What Was That Like - a storytelling podcast with amazing stories from real people

When you travel internationally, do you ever get nervous when you come back to your own country and have to go through all the questions about where you’ve been, your reason for travel, and what you’re bringing back into the country? This is stressful for a lot of people, even those who have not done anything wrong. My guest in this episode is Emily. She lives in Toronto, and a few years ago she spent some time in the Caribbean. She flew back into her home airport, and had to go through that process of being asked all the questions. Like a lot of people, this really stressed her out. But in Emily’s case, she had good reason to be nervous. Under her dress was roughly $150,000 in cocaine. That was a bad day for Emily. She told me the whole story, including how that experience led her to what she’s doing today. Follow Emily, and try some of her amazing popcorn: website: comebacksnacks.com Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/comebacksnacks/ Facebook: http://facebook.com/comebacksnacks YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCoBFKhNnSi2dA_WXTDaRP2w This episode is sponsored by BetterHELP – professional counseling, done securely online. Get 10% off your first month by using this link: BetterHELP.com/WHATWAS This episode is sponsored by Ana Luisa – timeless, earth-friendly jewelry starting at just $39. Get 10% off by using this link: AnaLuisa.com/WHAT and use the promo code WHAT

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No matter where you live, there’s the possibility of experiencing some kind of bad weather.

We lived in Maine for about 13 years. And since I was self employed and could pretty much dictate my own schedule, I decided to work part-time for my town’s EMS service. So I got trained in emergency response, and was often called out when someone called 911 with a medical emergency or an injury. And usually I was working with a paramedic, who was pretty much in charge of the situation because they were more experienced. I would do whatever was needed to assist them and the patient, and a lot of times that meant I was driving the ambulance to the hospital while they took care of the patient in the back.

There’s one call I remember pretty clearly. This was in the winter, at night, and we had just had a big snowstorm so the driving conditions were pretty bad. We got a call about a car accident. This was just a single vehicle crash – the person had lost control and run into a tree. We got there and found just one person, the driver, and she was still in the car with some broken bones. Her worst injury was her broken pelvis – she had what’s called an “open book” fracture, where the pelvis is broken into right and left halves. It’s really painful, and she was conscious and experiencing all of it.

We got her out of the car and into the ambulance, and I was not looking forward to this trip. It was still snowing pretty hard, and it was dark, so the visibility was poor, and the roads were slippery. And this is rural Maine, so the hospital was not close by – we had to get to the hospital down in Portland. In perfect weather, it was about a 30 minute drive. On this night, it took more than an hour.

And that was some high-stress driving. I had to kind of creep along and make sure I stayed on the road and didn’t slide off into the ditch. And there was the added pressure that this poor girl in the back was depending on my driving to get her to the emergency room. On top of that, she’s lying on her back with a badly broken pelvis, and every time I hit a bump in the road she would scream in pain and I would feel terrible because I hit that bump. We eventually got there, but that ride seemed to take forever.

My guest today is Todd. He lives in Canada, and he has seen his share of bad winter weather. He’s also a truck driver, so in a lot of cases he finds himself driving his tractor trailer in those conditions. Most of the time, it’s no big deal. He’s used to it. With poor visibility and slippery roads, everyone on the highway just keeps moving forward, slowly and carefully, and eventually you get there.

But there was one time he was driving during a bad snowstorm, and that slow forward movement came to a full stop. And that’s where he stayed.

If you’d like to message Todd, you can email him at [email protected]

Jose sent in a voice mail, and you can see his tattoo work on Instagram:

https://www.instagram.com/gordotaub/

Get the full transcript for this episode and ALL previous episodes in a single digital download:

WhatWasThatLike.com/transcripts

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October 4, 2016 - For Jennifer and her husband Chris, and their 4 children, it was just a regular Tuesday. Up until around 8 pm that evening. Jen was driving home and she had their two daughters in the car, ages 12 and 4.

Jen stopped at a stop sign, and then proceeded into the intersection without seeing the motorcycle that was approaching on her left. The motorcycle hit her car, and with that collision, the lives of two families were forever changed. David, the driver of the motorcycle, was taken to the hospital, where he died two days later.

In my conversation with Jen, we talk about a lot of different aspects of what happened. She told me a little of what life was like before the accident, and she described what happened from the moment of impact and the hours and days that followed. We discussed her feelings of guilt at being responsible for the death of a person, her overwhelming sadness that it happened, her fear of what was going to happen to her from a legal or criminal standpoint, and what happened when she had a chance encounter with one of David’s friends. She also talked about what she’s doing today to help others who have found themselves in similar situations.

There’s actually an acronym for someone who has gone through this. That person is called a CADI. That’s spelled CADI, and it stands for Caused Accidental Death or Injury. You’ll hear Jen use that acronym during our conversation so I wanted to let you know what it is ahead of time.

For people that have caused the accidental death of a person, there are resources available and I’ll have those listed in the show notes for this episode, at whatwasthatlike.com/01.

Also, a warning. Around 14 minutes into our conversation, you’ll also hear the actual recording of the 911 call that Jen made at the time of the accident. In the beginning she’s on the phone with the 911 operator, then she hands the phone to a man who was also on the scene, and he talks to the operator briefly. Following that is a second brief 911 call from a female. Again, this is about 14 minutes into our conversation, so if you might find the intensity of that audio to be upsetting, you can fast forward about 4 minutes to skip past that.

One of the takeaways from this conversation is that it’s good to see things from a different perspective. You know we hear about accidents like this almost every day, and it’s really easy to assume that the person is just some selfish jerk who was talking on their phone, or texting, or just not paying attention, even though we really don’t know what actually happened. Sometimes those assumptions are true, but not always. Today we get to hear the other side of that story.

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There’s something I find really fascinating, and that’s learning about the wildly different ways people react in a sudden emergency situation.

Imagine you’re in a restaurant and the main dining room is full of people. Everyone’s talking, servers are buzzing around to their various tables, people are enjoying their food. Then suddenly at the table next to you, a middle-aged man clutches his chest, yells out in pain, and falls from his chair. It’s pretty clear he’s having a heart attack. He’s still conscious and breathing, but he is clearly in distress.

And what does everyone do? No doubt, there will be a person who will yell out for someone to call 911. There will be people who see what’s happening, and their first reaction is to quickly look around the room, like they’re looking for help. There might be someone who goes to the man and tries to do CPR. Incidentally, if someone is still awake and breathing, you don’t need to do CPR. I can guarantee that many of the people at the nearby tables will not do anything – they’re definitely going to watch and see what happens, but they won’t take any action themselves. And there will be some people who will immediately get up and get away from what’s going on. Their brain tells them they need to leave. I know this, because I’ve seen it happen.

And there will be some people who remain calm, and try to help. They’ll make sure someone has called for paramedics (or they’ll just take out their phone and make the call). They’ll get the man into a comfortable position, maybe talk to him, maybe check his pulse. These are the people you want to have around when something happens.

But that’s the interesting thing about this. If you’ve never been in a situation like that, you don’t really know for sure how you’ll react.

My guest today, Jen, doesn’t have to wonder about that. She knows how she reacts. That’s because one day at work in a retail clothing store, she turned around and was facing the barrel of a gun.

Jen’s podcast is called I NEED BLUE – www.IneedBlue.net

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Luke remembers that day in January of 2016 pretty vividly. He was 23 years old, recently graduated from college with a degree in engineering, had his whole life ahead of him. On that particular day, he was in Ft Lauderdale, Florida and he went into a Subway fast food restaurant and bought a couple of bottles of water. He was feeling very sick, and he knew exactly why he was sick, and it wasn’t food poisoning. He knew that the awful feeling in his gut was because a little rubber packet had burst inside his stomach, and some very high quality cocaine was now flooding into his insides. Shortly after this happened, he would be in a coma, and he was in that comatose state for 10 days.

As you might imagine, Luke has a pretty interesting story to tell. And we talked about every detail. He told me about why he made the decision to travel to Panama in order to smuggle cocaine into the US. How he researched it and planned the whole process, even though he had never done anything like this before. What it was like to be in a coma, and what it was like to come OUT of a coma. And then, the next sort of chapter in his big adventure – going to prison, and how he was able to get through that.

What you’re going to notice about Luke is that he’s no dummy. He’s very intelligent and well spoken, and he has a really positive outlook on life. He also has a lot of confidence in himself and his abilities, and although usually self confidence is a GOOD character trait, in this case it was partly to blame for him making the bad decision to make some quick money. He figured, high risk, high reward, but he also did as much as he could to minimize his risk. But... it just didn’t work out the way he expected it to.

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