The importance of having regular preventative medical checkups can cover a lot of different things. But It's kind of a funny question for me to answer, because I don't know that I'd necessarily agree with having to be checked up medically regularly. I think it's important for younger children. The importance of having younger children tracked regularly is making sure that they're getting enough nutrition and exercise, they're learning healthy habits. They are outside getting fresh air, making sure that they're having a safe environment at home making sure, like I said before, teaching them about good nutrition, making sure they're getting the nutrition that they need, to grow and be healthy and to be strong.

So I think for kids, it's more important. A lot of people here it's kind of 50/50 about immunization. Some people believe I'm immunizations for children are important. Some people think that they are dangerous, but whichever side you fall on, it is important to talk to a medical professional and decide what the right courses for your family, and you could do that during regular medical checkups.

For adults, it probably is. It's important to, like, for women you can screen for breast cancers and things like that. Cervical cancers during your yearly, well, visits to your doctor for men saying with prostate cancer.

So it is. It is a good thing, and it's important to just kind of keep on top of those seemingly routine checkups that can actually end up preventing a more serious disease down the line. Actually had a brother in law who went in for a medical checkup just a yearly checkup, and they were feeling his throat and his thyroid felt funny. And he was actually diagnosed with cancer in his thyroid and made a full recovery, which is great. And the doctors had said he was very lucky that he had gone in for his medical checkup and that his general practitioner discovered that. So just keeping on top of your overall health is important, and you could do that through your regular medical checkups.

So, there is a common illness here in Utah, and it's probably a common illness in most places. But strep throat is common here. The strep infection can actually infect the body anywhere, but I seem to hear about strep throat more often here than any other type of strep infection. But the symptoms are having a very sore throat, difficulty swallowing or eating food or drinking.

A lot of times thief throat is very red, and there could be white puss pockets on the back of the throat and in the tonsils and with strep throat that I've experienced you get a very, very high fever between 102 degrees and even up to 104 degrees. When I had strep throat, I had it at 104 and you can have body aches and chills with that fever. But if you go to the doctor, usually you can get a strep test, and they can give you an antibiotic that is usually taken orally. You swallow the antibiotic, and usually within 24 to 48 hours, your symptoms will subside and you'll feel better, and you'll be able to return to school or work and are no longer considered contagious when you no longer have a fever for at least 24 to 48 hours. Sometimes it can take up to a week for the antibiotics to work.

But for the most case, it happens to take effect pretty quickly, and you can return to normal life fairly quickly. But, yeah, I think that that's probably a common illness that is around Utah. I see it a lot in kids because they share everything. So you know, you share a drink with a kid who has strep throat, you're probably gonna get strep throat. It's a pretty contagious illness, and so we see it quite often with younger kids in this area, and teenagers who share everything.

So I'm going to tell you guys about a time when I was very sick. This was about 10 years ago, back when I was a young in college and I was in class and I started feeling a little bit off. I started having fever and chills while I was in class and feeling very lightheaded. So I asked my professor if I could go home, which they let me. So I got in my car and I drove to my apartment. And I took some ibuprofen and I tried to take a hot bath, but the fever just kept getting higher.

And then I started getting these weird, like, stomach cramps that would come and go every few minutes and they would get really intense, and then they would go away and then I would throw up. And then the stomach cramps moved from just being in my stomach to being in my back as well. And so I was just throwing up constantly. I couldn't go more than 10 minutes without throwing up. My fever was high. I was lightheaded. I couldn't breathe very well because of the pain in my back and in my stomach.

And so at that time I called my older brother, who lived in the same city that I did, then was going to the same university and he drove to my apartment and he had to pick me up because I didn't have enough strength to walk and he had to carry me to the car. We went to the emergency room in Phoenix, Arizona, and I had to wait for a while and they made me throw up in this little tiny bucket that they had. It was like I would throw up once in the bucket would be full, and I kept filling up the bucket, but they finally got me back into the back and they had to do a bunch of tests and they did some CT (Computed Tomography) scans and some ultrasounds, and in the end they diagnosed me with two kidney stones.

So I had stones in my kidneys, which was causing the pain in my back and in my stomach, and I was given medication for that and went and changed my diet because apparently if you are dehydrated, not drinking enough water, you could get kidney stones. So I now drink plenty of water, and I haven't had any issues since.

What were the main lessons that I learned from my parents? I think the main lessons that I learned from them were to really work on creating good relationships through loving other people by being empathetic to their needs. And if I had the power within me that I should do what I can to always help another person. When we were younger, we had a lot of different people come live with us, live with my parents. Our home was kind of this open home for people who are needing support.

If people were needing shelter, if people were needing help, my home was that, and as a kid, that was actually really hard for me because I felt protective of my space. But now, being an adult and realizing that there was a lot of power that my parents had to help other people to. Sometimes they were teenagers in our neighborhood who were having a hard time. Sometimes they were family members, and sometimes they were just people who may need that extra space because they were having construction done on their home.

Or maybe there had been a fire or flooding in their home that made it so it wasn't livable at the time. My parents would always say, come live with us. We would have people in our homes for weeks and months at a time. So that was a really good lesson that I learned from my parents to always share what we have to give freely, because when we do that, they're always going to be a good benefit that comes back whether it's just better relationships with people.

Or maybe there could be that satisfaction of knowing that you we're able to help someone else. Sometimes we call it the currency of goodwill, knowing that you've been able to help someone makes you feel richer in life and more abundant in life. So that's one of the best lessons I learned from my parents.

Are my parents overprotective? No. They're not. Similar to their approach to parenting, which was more relaxed, they felt like they could really trust us. That they let us make our own choices and also experience our own consequences. They tried to protect us by teaching us good principles by setting a really good example for us by being the people who help others, who are kind to others, and who follow the guidelines and the personal value system that they've created for themselves.

They were able to really help us and guide us as youth so that we could follow a similar path.

There are times that we might be heading down away that would lead to poor consequences that they didn't want us to experience. So, in those times, my parents would have a small intervention with us where they would talk to us and say, this is where I see this going. Are you prepared to face that consequence? And usually the answer is no. I don't want that consequence. So they would give us a lot of guidance and feedback and help and then encouragement to make a better choice.

And that really helped us a lot of times also because we had a good relationship with them. When we did feel like we have made bad choices, they were always a really safe person, in a safe place to come to our home was always felt safe, so they didn't have to be so overprotective of us because I think they had a lot of confidence that they were teaching us really good principles and because they knew us and we had a good relationship with them. They trusted us. They hoped, and really believed that if something bad were to happen, that they could, we could trust them enough to come to them to ask for help. And both, we could get put back on a better track than where we might have been otherwise.

I think my parents were able to be more flexible on the rules because we had a good relationship. So we trusted each other. My parents trusted that I wouldn't do anything very bad or very disobedient or very naughty because we had a good relationship and they knew that I would try to choose what was best and what was right, and I almost always did.

The best thing about my parents. The thing that I really love and appreciate about my parents is that they are filled with a lot of love and patient. So I grew up in a family of eight kids, and we were all born really close together. So between my oldest sister and my youngest brother, there are only 12 years between all of us. So when we were growing up, we we're kind of wild and in a little silly and probably a lot to handle for my parents. But my dad and mom never made us feel like we were a burden, that we were trouble, that we were so naughty or disobedient.

They tried to fill our home with a lot of love, with a lot of music and with a lot of lessons that people and relationships are always more important than things. Because when we were younger, we were really hard on the possessions that my parents had, like cars or toys or furniture, anything that we could get our hands on seemed to get destroyed quickly because we just weren't very careful. And we were also just little, so when we were being a little too careless or a little too rambunctious. There were times when things would get broken or scratched or ruined, and I never heard my parents yells at me. I never heard them fight with each other. I only remember kindness and patience and a lot of love and support from my parents. So when I think of the best less than that my parents taught me, it was this that people are always more important that than things. Things can be replaced. But those relationships are harder to repair once they're broken.

What do my parents do for a living? My dad is an advertiser. What an advertiser does is they help people who are trying to sell a product or a service. So for most of his life, he has worked with different companies and businesses, helping them right advertisements that would then be used in print or over the radio, or on a billboard on the side of the freeway. So he's worked his whole life doing that. He used to own a small business. And in the business, he hired an artist.

This artist would draw and write funny things, maybe like a comic or a picture to help depict whatever was being sold. But when the world went more digital and there were more graphic design, artist and things went to computer, my dad had to let his artists go. He also didn't really have a need for his salesmen because everything was done online. And so my dad was able to do most of that by himself. So he spent his whole career working with other people and trying to help them sell and did that through a lot of recordings, a lot of writing and selling the business that way.

My mom, she is a teacher. She taught a class called home economics. What that means is she would help kids, more like teenagers, learn how to cook food, learn how to sew, learn how to do things like nutrition. Learn how to take care of children, things like that, things that will help you run a home when you're ready to do that. She did that when she was first married and then stopped teaching so that she could have a family. And then she picked it up again.

My mom is a really talented seamstress, which means she knows how to make clothes. She knows how to so and so for about the last 15 years, she's been working for a fabric store, where she helps people learn how to use their sewing machines and also to learn how to quilt, which means putting little tiny pieces of fabric together to make a bigger pattern. She's a really talented at this.