautiful day. And it was my honor to spend my birthday with you.
That's right. Absolutely. Yes. We all have to remember wishing you a happy birthday and my goodness.
And for you listening today, my hope is as always that you have been entertained,
but more so that you've been impacted.
Something said today that will impact your life from this day forward.
Remember, if you like today's episode, be sure to share it with a friend,
spread the news of this incredible woman who we just got to hear her story.
Always in the hope that it will leave an impact on your life.
My name is Kevin Lowe, and this is Great Grace and Inspiration.
Get out there and enjoy the day.