243 Deanna Shrodes, D.Min. (Part 1)
/Haley: You are listening to Adoptees On the podcast where adoptees discuss the adoption experience. I'm Haley Radkey. Our guest is Dr. Deanna Shrodes, a minister and well-known writer of the Adoptee Restoration blog and multiple books back in 2019. Deanna and I discussed the challenges of searching for her father and coming up with false leads and dead ends over and over four years.
Well, today she's back to share her heartwarming and heartbreaking story of finding her father Gus Nicholas after a lengthy search. Her story is so unbelievable that it has gone viral with millions watching on CBS mornings, we talk about the joy and grief and messiness of all of it. I wanna give a trigger warning that we do discuss suicidal ideation in this episode.
This is part one of a two-part series on Deanna's story. Next week we'll finish her story and share our recommended resources with you. Before we get started, I wanted to personally invite you to join our Patreon adoptee community today over on adopteeson.com/community, which helps support you and also the shows to support more adoptees around the world.
Let's listen in.
I'm so pleased to welcome back to Adoptees on Dr. Deanna Shrodes. Welcome, Deanna.
Deanna Shrodes: Thank you, Haley. I'm so excited to be here with you. I just love hearing your voice on your podcast, and of course, I love to have the privilege of being with you here on this podcast myself.
Haley: Well, this is your second appearance on the show and you were on in 2019 and at the time we talked about your biological mother, your relationship with her for 20 years, and then she told you she was gonna take your father's name to the grave and died very shortly thereafter.
And so you had this decade long search for your biological father and we were talking through in that episode, you can go back and listen, it's episode 124, talking about some of the matches you had here and there that were very hopeful, and even you looked similar to one of the gals that you tested with and thought you had a relationship, you thought you had found the family, and then it wasn't to be. In 2022 something really miraculous happened. So would you share that story with us?
Deanna Shrodes: Yes. Well, I had, this has been such a long journey, as you know, and when my mother passed away, which was literally months after she said, I'm going to take his name to the grave. She passed away. I was devastated. I literally did something I had never been done before, which was taking a 40 day leave of absence from work. I was so upset. About all of this because it felt hopeless. It felt like this is totally hopeless. She has died, taken his name to the grave.
She tells me that no one who's alive knows what his name is. And sure enough, anyone I ask in the family would say, or among friends or anybody, you know, we know nothing. So all I knew was that he was Greek. She told me he was Greek, but of course I didn't know that until I took a DNA test. She told me he was Greek.
She told me that he was older than her. She told me that he had black, wavy hair and that was it. That was all I had to go on. And so I quickly took the DNA tests at all the, you know, most popular sites like Ancestry and 23 and Me and Family Tree and all of that. And I was really depressed when they came back.
The only great thing when they came back was that I could see that she had told me the truth that he was Greek because I was, you know, overwhelmingly half Greek. It basically showed I was 50% Greek and then I had all these Virginia American matches on the other side. And so that I knew for sure. But that was it because all the other matches were like fifth through eighth cousins as far as on the Greek side.
And then I had tons of matches on the maternal side. So we really had nothing to go on. And this is the part where a lot of people could really get skeptical, and I understand. But I began to pray about it. I was already praying about it, but I got really, really serious about praying about this, Haley, because I just felt like outside of a miracle, there's no hope.
I, I sincerely felt without a miracle of God, there is no hope. So I started praying about this and I just said, you know, I, I totally believe all this stuff that I teach other people I to, I mean, I honestly believe all of this stuff that I have been teaching for so long. And I said, God, I just believe you can tell me his name.
And after about three intense sessions of prayer, I sense this name. Many people will say, well, are you telling me you heard an audible voice? No. Are you telling me that uh, you know, someone appear, an angel appeared to you? No. What I'm telling you is that I sense this. All I can say is I sense this name just drop into my mind.
Just like any thought would drop into your mind, just like, oh, I need to go get a burger from McDonald's or whatever. You know, you have this thought drop into your mind. I had this thought drop into my mind and this, this voice in my mind simply said, your father's name is Gus. So I often tell people these things that happen to me like this, uh, partly because, you know, first of all, you know, I could, I could be wrong and I have been wrong before, but I also could have really heard the voice of God.
And I, I want absolute witnesses to that. So, I told my husband of course, and I told some other friends, like Gail Lechner Lechner, who's on my search team and some other people, but I also told some total unbelievers, like my closest adoptee friend is Laura Dennis, and you know, she's in heart of our community and she's also a writer.
And, uh, she's a total believer. She is an atheist. And I will never forget standing at my stove stirring spaghetti. And her and I are on the phone and you know, we talk all the time on the phone too. And I said, Laura, I just need to tell you something that just happened to me. And you know, she's taking care of her kids and I'm stirring spaghetti.
And I said, the Lord told me my father's name is Gus. And she's what, What? So I literally took her to the Bible, even though she doesn't believe in the Bible. I took her to the Bible, showed her the scripture where it in first Corinthians 12, where it talks about that, you know, God will still tell us things today and through the gifts of the Holy Spirit, and I'm trying to explain this to her, and of course she calls it something else.
She calls it the collective consciousness or something like that. And I said, well, I believe that that's the Holy Spirit. And she says, well, I believe you. I believe you. I, you know, I, you know, you're my best friend. I totally believe you. So I'm not sure whether she thought it was God, but she did think that I had heard something.
So anyway, I told people, believers and unbelievers alike, this voice spoke to me. My father's name is Gus. And then, I know this sounds a little crazy, but I had put together my search team and they're called Finding Mr. Greek. And I had started this on Facebook. It was a secret Facebook group. And, uh, Laura's in that group.
And, uh, some other people that are really key in that group are Regina Ziland, Lynn Grub. There's Gail Lechner, other people that are in this group, and I told the people that were helping me search at the time, Priscilla Sharps another person from the first mother community, she was helping me search at the time and I said, I know that you might think I'm crazy and I know that you might think that I'm wasting your time, especially if you don't believe the same way that I do.
I said, but I feel like my father, his name is Gus. I feel like God told me that his name is Gus. And you know, I didn't have one friend laugh at me. And this is so key, Haley, because it's really important that even if we sound a little kooky at times, that our friends don't laugh at us and that they support us.
And not even Laura, who's an atheist. She didn't laugh at me. She said, I'm, I'm listening. I'm understanding. I, I don't know what this is, but I believe you. So we searched for a man named Gus and we decided, that it would be the best to go 10 years younger and 10 years older than my mother. You know, to go a 20 year time span.
And you know, then we felt certain that we would find him if his name was Gus. And so there were a lot less Greek people in Virginia at the time, and you know, less people had immigrated there. And so we started looking for anybody named Gus or also Constantine, Constantinos, Costas. Those are all also Greek names for Gus.
And we were searching for anybody in that age span that was living in the area at the time. And when we would find them, we would rule them out. Sometimes we would rule them out, like if we found out that like they were serving in the military overseas or something like that during the year that I was conceived or other things like that, that would be absolute proof that they were, or maybe just other mitigating circumstances.
But anyway, if, if we could find them or their family member, I, I would ask them to take a DNA test and that I would pay for it. And we ran out of people, Haley, none of these Gus candidates worked out. None of them. And so it was depressing because I really did feel as well that, well, maybe I really don't, you know, hear from God or know God that well after all.
I mean, I don't know. We were back to square one and we kept looking and we had leads that we followed. We would find people in the Richmond area that were Greek that maybe looked, you know, favored me. We found photos online of people that favored me. We found people that had, you know, gone to school with my birth mother or other people in the area that may be connected to her or to her family that we would call and also ask them to test, and I would pay for it.
and I paid for a lot of tests. We, we tested a lot of people and every time they would come up that not a match to me and every time that, that would not be a match to me, I would just be devastated again, all over again. But we kept going and nothing really of consequence happened for the next eight years.
And Wow. That was really, you know, very hard. We did have really a quite a shock when, sometime later after I had already told everyone that God had told me this. I called my aunt who was very close to my mother and I said, listen, she's been gone for a while now. I've waited what I feel is a respectable amount of time.
Could you please tell me anything about my father? Could you please tell me anything? Anything, anything at all that you recall? And she says, well, I'm getting older and my memory is not what it used to be, but if memory serves me correctly, his name was Gus. And I just about fell off my chair because yes, you know, I did hear that voice, but wow, just having my aunt say that was huge.
But then it was also extremely depressing because we'd already looked at every Gus and they weren't panning out. So eight years went by and then that brought us to May 11th, 2022, not even a year ago. And I was on a three hour leadership zoom call with this leadership group called the Stronger Leadership Cohort that I lead.
And I had brought a friend of mine on that call to teach that day. Her name is Pastor Stephanie Smith. She's from Washington State. She was teaching, and I know this might sound, again, kind of kooky, but I'm just telling it like it is. That Stephanie said to all of us on that call. She said, I want all of you to take a piece of paper out right now on this Zoom call, and I want you to write a question to God, and it's just gonna be between you and God.
We're not gonna share these. So I took out my paper and I wrote, and I still have that paper today. It, it just says, when are you gonna help me find my father? And then my friend Christie, who's a pastor who was on that same call, she, on her paper, she had three questions she had. And then the third one was, will you please help Deanna find her father?
And I have a lot of people that go, what is the big deal with that? Like, didn't you already pray about this a thousand times? And you know what? What's the significance of that? And I always say, first of all, the Bible says, don't stop asking. Don't stop seeking. Don't stop knocking. Keep asking, keep praying.
And secondly, the people you surround yourself with are really key. The people that you surround yourself with have a lot to do with where you're gonna go in life and how you're gonna do. My friend Christie cared. She knew that even after all these years of me talking about it again and again and again, my friends could have been so sick of me talking about this, and especially my friends that are not adopted, and Christie's not adopted.
She really cared about, wow, this really hurts Deanna, that she doesn't know who her father is. We need to keep praying for her. So really significant to me that I had friends that cared, and so we went through that Zoom call. And when I got off of there, Regina Ziland, who was really, at that time, her and Gail were kind of like the lead people on this search and they were working on my behalf daily.
I mean, they would check my DNA things daily to just to see all day long, like if something popped up. And when I got off that call, Regina called me and she says, Deanna, I, I could not wait for you to get off this call, your Zoom call because you're not gonna believe this, but we should know within an hour who your father is.
She said, you have a very close match and we should be able to drill down on this and know who he is in about an hour's time. And I was like, what? And sure enough, I had a first cousin match and then the team online, they started researching him, building out his family tree, looking at everything they could about him.
And very quickly they discovered that he is an X match, an X DNA match. And if you have high enough centimorgans, I believe it's called, if I'm saying this right, if you have a high enough, centimorgans, then you can pretty much be assured that that person comes through that matches Mother's Line. So this, this was a definite, it was high enough that it was an X match with my cousin, and that meant that his mother's brother had to be my father, had to be my father.
And then we just had to wonder, how many brothers does she have? How complicated is this gonna be to drill down on this? And we were elated when they, with sure enough, within an hour's time, they had built out that family tree. She only had one brother and her brother's name is Gus. It was Haley. It was just the most amazing moment to stare at that tree and to know that, oh my gosh.
And I know that people probably wonder, how did you miss him? Well, we were, we were off by a few years because we discovered that when I knew that when I was born, my mother was 20 years old. I didn't realize my father was so much older. She was 20 and he was 36. And we only went on a 10 year span and they are 16 years apart.
So that's how we missed our Gus. My Gus that's how we missed. Yeah, within just a few hours time, not even a few hours, I had reached out to the first cousin match on email and he said, I'm in Greece right now. Can I, can I call you? And he called me and he said, I think you might be my Uncle Gus's daughter.
And I said, I believe that too. And he said, what else do you know? And I said, I know absolutely nothing other than that. And that he had black, wavy hair. That's all I know. And he said, okay. And, and you know, would you like to know some more? And I, yes, absolutely. Then we just took it from there. And that led into me finding out that unbelievably, all this time, Hailey, I thought I was finding a grave.
Too much time has gone by and I thought for sure he would be dead. But I was absolutely stunned to know that my father was alive and that he was 91 years old and that he never got married and that he never had any other children, and that I was his only child in the world.
Haley: It is the miraculous story.
Deanna Shrodes: Mind blowing.
Haley: And he was living in the United States.
Deanna Shrodes: Yes, he was here in Virginia, never left the same city. Matter of fact, never left the same house. I mean, he's where he was all along. He was at the same spot all along when. He and my mother conceived me same spot. He's never moved.
Haley: I wrote down something that you shared, that you're a biological mom's partner at the time had said to you, saying that your mom, speaking of your father said something like, I could have danced all night with him. And when I re-listened to that interview I had with you Yes. And you shared that, I thought, oh my gosh. We didn't know it at the time, but that was also a clue.
Deanna Shrodes: Yes.
Haley: So anyway, you come to meet him.
Deanna Shrodes: So I find out that my, he was 91, never married, never had any children, and that he was a very well-known, popular teacher, dance instructor and performer in the Richmond, Virginia area. He didn't just stay there all the time where that was always his home base. He also worked in New York City. He worked in Los Angeles. He won many Fred Astaire awards all over the world for both performing, and then he won many awards for teaching.
So a lot of people in the area knew him and my stepfather had no idea who he was, or he would've told me. Something to know about my stepfather, he, he loved my mother fiercely, but he also had a real soft spot for me because we were in the same situation.
He was never told who his father was and he knew how, how much that means to a person and how much that can hurt when they don't know. And he would plead with her, please tell her, please do the right thing. Please tell her. And he told me, despite how much I love your mother, if I knew that name, Deanna, I would tell you.
And especially after she died, he would say, Deanna, if I knew, if I knew, I would tell you. And he didn't know that my father was a dancer professionally. He just knew that my mother told him, I could have danced all night. And the very first night she and I were reunited, she said, oh, he was my Greek God.
That's what I called him, my Greek God. And she told my stepfather I could have danced all night. And then he said, you know, everything was you know, she didn't want you to find him and she didn't give you any help or any information. But the moment you said you were doing DNA testing, it was like as if she started screaming, get me off this stance floor. Get me off the dance floor.
Yeah, so the reason for all that now becomes clear. He was a professional dancer and it, it was just amazing getting to know him. Within less than 24 hours, I was on FaceTime with him, and it's an even more miraculous story because he was in a nursing home at the time, and I came to find out from the nursing home staff what had happened was he was pretty much alone. He lived alone and he was just looking after himself and he didn't show up to a doctor's appointment. And his wonderful doctor, I will always thank God for her at V.C.U., did a wellness check and they came to the house, and I don't go into all the details on this except for just a few close friends privately, just for his own dignity.
But he was, he was on the floor. He had taken a fall and he was in terrible, terrible condition. Such bad condition. He went to the hospital by ambulance. He stayed there for the next two months where they were just trying to get him well enough to go to a nursing home, and adult protective services had taken over because he was by himself and he was insisting on going back home by himself.
And they said that he couldn't because he was, it was too dangerous to do that, and he had no one to take care of him. So they said, unless a miracle would happen, you're gonna be in this nursing home the rest of your life. And he was so depressed. He hated that, absolutely hated it, but because of the dire condition that he was found in, that was what needed to happen.
So the very next day, May the 12th, I FaceTimed with him and he instantly accepted me and knew who I was. There was no doubt in his mind, he, it wasn't so much the DNA. It wasn't so much that he was told right away that he looked just like me. It wasn't any of that. It was, he knew he had a relationship with my mother.
He knew they had conceived a child in 1966. He knew all this, and so he knew. He knew this was not a some fake thing or whatnot, even though we would go on to take a home kit DNA n a real quick first, and then we ended up taking a legal third party DNA test that, you know, came back absolutely a match.
He believed it from second one. Second one, he believed it. I never doubted it and welcomed my FaceTime call, and I didn't know it at the time, but he's not a crier, he's not real emotional and he got real emotional on that call and, I thought at first, okay, I need to back off here. And I said, Gus, I've known that I was coming for you.
I've been coming for you for over a decade through DNA testing and before that, you know, searching for you in my mind, and as I think probably all adoptees do with our, with our parents, and I said I've known I was coming, but you didn't. And I can see you're getting real emotional. And I said, do you need a minute or do you want some time?
And we can come back to this later. We can have a phone call. And he just said, how soon can you come? That was how he responded to that question, how soon can you come? And we just continued talking as long as we could. You know, we, we talked constantly after that. He didn't have a phone. And we had to rely on the kindness of others who had a cell phone or we had to rely on the people at the nursing home that would come with an iPad and put us on FaceTime together.
But every single time, we never wanted to hang up. And I remember even on one call he said to me, well, I guess we have to hang up sometime. And it was always hard to hang up. It was always hard to say goodbye. You know, we, all we wanted to do was just talk nonstop. And then of course that led to me pretty quickly going there in person to see him and to meet him in person for the first time.
Haley: I know that so many of us just need to have our answers and it eats away not knowing where you came from.
Deanna Shrodes: Mm-hmm.
Haley: So do you have a sense of how that shifted for you, the instant you saw the name on the screen from the Search Angels to the first call, and he actually wants you to come. Do you have a sense of how that actually impacted you, like emotionally, psychologically?
Deanna Shrodes: I don't know that you and I have talked about this on the last call. Our last time that I was on Adoptees On. It instantly changed me. It instantly impacted me. I had told my husband for 35 years, cuz that's how long we've been married, and then two years of dating before that. And he's seen me struggle with this, our whole relationship.
And I promised him way back in my twenties, if I could just meet my biological parents, everything would change. And I would settle down in such a way that, you know something, this, this restlessness inside of me would instantaneously settle down. And I knew he was skeptical because he saw how bad it was.
He lived with me every day. And this was an everyday thing. And when I met my biological mother, it did settle down about 50% it, it did largely settle down. He saw a dramatic change in me when I reunited, but there was still a big element of restlessness. So much so that I, even though I'm a minister and have been for all these years, even though I'm a leader who's even had success. I don't say that to brag.
I say it for the context of you understanding of everyone understanding the depth of this. Even though I had a lot of successes under my belt, and many people even in my field would say, oh, Deanna has so many open doors. And she's so confident and she does so many incredible things.
I was plagued with suicidal ideation. It was something I struggled with for all these years, and my husband in particular, that was a huge weight that he carried. When I had a DNA test that was not a match a couple years ago, he walked into our room the day I got that back and it was not a match, and I spiraled down into one of those periods of despair.
And it's important to note, you know, I've had various Christians who I am in relationship with that say, well, couldn't you just pray? Couldn't you just seek God? And he's going to take these feelings away? Oh my gosh, you know, did they not think I did that? You know, hello, I have prayed.
I have laid on the floor. I have cried. I have sung worship songs. I have gone to retreats. I have had people pray for me. I've done all these things, and I've truly, truly, truly sought God over this. But I could not just pray this away. And my husband walked in the room, turned on the lights, and begged me to stay alive, begged me.
He started naming like 50 people that would be devastated if I was gone. I know that's probably not the best way to get somebody to, to not leave this world, but it, he was desperate. He was just standing there naming all these names, begging me not to leave the planet and saying, you know, this is how this person would react.
And babe, they love you. They love you so much, and please, you know, please, please, just for our sake if nothing else. The bottom line is this, Haley, that when I found out who Gus was, and then especially when I came into a relationship with him, that was instantaneously changed in my life.
Now, I know people can say, well, you know, it's only been even now, it hasn't been a year.
How do you really know that? This was the revelation to me. I know I'm skipping ahead, but. You know, Gus and I had time together and he's, you know, he's passed away now and I'm sure we'll go back and kind of revisit those, those happenings in a little bit. But he passed away. And I remember when hospice came and said, Hey, we're on our way over and we've got another staff me member on the way over and you need to gather up the drugs and we're going to destroy them.
And I can remember gathering all that up. And you see, before when I would have these thoughts, it would be about emptying out my medicine cabinet and just mixing a bunch of stuff together. And in my worst moment of grief of saying goodbye to Gus, I mean it was, it was the hardest thing, and when they told me to gather about all that up, there wasn't even one moment where I thought about, Hey, this would be so easy. I could just gather all this up and go out of this world because a person I love so deeply is gone and it hurts so bad.
Did it hurt? Yes, it still hurts. I told you that he's only been gone a short time. Still hard. I'm still going through the grief processing, grief counseling, but never once, never once since the day I gathered up those drugs to destroy and even now, I've never, never, never had one more thought of suicide. It's been total peace. Total peace.
Even in all the pain of having to say goodbye to him. The fact that I finally knew who he was and knew him took that restlessness and that pain away, and I've never struggled with another thought. And that's what's kind of proved it to me.
I'm not an expert, I'm not a psychologist, but it was just mind blowing to me how that struggle in my life was gone. It was. It's never come back and the restlessness, it's gone. It's completely gone. So that's how it's impacted me in such a way. It's, it's changed my whole life.
And again, I know I'm skipping ahead here a bit, but my husband is not emotional. And sometimes to a point where I'm like, what's wrong with you? And I've seen so many people die. He hasn't even shed a tear. He's, he just doesn't get worked up. And the night that Gus passed away and they were taking him out and they paused in the living room and said, would you like to see him one more time?
And before we take him? And I said, yes. And I didn't think my husband was gonna come in. He's a pastor, but believe it or not, he, he doesn't go up to the casket. Even at, uh, it's, it's weird. Even at viewings and funerals, he avoids the casket and he just goes to the pulpit and does a service, and then he greets the family, walks, walks down, greets the family, but he never goes to the casket.
I'm thinking, Larry is never gonna come to this gurney. He is never gonna come to the casket. He's not gonna do any of that. As I was saying goodbye to Gus, my husband was standing, I didn't know it, but when I, when I lifted up and I was, I was holding him and hugging him. And when I stood up, my husband was standing over me and he was weeping, weeping, weeping.
And I, I, I just, I didn't understand it cause I'd never seen it before. And then as they wheeled him out, my husband went to the front steps of our house. And as they were leaving, he was just on the front steps, bent over and he was just weeping. And he came back in and I said, who stole my husband? Like, where, where have they taken my husband?
Cuz I've never seen you do any of this before. And he said, this is about 15% Gus, and it's about 85% you. And I said, what are you talking about? And he said, Deanna meeting that man changed everything for you. And thereby it changed everything for me. It changed everything for our marriage. It changed everything for our world.
Him saying yes to you, him opening his arms to you and welcoming you into his life, changed it so that I never, ever have to stand over a bed again and say, babe, we really need you to stay in the world. He said, all of this has changed because he welcomed you in. And he, he loved him. He, um, they had so many good times together.
They had such a great relationship. He said, don't get me wrong, I'm gonna miss him like crazy. But he said, I'm crying so hard because he's changed your life and I'm the one that lives with you every day. And I see it. I know for a fact this has completely transformed your life.
And so moving beyond the loss of Gus has really affected Larry a lot as well.
Haley: Thank you. Appreciate you sharing that.
Deanna Shrodes: I don't think I've ever cried this much on a podcast.
Haley: I told you before we got on, I've been crying all morning. I had a funeral this weekend as well, so. The, the grief is just like at the surface, you know? And, um, you messaged me, I think in June of 2022 saying you wanted to come and share about finding Gus and come back on the podcast.
And I did not message you back . I, I was like, yeah, yeah, for sure. For sure. And then I did not want to impose and take one second away from your time with your dad because as you kept sharing on Facebook all the stories about Gus and you know, your story has gone literally worldwide viral because of your decision to bring him home and care for him.
Deanna Shrodes: Yes.
Haley: You've been sharing through, through months and months and months. And I was like, she's not, I'm not taking one second of her time from her dad. So anyway.
Deanna Shrodes: I appreciate that. Yeah, I little did. I know we would have such a short time.
Haley: Yes. And you, you had a battle, I don't know how much you wanna go into that or not, but you had a battle to take him out of his nursing home, because of, we'll just say greed from, you know, one person at the nursing home to bring him home.
Deanna Shrodes: Yeah. So we, of course we met in person. Just talked and talked and talked, and I was able to share my faith with him. You know, I don't know how deeply you wanna delve into this, but you know, we prayed together and I found myself just not only getting to know my father for the first time, but even strangely enough, you know, leading him, you know, in a spiritual journey and.
Wow. It was, it was a lot. And then it became clear, you know, how miserable he was there. Well, first of all, my boss was so amazing. Is so amazing. And he was letting me just go up there constantly and see Gus and I would work from the road. I would work from a plane. I would work from my car as my husband was driving us there.
I would work in the hotel rooms, you know, but I could see this is just not sustainable. Gus right away wanted me to just move there and be with him. And I said, you know, Gus, I have a husband, I have a job. And so I just kept going up there to see him and spend time with him and spend days and weeks at a time.
And it just wasn't sustainable to keep doing this long term. And I wanted to be with him every single day. I didn't know how much time we had. He was 91 and. So the decision, it came to a decision where I realized, you know, we wanna spend every second together because we have been kept apart for so long.
We don't wanna miss a moment together. I have to keep my family intact. I have to keep my job intact, but I, I wanna be with my father. I wanna be with him every day. So the decision was made to bring him to be with me in Florida and everyone was so excited about that. His doctor was over the moon about it.
So happy. Adult Protective Services was super happy. A lot of the people in the nursing home were super happy and one person, the financial administrator was not happy at all cause they would lose a lot of money by Gus leaving and. So, you know, on that, on that aspect, I was fought. You know, she never accepted that I was Gus's real family.
She couldn't imagine. In fact, she said this, you know, don't you see how crazy this is? Like this is a stranger. You don't know this man? And I said, well, I'm sure this would seem crazy if you didn't realize that, first of all, he is literally my father and I have a legal DNA test to prove that. And I've been searching for him for a super long time and have proof of that and I've been longing for him for all this time. And he accepts me and we wanna be together.
And she thought it was the craziest thing that anybody supporting this has lost their marbles. She said over, you know, months of time, she said he's gonna get sick of you and you're gonna get sick of him. And it's, this is just a bad situation here waiting to happen and your strangers and blah, blah, blah.
So she fought me on it. She fought me on it a lot, and we ended up, I, I fought it just Larry and I ourselves doing what we knew to do to fight this battle. And I could see it eventually, and, and again, the clock is ticking and I don't know how much time we have. I didn't know whether Gus is gonna last a month or five years, and I wanted to have him as quickly as possible.
And so we went ahea and sought legal counsel. We got attorneys and then, we won that battle and with the help of his doctor as well. Cuz his doctor 100% supported us. She was so excited. The staff at his his doctor's office was separate from the nursing home, but they would still come to examine him and, and, uh, check in on him.
And his doctor's office, they were just thrilled beyond belief that this had happened cuz they knew how miserable he was before and how happy he was now and how much he anticipated being with his family now that he found us. And so June 26th, we brought him home. And he needed full-time care. The reason, even though he was so unhappy at the nursing home, he did need to be somewhere where he had full-time care because they were right.
They were right about the fact that he could not care for himself. He was a danger to himself if he had tried to do that. So he needed absolute 100%, 24 hour a day care, and he was bedridden. And we brought him home the 26th of July and I became his full-time caregiver. I still had to work my job and, you know, the first month my boss was so wonderful.
He allowed me to work from home the first month that I had Gus at home. And then during that month I was interviewing people to be able to do caregiving. Nurses, to do caregiving while I was at work, and I work three days a week in my office, which is an hour away, and then I work from home the other two days a week.
So I was interviewing people during that month to take care of him while I was at work during the day, and then also for us to be at church on Sunday. We got, we hired another caregiver so that we could be at church on Sunday morning, and after a month I had those people and was able to go ahead and do that.
And so then I went back to work after 30 days. And had I known that Gus was going to last such a short time, I don't, I wouldn't have done that. I would've asked for a leave of absence. But hindsight is, I mean, you don't know what you don't know. I was looking at it like, oh, you know, I was thinking I'm gonna take such excellent care of him and I'm just believing that he's gonna last another, you know, two to three minimum and maximum maybe five.
And that was what was in my mind. Had I known the future, I would've said, Hey, we need to talk about a leave of absence. But I didn't. I didn't realize that. And of course I've beat myself up for that a million times, but I just realized you don't know the, nobody knows the future. So we had several months together, and then he passed away December the sixth on St. Nicholas Day, believe it or not, St. Nicholas Day, his name's Gus Nicholas, and he passed away on St. Nicholas Day.
Haley: I think for those of us who know you and have followed you for so long, to me, this wasn't a surprise because of how you shared this, In our last interview, you shared how you took your niece's baby and went to in the efforts of family preservation and
Deanna Shrodes: Yes.
Haley: You just walk out the walk and so. But for the world, I think this is like this just shocking, unbelievable thing. Cuz when you were talking about caregiving, like this is 24- 7. Can you tell us about that? Like the real, real, yeah.
Deanna Shrodes: Yep. I had never, okay. Well first of all there have been, I would just say Haley, I'm really blessed that probably 95% or more of the people that have ever talked to me about this or even talked to my friends about me or whatever, they're over the top and they, they're so supportive of this.
I think it's the most amazing thing ever. But probably 5% of people have said really mean things like I, my husband has had people taken aside, and even my assistant has had people take her side and say, Deanna needs mental help. She's going off the deep end. She's taking in a stranger. She's, you know, uh, she's diapering a stranger. She is bathing a stranger. This is just the craziest thing we've ever heard of. She needs psychiatric help.
And yeah, a lot of people, not a lot, about 5% of the people, I just wanna try to be more exact here and not exaggerate. About 5% of the people said she's, she's gone crazy. And even when this made national news media, I would say 95% of the comments were amazing, but there's 5% of just hateful people who say terrible things.
Turning this from a beautiful story into either this lady needs psychiatric help, or there's gotta be more behind this, or Nobody helps somebody like this unless they're ill- motivated. Well, like you, like you say, first of all, the majority of those people don't realize other people that I've taken in and helped. And for nothing.
And secondly, those people probably don't know that I blogged about this incessantly for 10 years, that I was craving my father not knowing whether he was dead, alive or who he was or anything about him. I was craving more than anything to know who my father was and to have a relationship with him.
So, you know, there was no ill- motivations here. I just really craved a relationship. And when I got that, I fell very hard for him as a father and desired that relationship. And when he opened his arms to me, man, I just ran full speed ahead into his arms. But there were those people who said, Deanna has gone nuts and tried to get Larry to get me some help.
And he's like, well, Deanna's actually already in therapy. And with a licensed counselor who thinks that this is great, you know, and it was a lot of work. It pushed me to my limits. Uh, I finished school 12 days before I met Gus. I earned my doctorate 12 days before. I had all these grandiose plans of what I was gonna do with my dissertation and with my work.
And in 12 days, life turned upside down. And I often tell people, taking care of Gus full-time was harder than getting my doctorate. It was harder than a dissertation. I seriously, I my total view, my life view, my respect for people that are caregiving. It's like a whole new world that I never knew anything about.
I was embarrassed as a pastor that I did not know certain people in my church were going through this. Like I knew they were taking care of people, but I didn't realize the full extent of what that took and what that meant. And then I, you know, just suddenly felt just embarrassed that, oh my gosh, I didn't realize this is what these people are going through.
And like, how can we as a church support them better? And, oh, my lands this is just, you know, an unbelievable new world that I'm walking in. And we had to have Gus's doctors come to the house. This was before he was ever, you know, on hospice, but just when he had regular doctors, and I remember the first time his, his new doctor came to the house to give him his first examination.
And I called someone to come right away. The soonest they could come was eight days in. And eight days in. The new doctor comes in, sits down and says, tell me a little bit about your family and you and your father. And I started telling the story and his mouth just hung open. And he goes, oh, wait, wait, wait.
You've only known him since since May 11th and you've never taken care of any adult in your life and you've never done any of this, and you're, you're doing like, this is only eight days in that you've been doing this? And I said, yes and he, I mean, he was dumbfounded, dumbfounded. And it was the biggest learning curve I've ever gone through.
Like I said, even with a doctorate, that pales in comparison to this, and that was pretty hard. So when it was about, I would say two months ahead of me bringing him home, the first month, I would step outta the room whenever they did anything for him. I would just automatically leave. They wouldn't even have to tell me to leave.
And then when it came to a month before, they said, would you like your daughter to step out? And he would say, no, no, don't make her step out. And then they would say to me, well, what is your comfort level? Do you want to stay in the room or go out? And I said, well, if I'm gonna be bringing him home, I need to know how to do all this.
And the nurse said, you're exactly right, you do. And so she says, you, you need to stay here. So the next morning she showed up. I would go to the nursing home at about 7:00 AM and I would stay until bedtime. And when I showed up at seven o'clock the next morning, here comes the nurse and she's got a box with her.
And she said, this is the day. And I said, the day for what? And she said, the day that you do everything, and I watch and coach you through it all. And so she said, get on your triple gloves. And so I triple gloved up and she walked me through every step of what it was, from start to finish to get Gus ready for the day and walk through the day with him, and then get a, you know, everything, everything that it took to take care of him.
So I did have their coaching, so to speak. They were kind of mentoring me. And then, um, when I brought 'em home, it was still scary doing it all myself without a nurse right there. So I had some nurse friends that I would call on the phone and be like, am I doing this right? Please, somebody help me. Uh, and got some help that way.
I was really grateful to be surrounded with people who wanted to, wanted to help me with things like that. When I needed to just reach out for a phone call and some friends even just came over to say, Hey, let me just come over and, I will be that person to stand beside you while you do this. Help you through it.
But yeah, it was a whole new world, Haley. It took, turned my life upside down and I'm ever grateful for every bit of it. I would not trade a bit of it for the world, but it was the hardest thing I ever did.
Haley: That's such an intimate way to get to know someone. And as the daughter caring for a father,
Deanna Shrodes: It is.
Haley: And doing a lot of the tasks that you would've done for your babies when they were little, you know? And it's like switching that role.
Deanna Shrodes: Yeah. He said something profound to me toward the end. I didn't, of course, I didn't know it was the end. I didn't know. It was just before I knew that it was coming to that point.
And one night I was, I had finished feeding dinner, I had finished getting him dressed for bed. I would, you know, every night I would tuck him in and then I would either read to him the stories that he liked to hear, or we would listen to music together, or we would just sit and talk for a couple hours. And it was just coming to the time where I was gonna turn out the lights and say goodnight.
And he said a sentence to me, I'll never forget. He said, you're a daughter who was like a mother to me. It just pierced my soul. I mean, I. I realized that he felt that level of care as a mother would care for her child, and it really was like that. In some ways, we would transition in our conversations many times to where I did feel like the daughter, and other times I did feel like the mother.
Like I would feel like the daughter. There wasn't really anything that he could do about my problems, but the, the one thing I miss about Gus the very most, the very most is that even though he didn't have the power to get outta bed and take care of anything, or do anything for me or solve my problems, every day, every day he would say, how are you today?
How are things going? And if you noticed that, especially when I worked from home, a lot of times he never wanted me to leave his side. I would take his side tray table, set up my computer, get my cup of coffee, and I'd just work right alongside of him. So I never had to leave him. And he would hear me on the phone and on zooms and stuff, just handling problems and stuff, and I didn't hide it from him.
I'm just, you know, I have to work. And so I would be handling problems and he would hear me get stressed. He would hear me in stressful conversations with people. And when I got off of those type of calls, he would say, are you okay? Are you okay? Well let me help. What can I do? I say, gosh, you can't do anything, but you're helping me just by being here.
Just you asking me if I'm okay. Just you asking me what you can do to help, that's helping. And just know that that's helping me a lot. Well, how is that helping you A lot? And he just couldn't understand that that was doing something for me that I had never received, you know, before. Especially from a parent.
So him asking me repeatedly, are you okay? And is there anything I can do to make it better? That is the number one thing I miss from him. It was the tenderest most amazing part of my day, and I 100% felt like his daughter in those moments. He was my dad who wanted to make everything okay. But then there were those times where I felt a shift, where then I felt like I was the mother because it would come to bedtime and I'm saying, you have to take this medication to, to live. And maybe he wouldn't wanna take it. And I would say, no, it's really important. According to your doctor, you really need this. And maybe we go back and forth about it and or I would need to bring him, you know, whatever it was that he needed to, to be okay physically, you know, whether it be a, you know, a drink, a milkshake.
You know, some medication, some ice, whatever it was. Those moments, a lot of times I felt more like a mother and that was okay.
Haley: Okay. Part two of Deanna's story will be live next week if you would like to follow her. Her website is DrDeannaShrodes.com. You can sign up for her newsletter there and we will have links to all of her social media handles in the show notes.
I'm really, really thrilled about bringing you this two-part conversation where we talk about some of the things that won't likely get covered in the news coverage around Deanna and Gus's story because the reporters that aren't adoptees just don't get all of it, and we do.
So I'm really thankful that she's willing to go there with us. And so make sure you thank her if you've appreciated her telling her story.
And the other thing I wanted to let you know is a new project we've been working on, kind of secretly, behind the scenes. We haven't really announced it. Is we are transcribing our episodes now, and so our goal is when we have a new episode go live, we have the transcription to go alongside of it, and we're also working backwards in our catalog to have old shows transcribed as well, with the goal being the whole back catalog being accessible via transcription.
If that is important to you, and you want to contribute to the cost of doing that, please go to AdopteesOn.com. There's a little PayPal button there that you can donate, one time donation. If you would like or join our Patreon community. And both of those things contribute to the cost of producing our episodes and including that big transcription project.
I really appreciate that. Thank you for being such a generous community.
And that's it guys. I guess we will do our recommended resources next week and we will finish up Deanna's story and yeah. She shared something with me next week that she was like, I haven't really told anybody of this yet, so get ready. I definitely cried. Okay. Uh, thank you so much for listening and let's talk again next Friday.
