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Is there a better battle royale than the one that’s raged between curiosity and common sense since, oh, a certain fig leaf–wearing someone couldn’t leave well enough alone and keep her grubby little paws off the pomegranate? It’s the steel-cage death match between two opponents too stubborn—and too interested in bloodying each other up—to recognize how evenly matched they are.With that in mind, we set out to strike a blow for common sense by asking nearly a dozen St. Louisans (or former St. Louisans) to recount for us their brushes with death, to relive their out-of-the-ordinary experiences, to give us a peek into their extraordinary jobs.
This is what they told us.
This Is What It’s Like … To Have a Heart Transplant
By Valerie Hoven, 23, publications coordinatorAs told to Sarah Truckey
It’s freaky to think that this heart was in someone else’s body before, but I think about it more scientifically: What keeps it pumping? And I hope it doesn’t stop.
It’s kind of sad just to know that you were a failure, to know that you were marked for death. Right after the procedure, I had bouts of depression—serious depression. There are three machines monitoring you, every move you make is being reported back to someone, and I just wanted to be alone so badly.
The most interesting thing about my heart transplant—and what makes it more sad—is that it happened on Father’s Day. My dad got the best Father’s Day gift, but a father also lost his child on Father’s Day. That’s depressing to think about. I never think someone had to die to get me this heart, I just think about how someone lost their child.
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The thing that changed me the most, aside from being able to run and breathe, was seeing how people reacted to it. I realize that what I’ve been through isn’t normal and everyone is going to interpret it differently. I feel like I’m judged. I don’t tell people because they think I’m still sick and I can’t … “Oh, don’t lift that box!” But I can—the heart’s mine now. It’s OK.
What worries me a lot and why I don’t want people to know … like, I don’t want my future husband to think, “Oh, she’s gonna die in 20 years and leave me with three kids,” ’cause we don’t know if that’s true or not. So I’d rather them not know until I know if he’ll stay with me or not. Till death do us part … even if it’s right away.
I admit I think about the process almost every day. Like after a long flight of stairs, regardless if I feel out of breath or not, I think about how I could never do this before. Do I think about the family every day? No. Do I think about how there’s a dead person’s heart in my body? No. Do I think that I lost the heart that I grew up with? No. But I think about how I couldn’t do this before, and it feels really good to be able to do it now. Even eight years later, you still think, “This feels really good.”
This Is What It’s Like … to Go Undercover
By Anonymous, patrolman, a North County police departmentAs told to Matthew Halverson
You have to be an actor. You ditch normal speech. When you’re in that world, it’s a matter of survival. The guys that I was dealing with were people who had probably spent the majority of their adult life in prison, so they didn’t say, “I need to urinate.” It was “I’m going to go piss.” Sometimes you even get close to these people. I’ve had people ask me to be godfather to their kids.
It’s like flipping a switch. I’d be talking to my wife or kids on the phone and then doing a report, and then I’d have to go meet a guy and buy some heroin. I had an old truck that had all kinds of trash in the back, and I’d open up the hood and get some dirt on my hands from the air filter and rub it on my face. My hair was down to the middle of my back, my beard was down to the middle of my chest. Most people were pretty apprehensive about getting into a car with me.
The most stressful part of the job was the factor of the unknown. You do your homework on people you’re dealing with, but human beings are unpredictable. When you go into these buys, it’s not like a math equation, where you’re going to get the same answer every time. Our equations, you never know how they’re going to turn out.
There’s times when you’re buying drugs with a guy sitting in the front seat of your car and he’s carrying a gun. Will they shoot us? I don’t know. Will we shoot them? If we have to, sure. You just have to keep your wits about you and watch everybody’s hands. You don’t play anybody cheap. Even if you’re just going to buy an ounce of weed, you don’t take it like it’s a pop fly.
When you pull the pistol out and tell them, “You’re under arrest. I’m a police officer,” they don’t hear that. All they see is the gun and a longhaired crazy guy. At first, they usually think they’re getting robbed or they’re just going to get killed. I’ve had guys start crying. And then when they find out you’re a cop, they’re almost relieved. “No, I’m not going to kill you, but I am going to put you in prison.”
This Is What It’s Like … to Perform an Autopsy
By Dr. Mary Case, chief medical examiner for St. Louis, St. Charles, Franklin and Jefferson countiesAs told to Jeannette Cooperman
When I perform an autopsy, I’m dressed in a scrub suit and operating gown covered with a plastic apron, double-gloved, head cover with mask and goggles and shoe covers—it can be very hot if the autopsy suite is not really cool, like 65 degrees. Better to be cool than hot. If the case is several hours, it can be physically exhausting; I sometimes liken it to digging a ditch. Being bent over the body to look for bullets can be backbreaking. The autopsies that are long and exhausting are the multiple gunshot wounds, multiple stab wounds or beatings, or cases where I have to do extensive dissection of vertebrae or other bones. Then there are the decomposed bodies, where the special effects of smell, insects or larval forms, and putrefaction of tissues challenge all the senses. How do you get used to the smell? You don’t. The face coverings make it less daunting by throwing up at least a psychological shield against the bad stuff.
An autopsy is not the emotional experience people think it is. I don’t pick up a heart and think, “Who’s broken this heart?” I look into the body to see why we die. It’s like solving a puzzle. I don’t think of the brain or the heart as body pieces. It’s a body with organs that were all working together.
When I was younger, I thought it would make it easier to accept my mortality if I could see what might cause it to happen. It hasn’t! What it’s taught me is that frequently people just hinge—there’s just a very tiny difference between being alive and being dead. A sheriff died from a gunshot wound, and I autopsied him and found all three major coronary arteries totally occluded. Why was he living? Someone else can have the slightest narrowing of one artery and die.
This Is What It’s Like … to Stay Up 24 Hours Negotiating an NFL Contract
By Samir Suleiman, 32, St. Louis Rams director of football operationsAs told to Matthew Halverson
In June, the Rams’ re-signing of quarterback Marc Bulger for six years—and the marathon negotiation process that went with it—got a significant amount of ink. Turns out, that was only half of the story.
I guess the thing that got put out there was that I was up for 24 hours. I think I was up for more like 48. I was actually in my office for 24 hours, working on both the Bulger and [first-round draft choice Adam] Carriker deals and putting them together.
Carriker’s agents and I came to an agreement around 2 a.m., and then while everything was still in my mind, I put the contract together. I actually suggested that as soon as I finished, they come over to review it because my main objective was making sure that Adam could be at the first practice that day. I think they were a little tired, so they said, “Oh, we’ll just come in in the morning with him.”
I’m usually in the office by 3:30 in the morning. And by the time that I finished putting together Carriker’s contract, I looked at the clock, and I think it was 3 the next morning. My mind-set was still pretty sharp the whole time. I was in the zone and just wanted to get the thing finished. I really wasn’t tired. It didn’t hit me until a day later.
This Is What It’s Like … to Be Schizophrenic
By Carol S. North, professor of crisis psychiatryAs told to Jeannette Cooperman
It’s kind of like chasing a dream. Have you ever been in a state where you’re half awake and half asleep and you hear voices? Remembering psychotic experiences, when you’re not psychotic anymore, can be like chasing the memory of a dream.
Mostly the voices were not a good thing, because they didn’t steer me right. But at times I thought they were enlightening me. As you get better, there comes a point when you realize that all the so-called enlightenment was really just a mixed-up muddle. It’s like waking up from a really bad dream: “Oh man, that was confusing, that was hard for me to figure out, I’m glad that wasn’t real.”
The worst was when the voices got very loud—they would yell, or talk so much I couldn’t think. I would look around at other people to see if they seemed to be attending to the same things, and I would consciously try to key myself off their responses. If nobody else seemed bothered by an inflammatory voice, I would try to ignore it.
A lot of it was just chitchat. But sometimes they would just say stuff that was out of left field, and sometimes they would say stuff that was really funny.
It’s not fantasy. That’s one of the complaints I had when I saw A Beautiful Mind. It’s real. It’s happening to you. There’s something in your brain that’s firing off stimuli, and you are responding to stuff that’s hitting your
sensory apparatus.
At times my hallucinations were keyed off of things that were going on in my environment, and at times the content was random. But those random firings probably weren’t entirely random, just like your dreams aren’t entirely random.
I’m not glad I had to experience a psychotic illness. It was unpleasant and difficult. But it did get me accustomed to not panicking when weird stuff happens.
