Recovery

Recovery

Transcript for Recovery (full episode)

From Stanford University and KZSU, this is the Stanford Storytelling Project.

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Zubi, tell me about your room.

What do you want to know about my room?

Just, can you describe it?

Because I feel like it's very strange.

Well, I guess it is a little strange.

I live in an attic.

It's exactly how I want to live.

There's a monitor that's accessible from anywhere in the room.

There are fans everywhere in the room, so the air circulation is always good.

I put nine black lights in my room, so every place is lit.

There's posters everywhere that react to black light.

You're listening to State of the Human.

Our managing editor, Rachel Hamburg, is talking with her housemate, a Stanford grad named Zubair Ahmed, about his room.

Zubair lives in a room that's only accessible from a sliding window halfway up the wall in an old house.

He needs a step ladder to climb in.

And to make matters weirder, he's covered the walls in black light posters of glowing submarines, fairies, and forests.

When the sliding window is closed, the room emits a blue glow.

There's actually a finite amount of black light posters on the internet.

You can actually browse through all of them in like six hours of time.

So that's what I did.

And I bought the ones that I really liked.

And I put them all over my roof and my walls.

And I really enjoy this atmosphere.

It actually does put me in a very nice mood.

Zubair's room isn't just strange.

It came out of special circumstances.

I was given responsibility to help out my brother.

And I brought him over to California.

I tried to help him out.

I got him a job at Seyfried Dining.

But for some reason, my brother really couldn't adjust to California.

He had friends, but he wasn't happy.

And that made me really sad.

And I didn't know how to deal with it or how to handle it.

Because I've never had another human being completely be dependent on me.

And I didn't know what kind of a burden that was.

That's actually, it's quite a burden.

It's much more than I understood at the time.

I certainly understand better now.

When his brother finally left California, Zubair realized how unhappy he had been.

And without his brother to take care of, he was facing the prospect of living alone.

So he decided to launch on what he calls my personal happiness project.

The happiness project.

Basically, I was sad, and then I wanted to be happy.

So I didn't know how to do that, because sometimes when you're sad, it's hard to be happy.

He dropped his plan to live alone and moved into a house with a bunch of friends.

And one of the things I realized is if you really love where you sleep, it'll probably make you happier.

And it worked.

Totally worked.

I wasn't sad.

I was very happy.

It was an act of recovery.

I just wanted to figure out where would I be really happy to sleep.

And I tend to be really slightly quirky.

So my room is also slightly quirky, I guess.

Would you call it quirky?

I don't know.

Yeah, I would definitely call it quirky.

You're listening to State of the Human, the radio show of the Stanford Storytelling Project.

Each week we choose a common human experience, like breaking into song or returning home, and we bring you stories that explore and deepen that experience.

I'm your host, Sophia Paliza, and this week we're talking about recovery.

In this show we'll be asking the question, how do we recover?

Recovery, of course, can be pretty straightforward.

Even a prescribed and passive process.

You take medicine, you sleep, you wait.

But like Zubair learned when he created his room, sometimes recovery requires a radical act.

The stories in this show are about those acts.

People who have to do something surprising in order to recover.

Our first story is about a pre-medical student who had to completely change how she processed emotion in order to learn something many doctors never learn.

How to recover from the trauma she saw in the emergency room.

In our second story, a young man interviews his dad for the first time about the way that they both changed after his mom's death.

Our third story explores what to do when the people you're trying to help recover simply can't change.

They can't even remember you.

Our fourth story is a poem about a man who literally becomes someone new in order to recover from a haunting feeling he's had his whole life.

And to close the show, you'll hear again from Zubair.

This time, we're not talking about his happiness project.

We'll be talking about a different, much bigger difficulty that Zubair had to deal with.

And the way he recovered was sort of an accident.

It's all in the next hour on State of the Human.

For our first story, meet undergraduate pre-medical student Ryoko Hamaguchi.

Hi, my name is Ryoko Hamaguchi, and I am a sophomore at Stanford University, and I'm majoring in biology.

When she came to Stanford, Ryoko had pretty dramatic expectations of what it was like to be a doctor.

She says she felt like she would be an angel of compassion.

But when she began working as a volunteer in the emergency room, she realized she was pretty far from being an angel of compassion.

Every time she witnessed other people suffering, she wanted to run away.

Sometimes she actually ran away.

What she was feeling is called compassion fatigue, and it's actually a huge problem in the medical field because it means that doctors stop treating their patients like people.

Ryoko was worried that her compassion fatigue meant that she shouldn't be a doctor.

But then she took a class that taught her a new way to think about the emergency room.

I came to Stanford kind of vaguely thinking that I wanted to go into medicine, but if someone asked me why I wanted to be a doctor, I couldn't give kind of like a genuine answer, and I wanted that very badly.

It was really a mixture of just the general sense of helping someone that appealed to me a lot.

Felt like having the heart of a doctor, being really fit for that profession would mean that you would put everyone else's needs over yourself.

So you would forget about your hunger, forget about your sleep, and you would just reach out to everyone.

And that was what I envisioned to be like the perfect doctor.

And I thought that being in the ER, I would feel this kind of swell of compassion, wanting to help everyone and having that joy would kind of let me know that I'm fit for this job.

And this was the path that was right for me.

Thank you Well, a year and a half ago, right when I started Stanford, I joined this organization called SCOPE, and it stands for Student Clinical Opportunities for Pre-Medical Experiences.

It's a mouthful, so we just call it SCOPE.

Essentially volunteers in an emergency department, not at Stanford, but at the Santa Clara Valley Medical Center.

So that's another hospital a little ways away.

Do a combination of shadowing attending physicians in the ER, but we also kind of help with the flow of the ED.

So we help bring supplies to the physicians and we bring blankets and we bring water and food to the patients.

You I wasn't really envisioning what the patients would look like.

I kind of thought they would all be the same, suffering on the same level.

They were just uniform.

And then once I got to the ER, it was very, very different.

And I saw different patients with different stories, and there was just this bubble of suffering and pain that I was kind of thrown into, and I was just so overwhelmed.

And then probably maybe a month or two ago, it was at the very, very end of my shift.

I was actually leaving, but someone called a major trauma, which is like the highest level of trauma that can come into an ER.

And it was this boy, maybe like 17 years old, and he was in a wheelchair.

He was disabled.

And apparently his heart stopped.

He stopped breathing.

So the parents brought him into the ER.

And the ER physicians and the ER techs and the nurses and surgeons from upstairs and whatnot just came into the trauma room.

And it was a violent resuscitation because so many nurses were kind of like climbed up onto him and performing CPR.

And his parents were just crying and screaming.

And the nurses were rushing from the trauma room to the hallway trying to get to the patient.

And the parents at the same time was just mass chaos.

And I just felt myself kind of clam up.

And I remember physically just shuffling slowly away from the trauma room, just kind of backtracking, backtracking, backtracking.

And then I think I actually locked myself in the staff locker room where I keep my stuff.

And I was just kind of sitting there until it was time for me to leave.

And that was one of the most extreme cases that I'd had, but even before then and some of the other shifts that I had throughout the year, I felt myself become weirdly more hyper-sensitive to my own body, which is kind of weird.

But if I was feeling hungry or if I hadn't slept that well the night before, then I became more aware of that and I latched onto that physical sensation.

So if I felt that I was hungry, I would be thinking to myself, oh my god, I'm hungry, I'm hungry, I'm hungry.

Or if I'm sleepy, like I need sleep, I need sleep, I need sleep.

And I feel like after those shifts, I just felt so guilty and so ashamed walking out of the hospital because I had envisioned myself becoming compassionate and reaching out to others.

And instead, I feel like I literally became self-centered.

I may have had maybe the brains of a doctor or the work ethic of a doctor in terms of academics and having the drive, but in terms of having a heart of a doctor, I felt maybe I didn't.

And that thought was just devastating to me.

And then, maybe a month ago, I was in an essay writing class here, taught by Andrew Todd Hunter.

He was talking to our class about compassion fatigue in trauma medicine, it fit with what I was encountering.

And I don't know too much about it, but I know that it is very common.

It is called compassion fatigue.

Sometimes it's called burnout also.

I guess it's common in all medical fields, but particularly in ER medicine, trauma medicine, so doctors and techs and nurses involved in that field, they're exposed to so much pain every day with every patient, and they're unable to feel compassionate or connect with these people anymore, and they kind of distance themselves.

And he gave us one mantra and one metaphor to kind of put in our minds when we're encountering suffering.

So in his class, I think he was talking about his own experiences as an EMT.

So he was in kind of the same situation that I was.

And at one point, he himself felt kind of clammed up when he was surrounded by all of these people in pain.

And he asked one of the veteran nurses for advice about that.

And she taught him two things that have stuck with him throughout his life, and one was a mantra that was called just being open.

And the other one was a metaphor of being a conduit, instead of envisioning yourself as kind of a bottle with a limit and just taking in everyone's suffering until you just shut off and don't take anymore.

But instead, just seeing yourself as a conduit with no set limit and just accepting people's pain and having it just pass through you.

Thank you.

So I used those two metaphors in the next shift that I had in the ER, so I always just reminded myself, just be open, be open, be open.

And whenever I interacted with patients who were in pain, I would imagine myself as a conduit, and I would imagine their pain, or their physical pain, their emotional pain, just kind of washing through me, and then just coming out the other end, and not just bottling up.

So one patient that we had, she was a 17-year-old girl who came from a group home because she allegedly tried to commit suicide by ingesting a whole bunch of pills.

But when I went to her with the resident doctor, like I saw just like mascara just streaking down her face, so she apparently cried, and she was very quiet, not smiling at all.

And when the resident did her physical examination to make sure she wasn't hurt in any other way, besides the ingestion, we saw a lot of like cuts from self-harming, just down her arms across her thighs and whatnot.

And I think without those metaphors of being open to her pain and her circumstances, before I probably would have just closed off and kind of scared to reach out, and I'd probably just let her be.

But with those two metaphors, being a conduit and open to that, just let me reach out to her.

And it's not like I started talking to her, having a conversation, but I checked in once in a while.

I asked her if she needed anything, and I was able to get a few smiles from her.

So I thought that was one moment where I thought it was working.

And I felt connected to the patient.

Instead of seeing her as someone who's cutting herself or someone who just ingested a whole bunch of pills to kill herself, I saw her as, you know, she's 17.

She's not that much different from myself.

She probably has the same pain.

She's human, just like me.

And those two tools just help me a lot.

And I felt more grounded, and I didn't feel myself clam up.

And I felt more connected to the patients that I was seeing.

All of these lives are being shattered, and they're being rebuilt at the same time.

And there's hope, and there's hope lost.

And there's so many stories just being written and rewritten in the same space at the same time.

And as a doctor and also as a volunteer, you're there to be in those stories and help co-write these stories as they're happening.

And these are just lives changing.

These are some of, like, the scariest things that these patients have ever experienced.

And to be able to be present in that space, I think is amazing.

That story was produced by Xandra Clark from an interview conducted by Alize Iqbal and Rachel Hamburg.

Break.

That last story was about learning how to process a lot of pain in one moment, to stay present with those who are suffering.

But what about when that moment has passed years ago?

In our next story, Lucas Loredo talks to his father for the first time about the long process of recovery after Lucas' mother passed away.

And then press enter.

One come up for Chopin.

Knock.

Nocturne.

That looks more like it.

Let's try.

Oh, here we go.

So, let's see.

Can you hear me?

Yep, it's gonna make me cry.

Yeah, she practiced that all the time.

That's my dad.

So, my name is Carlos Loredo.

And my dad and I are really close.

There was a time before my mom, Xanda, died when I didn't know dad at all.

The three of us lived together, but dad and I were complete strangers.

I was always nervous around him.

And when I was a kid, I thought I'd go my entire life without us ever getting close.

Part of the reason why I was so nervous was because dad just looks intimidating.

He's Cuban and he has a wide nose and thick hands.

He's got a big silver beard.

His white hair is slicked back and he always has on black Ray-Ban sunglasses, even when we take photographs.

Another reason why we didn't get close was that dad worked a lot.

He got his PhD in psychology from the University of Texas in Austin and he was always at court or seeing a client or meeting with attorneys and I didn't see him.

We did go out and play catch sometimes, but I remember dad always throwing the football too hard.

Growing up, mom played piano.

She was tall, 5'11, way taller than dad, and her long fingers made it easy for her to play Debussy and Chopin.

Most of what I remember about mom comes from stories other people tell me.

I've heard about the time she and my aunt flashed a Coast Guard helicopter at the beach, and my neighbor says that she could hear my mom laugh all the way across the street.

I do remember her reading Dr.

Seuss and Shel Silverstein to me every night before bed.

And I do remember that for her, I was what made the world spin.

Years later after the motorcycle trip, dad and I would get very close.

During my childhood though, we weren't.

Yeah, with you being real close to mom and because there was a time I remember Xandra saying like you were scared to talk to me.

And it's like, why the is that?

That's like, maybe how my voice sounded or dad, or it was easier talking to her because y'all talked all the time.

Lots of things about my mom were kept from me.

She struggled with depression and anxiety for a long time.

And when her dad died, when I was seven, she started taking medication for panic attacks and bipolar disorder.

Eventually the medication made her fingers slow like they were pulling through honey.

And I remember her sitting at the piano cussing because she couldn't play anymore.

I was 10 when mom started nursing school.

The plan was get a degree, start working, and dad can cut back from work and ease into retirement.

I think, too, my parents thought that if mom had a goal to focus on, she might get better.

After graduating from nursing school, she started working the night shift at the neonatal intensive care unit.

I think it was some months, I don't remember.

But that was, she was on a night shift.

And then she quit, because she was having too many hallucinations at work.

Did she tell you what they were?

Pretty crazy.

I don't remember, some of them I remember.

I don't particularly feel like talking about some of them.

Some of them were real scary.

I was scared what she might do to herself, or what she might do with you, or to you if she were in a car.

Do you think that she would have ever wrecked the car if her and I were in it?

I knew that her real self would never do that or come close to it, but she was pretty desperate to get out of what she was feeling.

It was real scary at the end.

What did you think was gonna happen?

I mean, where did you see it?

Nothing good, nothing good.

So what do you, I mean, what do you do?

You worry a lot.

You talk to lots of people.

You fret, you try to protect, and it's pretty scary feeling, actually.

It was that last year mostly where everything was going to hell, kind of?

Just more often to hell and more often to worse hell.

So, yeah, it just got progressively worse for mom.

It's like, you know, it's going to end bad.

You just don't have no control over it.

I was 11 then, and I didn't know mom was having panic attacks, or hallucinating, or that she might have been a danger to me or herself.

I didn't realize that dad was worried, and I didn't realize how hard dad fought to make her better.

I remember her saying, I'm such a bad wife, you'd be better off without me, and I told her, well, you know, I'm not running away, so if you go down, I'm going down with you.

When you said that, were you prepared to go down with her?

I wasn't going to give up, so yeah.

We must have loved her like crazy.

That year working at the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit changed my mom.

Every morning when she came home, she was a little less mom and a little more animal.

The night was turning her into something I didn't recognize, something dangerous and unpredictable, something like a werewolf.

In the movies, a werewolf turns back into a human in the morning, but mom never did change back.

In October of 2002, one year after she started the night shift, mom started having chest pains and difficulty breathing.

A couple days later, on October 3rd, she passed away in the bathtub from a blood clot in her lung.

I was homesick that day, and so I saw everything.

Just, you know, I was worried about her and just wanted to comfort her and stuff, so, you know, I got up, she was taking a bath, and I went, watered, and came back in, checked on her, and she was gray and said she couldn't breathe, and I went to her, and...

I remember the way you said her name.

Shanda, Shanda, just in this way that I knew.

It was like the world was ending or something.

Dad lifted mom from the tub and laid her on the floor.

I was on the phone with the 911 operator, and since dad didn't know CPR, I had to have the operator help me guide him through it.

Dad tried to bring mom back until the paramedics came.

Our family friend came to pick us up in his dark green convertible and he drove fast.

We turned left through a red light, and as we made the corner, we were almost hit.

I remember the oncoming car bearing down on my window, but I didn't care.

I felt like I was watching an actor on a stage, playing out my life from far away.

So, the doctor called you out, and what did he say?

They kind of soft-pedaled it, and it's like, you know, we did everything we could, and we just couldn't bring her back.

I'm sorry.

You want to spend some time with her, whatever they say, you know.

I mean, I already knew what he was going to say.

What did it feel like when he said it?

Shell-shocked, basically.

It's like, I mean, I know she died, but it's like it just didn't register.

It's kind of like football games where, you know, you just put it all out on the line, and, you know, and then some, and then you lose, and then you're just sitting there numb.

You had given it everything you had.

When they called that out into the hallway, I remember looking out the window and seeing people walk by, and I thought, how weird that today my life is ending and theirs isn't.

When dad came in, he told me, I have bad news, and that was it.

And that was it.

What was that?

I was 12 when mom died, dad was 52.

People brought food and came by to tell us how sorry they were, and there was a lot of stimulus.

But after a while, people stopped showing up, and eventually it was just me and dad.

Me and this person, I had always been nervous around.

Me and this stranger.

And we're it.

We are what's left.

So you're here, mom's gone, and you're left with this kid.

Well, and I can't work because I'm just too emotionally distraught.

And as you know, I was pretty depressed and pretty removed.

And that didn't help your situation at all.

Did you feel?

Bad.

I wasn't doing any better than I was.

And it's like I couldn't even remember how to cook.

Mom wasn't there to play music anymore.

And I remember how still and dark the house was.

I tried to take care of dad.

I always comforted him when he was sad.

Sometimes I put my ear against his door and heard him crying alone in his room.

For myself, I cried on the day mom died and a couple days after that.

Then I did not cry.

Not once for years.

I felt like there was only space for one person to be sad in the house.

And that person was not me.

I didn't know it at the time, but I was angry.

I felt cheated that dad could cry and I couldn't, and I felt abandoned.

Dad couldn't take care of me.

When mom died, I didn't lose one parent.

I lost two.

Things would end up getting better, but for a year and a half every day was the same.

I would go to school, work hard, then come home and enter into our quiet house.

I would go straight to my room and get on my computer.

Dad would call me into the kitchen to get dinner.

I remember taco nights a lot.

And I'd get my plate, and dad would get his, and I would say, I said, okay, if I eat in my room, and he would say, yeah.

Dad would take his plate to the living room and watch television, and I'd take my plate to my room and shut the door.

At night, my mind would run, and I would think terrible thoughts about dad.

I'd lie awake and wish I still had mom, my best friend, and not this stranger named dad.

And I could hear the hum of the television in the living room, mixed with the sounds of dad crying, coming from under my bedroom door.

And every night, I felt a little less human, and a little more like something else.

Something animal, something dark, something like a werewolf.

Dad used to ride motorcycles when he was a young psychologist, so for his 53rd birthday, me and my half-brother, Juan Carlos, split the cost of a 24-hour Harley rental.

I don't know Juan Carlos well because he grew up with his mom, but it was his idea.

It was something me and dad could do together, just the two of us, and I think Juan Carlos was trying to help us get close.

As the trip approached, it seemed to gain more weight.

I needed dad to snap out of it.

I was too exhausted to take care of him anymore, and I thought this motorcycle trip might somehow give me a sign that he could take care of himself.

We went to the Harley rental store in Round Rock, 30 minutes north of Austin.

The bike we got was a cruiser with a streak of powder blue paint down the side.

It had a backrest, which they call a sissy bar, and saddle bags for storage.

Dad drove the Harley back to the house that night so we could get an early start in the morning.

I went back with a family friend.

It was the first time dad had ridden a motorcycle in 20 years.

You know, like, you know what Harley's sound like.

When you ride them and you give the throttle, you know, you goose it, it's such a nice sound, you know, and such a nice feeling.

And then you put it in gear, it engages, you give it the throttle and you go.

It's like, what does it feel like?

Freedom, kind of free, you know, free.

The next morning we packed water and nectarines in the saddlebags.

I was excited, but scared.

Dad was on medication then, and he always had this cloudy look in his eyes like his mind was somewhere else.

There were days when he drove me to school, and the car would get really close to the curb, and I thought for sure we would crash, but I don't think dad ever knew anything about it.

And I'm about to get on the 2,000-pound machine with this guy, and I don't trust that he can keep me safe.

I climbed on the back of the motorcycle and brought my arms around dad's stomach.

Dad and I hadn't been this close physically ever, and it felt weird.

But when you're on a motorcycle, you have no choice, and so I held on.

We rode through the Texas Hill Country.

It was a spring day, cool enough, and the sky was big and open.

We rode south from Austin on a road called the Devil's Backbone that overlooks Canyon Lake.

We came down out of the hills and rode next to the blue-green water of the Guadalupe River.

It's kind of a curvy road, and then when you get to River Road, it's just like, oh man, because it's cooler there also.

Because of the trees?

Yeah, well, you ride next to the water, and you have all these huge cypress trees that shade the road, and they line the road.

And people dotted the river in inner tubes.

And this is Texas, so there are two tubes per person, one for them and one for their coors of beer.

I loosened up a little.

I let myself rest back against the sissy bar and took it all in.

The one thing about being on a motorcycle is that it's so open.

There's no metal around you, no windows, nothing.

And all the people in their inner tubes wave to us, and we wave back, and I let my grip around dad's back relax.

I was getting more comfortable.

And I wasn't as afraid, I was having fun.

We went to the end and I said, well, there's a way to get to green Texas and all of that.

And then we rode across that low water bridge.

I remember that.

Uh-huh, and then we ended up at that little restaurant, hamburger joint right by the river.

What was the hamburger joint like?

It had nothing, no kind of hamburger joint, but we were eating and sitting by the water.

And I remember feeling, the good thing is I know that I was coming out of my hole because I was enjoying myself.

It's like, cool, I can laugh again, I can enjoy things again.

And I can have fun with my son.

And look what a great time we're having.

Isn't this cool?

By the time we finished eating and got back on the road, it was dark, rush hour.

We rode through the cypress trees and waved at the leftover tubers as we crossed back over the low water bridge.

We got back on the highway and it was busy and it was dangerous.

I was nervous again because cars kept coming in front of us.

So I hugged dad's back tighter.

So they kept coming into our lane.

Yeah, twice, so from New Bronzeville, which is what?

50 miles from Austin.

So in 50 miles, we almost got run over twice.

I remember you putting your boot out.

Is that right?

Getting ready to kick off the car.

Yeah, I'd forgotten that.

That image is burned in my brain because it was like, I'm on the back of this huge motorcycle, and we're about to get run over, and there was nothing I could do about it.

Yeah.

There was nothing I could do, and the only thing I could do is just trust you knew what you were doing and that you'd protect us.

I think that's why it sticks in my brain so much, because it was like, I had no control, and for so long, I had felt like I was taking care of you, and we were riding back on the motorcycle, and it was kind of this moment of like, well, maybe this guy can take care of me too.

There is a division in my brain.

There is before the motorcycle trip and after the motorcycle trip.

Before, I was the caretaker, and it took a long time for me to get close to dad, to trust him.

But the motorcycle trip was the beginning of that trust.

And after it, things got better.

Talking to dad these last few weeks has been really hard.

I wanted to understand how I came to trust dad, but what kept coming up is that I never knew how much dad fought for mom.

When I transcribed our interview, I kept tearing up, and I can't get over it.

I mean, what kind of love would it take to look your partner in the eyes as she slowly sinks away and say to that person that no matter what, you will be there?

And that's what my dad did.

He looked at my mom, the woman he loved, and he said he would go down with her.

And he did.

And then he came out again.

And you and I have, you know, my dream came true.

You believe it?

What was your dream?

I told you, buddy.

I know, remind me.

It's that I'd have the best, closest relationship with a child and if they were a son, it'd be like icing on the cake.

And I had that, so it's like, couldn't be better.

The effect of those two years after mom died lasted eight more.

And it's only now, ten years after her death, that I feel like I'm becoming human again.

The process has been slow, and it's been hard.

But now it feels like those nights lying awake happened in another life.

I can feel the moon going away, and I can feel that the werewolf in me is finally leaving for good.

That story, River Road, was written and produced by Lucas Loredo, who graduated from Stanford in 2012.

You're listening to State of the Human, the radio show of the Stanford Storytelling Project.

This week, we're exploring the many ways that people recover.

In our last story, Lucas Loredo and his father both shared memories of Lucas' mother.

But what about when the problem is that you can't remember anything?

What does recovery look like then?

Nina Foushee brings us this story from the mental health ward of the Menlo Park Veterans Hospital.

Each Wednesday afternoon, I volunteer at the Veterans Hospital with United Students for Veterans Health.

The ward I visit bears the construction paper artwork of children who still don't know what war is.

The artwork, like the flower arrangements on the dining room tables, comes from people who will never visit.

I follow the hospital rules, using hand sanitizer and remembering that compromised immune systems means never touching the surfaces of things.

One of the most important rules is not expecting to be remembered.

Nearly everyone in the ward has some form of memory loss.

Inside the hospital, there were usually a few people parked in front of the TV, below a sign in the common room that read, turn the TV off during mealtime.

The first time I met Eleanor, the only female veteran in the ward, I asked her if she wanted to talk, and she pointed to Heather Locklear on the TV and hissed, shh, she's telling me important things.

When I could pull her away from the screen, I wheeled her to the dining area and tried to ask questions about her life.

When I talked to her, she'd lean conspiratorially across the table, her pink mesh headband just inches from my face.

She often responded to my questions by buzzing her lips and vigorously nodding her head.

Though she believed she was meeting me for the first time each week, she seemed animated, almost chummy.

Sometimes Eleanor didn't speak at all.

Those days, we would sit across from each other and carry on a kind of conversation with just our eyebrows and shoulders.

Sometimes I read her Walt Whitman and Treasure Island.

Eleanor, listening wide-eyed, would vigorously shush anyone walking by, as though she was the lone congregant at a warship service.

I remember trying to get the voice right for Long John Silver.

I'm Cap'n Hero by election.

I'm Cap'n Hero because I'm the best man by a long sea mile.

I think he was her favorite character.

When I read John Silver's parts, she seemed to take on his role, putting her elbows on the table and waggling her finger to address her shipmates.

One afternoon, I noticed her folding dinner napkins.

I decided to teach her to make a paper boat.

It was mesmerizing to watch her, knowing the likelihood that, at each crease, she would not remember those that had preceded it.

She approached the process with wonder.

She was watching her hands as if they were children doing delightful, unexpected things.

I asked my friend Pat to play piano at the Veterans Hospital because his playing makes me forget where I am.

I wanted Pat's music to take the veterans out of the ward.

He tried to temper my enthusiasm with a shrug, saying, I'll do a little Sinatra.

The old people like that.

He came to the ward the next week with hands in his pockets.

He didn't make eye contact with anyone as he walked in.

When he sat down at the piano, I turned off the TV.

He began to play.

From the moment his hands touched the first key, Eleanor rolled her shoulders, buzzed her lips, air-pianowed and snapped.

When the nurse gave Eleanor her pills, she closed her hands over them and shook her fists like maracas.

Watching Eleanor, I felt a buzzing in my limbs, an inability to swallow.

For those songs, I think I joined her in the feeling of being lost within time.

I could let Eleanor exist for a moment, in the room and in the songs.

The music stripped away the condescension and separation implied in the visitor-patient distinction.

I felt that I was just a person in a room full of people.

The room swelled, and I felt all of us inside it.

Me, Eleanor, Pat, Mr.

Ballesteros, who stayed sane by humming Hawaiian lullabies, the nurses, the techs, and all the silent broken members of the ward, the ones whose blood and dreams were to the tune of the machines that communed with their veins.

All of us.

At the end, Pat stood up and shook each person's hands.

Eleanor told me he was a good boy, but her eyes said he was a god, and I believed her.

People become what they invoke.

Pat left, and Eleanor kept buzzing and clapping like there was some music left that she'd breathed in and still had to cough out.

The other volunteers and I played repeat-after-me rhythm games and held our breath, not wanting the music and Eleanor to fade.

We wanted to pretend that Eleanor would remember Pat's playing, but quickly her hands went still, and she looked up at us with the intake of breath and the clumsy indignation that marks when her mind resets.

She glanced back over at the TV, her North Star.

Dinner would be served soon.

We left.

Pat can bring anyone to tears when he plays, but he resists sentimentality.

So in the parking lot, where many good scenes end, he looked at his sneakers and told me not to exaggerate when I explained that this was the highlight of Eleanor's whole year of mine.

He played somewhere over the rainbow.

I smiled to the point of tears as I watched Eleanor go to the place Dorothy described.

But Eleanor will not remember Pat or me.

I don't know what significance playing for her holds when her memory of the music proves ephemeral as the flush in her cheeks when she listens.

What does it mean to visit someone who doesn't remember?

I like to think that Pat's music captured all of us equally.

Pat's playing was the first experience I had shared with Eleanor that made time feel irrelevant.

I want to believe that shared experience without shared memory can be enough.

In the meantime, I play Sinatra just to see Eleanor dancing.

That story was written by Nina Foushee and produced by me, Sophia Paliza.

You're listening to State of the Human, the radio show of the Stanford Storytelling Project.

This week, we're exploring the radical ways that people change in order to recover.

This next poem features a character who takes this idea to the extreme.

He's tried all sorts of ways to become a new man, and he's got one last idea left.

Stop being a man.

Stop being a human.

Become something else entirely.

Here's Stanford Jones lecturer, Greg Wrenn, reading the poem that titles his book, Centaur.

Centaur.

One.

Smelling manure, the humid sharpness of rainforests, beyond his stables and field, I got off the bus.

For three days, I'd fasted on deviled eggs and honey, sipped turmeric water.

Just following his orders, my orthopedic surgeons.

I'd ripped out his ad from the back of an almanac, dog-eared on top of a friend's toilet.

Do you believe in centaurs?

You can rid yourself of burdensome-footed legs.

Angel of Brazil now offering a revolutionary surgical procedure to become a centaur.

Be zero and one, sleek and wise velocity.

Risk free.

It spoke to me as a relic seems more holy once taken from its locked case and placed in one's palm.

Two.

Intake form, Part D.

Always felt dead from the navel down.

Some man touched me in the crib, warped my bones.

Never could run like the other boys, those lithe cheetahs flying past the dugouts, the fence feathered with creeper.

My feet splay out like an emperor penguins.

I will them into straightness, but turn around and still see fresh, angled prints in the sand.

Please, please hoist my hips from my body into the heavens, hot engine lifted from propped open hood.

Cordless, immaculate sander, work my ilia.

Invisible chiropractor, tune my ischia, each grateful pubis, shift my kneecaps inward.

Nudge those two pneumatic clams closer in the mud.

Three.

His therapist's last notes, a fragment, stolen from her Watertown, Massachusetts office.

Marcus says he must do it, he must change, advised him of my concerns.

One.

Another distraction from abuse history.

Two.

Issue equals sex addiction, does not equal correcting physical deformity.

Three.

Medically risky hygiene in Brazil.

Four.

Centaurs are lusty from my reading.

Four.

Previous interventions.

To reawaken waist to feet, I've tried uttita trikonasana, rolfing sessions, psychedelic meditation retreats, pure stretches of mindfulness spiked with extracts of Yucatan moss.

All a bunch of New Age baloney.

I considered binding my feet, having the bones of my lower limbs broken, reset, too geisha-like, too Golgothan.

I let many men, culled from cyberspace, crush and slide into me, choke the backs of my thighs like chicken throats, graze and bite, grip my arches, but it never worked.

Five.

I want to feel alive, I said three times as I rapped on the door with the greasy horsehead knocker.

The intercom crackled.

A long tone.

A nurse's voice wavered and gained strength.

Sit on the cushion in the center of the fourth stable.

Close your eyes.

Your left lid will twitch when your animal whinnies and puffs its arrows of longing toward you.

Six.

Motes curling in barn light.

Cushion really low milking stool in middle of long corridor.

Fringed with Fisher Price toys.

Hey, I plunked down.

Stalls seem to rattle, breathe as single mammal, tightly collared.

Promise grace wasn't shot.

Bow never even strung.

Arrows never whittled, feathered.

Had I tapped unwitting inner species' morse code, let no one love me.

Choose me.

Soul horse, let's go home.

Dr.

Angel shook me.

Then shook my hand.

Do not despair, Marcus.

Let's be more practical.

They can be so stubborn.

Rolling his eyes far back into his head, he whirled about, stopping to point at Mr.

whose eyes shone like new black top.

I hear him crying your name.

He's homesick.

Seven, surgery.

Holding the mask over my mouth, Dr.

Angel counted down in Portuguese with a Tuscan accent, and I heard Mr.

being rolled in on a wonky cart.

No doubt he was on his side, on a bed of dry ice, fine sharpie lines drawn along his lower neck.

When I woke, strange birds were grooming themselves on the windowsill.

No saliva in my mouth.

I heard water running continuously.

An enormous drum of pain persisted below my stomach, pinch, pull, pound, stretch, fitful fusion, incubus knock, dawn, agony, teething.

Days later when I first stood up, I was a palsied crab, dazed, skittering, scraping.

Hot flurry of spindles seeking ground, ratchet legs of milk teeth, what moves us on, gravity and shallow grave.

In the mirror I saw my navel was nearly stretched down to where my brown coat began.

Skin the color of dry pomegranate pulsed at the suture.

I told my new body, you must die.

I began emitting more heat than ever.

Sporadically I shook.

8.

Post-op.

Once, only once, I let him ride me bareback.

It was near sunset, late, late November.

He'd completed his day's work.

We were in the kitchen, and he brushed away a housefly from the veins along my numb legs.

He kneeled a bit.

He relaxed into my back.

He held on to my neck, his calves against my flanks, and I started for the field, what felt like an ocean.

There's a trust that won't throw us.

He understood.

No bridle, no reins.

Thanks.

That was Greg Wrenn reading his poem, Centaur.

That piece was produced by Rachel Hamburg.

You are listening to State of the Human, the radio show of the Stanford Storytelling Project.

And this week, we're talking about recovery.

We're back in Zubair's room.

The blue lights are still glowing, but the room and the happiness project are no longer the subject of conversation.

Zubair and Rachel are talking about a different kind of recovery.

Eight years ago, Zubair's family left their home in Dhaka, the capital of Bangladesh, to come to the United States.

They left behind a huge family and a rich history, which was scarred by a 1971 war that killed many hundreds of thousands and displaced millions.

They left behind daily blackouts and undrinkable tap water and the monsoon rains that flood Bangladesh every year.

And they landed in Duncanville, a small town in Texas, in an apartment next to an empty park.

Zubair was 16.

He says he and his family had a hard time adjusting.

We immigrated to America in 2005.

So it's been roughly eight years since we've been here.

And changing a lifestyle sometimes can take more than eight years.

Sometimes some people don't even, can't even do it.

Because it's really difficult to not stop thinking about where you come from.

I came here when I was 16 and a half, which is, you know, you're forming your identity at the time.

And you don't really know who you are, but you'd love to find out.

I mean, everybody would love to find out despite age.

But it's more restless in teenagers, I think.

When Zubair came to Stanford, he was still thinking about his history and his family's history in Bangladesh constantly.

So in this phase, I just thought a lot about these things, about the war, which I didn't live through, by the way.

My parents lived through it.

So I thought a lot about the war.

I thought about back home.

I would think about them when I'm doing homework.

I think about them right after I watched a movie.

I think about them before going to bed.

And during this time, he began writing poetry.

He found a mentor named Michael McGriff, a lecturer at Stanford.

He told Zubair to write.

He encouraged me to write poetry.

I basically start off with an emotion that I have.

And then I expand that emotion, and that becomes a poem.

I was just writing poetry because I enjoyed it so much.

And then this one time, I sent a whole bunch of poems to my mentor, Michael McGriff, and he got back to me and he said, yo, Zubair, I just sent out, like, a manuscript to McSweeney's.

McSweeney's, by the way, is a prominent publishing house.

And I was like, okay, sure, I don't know what.

What does that mean?

And I wasn't really thinking about publishing.

The thought, of course, crossed my mind, but I wasn't, I didn't know it could happen.

It just didn't make any sense.

And then eight months later, McSweeney's got back to me in an email saying, we really liked your book.

We hope you didn't give it away to another publisher.

And that kind of made me laugh because I didn't really turn it into anybody except them.

So the book got published and right after it got published, it came out in December 2011, 2012, sorry.

And right after it came out, I noticed this really funny thing.

I felt completely differently about Bangladesh and I felt completely differently about my past emotions.

It was almost like emotionally growing up.

I don't think about these things anymore.

They affect me.

I've learned from them, but they're not on my mind all the time.

I have other things on my mind that are only made possible because I've had these experiences.

That's what the book helped me do.

It actually drew a very nice line in the sand for me to just cross over and explore a completely different world in which I can grow.

Zubair's book, City of Rivers, was published by McSweeney's in 2012 and nominated for the Northern California Book Awards in 2013.

The last poem in the book is called Concession.

So this is the last poem in your book and it feels like the happiest in a lot of ways.

Yeah, I would say that.

I wrote this poem well after I've written all the other poems in the book.

I would say it's happy but more like acknowledging that the past happened and it's time to move on.

So yeah, so this poem is called Concession and it's the last poem in my book.

Concession.

I could sit here all night and chances are I will.

The moon lights the ocean on fire.

I watch the waves repeat themselves until they become a house with soft lights and no furniture.

I begin to sleep.

My body is music.

I will never have a home.

Mm-hmm.

Today's program was produced by Rachel Hamburg, Xandra Clark, Sophia Paliza, and Jonah Willinghans.

Special thanks to Ryoko Hamaguchi, Elisa Iqbal, Lucas Loredo, Carlos Loredo, Nina Foushee, Greg Wrenn, and Zubair Ahmed.

Thanks also to Charlie Mintz, Kristi Hartman, Victoria Hurst, Joshua Hoyt, and Natasha Ruck.

Music you heard on this program includes music by Broke for Free, Sato Koji, Steffen Basho-Junghans, Podington Bear, Nic Bommarito, Matt Baldwin, Gilly Cuddy, Augustus Brough, and Gallery Six, The OO-Ray, Candlegravity, All Right Lover, Waylong Thornton, Stella Wallstrom, Dexter Munday, and Johnny Ripper.

For their generous financial support, we'd like to thank the Stanford Institute for Creativity and the Arts, the Vice Provost for Undergraduate Education, and Bruce Braden.

Remember that you can find this in every episode of State of the Human on iTunes.

You can also download them and find out more about the Storytelling Project's live events, grants, and workshops at our website storytelling.stanford.edu.

For State of the Human and the Stanford Storytelling Project, I'm Sophia Paliza.

By the way, if you need to recover from listening to this show, consider sleeping, eating or waiting.