When The Doctor Told Me I'd Never Cook Again

Cowboy Coffee Hour with Cowboy Kent and Shannon Rollins

Kent Rawlings recounts a life-altering heat stroke incident from 2004 while catering outdoors during an extreme heat burst in Oklahoma. After

Key takeaways

• Kent suffered a severe heat stroke in 2004 near Snyder, Oklahoma, when temperatures hit 117°F during a rare 'heat burst' weather phenomenon.
• The extreme heat triggered atrial fibrillation (AFib) and dangerously low potassium levels, leading an ER doctor to warn him he would never cook again.

Main topics

• Heat stroke and AFib medical emergency
• Chuckwagon cooking environment challenges

Notable quotes

"Kent, if that don't get back into normal rhythm here in a minute, we're going to shock you."

Conclusion

The episode serves as both a cautionary tale about heat safety and an

Transcript preview

Speaker 2 (0:00) A doctor told you, honest to God, that you would never cook again. That Speaker 1 (0:05) day we had one of them weather phenomenons again called a heat burst. And I just remember thinking, I don't know if I've ever been this tired. And this doctor finally come in there in a minute. He said, Kent, if that don't get back into normal rhythm here in a minute, we're going to shock you. How severe this is, he said, we won't know for a while. But he said, you'll never cook again. Speaker 1 (0:27) Howdy, my name is Kent Rawlings. I've been a cowboy and a chuckwagon cook for over 30 years, cooking for ranches all across America. You might have seen me on the Food Network or alongside my beautiful wife Shannon on our YouTube show where we share cowboy cooking from the trail. But now we're going to take you behind the scenes to real campfire conversations. Join us as we share humor, cowboy wisdom, and stories full of history, heart, faith, and of course, a little fire so grab you a cup of coffee pull up a chair and welcome to the podcast Speaker 1 (1:05) Hey, we thank y'all so much for taking time out of your busy day to join us. We hope y'all are having a good time with this because it's the easiest job I've ever had in my life. Speaker 2 (1:13) It's pretty nice. We get to sit, visit, and there's no, we don't have to build a fire, which speaking of, we're going to get into a lot today. Yes. About the extreme heat and extreme weather that we've experienced cooking on the wagon. Speaker 1 (1:28) Yeah. Mother Nature, sometimes she deals us a blow we didn't know was coming. But, you know. Just a while back, we did an episode on writing letters. Speaker 2 (1:38) Yes, the old school method of writing letters and how it's coming back. And Speaker 1 (1:42) we had so many comments of people telling me that how many letters they wrote. They kept all these cards and they did all this, you know. But there was this one comment because you made a comment and asked, you know, do they not teach cursive in school anymore? Speaker 2 (1:56) So, yeah, I don't. What was the feedback? Speaker 1 (1:59) Everybody was saying no. They don't? Speaker 2 (2:01) Now, I did hear, so Kelly, a gal that works with us, she has a daughter in high school, and she says that they do still teach cursive there. However, they don't teach typing. And I thought that is so bizarre because I would think, like, of anything, we'd drop cursive and really focus on the typing because we're such a computer world. Speaker 1 (2:22) And, you know, I had a lot of men comment that they do have trouble sometimes expressing their feelings. But there Speaker 2 (2:29) was Speaker 1 (2:29) this comment that really sort of stuck out to me, and this is from Wyatt9447. He said, I enjoyed this episode. Kent, you're a true gentleman. I can see you really love your wife and not afraid to express your feelings to her. The answer to the question about the curses, if they still teach it in school, is no. More public schools will get away from teaching it, which is a shame. How will the youth of today be able to sign their name to important documents? I can relate to you about writing in high school. I could write an entire paper without a comma or a period. God, I hated that red ink the teachers use. I've seen a lot of that red ink in my writing in Speaker 2 (3:07) schools. Also, when we've been doing any of our cookbook Speaker 1 (3:11) proposals Speaker 2 (3:12) and we send it to our editor and our agent, oh my gosh, you do feel like you're back in high school with the big red marks and you think you did really good. But that prepares you, right? Speaker 1 (3:23) Yes, it does. It makes you better. You know? Speaker 2 (3:25) Let's talk about being prepared. Yaunt to? Speaker 1 (3:28) Yaunt to. How do you spell that? Speaker 2 (3:30) Y apostrophe A-N-T-O. Do you think? A Speaker 1 (3:36) -M-T-O, Yontu. Speaker 2 (3:37) Yontu? I don't know. Speaker 1 (3:38) It's Czechoslovakian. Speaker 2 (3:40) That's for sure Oki. Speaker 1 (3:42) Yes. Right there. Speaker 2 (3:44) But hey, so this episode. We're talking about actually a specific time when a doctor told you, honest to God, that you would never cook again. Yeah. Speaker 1 (3:58) And Speaker 2 (3:59) that was all because of the weather. Yes. And I want, most of you guys know, but I want to paint a picture for everybody that, you know, the saying, it gets hot in the kitchen. Well, Speaker 1 (4:11) that is obviously very true. Speaker 2 (4:15) kitchens, you've got ovens going, you've got burners going, it's going to get hot in the kitchen. However, our kitchen is very different. And you would think that maybe being outside in the wide open and mother nature that, you know, there's a breeze or you have a little more area to work with. It doesn't get as hot. That is absolutely not the case. Speaker 1 (4:35) No, I mean, I would rather cook in 20 below any day of the week than cook in heat and humidity. Yeah. You know, it just. It just wears you out. You can get warm eventually, but when you get so hot that things begin to happen to you, you can't cool off. That's the problem. For us, with Speaker 2 (4:55) our wood stove, you can always get warm, but you can't get cool. Because once you get to a certain point, you're outside. If we're cooking in the summer, we've got the heat going. We've got the stove going. There's no place to escape to get cold. Speaker 1 (5:13) No, it's probably because we didn't pay the electric bill and that air conditioner ain't working. Only Speaker 2 (5:17) air conditioners if we get a breeze coming Speaker 1 (5:19) through. But Speaker 2 (5:20) so our setup, we've got the chuck wagon and no electricity, no running water. We have a water barrel. Yeah. But our cooking and heat source is a wood stove. And we fill that up and the stove, we can cook on it like a... Speaker 1 (5:37) Flat top or grill. Speaker 2 (5:38) Grill. Or when we stop it with wood, that wood burns down. It makes a nice coal. And then we pull those coals out and we cook in Dutch ovens for like baking, breads, sides, desserts. And you just get more Speaker 1 (5:52) heat scattered out around you. Speaker 2 (5:53) So there's just like a massive amount of heat, right? Yeah. Speaker 1 (5:57) What Speaker 2 (5:57) do you think is the temperature of the stove? Like if we're talking about... Like a three-foot area maybe from the stove. How hot do you think that is? Speaker 1 (6:10) On a very hot day in July and August. somebody give us one of them little guns. You just aim at it and it tells you. The heat probe, yeah. And I was standing four foot from it one day in August and put it on there. And I throwed that thing in the fire after that because I didn't want to know. It said 289 degrees. Oh my gosh. Speaker 2 (6:31) That's a big reason also why we moved from Southwest Oklahoma to New Mexico. We're in now the pines. We're high elevation. We're like 7,600 feet? Speaker 1 (6:42) Yeah. Speaker 2 (6:43) Is because, so we cook year round, whether it's cooking for a crew or it's cooking for our YouTube channel. So it was getting to the point where we were, summer was like nearly nine months out of the year. It Speaker 1 (6:59) felt like it at times. Speaker 2 (7:01) We had to, I remember it was just the very beginning. I think this was May. And we had to have all of our filming done by preferably like 8, 8.30 in the morning. Because otherwise, we Speaker 1 (7:14) were over 100 degrees. Yeah, bowl of sweat looking at it. And Speaker 2 (7:17) then you start the fire. So you're starting at 100 degrees. Then you get the fire going. And like you said, you're pushing to 300 degrees right up Speaker 1 (7:26) near that stove. Yeah, and I've never had to shave the hair off my legs. Ever. Did you Speaker 2 (7:32) have any like tricks? To beat the heat. I know at one point we had a shield that was up against Bertha that kind of blocked some of that heat. Speaker 1 (7:43) Yeah, it Speaker 2 (7:43) was an Speaker 1 (7:44) aluminum road sign a guy gave us in Tennessee to keep you from burning your kneecaps. I remember one time cooking over there, and they wouldn't let me set this before we have the Cadillac Bertha. Our old one didn't have no floor in it. And they had me on concrete blocks up off this grass. Speaker 2 (8:03) And Speaker 1 (8:04) there was a space in there about like that. And I was doing, me and you were feeding about 150 bone-in pork chops. And I remember it burning little holes and blisters in my legs, you know, that day. And when we got that shield and it's aluminum and you just lay that sign down by there, it was a tremendous amount of difference because it protected. your knees. You know, one guy said, hey, I'm going to give you this leather apron to keep that heat off of you, you know. But when that thing gets hot, it's twice as hot on the other side, you know, and so it didn't work. But the aluminum sign was pretty good. Still got it. Speaker 2 (8:39) I don't, I'm trying to think if there are any other little tricks that we do to stay. Oh, we would, we would take like towels and dip them in ice water and put them around our necks. That kind of helped. Speaker 1 (8:51) Yeah, and if it was close to a water hose where it was catering or something somewhere, it always went to ground down every once in a while, you know. But there's really no escape from it in the very hot months of July and August. And Speaker 2 (9:05) that's when people want. you to cook and are having parties is usually in the spring, of course, through the summer, early fall. The only time we were really cooking in the winter, we had a few festivals that we cooked in. And then also ranch cooking. Sometimes when they're calving early, you get kind of like a February time. And it's Speaker 1 (9:28) nice. Which is really nice. But Speaker 2 (9:29) everybody always wanted to cook when it was hot. Before we really get into the episode where it got. not so good for you. Were there any signs that you were kind of looking for? Like, Oh, maybe I'm getting too hot. I need to like. I don't know, slow down or get out of it or something. Speaker 1 (9:48) I remember one time when we had first moved down there to Byers, Texas, and we had this little steakhouse deal. Remember? And we'd open like three weekends a month, maybe, if we weren't catering. Speaker 2 (10:00) Yeah, it was like a Friday, Saturday, did we do? And Speaker 1 (10:03) you were running inside and I was running outside. Speaker 2 (10:06) And Speaker 1 (10:06) it would be, that year it was miserable hot. You know, we had 78 days over 100 down there and 60 of them was over 115. And you'd get that old hot wind blowing on you. And it just felt like a blast furnace. Speaker 2 (10:21) And Speaker 1 (10:21) I remember you come out there one evening and you told me, she said, I don't know how you go up there and stand by that stove. And I said, there's something just clicks in my brain that says, hey, it's hot, but you got a job. You know, and you can't really get away from it when you're cooking 40, 50 steaks up there because you're constantly moving from one end to the other and flipping them back and forth. But it was just, it never was one of them deals for a long time that I ever thought I couldn't do it. You know, I was thinking, oh, it's hot, you know, but I've done this before. I Speaker 2 (10:54) can Speaker 1 (10:54) get by. Speaker 2 (10:54) So there was never a point for you where you were like, yeah, no, this is too much. Speaker 1 (10:59) I would dread it. You know, I remember one time. I was in Georgia in August. Oh, my gosh. I was cooking for about 400 people. Speaker 1 (11:13) And when I walked out of the motel that morning, it felt like somebody just slammed your head in the oven door, you know. And I told this guy, I said, I don't know how y'all live down here. He said, oh, you'll get used to it. I said, I'm not. I'm going to leave as soon as I get a chance. Speaker 2 (11:26) When you were, you filmed an episode for Netflix's Barbecue Showdown. Yeah. And it was filmed in August, or it was filmed in Georgia. Yeah. What time of year was it? Speaker 1 (11:36) December. Speaker 2 (11:37) Oh, okay. So was that better? It Speaker 1 (11:39) was nice. Oh, was Speaker 2 (11:40) it? Speaker 1 (11:40) Oh, yes. I Speaker 2 (11:41) couldn't remember when that was. Speaker 1 (11:42) You know, I went to Houston one time because I took every job I did for a long time if I could make $200, you know. And went down there and cooked for this lady, and it rained about a half inch before I got ready to cook, and steam was coming off the ground because it's 95 degrees and humidity 90%, you know. Got three. I mean, it was ringing wet. And she said, Boy, Kent, this was the best thing ever. We're going to do this again. I said, I'm not, ma'am, unless you move it to February. I Speaker 2 (12:08) mean. I Speaker 1 (12:08) mean, you learned your lessons, you know, but it's, I don't know. Speaker 1 (12:14) I never had one of them that I thought. Speaker 2 (12:18) This is the Speaker 1 (12:19) last one. Speaker 2 (12:20) Yeah. You Speaker 1 (12:20) know, and I enjoyed, I mean, I've been cold, really cold. Speaker 2 (12:24) Yeah. Speaker 1 (12:25) But. I just despise the hot. Speaker 2 (12:29) So there was a time. Uh-huh. And this was maybe, I don't know if this was the time you got the hottest or if this was maybe one of those cookings that nearly did you in. But there was a specific time that you were, I was not in the picture at this point. This was just when you were really catering nearly almost