Eli's Story

This isn't a standard episode of Trivial Warfare. As a local business I sponsored an event in August called Black Tie for Eli. Eli Watterson was an adorable 4 year old boy who became sick in 2014 and spent the last year living in hospitals. His parents had it very tough. His mom had to quit her job as a teacher to stay with him in the hospitals and eventually he was moved up to Duke Medical Center hundreds of miles from home.

During his hospitalization the family struggled through multiple near death situations and were doing everything they could to keep him alive. I recorded this interview with his father Jerry a couple of weeks before the big fundraising event to help them with some of their expenses and medical bills. It's a deep interview, we talk about Eli's experience and Jerry's experience as his father. We don't hold anything back.

Eli passed away the week after we recorded this. It was a very sad moment and one that still makes me tear up. You can hear it in the interview, we really did have hope. We thought the miraculous was going to happen and Eli was going to make it.

Rather than chop the interview up and play snips of it during my shows leading up to the event I decided to release this full version as is out of respect for my audience so that I didn't lead them on with snippets to draw them in after I knew the final outcome.