476: What Doesn’t Kill You

Ira Glass

Tig Notaro is a comedian. She was on our show this past spring telling the story-- maybe you heard this-- about Taylor Dayne. But in just four months she went through a series of terrible things, life changing things, including finally, two months after she was on our show this past May, she was diagnosed with cancer.

Her doctor called her with the test results on a Wednesday. Eight days later she was told that it was stage two and that it might be spreading throughout her body. And then the next night she did something that you don't see a lot of cancer patients do. She went on stage and did a stand-up set about it, about everything she was going through. She felt like she had to.

Ira Glass

The set she did at a club called Largo in Los Angeles became notorious in comedy circles immediately after it happened because another comedian, Louis CK, tweeted that it was one of the best sets he ever saw. It's not the kind of set that kills with joke after joke after joke. What makes it special is listening to it you can feel Tig figuring out how she's even going to talk about these things on stage as she's making her way through it.

Ira Glass

Well, today on our radio show, "What Doesn't Kill You," we have stories of people who nearly die. Some of them nearly die more than once. And we see what it turns them into, who they are when they come back to the rest of us.

From WBEZ Chicago, it's This American Life, distributed by Public Radio International. I'm Ira Glass. Stay with us.

Ira Glass

Act One, "Too Soon?" So we're going to start with that set that Tig Notaro performed the day after she heard that she had stage two cancer back in August. It's never been broadcast or released anywhere from now. This is going to be excerpt of the much longer half hour set.

[CROWD CHEERING]

Tig Notaro

Good evening. Hello. I have cancer. How are you? Hi, how are you? Is everybody having a good time? I have cancer. How are you? Ah, it's a good time. Diagnosed with cancer. [SIGHS]. It feels good. Just diagnosed with cancer. Oh, God.

Oh, it's fine. Here's what happened. It's very personal. Found a lump. Guys, relax. Everything's fine. I have cancer.

[LAUGHTER]

Found a lump, got a mammogram. I ended up getting biopsies, which is painful. It feels like being stabbed. I felt like I'd been rear-ended all day, and then just dropped off back at my house. I couldn't move or anything.

And it was so intrusive and horrible. And I was just like, God. After all of these like ice pick, stabbing feelings, I'd better have cancer.

Somebody over here just keeps going, oh. Oh, I think she might really have cancer. Who's taking this really bad? Oh. It's OK.

[LAUGHTER AND APPLAUSE]

It's OK. It's going to be OK. It might not be OK. But I'm just saying, it's OK. You're going to be OK. I don't know what's going on with me.

I literally got diagnosed just a few days ago. And this friend of mine, she was like, oh my gosh. I'm sure you've heard about these funny cancer greeting cards. And I go, whoa, whoa, whoa. You're sure I've heard about funny cancer greeting cards? I was like, I just got diagnosed.

I didn't just go out and learn all about the subculture, and start buying knickknacks, and like, no. I don't know about the funny cancer greeting cards. I just don't know. I just got diagnosed.

And so my friend texted me one of the cards. The outside of the card says-- oh, what is it? So you have cancer. Sad face. Then you open the card. And it says, thank goodness. I've been looking for a reason to shave my head.

[HESITANT LAUGHTER]

I can't believe that's what you guys haven't laughed at tonight. That was straight from the funny cancer greeting cards.

[LAUGHTER AND APPLAUSE]

What's odd, though, is having this diagnosis, it's such a weird time because I have so many amazing things going on in my life. Like, all of the best and all of the worst is exactly at the same time. In fact, at the end of March I had this-- basically a bacteria was eating my digestive system. So I had this bacteria eating my digestive tract. So I lost 20 pounds. I've put five back on.

And just please bear with me. It's so hard, because right now in my life, when I have a show I don't feel like, oh, I want to go talk about how funny it is that a bee was taking the 405 freeway. Like all the jokes that I've written, I just am like, I can't even bring myself to talk about it.

Because-- and just, everyone relax-- my mother just died. Should I leave? My mother just died-- tragically, too. She was 65, she tripped, hit her head, and died, a week after I got out of the hospital.

What happened was after we buried her in our hometown in Mississippi, we drove back to Texas. And I was checking the mail. And the hospital sent my mother a questionnaire to see how her stay at the hospital went.

[LAUGHTER]

Hm-- not great. Did not go great. The questionnaire asked things such as, number one, during this hospital stay, did nurses explain things in a way you could understand? I mean, considering you had zero brain activity.

Number two, was the area around your room quiet at night? Or could you hear the 12 hours of your daughter alone at your bedside sobbing and telling you things she wished she was brave enough to tell you when you were conscious? Number four, suggestions for improvements. Such as, should we stop sending questionnaires to dead people?

When I was-- I'm jumping around a lot-- I'm going back to the cancer. I'm bailing on the mother thing. After I got the biopsies, they did another mammogram. And I had to have my shirt off. And I was standing there at the machine. And the technician said, oh my gosh, you have such a flat stomach. What is your secret? And I was like, oh, I'm dying.

[LAUGHTER AND APPLAUSE]

The condition I had in the hospital is called C diff. And so I just refer to it as the C diff diet. You just sit there and watch the pounds melt away. Don't like exercising? Who does, girlfriend? This diet does all the work for you. Just clear all the bacteria from your intestines and let the C diff whittle way at your waistline.

So basically, the events-- I got pneumonia. I was in the hospital for a week for C diff. Got out. A week later, my mother died. I know, it's hilarious. Then I went through a break up, right in the middle of it all. It's tough times. You can't stick around for that. Got to get out before the cancer comes. Went through a break up.

Tig Notaro

Seems totally legitimate. Who here is just wishing I would tell bees going down the 405?

[LAUGHTER]

I just can't. I'm sorry. [SIGHS]. But you know what's nice about all of this is that you can always rest assured that God never gives you more than you can handle. Never. Never. When you've had it, God goes, all right, that's it. I just keep picturing God going, you know what? I think she can take a little more.

[LAUGHTER]

And then the angels are standing back going, God, what are you doing? You are out of your mind. And God was like, no, no, no. I really think she can handle this. But why, God? Like, why? Why? I don't know. I just, you know. Just trust me on this.

I heard another little sad [INAUDIBLE]. May you just should have stayed home. You know, what if I just transitioned right now into silly jokes right now?

Tig Notaro

No. I want to hear more bad news. No!

[LAUGHTER]

Where are you?

Tig Notaro

Now I feel bad that I don't have more tragedy to share.

[LAUGHTER]

I'm honestly tapped out. Like that's all that happened to me. That's it.

Ira Glass

OK, it's me again jumping in here. So after about half an hour of this, trying all kinds of stuff. Some that gets huge laughs, some stuff she's just kind of trying out and seeing. For example, she talks about getting a double mastectomy. She talks about her friends not knowing how to talk to her normally now that she has this diagnosis. There's a whole bit about will I date with cancer? And as the set is winding down, the audience requests the bee joke that she's been mentioning.

Tig Notaro

Tell the bee joke? OK.

Ira Glass

And hearing her do the bee joke is like hearing her perform a version of herself which she knows doesn't even exist anymore.

Tig Notaro

I was driving here.

[LAUGHTER AND CHEERS]

And ugh, just a lot of traffic.

[LAUGHTER AND APPLAUSE]

And my car hadn't moved in several minutes. I was just sitting there. And my window was down. And a bee flew past me. Do you have any idea how frustrating it is when a bee passes you in 5 o'clock traffic? And PS, what was the bee doing taking the 405 in the first place?

Anyway, thanks so much for coming.

[CHEERS AND APPLAUSE]

Ira Glass

Tig Notaro. What you just heard was less than half of what she did that night. The full thing is available, can be downloaded at Louis CK's website, louisck.net.

Tig Notaro

Yay, cancer! That's the best response I've ever gotten.

Ira Glass

Act Two, "Just Keep Breathing." So this 13-year-old get bit by a shark. And it's harrowing, but not as harrowing as what happens after the attack. Because sharks are dangerous, but so are grown-ups.

The 13-year-old is now a grown-up herself. And she agreed to tell her story here on the radio. But she asked that I not give out her name. She was raised in this small town in New Zealand where everyone knew the shark story. And the last few years, she's been enjoying a life in America where that is not the very first thing that every single person she meets knows about her. And she wanted to try to keep that going by not outing herself on the radio.

The attack happened when her family was out on a camping trip at the beach. She went for a swim with her friend.

Ira Glass

She says the feeling of this was like the shark was trying to get inside her. It grabbed her on her right side, a few inches above the hip. The shark, as best as she could tell anyway, was about five feet long. She was just over five feet tall.

Ira Glass

She hobbled towards shore, sent her friend for help. A small chunk of skin was torn off. She had two big puncture wounds. Her swimsuit was half tattered.

Ira Glass

On the beach, a small crowd starts to form. Of course, to her horror. Her parents show up and drive her to the nearest town, which she remembers as 30 minutes away. Though her mom remembers it as 15 to 20.

It's such a tiny town in a remote part of New Zealand that there's no hospital there. It's Friday night. So they have to call the local doctor to come in to open up this little medical office.

Ira Glass

Now these instructions from the doctor play a big part in what is about to follow. They've become part of family lore. So I just want to hold on this point for one more moment. The doctor said-- or anyway, they remember him saying--

Ira Glass

Remember, they're on vacation. It's her parents and her three siblings, all younger. She's in pain. But the doctor said she'd be in pain.

Ira Glass

This, after all, was what the doctor told them was going to happen. She'd be uncomfortable, that was normal, nothing to worry about. This continues all night. She throws up blood into a cup, feels feverish.

What's actually happening, everybody's going to learn later, is that the shark has bitten through her bowel in several places. So the contents of her bowels are slowly leaking into her gut, basically poisoning her. She's developing sepsis and peritonitis. She is bleeding internally. One side effect of all this is that her lungs start filling with liquids, making it increasingly difficult for her to breathe.

Ira Glass

Now I talked to her parents to answer the question that might be forming in your head right this second. They do not seem like terrible people, or the worst parents I have ever met. They both understand how they screwed up that night.

Her mom told me, yes, she knows this all looks very bad in retrospect. And they should have listened to their kid. Yes, her dad said. She woke them up. She said she was dying. They didn't do anything. It all looked very different later.

In their defense, they both pointed out that, at the time, the liquid that she was throwing up looked more brown to them than blood-red. They both assumed that it was Coca-Cola, which she had been drinking. And not to excuse their actions, but simply as context for the "stop hyperventilating" remark, her mom pointed out that, at that age, her daughter did hyperventilate when she was nervous about all kinds of things, like a music performance at school.

When the sun came up the next morning, their daughter was pale, having a terrible time getting in enough air to breathe. And then her eyes rolled back in her head. Her mom saw the whites of her eyes. And she said she felt like she was falling through the surface of the Earth. She had somebody call the doctor's office. They were coming in. Her daughter picks up the story.

Ira Glass

Actually, whether it was a shark or some other creature is still in some dispute. Her dad says that the town listed it officially as a stingray attack, so it wouldn't hurt tourism. A New Zealand shark expert told us that if it were not a shark it could either be a stingray or a fur seal. But it would be impossible to tell that without a photograph of the wound, which we were unable to locate in time for our broadcast. Anyway, back to our story.

Ira Glass

A long journey, because by this point, there is so much fluid in her lungs that it's taking all of her concentration to keep enough air going in and out. It's exhausting.

Ira Glass

She started losing consciousness. But she describes it as lifting off in an airplane. It felt good. Though she fought it.

Ira Glass

Her mom was in the back seat with her. And her mom told me that when they stopped on the bridge, there was a noticeable change. Her daughter's body seemed to get very light. She told her husband to hurry.

Finally, they arrived at the medical office. She can't speak, can't move. But she's still conscious. There are now either three or four doctors, depending on whose memory you rely on.

She's put on a table. And she hears the doctor say something to her parents that she can't quite make out, but that seems to be either she's dying, or possibly, she's dead.

Ira Glass

The parents do confirm these quotes. Her dad remembers saying, that was my favorite daughter. He said it was obvious that she might die. He was haranguing the doctor to do something now. Her mom does not remember, but says that it is very possible she declared, just like the cat. Because Winkles had died of internal injuries after its stomach was perforated, very similar to their daughter.

Ira Glass

Doctors slice into her arms and ankles. She still had inch-long scars that she showed me. She says it's hard to believe that when they sliced into your ankles with no anesthesia, it hurt worse than being attacked in the water.

Ira Glass

The way she remembers it, when they cut into her ankles, she jolted. And they realized at that point that she was alive. And they called the helicopter to fly her to a proper hospital.

At least, that's how she saw it at the time. The reality was different. I reached one of the doctors who worked on her that day, Dr. Vic Eastman. He was trained in emergency room medicine. And he says that they definitely were not performing an autopsy. He said that she was in such a state of shock, she lost so much blood. They believed that if they didn't get IVs into her immediately, she would die.

Cutting into the arms and ankles is what doctors do to find a vein in that situation when there is so little blood pressure. This is a standard ER procedure. And they didn't feel like they had the time to stop and anesthetized her.

They did call in helicopters. She was flown to a hospital in the city of Nelson, where she was operated on. For a while, it didn't seem like she was going to survive. She went into a coma, and woke up days later.

Ira Glass

When somebody asks her to tell this story, what happened the day after she was bit by the shark-- or whatever it was-- it's possible for her to get mad all over again. But it usually doesn't come up. She doesn't think about it.

And she's fine with her parents. Her relationship with them is pretty much like anybody's. And she understands their actions that day. Everybody moved on.

Ira Glass

It was a family with four kids. Nobody was inclined to dwell on the past, including her. Within a year, her dad had started buying joke presents about it-- a necklace with a shark, and a swimmer coming out of its mouth. Or a t-shirt with a cartoon shark bite, fake blood splatters, and a hole-- a real hole in the shirt-- coincidentally, right where her actual bite was.

The fact that she nearly died, that was the past. She wore the shirt and the necklace. And then quietly, after a while, she had enough of it.

Coming up, when you're little, you learn that you are supposed to be careful with sharp, dangerous objects. You learn that you are not supposed to put dangerous things into your mouth. In a minute, somebody who ignores both those rules-- really, really ignores them. From Chicago Public Radio and Public Radio International when our program continues.

Ira Glass

It's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Today's program, "What Doesn't Kill You." We have stories of people surviving all kinds of things, and where they end up on the other side of that. We've arrived at Act Three of our show. Act Three, "A Real Nail Biter."

This story is amazing. Because the woman that it's about, I think more than anybody else on today's show, probably should not be around to tell the story. Reporter Jessica Benko tells what happened.

Jessica Benko

The woman's name is Cathy. And the thing that almost killed her over and over was a thought. It first appeared one day when she was 12 or 13 years old. She was in a psychiatric institution at the time.

Cathy asked that I not use her full name on the radio. And she didn't want to discuss certain events of her childhood. She hopes it's enough to describe it as troubled. But she threw violent tantrums as a kid, assaulted her teachers, and even began cutting herself. So Cathy's doctors had convinced her parents an institution might help her. But it was there that the thought first came to her.

Jessica Benko

Cathy says it felt good to swallow the nail. And once it was in her stomach, she felt intense relief. The thought was no longer nagging her. Doctors put her in the hospital and waited for the nail to pass. But once it was gone, the thought returned with increasing frequency, again and again.

Jessica Benko

All of this sounds intolerably painful. But for Cathy, it was even more agonizing when she wasn't able to swallow something, when she wasn't able to appease the thought. Cathy told my producer Brian Reed and me about one day when she snatched a straw from the common area of the psych ward. She hid it in her bra, hoping to swallow it the next chance she got. But the staff strip-searched her before she could do it.

Jessica Benko

Cathy isn't using metaphor here. She genuinely believed this irrational thought that if she didn't swallow the object she had fixated on, she or her mother would die. She says having the object inside her felt like a protection.

Cathy was given a lot of diagnoses over the years. But doctors believe her swallowing was a symptom of obsessive-compulsive disorder. This is the same disorder that causes people who are afraid of germs to wash their hands incessantly, or others who are worried about a fire to check the stove dozens of times before they can leave the house. Cathy's fear about her or her mother's safety was a more extreme and illogical version of this.

Doctors didn't have a good cure. No matter what they tried-- therapy, drugs, repeated electroshock treatments-- they could not stop the thought from torturing Cathy. All they could do was try to stop Cathy from hurting herself. She couldn't be trusted on her own, so she was permanently institutionalized and put in four-point restraints.

Jessica Benko

On top of this, Cathy was constantly supervised by one, and sometimes even two staff members. But that didn't stop her from swallowing things. By law, every eight hours staff had to let her walk around for 15 minutes. Those 15 minutes were Cathy's chance to act.

Jessica Benko

She had to win. Because every time she focused in on a new object, the fear that something horrible might happen was reignited.

Jessica Benko

Cathy never got her hands on a real metal knife, just the plastic ones they used in the hospital. But the results weren't so different. A quick warning, what Cathy describes in the next minute or so is graphic. You might want to turn down the volume if you're sensitive.

Jessica Benko

This wasn't even the closest Cathy came to dying. Once-- I'm sorry this is a little graphic-- she sneezed while swallowing a radio antenna. And it became lodged dangerously close to her brain stem. Doctors had to put her in a medically induced coma while they figured out how to extract it.

Over the years, Cathy had more than 500 endoscopies, where surgeons inserted a tube down her throat and pulled the item out through it. She had more than a dozen invasive surgeries to remove objects and repair tears and holes in her stomach, intestines, and esophagus. One of Cathy's doctors told us she almost single-handedly trained an entire generation of surgical residents at his hospital's ER. Things got so bad that after Cathy turned 18, hospital staff went in front of a judge to get permission to put her in a straitjacket.

Jessica Benko

When Cathy was 21, she was transferred to yet another new facility-- Taunton State Hospital. She was so heavily drugged when she arrived, she didn't wake up for about a week. And when she did, her muscles were so atrophied from being restrained she couldn't hold up her head or lift her arms.

But Cathy says this hospital, Taunton, was different. The doctors and staff were willing to give her a chance. They set up a system of rewards she could work toward. Each day she went without swallowing something, she was allowed one hour out of the straitjacket.

They helped her build muscle tone back in her arms by walking her hands up and down the walls. They showed her a bit of kindness. After a winter storm, they brought her a snowball, something she hadn't felt in about 10 years.

And it was at Taunton that Cathy had a chance encounter that changed her life. Her regular psychiatrist went on vacation, and another doctor filled in for him. He was familiar with a relatively unknown surgery for extreme cases of OCD that he thought might help Cathy. It was a controversial procedure, mostly because when people hear about brain surgery on mentally ill patients, they immediately think of a lobotomy.

This wasn't a lobotomy. It was much more high-tech and precise than that. But it would mean destroying a small section of Cathy's brain. The idea was that surgeons could burn out a piece of the circuit they believed was malfunctioning-- the circuit that communicated between the emotional and logical parts of Cathy's brain.

Only one hospital in the country offered the procedure regularly. And it happened to be near Cathy-- Massachusetts General. They had been doing it for decades. And they had found that the risks were low. More than half of the OCD patients who got the surgery improved. And for those that didn't, the side effects were minor.

So Cathy agreed to try it. It took about two hours. And amazingly, after she got out of the surgery, she immediately felt different. Her urge to swallow had vanished completely.

Jessica Benko

That feeling lasted almost a year, until Cathy relapsed. The obsession came back. And she started swallowing again. So doctors did a second surgery and destroyed a little more of her brain. Again, Cathy woke up and the thought was gone. Again, she moved forward warily, not sure if it would last.

As the months passed, she began earning more freedom in the psych hospital. She was out of the straitjacket for good. Staff let her walk around the grounds of the hospital freely.

But recovery wasn't easy. Even moments that should have been exciting were challenging instead. Like when she went home for the first time. After spending 10 years confined, mostly in restraints, to mental institutions, she was allowed to go to her mom's house for dinner.

Jessica Benko

More than a decade later, Cathy's showing us around her apartment. When she first moved out on her own, she was 28. Though she essentially had the life skills of a 13-year-old. She had to learn how to cook, how to clean. Her doctor sent someone to teach her how to shower by herself.

Jessica Benko

Since then, Cathy's earned her GED and has taken a few classes at community college. These days, she checks in with her therapist every six months or so. She has a good life. She's funny, easy to talk to.

Jessica Benko

We went over to the desk in the corner of her living room. Cathy picked up a mug filled with pens.

Jessica Benko

One came from TD Bank, one from the Institution for Savings. A friend gave her another. Now she can take one out of her collection and jot down a grocery list or a note to her boyfriend.

Ira Glass

Jessica Benko in New York.

Ira Glass

Act Four, "The Sweet Year After." In the aftermath of some terrible incident that nearly kills you, turns out things can be kind of great. Tim Kreider explains how.

Tim Kreidor

17 years ago, I was stabbed in the throat. This is kind of a long story, and less interesting than it sounds. Except for the 10 or 15 minutes during which it looked like I was about to die, which I would prefer not to relive, getting stabbed wasn't even among the worst experiences of my life. In fact, it was one of the best things that ever happened to me.

After my unsuccessful murder, I wasn't unhappy for an entire year. Winston Churchill's description of the exhilaration of being shot at without result is verifiably true. I'm not claiming to have been continuously euphoric the whole time. It's just that during that grace period, nothing much could bother me or get me down.

The horrible thing I'd always dreaded was going to happen to me had finally happened. I figured I was off the hook for a while. In a parallel universe only two millimeters away, the distance between my carotid and the stiletto, I would have been flown home in the cargo hold instead of in coach.

I started brewing my own dandelion wine in a big Amish crock. I listened to old one hit wonders, much too embarrassing to name in public. And I developed a strange new laugh that's stayed with me to this day-- a loud, raucous barking thing. It makes people in bars or restaurants look over for a second to make sure I'm not about to open up on the crowd with a weapon.

Not for one passing moment did it occur to me that God must have spared my life for some purpose. Even if I had been the type who was prone to such notions, I would have been disabused of it by the heavy-handed coincidence of the Oklahoma City bombing occurring on the same day I spent in a recuperative coma. If there is some divine plan that requires my survival and the deaths of all those children in daycare, I respectfully decline to participate.

What I had been was not blessed or chosen, but lucky. Which is not to turn my nose up at luck. It's better to be lucky than just about anything else in life. And if you're hearing this now, you're among the lucky, too.

You'd like to think that nearly getting killed would be a permanently life-altering experience. But getting stabbed was like a lightning strike-- over almost as soon as it happened, and the illumination didn't last. You can't feel crazily grateful to be alive your whole life anymore than you can stay passionately in love forever, or grieve forever for that matter. Time makes us all betray ourselves and get back to the busy work of living.

It's easy now to dismiss that year as nothing more than the same sort of shaky, hysterical high you'd feel after being clipped by a taxi. But you could also try to think of it as a rare glimpse of reality, being jolted out of a lifelong stupor. I can't recapture that feeling of euphoric gratitude any more than I can really remember the mortal terror I felt when I was pretty sure I had about four minutes to live. But I know that it really happened, that that state of grace is accessible to us, even if I only blundered across it once and never find my way back.

At my cabin on the Chesapeake Bay, I'll sometimes see bald eagles swoop up from the water with wriggling little fish in their talons. And whenever they accidentally drop their catch, I like to imagine that fish trying to tell his friends about his own near-death experience, a perspective so unprecedented there are no words in the fish language to describe it. For a short time, he was outside the world. He could see forever. There's so much more than they knew. But he's glad to be back.

Ira Glass

Tim Kreidor reading an excerpt from his book of essays and cartoons with the really wonderful name We Learn Nothing.

[MUSIC-- "SURVIVAL SONG," BY ANDREW JACKSON JIHAD]

Ira Glass

Our program was produced today by Brian Reed with Alex Blumberg, Ben Calhoun, Sarah Koenig, Jonathan Menjivar, Lisa Pollak, Robyn Semien, Alissa Shipp, and Nancy Updike.

Our senior producer is Julie Snyder. Production help from Tarek Fouda. Seth Lind is our operations director. Emily Condon's our office manager. Elise Bergerson's our administrative assistant.

[ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS]

This American Life is distributed by Public Radio International. Our new film, Sleepwalk With Me is still in tons of theaters. Like any comedy, it's always more fun to see in a movie theater with a crowd of people.

But if you are one of the many, many people who actually comprise the majority of people in our country, maybe you've got kids, maybe you stay at home, you don't get out to movies much, I'm excited to announce that our film is available now on VOD-- Video On Demand-- through most cable operators and satellite providers. You can watch it right now, tonight. Or we are encouraging everybody-- we have this idea to throw pizza parties this coming Friday night, October 12, Friday night. Invite over friends, order some pizzas, watch the film.

Mike Birbiglia, who stars in the film, and I will be Skyping and video chatting into as many parties as we can. To sign up for that and to let us know how to reach you on Friday, go to our website-- thisamericanlife.org.

WBEZ management oversight for our show by our boss, Mr. Torey Malatia. His reaction to the presidential debate this week-- he turns it on, and I guess, I don't know, he was really put off by the president's performance.

Ira Glass

Well, understandable, I guess. I'm Ira Glass. Back next week with more stories of This American Life.

[MUSIC-- "SURVIVAL SONG," BY ANDREW JACKSON JIHAD]

Announcer

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