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 coordinator
As 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.
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 department
As 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 counties
As 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 operations
As 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 psychiatry
As 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.
This Is What It’s Like … to Land a Good Body Check
By Ryan Johnson, 31, center, St. Louis Blues
As told to Matthew Halverson
There’s so many different areas of the ice that you can deliver a check. My favorite—and I think a lot of guys would agree—is an open-ice hit, where you catch a guy coming through the middle with his head down or looking back. And it doesn’t always happen suddenly. Sometimes you can see where the puck is going and the position of certain guys, and if you get in the right area, it’s like, “Ooh, it’s going to happen.” You see a guy put himself in a bad position, and you know you’re going to be able to get a good pop on him.
Being able to catch a guy in that position is just as good as scoring a goal because it’s such a momentum turner in the game, and the crowd loves it. You see that, and your eyes light up and you’re like, “I got this guy right where I want him.”
You don’t necessarily have to knock him flying, but you want to finish him to the point where he’s not in the play anymore. But you have to be careful because sometimes, you can get a little overzealous and get too wound up, and you end up taking yourself out of the play or putting yourself into a bad position.
A lot of it is timing, a lot of it is your balance and positioning yourself. You definitely want to hit him with your shoulder, which is going to carry all of your momentum. It’s just like a football player with a tackle: You go to hit a guy standing up, and you’re going to go flying yourself. You get low and explode up. If I’m skating at a guy and I’m able to get low and get my shoulder right into his sternum, he’s going to have to be a pretty solid guy to not really feel that check and to not go down.
When you do it right, it just feels so smooth, and you feel the force of laying that shoulder and feeling the guy crumble. And sometimes, you don’t even have to put a lot of effort into exploding into them because you just catch them in the right situation where they go flying. It’s a great feeling. It doesn’t happen very often, but when it does, it’s exhilarating.
This Is What It’s Like … to Lead a Blind Man Up Mount Everest
By Luis Benitez, 35, mountain climber
As told to Shera Dalin
I grew up with asthma, and until I was 7, I was on every drug imaginable. I started rock climbing when we would visit my dad’s family in Ecuador because the doctors said it would help. As an adult, getting an invitation to climb Mount Everest was living the dream. But it wasn’t going to be just my first time climbing Everest; I would be guiding a blind climber, Erik Weihenmayer.
Everest gets a really bad rap in the media: “Oh, it’s been done every which way.” But it’s still the largest mountain on earth. It is 29,038 feet. The first leg of the climb should take five hours. With Erik, it took 11.
Before we could begin our summit push, a snowstorm hit. Then Erik got food poisoning. We were pulling our hair out. Because of the weather, you only get one shot at this. If the jet stream is over the mountain, the winds can get to 150 miles per hour.
At 26,000 feet, we entered the death zone. At this point you are on oxygen, and your body can’t recover at that altitude. You are fighting against the clock. I had set up my tent next to what I thought was a ripped-up tent, but it was one of two dead bodies there.
On the summit push, we were supposed to climb through the night, but the storm that we thought had passed hit us again. We reached The Balcony, which is at 27,000 feet, and we were getting hammered by the storm. It was about 20 degrees below zero, the snow was blowing sideways and we couldn’t see anything. We agreed to wait a half hour. If it didn’t clear, we were done. This is the way people die; they just sit there. We told base camp we would wait another 60 seconds. Then the base camp manager starts screaming into the radio, “It’s clearing, it’s clearing! Don’t come down!” Forty-five seconds later, it cleared.
As we got to Hillary’s Step at 28,500 feet, I started to lead Erik. It was the final, most difficult part of the trip—a 40-foot rock and ice climb. As we began to climb, I had to take off my oxygen mask so that Erik could hear my directions. I didn’t know what it was going to do to me. All I could think about was the breathing exercises that the doctors at Barnes taught me as a child.
When we got right below the summit, I told Erik, “We are here because of you. Stay on the rope, and walk in front of me.” But he refused. We walked arm-and-arm to the top. I was bawling like a baby.
I had spent 10 years working toward that goal. Not only had I just done it, but sitting right next to me was a blind guy.
This Is What It’s Like … to Eat 22 Pounds of Pizza in One Week (and Win $1,500)
By Brian Tournier, 37, bond analyst, and Adam Tournier, 34, physics professor
As told to Margaret Bauer
In 1995, these brothers took on two pizza joints in one week. Their foes: Pointer’s 28-inch, 10-pound Pointersaurus (reward: $500) and Talayna’s 30-inch, 12-pound Monster pizza (reward: $1,000). The brothers remain the only team to complete Talayna’s challenge.
BT: The idea was that we would do the Pointersaurus, then use that as sort of a training run for the Talayna’s pizza. We had this elaborate game plan: “You gotta go eat really big meals and get your stomach used to having really big meals,” we’d say. But when it came down to it, it was like, “Hey you wanna go do that?” “Yeah, let’s go.”
AT: We went down there and did it and then went to Ted Drewes for custard. The fastest anyone had done it was 54 minutes, and we did it in 35 or 36 minutes. We were halfway done in 15 minutes. They were standing there with their mouths open.
BT: I think that maybe made us a bit cocky about doing the second one. But it was more just kind of brute force: Eat it as fast as you can before your stomach realizes what you’re doing to it.
AT: The Talayna’s one was oppressive. It was painful. We had an hour, and we did it in 59 minutes and 30 seconds. The owner frisked us, he checked our pockets to make sure we didn’t hide any ’cause he did not want to give us that check. He was like, “What do I need to do so that no one would ever be able to do this again?”
BT: That was a gut-buster in every sense of the word. There was no laughing, no joking, no ice cream when we were done, just discomfort. The Talayna’s is whole-milk cheese—a lot greasier, more difficult to keep down. It got to the point where you had to wash it down, just to be able to get it down.
AT: But the thing was to drink as little fluid as possible, ’cause when the pizza hits your stomach, it’s just going to swell, swell, swell. When we did it, the requirement was just the pizza, and now it’s like a pitcher of beer or soda and the pizza.
This Is What It’s Like … to Survive Two Aneurysms
By Mary Jo Frain, 43, project manager
As told to Matthew Halverson
If someone has to die, and they don’t want it to hurt, go stroke. It does not hurt. Everybody says, “Oh, I don’t want to die. I don’t want to die.” Don’t knock it—if you got to do it, do a stroke. It’s a hell of a lot easier than some of these car wrecks where you see a bunch of blood. I didn’t see one drop of blood.
Back up a couple weeks. I’d been having headaches. The doctor said they were migraines. They were bad. I thought maybe it was just that time of the month. I had them all over. But when it was sharp, it was right where the ol’ temples are. In the two weeks between the first “migraine” and the stroke, I was taking 10 or 12 Motrin a day.
I was going to school in Belleville for accounting classes. I went on Tuesday, 9/8/98, and that’s when it started. Our teacher brought his television because he wanted to catch Mark McGwire get his home run, 62. We were sitting in our seats, and then my mind was like a tunnel. I could see that people were moving, but it seemed really far away. Their tone of voice was real low. They turned and looked at me because I wasn’t watching the TV. Then they started calling 911.
It was like I was moving in slow motion. They came in with a stretcher. I don’t remember anything else, except once I was in the ambulance, they poked me or something and got me to open my eyes. I was on the gurney, but I wasn’t sure what they were doing. And then I was out again, and that’s it.
I’d had a stroke. Then I was diagnosed with having two aneurysms that night. The next night, they performed emergency surgery because they burst. From 9/8/98, I don’t remember anything until September 29.
I don’t really know if I died. I guess the only thing that I had was a dream. I was living underwater. I had a dream that I was living down there with the fishes. It was pleasant. I think I died—I was on life support. And it’s been a long nine years since then.
This Is What It’s Like … to Run to Mexico City
By Dan O’Brien, 33, sheet-metal worker
As told to Stefene Russell
It was a transcontinental run to raise awareness of indigenous issues throughout the Americas. One part came down through Alaska, one came down through Massachusetts, and one came from Tennessee—they all met up in St. Louis.
My mom took me to Payless shoes and bought me a $17 pair of running shoes because I’d never, outside of high school gym, run at all. They were so cheap, they actually ended up doing a lot of damage to my knees and my hip. The shoes made it to Greely, Colo. There were some massage therapists who donated their time there. And they were like, “Oooh. Those shoes are … horrible.” They were pretty well beat because we ran in the rain—it didn’t matter what the weather was, we still ran.
The first day I ran from St. Charles to Booneville. I got to three-quarters of a mile, and I thought I was going to die. My legs were burning. But within a week, I was able to do 10 miles. And then the next week, I was doing 20.
There were a lot of times when you’re running down a mountain pass into a valley and there’s not much to look at. You would just clear your mind. There used to be trade routes and communication routes throughout the indigenous communities, and they used runners. They would pray as they ran. It was something that I was taught to do. There was a lot of time to contemplate where you are and where you’re going. It was like meditating.
One of the things the runners would do is take coca leaves and chew them into a mash and put them under their tongue and run. I only did that a couple of times. I don’t know if there was even really all that noticeable an effect—you’re running for quite a while, it’s hard to tell what’s helping you sustain that. At that point in time, you feel like you could run forever.
We went down through Taos, to Las Cruces, and the last part was just very crazy. I ran into Mexico City, and we were staying with a guy who was actually from Mexico City, in the projects. Have you seen Baraka? You know that scene when they’re in South America and they show a high-rise? It was kind of like that.
Edited by Matthew Halverson
