826: Unprepared for What Has Already Happened

Ira Glass

From WBEZ Chicago, it's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. And I am happy to welcome to the studio Lilly Sullivan, one of our producers. Hey, Lilly.

Lilly Sullivan

Hi, Ira.

Ira Glass

And you're here because we wanted to kick off today's show with this interview that you did. And explain who this is with.

Lilly Sullivan

So, this interview is with this guy named Jackson Landers. Jackson, he's an outdoorsy type of person. He fishes, he hunts. And he writes about that stuff. He's a journalist who sometimes does this adventure journalism. Like, he wrote a whole book where he traveled around North America, hunting and eating invasive species. But the thing that I talked to him about was this one moment that happened near his house in Virginia. This day, he went fishing.

Lilly Sullivan

So Jackson actually knows a lot about black widow spiders and their bites. He lives in a place where there are a lot of them. And sometimes he finds them in the house. Or one time, he found one, and he put it in a Mason jar and kept that jar in his desk for months. And he would feed it and observe it and watch its behavior.

So he knew a lot about them, and he also knew that the truth is, black widow bites are very rarely fatal. They're just really painful, the kind of pain that would leave someone doubled over, incapacitated. But Jackson, he'd just been bit, and he's not feeling any of that yet.

Lilly Sullivan

He also knew that when you go to the hospital, they almost never give you the antivenom.

Ira Glass

That's the stuff that can cure a black widow bite.

Lilly Sullivan

Mm-hm. Because there's a fear that while the black widow bite probably won't kill you, the antivenom actually might. So when you go to the hospital, they usually just help you manage your symptoms.

Lilly Sullivan

He didn't go home, though. He just continued doing what he was doing.

Ira Glass

Fishing.

Lilly Sullivan

Yeah, and then he started to feel this tightness in his stomach.

Lilly Sullivan

Jackson's mom drives him to the hospital. And when he gets there, it's really lucky for him because they have a new experimental antivenom that they give him.

Ira Glass

So it worked.

Lilly Sullivan

Yeah. But the fact that he waited so long to stop fishing and get to a hospital, he's thought a lot about that decision. He says it wasn't just about the money. It's mostly something else.

Ira Glass

Well, today on our program, people who are in a situation where reality changes and they have not caught up to the new reality they're living in. This happens in so many different kinds of situations. We actually got the idea for this episode from something that a climate futurist said in an article about wildfires. The guy's name is Alex Steffen. And he talked about how so many of us, when it comes to the climate, are experiencing, quote, "the shock that comes with recognizing that you are unprepared for what has already happened."

Haven't you felt that with climate? Maybe with where politics has gone in this country the last few years or with personal news, sometimes. The shock of realizing you're unprepared for what has already happened. Today, we hear stories of people struggling with that exact thing, that reality shifting lag time. Stay with us.

Ira Glass

Act One, It's Probably Nothing. From the very beginning of the war in Ukraine, Elena Kostyuchenko was there, arriving the day after Russia invaded, finding and writing stories that were shocking. In the city of Kherson, she talked to people who told her they'd been tortured by Russian soldiers.

She found the place where they'd been held captive. She got the names of dozens of people who had been kidnapped. She's a longtime Russian journalist, publishing in the country's leading independent newspaper, Novaya Gazeta.

And she wrote this essay called "How They Tried to Kill Me" that we thought of for today's show because it shows so clearly how, during a time when everything is changing quickly, like in a war, your perception of what is happening around you can lag way behind the reality, even when other people are telling you straight to your face that things are different now.

It's read for us by Bela Shayevich, and it starts about a month into the war. Elena spent that first month reporting from Ukrainian cities that were under Russian attack or occupation.

Bela Shayevich

In those weeks, I could only focus on what was directly in front of me, where I could find electricity, where I could shower, how to cross the front lines for a story, how I could document everything I was seeing. I was surrounded by catastrophe, figuring out how to operate inside of a catastrophe.

What I couldn't see then, and I'm beginning to understand now, was the whole bigger picture of what had been unleashed since the invasion. There were new dangers now and new rules. I couldn't foresee how much my world was going to change.

First, my newspaper collapsed. I was at a checkpoint when I learned that Novaya Gazeta, the paper that I'd worked for 17 years, was ceasing operations under pressure from the Russian government. In some ways, I'd been expecting it. Other Russian media outlets were shutting down left and right. But still, the pain of it was unbearable. Novaya was like a second family to me.

When I got the news, I'd been planning to go to Mariupol. Mariupol was still resisting Russian incursion. I decided that I was going to stick to my plan-- go to Mariupol anyway, publish whatever I wrote wherever I could. I spent the afternoon before I was supposed to go in a hotel. I was trying to gather my strength.

A colleague from Novaya called me. She asked me if I was still planning on going to Mariupol. I was taken aback. Only two people from the newspaper knew that I was supposed to go there. I said, yeah, I'm going tomorrow. And she said, my sources have gotten in touch with me. They know that you're going to Mariupol. They said that the Kadyrovites have orders to find you. They're not just going to hold you. They're going to kill you. Those are their orders.

It was like running into a wall. I went deaf. Everything went white. I said, I don't believe you. And she said, that's what I said, too. I told them I don't believe them, but then they played me a recording of you talking to somebody about going to Mariupol, planning your trip. I recognized your voice.

She hung up, and I sat down on the bed I didn't think anything. I just sat there. 40 minutes later, my source from Ukrainian Military Reconnaissance called me. He said, we have information that an assassination of a female journalist from Novaya Gazeta is being organized in Ukraine. An all points bulletin on you has been sent out to every Russian checkpoint.

I couldn't stand the idea that they were going to stop me from reporting on their massive atrocities. I decided to give myself another 24 hours to figure out another plan for getting to Mariupol.

The following morning, I woke up to messages from an editor at Novaya. The Russian Prosecutor General's Office and the government censor had sent them letters demanding they take my reporting from Ukraine down from their website. The authorities said that if Novaya didn't take my stories off of the website, the whole site would be taken down. Novaya took my stories off of the site. Somehow, this is what crushed me. I started crying and couldn't stop.

Then rage came in place of the tears. I decided I would go to Mariupol, no matter what. I kept trying to find another road in, a road that didn't exist. The only thing that ultimately stopped me from going was thinking about what would happen to whoever agreed to take me in their car. If I got killed, they wouldn't be spared either. The next night, I left Ukraine.

I left in a really bad state. I had lice, mumps, and PTSD. My friends took me in. My girlfriend Yana came from Russia. She tended to me. My plan was to get better, finish the book I was writing, and go back to Russia. All of my work, my mother and sister, my entire life, all of that was there. I couldn't yet see that in this new world, I wouldn't be able to go home.

At the end of April, two months into the war, Novaya's editor-in-chief Dmitry Muratov called me. He spoke in a very gentle voice. He said, I know that you want to come home, but you cannot go back to Russia. They're going to kill you. I hung up the phone and started screaming. I stood in the street and screamed. At the end of September, I got in touch with Muratov again. I asked him to find out whether I could return to Russia now. He called me back several days later. No, no, no.

I found an apartment in Berlin and stayed there. I began working for the largest remaining independent Russian media outlet, Meduza. We decided that my first reporting trip was going to be to Iran. And then we decided that after Iran, I would go back to Ukraine. I decided to go to Munich to apply for a visa at the Ukrainian consulate there in person. Their website had been attacked by hackers and wasn't letting me file for a visa online.

There is no justification for what I did next, and there cannot be, but I need to confess that when I was planning my trip to Munich, I corresponded about it over Facebook Messenger. It wasn't secure at that time, and I knew that, but I thought, I'm not in Russia. I'm in Germany. I believed that Europe was safe. The basic tenets of my security, the protocols I'd been following for years, didn't even occur to me. I left myself exposed to what happened next at all of these moments that I can see so clearly when I look back.

On the evening of October 17, I took an overnight train to Munich. I took off my shoes, lay down on my seat, and slept. People walked past me. They'd bump into my feet. I kept sleeping. On the morning of October 18, I arrived. I went to meet my friend, tried to sleep, then went to the consulate. But I still wasn't able to apply for a visa. Now, their internal system was glitching. We decided that I would come back another day.

My friend picked me up at the consulate, and we went out to lunch. We sat outside at a restaurant. While we were eating, two different groups of her acquaintances happened to run into us. They came up to our table. There was a man and then two women. I thought, what a small town Munich is. It's like everyone here knows each other. I went to the bathroom and then came back. All I could think about was the visa. It was unlikely that I was going to get it, but what if it worked out?

After lunch, my friend took me back to the train station. As we approached it, she said, listen, I have to tell you something. You smell bad. Let me find you some deodorant. But she couldn't find any. I remember I was really surprised. She's a very tactful person. She would have never said anything to me if I hadn't actually smelled terrible.

When I got on the train, I found my seat and immediately went to the bathroom. I wet some paper towels and started wiping myself off with them. I was covered in sweat. The sweat smelled strong and strange, like rotten fruit. I sat down and started reading the manuscript of my book.

After a while, I realized that I was just reading the same paragraph over and over. My head ached. I had gotten over COVID a few weeks earlier. I thought, do I really have it again? I was covered in sweat. I went back to the bathroom and wiped myself off again.

When I got out at the Berlin train station, it hit me that I couldn't figure out how to get home. I've tried to describe what was going on in my mind at the train station, and the closest I can get is this. A friend told me once about what it was like having a stroke. She knew she was having a stroke. She understood that she needed to get down the stairs of her house and go out into the street, but she couldn't understand stairs.

I asked her, you mean you couldn't walk down the stairs? She said, no. It wasn't about being able to walk. I couldn't understand the concept of stairs at all. For me, the idea of space itself felt weird. In Berlin, it's easy to transfer from the train to the subway. I'd done it many times. But suddenly, I didn't understand getting from one platform to another, the whole idea of changing levels. My mind failed. I was terrified.

Finally, I did manage to get on the subway platform, but when I realized that the trains went in both directions and I would have to figure out which way to go, I burst into tears. People on the platform helped me get on the right train and told me to go two stops and then get off. I did. On the stairs, I got short of breath. I thought to myself, this fucking COVID has really messed me up this time.

I didn't once think, maybe I've been poisoned. I didn't know that what was possible had shifted. In the old world, before the war, Russian reporters had been poisoned, but only inside of Russia. Russians who were poisoned outside the country had mostly been former security services people, not reporters, like me.

As soon as I got home, I went to sleep. I hoped that I would feel better when I got up, but I only got worse. A pain in my stomach woke me up. The feeling was strange, very strong, but like it kept getting switched on and off. I felt so dizzy. The room was spinning. I barely slept. My head kept spinning whenever I sat down or got up. On the third day, it became clear that I was not going anywhere and that whatever I had wasn't COVID.

It isn't easy to see a doctor in Berlin. And I didn't know how to navigate the medical system. I wasn't able to get an appointment until 10 days after I got ill. The appointment was at a regular clinic in my neighborhood. The doctors, there were two of them, both immediately said that I had long COVID, but they did an ultrasound, too, just in case-- all clear. I also got them to do some blood tests. I came out of the clinic consoled. It was nothing. I'd get better soon.

Then the blood tests came back. They were bad. The levels of ALT and AST, two enzymes in my liver, were five times above normal. They tested my urine. There was blood in it. The doctors began taking me seriously. I was referred to another more experienced specialist. She said that it was most likely viral hepatitis, which I had contracted during the war. We'll figure out which hepatitis it is, and then we'll treat it, she said. The hepatitis tests came back negative.

My symptoms kept changing. My face started swelling. My fingers started looking like sausages. Then it was my feet. I lost sight of my chin. My face was no longer my face. I couldn't recognize myself in the mirror. Sometimes the palms of my hands and the bottoms of my feet would start to burn, turning red and shiny.

A few weeks into these symptoms, a friend of mine came to Berlin. He was horrified at the state I was in. He said, do you understand that you may have been poisoned? Have you talked to your doctors about that? I said, I haven't, and I'm not going to. That's stupid. I said, don't try to infect me with your paranoia.

Everything was exhausting, but I stopped being able to sleep altogether. It was as though my brain had forgotten how to fall asleep. My hepatic enzyme levels kept rising. I kept going to doctors. The doctors would come up with theories, test them, come up with new ones-- autoimmune diseases, systemic diseases, acute complicated complex pyelonephritis.

Finally, a doctor asked me, is it possible that you've been poisoned? I replied, no, I'm not that dangerous. I told Yana about it later, and we laughed. She said, of course. It's the simplest explanation. A Russian journalist? She must have been poisoned.

In December, two months after my trip to Munich, I went back to my neighborhood doctor. I got a new round of tests, and the results had gotten worse. My ALT was seven times above normal. We sat in the doctor's office. Then she said, Elena, there are two theories left. The first one is that the antidepressants you're on may have suddenly started working aberrantly. But you recently changed medications, and your symptoms and test results haven't changed.

That's why we have a second theory. Please try to stay calm. You may have been poisoned. I laughed. The doctor stayed silent. I said, that's impossible. She said, we've ruled out all other options. I'm sorry. You need to go to the Toxicology Department at Charité Hospital.

I spent the next three days in the apartment, just lying there and thinking. At first, I told Yana that it was all stupid and that the doctors had made a mistake. They just couldn't figure out how to diagnose me and didn't want to run any more tests. Then I got in touch with Meduza, my employer. And we started trying to plan our next steps.

In order to get blood tests done for poisoning in Berlin, you have to go to the police. So I did. They sent me straight to the hospital from the precinct. The police officers came, too, to talk to me and the doctors.

My first round of questioning with the Berlin criminal police lasted nine hours. They wanted to know everything, what I was working on, what I was planning to work on, who I had been in contact with in Ukraine, who I was talking to now. I had to reconstruct October 17 and 18, my trip to Munich, minute by minute.

The police checked my clothes and apartment for radiation, my body, too. They took the clothes I traveled to Munich with. Then the police did a safety check of my apartment. An officer asked me, why are your blinds open? You could easily be shot from the balcony across the way. They told me I needed to follow new safety protocols. Like what? I asked. Move. Take different routes home. Don't get cabs directly to your destination. Get out of cars a few blocks away. Wear sunglasses.

The police officers were mad at me. They didn't show it at first. But after the third round of questioning, we started talking. The lead detective said, we can't understand why it took you this long to come to us. You should have called the police right away, as soon as you felt sick on the train. We would have met you at the station.

But I didn't think I'd been poisoned. I'm still not sure. Why didn't you think so? It seemed crazy to me. And I'm in Europe. I felt like I was safe here. That is what drives us up the wall, the detective said. You people come here and act like you're on vacation, like this is some kind of paradise. It doesn't even occur to you to keep yourself safe. The Russian Special Services are active in Germany. We have political killings here.

The senior detective had already run two previous investigations of Russian citizens being attacked in Berlin. One was shot and killed in Berlin in 2019. The killer, Vadim Krasikov, received a life sentence in Germany for murder, quote, on the orders of the Russian government.

A year earlier, the same detective investigated the apparent poisoning of a prominent critic of President Putin, Pyotr Verzilov. But, the detective said, we weren't able to establish anything in that case, not even the substance used. I asked, how come? Because it's impossible to ask a lab, was this person poisoned? You could only ask if there was a specific substance present in their body. And there are thousands of poisonous substances. That's why it's such a popular means of assassination.

The Berlin police do not have any answers for me. Four months after I'd first gone to them, the prosecutor general's office informed me that they had not found, quote, "any indication that there had been an attempt to kill me." Quote, "Blood test results do not conclusively indicate poisoning."

But in the meantime, I was approached by the editor-in-chief of online Russian investigative news site Insider at a journalism conference. He took me aside. Elena, I have a personal question. But first, I need to tell you something. Christo Grozev from Bellingcat and I have been investigating a series of poisonings in Europe. All the known targets are female Russian journalists. I want to ask you. You haven't written anything for a long time. Is it because you've been sick?

And I told him what I'm telling you now. The doctors and toxicologists Bellingcat consulted came to the conclusion that the most likely explanation of what happened to me was that I'd been poisoned with an organochlorine compound. I've passed this information on to the Berlin police.

I've thought a lot about why it took me so long to believe I'd been poisoned. During my time at Novaya Gazeta, four of my colleagues were killed. I organized the funeral of Khimki journalist Mikhail Beketov. He'd been a friend.

I knew that journalists got murdered, but I didn't want to believe that they could kill me. I was protected from this thought by revulsion, shame, and exhaustion. It disgusted me to think that there were people who wanted me dead. I was ashamed to talk about it, even with loved ones, let alone the police. And I felt how exhausted I was, how little strength I had left, that I wouldn't be able to go on the run again.

At this point, the pain, nausea, and swelling have gone. But I still have very little energy. There are days when I can't do anything. I feel useless. Reporting is what has given me purpose my whole life. My partner, Yana, and I have to move every month now. The Berlin police say we need to, as much as we can, for our safety.

We have to decide for ourselves how much moving that means. It's so exhausting every time-- new languages, new currencies, new neighborhoods, packing, unpacking, over and over again. It's hard for anyone to get a sense of what's safe or what's dangerous in our current reality. Like, what if moving around so much is actually stupid, and we're driving ourselves crazy for nothing? Does anyone really know what Yana and I are supposed to do?

But the reality that we found ourselves in isn't actually totally new to me. There's something familiar in it. Even though Russia is my home, I never felt safe there. So for me, the feeling of home is the feeling of being unsafe. Now, I walk around foreign cities the same way I used to walk around Russian cities, paying close attention to the people and things around me, listening, watching, always weighing my risks. The habit of being vigilant actually feels comforting. It is both normal and not. You can take the girl out of Russia, but Russia may not let you go.

Ira Glass

Bela Shayevich reading an essay by Elena Kostyuchenko. This essay first appeared in n+1, translated into English by Bela. The book Elena talks about in the essay has come out. It's full of intimate, eye-opening stories of people all over Russia. It's called I Love Russia, Reporting from a Lost Country. The radio adaptation of her essay was produced by Nancy Updike and Valerie Kipnis.

Coming up, something good happens suddenly to comedian Tig Notaro, but she has trouble catching up to the reality of that. That's in a minute from Chicago Public Radio when our program continues.

Ira Glass

It's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Our show today is about moments when we all find ourselves catching up to some new reality that we're living inside, moments when we're shocked to realize that we are unprepared for what has already happened.

I don't know about you, but I feel like we get a lot of those moments these last few years. They happen when they're big, world shaking changes-- wars and politics, pandemics, the climate. But they also happen with small, personal upheavals. We find ourselves catching up to some new reality that we find ourselves in.

We have an example of that happening that got recorded on tape, like as it happened, somebody who was not adjusted to the new reality, their heads still sort of spinning, trying to get a grip on where they now found themselves. This is going to be the second act of our show. Act Two, We At The Hotel, Motel, Very Locked In. And the person this happens to is one of our regular contributors, Tig Notaro. She was on tour, doing stand up in Sacramento, California, in a big theater, the Crest Theater.

Ira Glass

And right before she got on stage, this thing happened to her. And you can hear it in her voice. In this recording, she is still not over this. Mentally, she has barely caught up to the fact that she is on stage in front of all these people, and she talks it out, brings them along for her mental ride with this.

Ira Glass

Tig Notaro. Her new stand-up special Hello Again comes out in two weeks on Amazon. Her podcast Handsome is available wherever you get your podcasts.

Ira Glass

Act Three, That's My Story and I'm Absolutely Not Sticking to It. So our show today is about moments when we're all catching up to some new reality that we are living inside, and we turn in this act to political realities. One thing that is very particular to being a politician is that it is a politician's actual job to make a new reality.

So maybe that reality is a world without abortion rights. Maybe it's a world where rich people get taxed a lot more. You see what I'm saying. Maybe you remember that old famous quote from a senior Bush administration official who told a reporter, when we act, we create our own reality.

Being a politician means that you think that you're the one who can reshape the reality that the rest of us live in. And with that in mind, we have this very interesting, very local example where you see a politician trying to bend reality to suit his purposes. Zoe Chace explains.

Zoe Chace

This is a story of a politician who denied the truth, and then admitted it, and then, very publicly, went back to the original denial, as if no one would notice. It starts in November of 2018, down in Monroe, North Carolina.

[APPLAUSE]

You know that feeling when you think you have something in the bag, and you're on top of the world about it?

Zoe Chace

That's the position this guy, Mark Harris, was in a few years ago. This was his victory speech. He'd just run for Congress.

Zoe Chace

This was a very tight race, though, margin of just about 900 votes. And Harris was headed to Washington when word came in he might not have won.

Zoe Chace

It wasn't long before Mark Harris, former Baptist preacher, was accused of major election fraud. The whole scheme was revealed at a hearing in Raleigh. The testimony was wild, mostly about a political operative Harris had hired, McCrae Dowless.

This guy, McCrae Dowless, there's so much I could say about him, because I did a whole podcast about this. But briefly, he was described as a good old boy who ate, drank, and smoked politics. You could usually find him with a cigarette outside the hardware store in his windbreaker.

McCrae had been hired to run Mark Harris's absentee ballot campaign. And down in Bladen County, McCrae allegedly hired people he knew to go around picking up ballots-- illegal-- filling them out-- illegal-- signing for witnesses who weren't there-- illegal. Apparently, he paid a woman named Kelly, who he befriended at the Hardee's drive-thru. He hired his in-law, Jessica. His stepdaughter, Lisa, she testified at the hearing.

Zoe Chace

The question on all this, of course, was, did the candidate, Mark Harris, know McCrae was directing all this fraudulent voting activity? Had Harris signed off on it? When Mark Harris finally took the stand, he was like, nope, not me. No idea any of this was going on, and I had no reason to doubt McCrae or what he was doing at the time.

The big moment in the hearing came on day three, when a surprise blockbuster witness upended the Harris team's narrative of things. That witness? His son. John Harris is a lawyer, at the time, an assistant US district attorney, respected, known lawyer in Raleigh.

And John got up there, all fresh-faced at 29 years old, and was like, Dad, you knew. You knew McCrae was a fraudster, allegedly, and you knew because I told you. We talked about it. I sent you emails, emails which are now in possession of the court, showing you he'd likely cheated in elections before using absentee ballots. I warned you he was probably cheating now, and you ignored me. He recounted those emails and calls to his parents on the stand.

Zoe Chace

At the very end of his testimony, which the entire room seems to find extremely convincing, John Harris asked to make a statement. His voice cracks.

Zoe Chace

John's crying. And then pan the camera to his dad, the candidate, Mark Harris. There's this famous picture of this moment. Mark Harris is crying, watching his son testify. You could see this as a moment where the reality of the situation finally caught up to Mark Harris, both Harris faces crumpling up with tears.

Was Mark Harris mad? Ashamed? Moved? He squirmed through hours of testimony the next day. And after a break, he walked into the hearing room tight-lipped and miserable. He looked down and read a statement off a piece of paper, admitting, yeah, some very bad things were done by his own campaign.

Zoe Chace

Another moment of catching up to reality, I think-- Mark Harris essentially admitting, after everything we've heard, I agree with you guys. It was improper. Whether I should have known or not, my side screwed up so bad that, yeah, let's do it over.

After that, Mark Harris leaves immediately. And the hearing is pretty much over. The elections board unanimously votes to run a new election, and Harris doesn't run. Kind of a big deal. It was the first and only federal election to be overturned due to election fraud in 90 years.

Anyway, that's where this tale of Mark Harris's short run for Congress lived in my mind-- a politician who had to admit the truth, sort of. So, imagine my surprise. Imagine how shocked, shocked, I was to see Mark Harris announce a run for Congress last year--

Zoe Chace

--with a completely different version of what had happened in the 2018 election, a new version that matches exactly what former President Trump says about his election.

Zoe Chace

First of all, where do I start? Dr. Mark Harris, you were the one who called for a new election back then. Remember? I understand that running a campaign based on being persecuted is very en vogue right now, but this is a very extreme example of it-- Harris claiming he was persecuted for something that he himself was accused of, election fraud, allegedly engineered by the campaign guy he hired.

But Mark Harris is reading the room correctly. This is the new reality we all live in. Saying you had an election stolen from you-- people like that, even, and maybe especially even, if it isn't actually true.

I reached out to Harris and his son to discuss this new take on things. Neither one would talk to me. This wonderful TV reporter in North Carolina, though, Joe Bruno, asked Harris about this a few weeks ago.

Zoe Chace

That's its own move right there. The "everything hasn't come out" move, the "once it does, I will be vindicated" move.

Zoe Chace

I'll say again, he's the one who called for that new election back then. There's reality, and then there's political reality. The two of them are so far apart right now. Post-2020, Republican politicians are pretty much required to agree that the election was stolen from Donald Trump. I think that's just the table stakes.

Mark Harris and a bunch of other candidates are taking it one step further and saying it happened to me, too. I have personally felt the pain of a stolen election. And it works. Last week, on Super Tuesday, Mark Harris won the primary. In this district, that means he finally gets to go to Congress. Welcome to Washington, Dr. Harris.

Ira Glass

Zoe Chace is one of the producers of our program. Her podcast where she tells the whole story about how election fraud accusations tore apart Bladen County. If you have not heard this, it's called The Improvement Association. It's from Serial Productions and the New York Times.

Ira Glass

Act Four, What'd I Miss? So we close our show today with this story from Tobin Low about a very special group of people who have to catch up to new realities all the time. They have no choice. It's part of their lives. Here's Tobin.

Tobin Low

This specific morning was unremarkable. Joe Dombrowski, a public school teacher at the time, was getting ready for work. He'd been out for a while, so he wanted to get to school a little early to get back in the swing of things. He ate a quick breakfast, dashed out the door.

Tobin Low

He arrives at school, walks down a small flight of stairs to the front desk, where the school secretary and the principal are hanging out.

Tobin Low

Apparently, a man with a gun had been randomly firing at people along I-96 that week, the very highway Joe had just taken to work. The man would end up shooting at 23 drivers.

Tobin Low

It wasn't even kind of like that. That's literally what happened. He had been asleep for the past three weeks and missed everything. And I don't mean napping or catching up on rest. Joe has a rare neurological disorder called Kleine-Levin Syndrome, or KLS. It affects about 1 in a million people. And its defining feature is that those who have it experience episodes of extreme exhaustion, entering a deep sleep for days, weeks, or even months at a time.

Now and then, they wake up. But when they do, they're in a fog, usually with only enough energy to eat a little, use the bathroom, and then back to bed. There's no known cause for KLS and also no known cure. When Joe first started showing symptoms as a teenager, it was completely debilitating. He'd go to school, feeling like he'd just pulled all-nighters for three weeks in a row.

Tobin Low

When he finally got a diagnosis, he learned that the only way out of an episode was to give in to it, which is what people with KLS have to do. They just have to sleep for however long it takes to get past it. So people with KLS frequently find themselves emerging into a very different reality than the one they left.

I talked to someone who missed the onset of COVID completely, woke up to a shutdown world. I talked to another guy who missed the events of 9/11 and a woman in Ecuador who recently woke up to find out war had broken out in her country. But the person I talked to who experienced the longest episodes by far was Arielle Poleg.

Tobin Low

During that year, Arielle had to put off her plans to go to grad school and instead, move into her childhood bedroom at her parents' house in Boston.

Tobin Low

It was 2005. I pulled up some of the biggest headlines from that year, just to get a sense of how much you could miss in that amount of time. She slept through the death of Pope John Paul II, Hurricane Katrina. She remembers seeing some headlines about it in magazines her mom left for her, but not much more than that.

Tobin Low

During those 15 months, all she knew was that she'd sleep almost all day and night, wake up for some amount of time, and then go back to sleep. And even during those waking hours, she'd be in a haze. She wouldn't talk. The people I talked to described waking up during an episode as extremely confusing and disorienting, like they couldn't tell what was real or what they were hallucinating.

Tobin Low

This is Arielle's dad, Neal. Arielle had gone into her episode in July.

Tobin Low

Arielle says even though she missed a whole year of her life, that's not the episode that sticks out to her. The one that really hurt happened when she was a teenager. She was in a deep sleep for a couple of weeks, but occasionally, when she would get up to use the restroom, she'd see her dad in the hallway.

Tobin Low

When she did finally come out of it, she found out her grandfather had gotten sick and died. That's why her dad hadn't shaved. He was observing a Jewish tradition when you're in mourning. She looked at pictures of the rest of her family, who had been able to travel to see her grandfather to say their last words to him.

Tobin Low

I see that. Before talking to Arielle, I don't know that I would have said I'm glad I was there for the most difficult parts of my grandmother's decline, but now I get it. It's way worse to have a new reality hit you all at once. Better to be there. Lucky, even.

Ira Glass

Tobin Low is an editor here at our program. If you think you might have the often misdiagnosed Kleine-Levin Syndrome, you can get more information from the KLS Foundation at klsfoundation.org.

Ira Glass

Well, our program was produced today by Diane Wu and Bethel Habte. The people who put our show together include Phia Bennin, Jendayi Bonds, Sean Cole, Michael Comite, Chana Joffe-Walt, Katherine Rae Mondo, Nadia Reiman, Safiyah Riddle, Ryan Rumery, Laura Starecheski, Lilly Sullivan, Frances Swanson, Christopher Swetala, Marisa Robertson-Textor, Matt Tierney, and Julie Whitaker. Our managing editor is Sarah Abdurrahman. Our senior editor is David Kestenbaum. Our executive editor is Emanuele Berry.

Special thanks today to Isaac Arnsdorf, Josh Lawson, Ben Phelan, Julie Snyder, Neil Drumming, Daniela Villarreal, Emmanuel Mignot, Varda Poleg, Kelsey Padgett, and Catherine Scott.

Thanks also today to Alex Steffen. The quote from him that we named this week's show after was in a story by Elizabeth Weil for The New York Times Magazine called "This Isn't the California I Married." Jackson Landers, the guy who got bit by the black spider, also wrote about his experience for The New York Times. His book about hunting invasive species is called Eating Aliens.

Our website, thisamericanlife.org. You can listen to over 800 episodes of our show for absolutely free. This American Life is delivered to public radio stations by PRX, the Public Radio Exchange. Thanks, as always, to our program's confounder, Mr. Torey Malatia. They tried to make him go to rehab, and he said--

Ira Glass

I'm Ira Glass, back next week with more stories of This American Life.