404: What if you were stricken with the flesh-eating disease?

Audible subscribers can listen to all episodes of This Is Actually Happening. Add free right now. Join Audible today by downloading the Audible app. This Is Actually Happening features real experiences that often include traumatic events. Please consult the show notes for specific content warnings on each episode and for more information about support services. If you can imagine a really scary roller coaster where you're tick tick tick tick tick all the way to the top and then when the rush happens, that's where something new in my life was about to go on. From Audible Originals, I'm Witnessel Dein. You're listening to This Is Actually Happening. Episode 404. What if you were stricken with the flesh-eating disease? A lot of who I am, I can look back upon my parents, especially my mother. She and her mother didn't get along extremely well. She ran off and got married at 16. This was in the early 1940s. So after Pearl Harbor, he joined the military he went in as a paratrooper. He came home once in 43, I believe it was. He went back. He was a paratrooper, D-Day, made it through Normandy, and three months before the end of the war, he was killed by a sniper through the helmet in Germany. I don't know if he ever found out she was pregnant, but he never was alive to experience my half-brother to be born. So she wasn't even 20 years old. And here she was taking care of a newborn, and she was a war widow. She met my father shortly after the war. And if you can imagine back at that time, how many war widows there were, and now there's a shuffling on which males actually came back and which ones were single. She met and married my father probably within a year after the end of the war. They had two additional children, so there's a group of three that is nine years older than myself. And then there's a second group of three, a group of three which I'm in the middle of. So I was born in 1958. My mother was stubborn. She worked her ass off. Contrary to my father, he had a fear of success. He worked on the floor of a Warner clutch and brake. So he was blue collar. She was bumped up then to white collar. But yet it seems that he wanted to destroy that. So at that time, there was a lot of fighting and yelling. We heard the story of my father throwing my mother through a plate glass window. But at the time, 1960s, women were just told to shut up and take it. But here is my mom. She said, no, that's enough. And then she ended up divorcing him in 1965 when I was seven years old. She was going to keep all the kids, raise us. She took on three jobs. We became really tight in circling my mother. We knew that we had to bond together. Us three younger kids, we'd have dinner ready. Oh, God, that made us proud. We wanted to do that for her. Those are the things that build us. My father would avoid making child support payments to the point where he was going to be thrown in jail and he didn't care. He would say something bad about her and she'd say something bad about him. So there was that aspect of learning about how not to do it. And we didn't want to repeat what we had gone through. After my freshman year in high school, my mother married a man who was white collar and we moved to Central Wisconsin. They would go out quite a bit. There was fighting involved and I'm sure alcohol had something to do with it. We had to call the police over. One time after my stepfather and my mother got into it and he was beating up on her to the point where my older brother, Jeff, who was one year older than me, grabbed a pair of numchucks and he went down and he beat up on my stepfather who had my mother pinned down and he was sitting on her arms. Psych is doesn't even come close to it, but they kept their marriage, which blew us apart. Why would she do this? But I think she felt she was going to be in trouble financially if she didn't stay with him because she always wanted a nice house. They had the parties. She loved that lifestyle. So I think it was a bit of a calculated decision for her to stay on in that toxic environment. After we moved to Central Wisconsin, I lost some of my carefree cockiness because here I was in a large high school. I think so many negative experiences. I started internalizing and I think I started pulling back until I started focusing on soccer. At the time, this is mid 1970s, soccer was just getting going in the United States somewhat. So I was 16 years old and was given the opportunity to play at the first division level with men that were in their 20s and 30s. A lot of them that had come over from Europe. I was given a great opportunity basically to go get my ass kicked playing against these guys, but also a fantastic learning opportunity to be just immersed in the game. And I dropped everything else and just focused on soccer. Maybe that was a warm snuggly blanket for me. My mother was still married with this gentleman while I was playing with the kickers at the time. So yeah, it was a way to get away. I went to school at University of Wisconsin at Oshkosh. I declared a major in broadcast journalism. That's also where my life in soccer really exploded. My first year, University of Wisconsin at Oshkosh had a men's club team. Jerry Stark was leading the team and I played under Jerry for two years. And during those two years, he also got me into coaching. I coached one team the first year and two teams the second. About a third year I was coaching four teams. I was also president of the club my junior year. I said, we need to make this a varsity sport. So we worked and worked and worked. And for two years playing against all varsity teams, we proved that this sport should be varsity. When I left the field after my final home match, the chancellor was there. He gave me a thumbs up. Next year it turned varsity. All of us were gone. But we gave that gift. We passed that on. I was the first one in the family in graduated college. My mom was extremely proud of me. And I remember her crying and hugging me. Then it was off to do another things, man, getting it to teaching. The school district of West Bend hired me. And in one year, I was named coach of the year that year for the high school program where I was that I was running. I was still playing. This is for the Pepsi spirits. I was named by the students as teacher of the year that year. That was also my last year teaching before I went to coach at the college level. A friend of mine who was coaching at the college level said UW O'Clair is going to be starting up women's program. I think you should apply for it. And within a couple of days, I got the call, want you to come and start running this program. It was a brand new program. And it was fantastic. And ended up bumping ourselves up into national rankings. So we finished my first season and I was going to be heading over to Europe with a group of college players that a friend of mine had hand selected from across the country. And we're playing in top tournaments over there. And everything is great. Nike called me and say, Hey, you know, we heard some good stuff. We want you to come down to Chicago and speak at the Midwest Conference for us. There are going to be the top 100 players in the Midwest are going to be there. We got national team players are going to be instructing top coaches from across the country as hell. Yeah. You know, you tell me when and where and I will be there. Man, that was going to be my summer of summers because we had a great recruiting class coming in and my objective for a year or two was to go into national championship. I could look back now and say that was the height. Everything was lined up. 35 years old. I was in great shape. I didn't even think about dating. I was too into finally maybe doing doing me and had a brand new car and was feeling really good, man, driving down the Nike with the roof open and just cranking tunes. Late morning of my first day at Nike, I was in heaven, man. I participated in some drills and some small group play with some national team players and then took a water break and sat down and I went to get up and all of a sudden my chest hurt and my legs were really heavy. Just trying to push myself up was really hard. And then later on we had a coaches exhibition and man, I started feeling poorly, but I finally had a point where I had to take myself out. I was exhausted. I had never been so exhausted. I didn't know what the hell was going on. That evening I was supposed to be speaking in front of these top 100 players. So it was great recruiting opportunity. I spent that night shivering like crazy, sweating like crazy and throwing up profusely. I was confused. I was starting to get scared, especially the next morning when I woke up. The kitchen staff was getting things going. I remember grabbing a slice of bread and an orange juice. I didn't want to embarrass myself, so I did not throw up. My body was telling me I had to throw up. That's what I really knew that something was wrong. The next day I was supposed to see my mom, but instead I showed up that morning and she had no idea. I didn't even have a chance to tell her what was going on. Soon as she saw me, she said, you get your butt over the emergency room. Something's bad. Right there, kind of busy. Young doctor took a temperature of 102.8. Gave me some pills of some type probably to rejuvenate me. I said, drink a bunch of Gatorade and you're going to be okay. That wasn't the case. I think my mom knew something was still wrong, but I just hung out on her sofa, still thinking I was going to be heading to my recruiting trip the next day. My mom made the decision for me when I walked into her kitchen and threw up, you know, you need to get back to the hospital. We're backing out of the driveway. I was in the front passenger seat. My stepfather's backing us up. And here's my mom outside her kitchen door standing on her driveway, had her hand over her mouth. That image really has been with me ever since. I had never seen my mother look so concerned in my life. I do not remember anything from as we were pulling out and watching my mom until I woke up. You know, I was told that my stepfather, Don, took us back to the emergency room and there was a more experienced doctor from another department that just happened to be in the ER. And soon as he saw me, he pulled me out of the ER and they pushed me up to intensive care. And the blood test came back and it was, yep, sepsis. You know, it was going into septic shock. Once someone becomes septic, the body is protecting its central core. And everything is focused on that core. So that's when everything else was shutting down because that's all the body knows how to do is just protect, protect, protect. All my organs were starting to shut down. So they medically induced me into a coma. Some of the things that I experienced, I was in an ambulance with a female doctor that felt so realistic. It hung with me for years thinking that I was going to meet her. Probably the coolest dream that I had is made no sense at all was I was hovering above the entrance to a Michael Jackson concert of which my mom and my stepfather, Don, were coming into. They were dressed up and I was watching them from above. And I remember even in the dream, this is really strange. Why would they be at Michael Jackson? Morphean. Wow, what a fantastic drug that is. I had a very, very strange occurrence waking up and no idea where it was. I could hear women's voices yelling, laughing. It seemed like there was an athletic event going on. When I was awake enough to be able to see in front of me a television, it was women playing beach volleyball. But there was a lady dressed in green scrubs standing and looking up at the television so her back was to me. And it was, what the heck is this? My eyes were scanning across the room. I started noticing dozens of cards and sagging mylar balloons and noticed on some of them they said, get well. So I'm piecing this together. It's finally come into mind. That's a nurse. And I'm in a hospital room and holy crap, these mylar balloons are sagging. So how the heck long have I been here? I still wasn't 100% positive that I was awake. But then she turned and was aghast and said, when you're going to wake up sometime, I'll be right back. Like what the hell? She left. But then I also noticed I can't move. I can't move. Holy crap. I'm I paralyzed. So that's when I think I started freaking out a bit. What happened? I had no idea. And here I was all by myself, pretty much fully now awake. I laid there unable to move until the doctor came in. Doctor comes in nice and slow. Good looking guy comes over to my right side, puts a hand on my shoulder, comes into my field of vision. It says, hi, I'm Dr. So-and-so and let's let you know, you've been in a coma for a while. And he started talking about group A strep with necrotizing fasciitis. Then he laid the big one on me, the flesh eating disease. Holy crap. This is 1993. This has been in the media and I knew what this was, the flesh eating disease. The illness that was described to me was known as group A strep with necrotizing fasciitis. Necrotizing fasciitis is the death of the skin, death of parts of the body. Sepsis will start to shut down organs because the body's more worried about the center, the core. So group A strep was the illness that I had contracted. Necrotizing fasciitis is what was happening to my body as things were dying. There are many different varieties of strep. This was one of the cousins of what we all know as most commonists, say strep throat. So this is group A strep. But throughout time, I must have in my genes lost the ability to fend off group A strep. We lose certain things through generations, whereas in 99.9% of the population still has that. No one knew how I contracted, but I know that I can speculate. I believe what happened was back in 1993 when this occurred, we didn't clean off weight benches or anything like we do since COVID. So I think that I may have had a pimple or something on my back. And because I was in training to go over as a guest player in Europe, someone prior to me that was on that bench had the group A that seeped through their pores or whatever and it was breeding on this bench and therefore went through my shirt into my sweat and then therefore into my body. That's what makes a sense to me. And doctors have told me that that seems realistic. It just fate, bad fate, but just happened, just happened. This was back in the early 90s. Jim Henson, the Muppets creator in 1990, he had a scratchy throat and didn't think much of it within, I believe, was three days he was dead. This is what he had group A strep with necrotizing fasciitis and they had to give a tagline to it because when someone like Jim Henson passes from an illness, they need to put a tag on it. So they put the flesh eating disease because if you look at it from afar, it could be construed that it eats flesh, but it doesn't. The flesh dies because it's not receiving blood. It's not receiving fresh blood. Therefore, and without receiving blood, the skin and muscle tissue starts to die and it works its way up. My family told me that you could see from hour to hour the purple and black coming up across my wrist and into my forearm. They could see that happening. Now I have information. At the same time, my mind shut off. I did not want to know anything more about this. Get me the hell out of here. You know, I'm supposed to be in Europe. I don't want to hear this. And he says a decision had to be made to either let you die, which really you should have been dead. Because you're an athlete, we were able to go to the second decision of amputating your hands, parts of both of your feet, and see if we could save your life. It's Jerry Springer, whose name is synonymous with outrageous guests, taboo confessions, and vicious onstage fights. But before the Jerry Springer show became a symbol of cultural decline, its namesake was a popular Midwestern politician and a serious-minded idealist with lofty ambitions. Through dozens of intimate and revealing interviews with those who knew Springer best, I examined Springer's lifelong struggle to reconcile his TV persona with his political dreams and aspirations. 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Follow The Spy Who now, wherever you listen to podcasts. You can also listen to the full season of The Spy Who sold nuclear secrets to Iran. Early ad-free on Audible. If you can imagine a really scary roller coaster where you're tick, tick, tick, tick, tick all the way to the top, and then when the rush happens, that's where something new in my life was about to go on. First thing that ran through my mind was, I'm not playing anymore. Clean, clear, done. Poof. But then I think my mind was going into what about my career? It was a tidal wave. Just blew me away and pushed me into a spot of, I don't want to hear it. Get me out of here. I want to go back to work. Put me in a wheelchair if that's what it takes. I couldn't handle it. And he says, the reason why you can't move, Scott, is because you've been in a coma for a month and you lost 40 pounds of muscle from atrophy. I was comforting though. I was not paralyzed. I had something now to focus on. Oh, you told me I lost 40 pounds of muscle. All right, here, I'm going to go gain that back. Let's get to work. All the way through the hospital, that's what I hung on to. So my mom was on the other side of town and the doctor patted me on the shoulder to leave the room. He told me that your mother and some family members will be here soon. But also I think that's when I started, especially when they showed up. That's when guilt started to come in on me. They're all trying so freaking hard not to cry. And my brother-in-law tries to crack some jokes and I couldn't talk back. I learned later while I was in the coma, family was there 24 hours a day for at least the first two weeks up until the amputations. Elizabeth Kubler-Ross famously came up with the five stages of grief, denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. But they don't happen in order. Hell, I didn't get to acceptance until a few years ago. And I think I could add three more to Kubler-Ross's theory and those would be fear, guilt, and shame. So fear was, geez, I'm scared, shameless, because how am I supposed to deal with this? So that's just straight up fear. And then shame is how I believe others view me. In my mind's eye, everyone was looking at my hands and everyone is looking at me for this something that's different from everyone else. Guilt is tricky. I felt guilty for how everyone else was affected by my illness. Very shortly after I woke up and understood where I was and what was going on, my mother, my stepfather, one of my sisters and her husband came into the room. And I could just tell they were emotionally toasted. And my mother and brother had to make the decision for me to either let me die or amputate Xiao and handle life. That's a lot of burden placed on them. I started feeling guilty and there were times I still feel guilty. If you've had 20 balloons that would float away if you weren't grasping all of their strings, they're all going to be gone. So it's trying to grasp all these emotional strings and hold on to this set of balloons with me. And I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of people go through the guilt issue of how many strings my family was holding on to as well. And I saw that as those are my strings, but I'm supposed to be responsible for. And now you are because I didn't have any hands to hold onto them. So they had to, but I felt guilty because they had to. They were holding my strings for me, which shows love. And that's all it should be. It's love. But from my perspective, it was I feel guilty that you have to do that for me. I think it points right back to my parents being divorced. My two younger siblings and I, we felt bad that we were the reasons why and all of this came back out. The day after my parents divorced, I was six or seven. My mom was starting to work three jobs. If we had the garage door open for when mom came home, so she wouldn't have to get out of the car and go lift it up. If we had the house clean, so she didn't have to deal with it. If we had dinner started, so she didn't have to deal with it. That was huge for us. We took a lot of pride into making mom smile. She could relax and we never, never wanted to let her down. Of the four people that walked into my room, my mother, my stepfather, sister and her husband, my mother is the one that stood out to me the most. At one point I saw my mom out of the corner of my eye, shift and move over to the window and put her hand over her mouth. I know that she was crying. She knew that I could still hear. I think she was doing the best she could to muffle that. Man, I think that was a flug in the gut. I'm not blaming my mom. She had been through this for a month, but here I am awake. I think it was a relief on her part, but that little kid and me, I think, came back out. I'm sorry. If I wasn't intubated, I wonder how many times I would have said, I'm sorry, mom. I'd never seen her cry. The doctor came back and said, let Scott rest. My mom said, you guys go ahead. Everyone was gone. She puts her hand on the rails on my bed and says to me, I don't matter what anyone else thinks is or is not possible, Scott. You're going to work hard and figure out ways to move forward. I think she knew what I was capable of and it was the same thing that she must have gone through when she was 19 years old and received this telegram that her husband was dead. Now what? Same place she was. Now what? She went through it so she knew damn well I could do the same thing. That's what started me not just down the road of get me out of here. I'm going to work, work, work, work, work, but it was also I know what I'm capable of. Let me do it. I want to prove this to my mother. She told me to do it. I'm going to do it right. So from the time everyone left, I started working on building up my muscles again. It was eight days I was in ICU before they transferred me, but that gurney ride was pretty interesting. So I was in the elevator with a couple of people that when they hit the button to go down to rehab, I had a flashback to what I would call a imputation day. I remembered coming out of the basement and being gurneyed into an operating room and we entered through the doors, the operating room, and here is Eric Clapton music playing and it's cold. I looked down at my hands. I believe I remember seeing my blackened hands because this is all the way up through my forums. That's what happens with the flesh and disease. The body sends out so many white blood cells when you're really, really, really, really sick. So many white blood cells that it clogs the veins at the extremities first. So that's how the flesh and disease, they call it that. My family also told me that basically on the hour you could see the change of the skin color as it started creeping up the arm, past the wrist, past the toes into the middle of the foot. So I believe I remember seeing that. The process of my body dying was over about a two week period. Then it was two more weeks healing really to see if I was going to stay alive. They had to monitor, did the recession, living skin turned to dead skin, had that stopped? Was this going to come back? They also had to check my organs. All my organs were shutting down. You know, I had dialysis. I had contracted pneumonia. How the hell is this guy alive? The guy that saved my life, he was the head of intensive care unit. He gave a presentation on my case. This is one of those times that we can't explain it medically. He should have been dead. He pointed to I was an athlete and I was tip top shape, but they couldn't explain it. But I also would say that I had some fantastic, amazingly knowledgeable people that kept me alive. I kind of became a special person in the hospital. By the time I got over to rehab, oh, everybody knew who I was. I wasn't supposed to be alive. I was the miracle guy. Of the five stages of grief, denial was definitely happening. Get me out of here, throw me in a wheelchair. I don't care. I want to go back. There was no anger. There was no bargaining. I was definitely heading in the direction of depression and there was no acceptance. I just denied it. So into rehab, that's for sure when I totally bought into the denial phase. And it didn't help, but I'm not blaming anyone that everybody around me was faking it as much as I was. Nobody wanted to talk about it. We didn't deal with it. I saw a pair of psychiatrists one time to check my IQ, but I failed to look inside of myself and I failed to work on my heart. I had a really great group of people I worked with in rehab and I was eat protein and build weight through muscle. So four months in rehab, my athletic director would get me tapes from training sessions for matches. I would talk to my assistant. I was working for Malus Bell. That was fantastic. But there was one thing that happened in rehab that really burst the bubble that I was blowing up and that was being fitted for hooks. I did not want these at all. It made me realize that I'm freaking disabled. I have no hands. Evenings my mother would come and we would watch Wheel of Fortune together while maybe she was feeding me until I got the hook somebody had to. And the night that she came that I had the hooks happened to be spaghetti on the menu. To try to manipulate a fork so it comes up to the mouth, but then so many times because I didn't know enough how to use them, the hook would open. So then the fork drops and then spaghetti sauce is all over. My mother came into the room while I'm doing this. And of course she came and wanted to help. And that's where anger came because I was frustrated. But I think it was fear. I was fearful of, oh my God, how am I going to live with these things? I can't even feed myself. So I think I had fear going on which led to anger because of frustration and then guilt again with feeling so bad that my mom had to feed me. How am I going to go forward from here? All those things came together and it blurted out with leave me alone. Let me do it myself. That exchange with my mom is still inside of me because I feel bad, guilty because of the way I treated her. But in that exchange, it did come out from her that she said, why didn't this just happen to me? I mean, the illness, why didn't this just happen to me? And that also guilt. One time doctors said, you know, they left enough meat on your bones there and your arms that you're going to be able to wear myoelectric cans. Like, I had no idea what myoelectrics were. Then somebody explained it to me and then I started being motivated towards that. So I use myoelectric cans, the exterior is rubber and the interior is hard plastic and then inside of that there are metal parts and there's little motors. Then works the same way on opening a hand. You don't think about it, but you do it. When you want to do something, the mind sends electrical current to the muscles to open or close. What I have in my arms, so I'm mid forearm amputee. In my upper forearms, I have a receptor over the muscles that open the hand and receptor over muscles that close the hand. By trial and error, a baby learns how to walk, how to handle things and that what I had to relearn was which muscles to fire for electricity to go through them and which muscles not to fire. It's very simple, but it's very difficult to learn how to fire which muscles. Within the week of using the myos, I was already grabbing a pencil. Maybe I wasn't denying as much, but by focus had changed. I'm finally going to see result able to feed myself. My electrics were big for my psyche because at the end of my shirt were hands, they weren't hooks. If there's any listeners out there that use hooks, I get it. They're functional, but not for me. I can't because it reminded me and that's why I don't wear short sleeve shirts. I don't want to be reminded because then I see, you know, I'm amputated it mid forearm. And also at this time was when I transferred hospitals up to Eau Claire where the university was I was coaching at. And on a daily basis, our goalkeeper, she would come over in the afternoons, throw me to wheelchair, get me into her little pickup truck, break the wheelchair down, throw on the back of the truck, go over the training fields. And I worked with her. She was all American first team all American that year, but she wore my jersey for every single match. I met a hell of a lot to me. How many cared for me? One of the most difficult things was I lost half of each foot. So the four foot was gone. One of the feet though, the skin was so far gone. Most everyone of the doctors where I was, they said do a BK a balloon the amputation. That's just what has to happen. It just so happened that there was a renowned plastic surgeon that got wind of me and he came up with a rather ingenious plan. He said, no, you don't need a BK. We're going to strip all the skin off of this foot, strip it back. And I'm going to put this thing back together with muscle from his abdomen and skin from his thigh. He was like Dr. Frankenstein. He rebuilt my right foot. But by the time I got to Eau Claire and we were working on becoming independent, just standing was so painful on this foot. This is, you know, skin and muscle that weren't supposed to be on a foot. So the body was reacting to this with pain. And one of the very hardest things I ever did was to learn how to re walk. They took me over a stairwell. I said, OK, we're going to go down one set of stairs and back up. I said, nope, this is what we're going to do. We're on the eighth floor. I'm going to walk all the way down to the basement. I'm going to walk all the way back up here, go up to the ninth floor. And then we come back down to the eighth. And that's what I'm going to do. The rehab person I was working with said, you're crazy, but what the hell? Let's do it. So we did it. That was me against the illness. That was me against the disability. That was me against the way some people probably thought my life was going to be. That's not happening. That was a pivot point for me personally. I still wasn't accepting it. It was me still bypassing the head and the heart. And here I am. I want to go accomplish something. That was the most important thing for me. But I think it also helped set me up for all the other crap that was still to come. So I got out of the hospital in December of 1993, exactly five months from when I first presented myself to that emergency room physician. Good friend of mine took me back to my apartment. I put on Pink Floyd Dark Side of the Moon, hit continuous play, and just laid on myself. I have no idea how long I heard that album. I didn't want to be around anyone else. I wanted to be lost in this album that really represented me emotionally. Maybe that was the first time I allowed myself to be emotional, but I had to do it on my own. You know, the album has to end. I have to get up and get on with life. While I was in the hospital, like I said, my assistant coach was leading the team. I came back for the second half of the season. Great season. So the next year was 36 back in running the program. And then towards the end of the season, we lost and it hurt. We lost again the next match and fell out of the top 20. And at the same time, my right foot, that that plastic surgeon was able to Frankenstein together, started opening up. I was told you need surgery. I couldn't. I couldn't. And I talked another plastic surgeon into just antibiotics and having a nurse come by and keeping it clean until after the season. And then we had to have surgery to close the foot. 37, my recruiting was starting to become less and less. I lost confidence in myself to go do a cold call at a tournament, to go reach out my hand to introduce myself to a potential player about, hey, come and play for us before you. I lost that. I was I was losing myself, losing my confidence. Season five quickly, you know, we lost early on. It's 38 still and realize this isn't helping the program. It's not helping me. I resigned and I did go out East for a couple of interviews. One university I went and had an interview at when I left, I went down the hallway and stopped to get some water. And I heard the athletic director yell across the hallway to where secretary was and asked the question, why did I just interview a guy with no hands for this position? So needless to say, I didn't get that job. That was not the last time I would come into discrimination. Two months later was our two week long $10 million medical male practice trial against the doctor that first saw me and released me with Gatorade. It took three and a half years to finally get the trial. So two weeks long came down to our expert witness, their expert witness. Well, their expert witness won. I lost. I had nothing. No job, no career to look for. No idea what the hell I was going to do. During the trial, there was one day that I was told we don't watch in the courtroom because we're going to bring in a psychiatrist. They didn't say the word suicide was going to come up, but I knew it. Was Scott prone to suicide? And I knew that was going to come up in that. And here it was after the trial. And it was going through my head, driving from a friend's apartment when we got the call from my attorney that we lost to my apartment thinking, Jesus, everyone's going to be thinking that I'm going to kill myself. I pulled into my garage thinking this as the garage door went down, I turned off my car. I thought a lot of people wouldn't be surprised if I didn't turn my car off or if I went and bought a pistol and ended it. That was it, man. That boom done. I just turned 39 years old and I had nothing. I don't know how the hell I was going to still pay for rent. I spent all night. I pulled out dozens CDs, playing music album after album after album as I started to come up with. I had to make the pendulum of my life, which had swung so far in one direction to go back in the other direction. I had to do it. No one was going to do it. And I came up with a plan. All right, here was the plan. Go back to the beginning, break myself down in order to build myself back up. I came across a gentleman that was the head coach of the small college in Olympia, Washington, called Evergreen State College. I would come and work with his team tactically. I'll come and work for you for free. In exchange, John, you were going to do what you can to help me get back into the coaching realm and finally help me reach my goal of being head coach of division one school. Okay, let's do it. But I had to go on food stamps ahead of living a crappy apartment. I had run into the brick wall of depression so hard. Depression called the fog. My life was muffled. So it's going back to my beginning. I took all my trophies, my awards, my plaques, everything I pitched it. I stripped down to nothing. By that time, I had to get rid of two cats and Bogart, the one cat that was with me, him and I in our car and we headed out to Olympia, Washington, took us three days and had nothing to do but just let myself think and relax and listen to music. I now had a plan. I had something I was heading towards. It wasn't easy. So when I finally get done with this long drive out to Olympia, Washington, moving to my crappy apartment, I am going to meet John for the first time. Then we start training. I realized something's wrong with me emotionally and I need to go seek help. But in order to be seen by a psychiatrist, I needed to be seen by a physician. I happened to meet with this female doctor. She sent me up to see a psychiatrist. But then two days later, she called me and said, I've removed myself as your physician because I'd like to go out with you. We hit it off and I mean, it was six months later, we were married and I became a step parent to three. I was happy being their step parent. John came through the next year. John called and said, hey, I've got something for you at Gonzaga. So I was brought on just as a regular assistant under the last year's assistant. The next year that head coaching position came up, the athletic director asked me, he wanted me to apply. But my wife and I at the time were watching a news story out of Seattle about this couple that had adopted two children from Haiti and they were without parents. Something pulled at me that even decades later now, I cannot understand what it was that pulled me towards I'm supposed to become an adoptive parent. Within 10 minutes, I was upstairs working in the office and looking up adoption and that's where my life really blows up into something strange. I call and ask the athletic director to remove my name from consideration for the head coaching position at Gonzaga and I started becoming a father to what turned out to be five children, two from Romania and three from Ethiopia. I left soccer totally. Boom, done. I'm now a full time dad. There was no question about I was going to do next. It was something telling me this is what I was supposed to do. I didn't make the decision. I can't explain it anything more than that. I did not make this decision to leave soccer to go into becoming a full time dad. It was made for me and I just went with it. I was into my 40s now. I mean, I was full time dad happy with the kids being home 43 years old. So by this time, five kids, five years away from soccer and just being full time dad and I was okay. I'm sure that was still somewhat in denial. You know, wasn't comfortable out in public. In my mind, everyone was looking at my fake hands and my kids didn't though. I was Tata, which is Romanian for father to them. At the same time, we did some moving from Washington to Colorado to New Mexico to Nevada. I'm back to Washington. By the time we got back to Washington the second time to a place called Bellingham, Washington, and I really came back into my own in Bellingham, Washington. So we were married for just under 20 years. But as marriages go sometimes, you know, our lives are going in different directions. Coaching was changing with me coming back to who I was. I was starting to get the bug back to go back to soccer. The kids were starting to get older. The youngest was a junior in high school, a couple in college, one in the military. And I could finally return to soccer. I was creeping in on being 60 years old when I finally returned to coaching. Kids were good. I know that they're mature enough for me to be able to divorce them. They'd be okay. I returned to coaching soccer just as the divorce is really, you know, about to happen. I actually put a resume together and applied for a position at a rather large club. But here's another point of discrimination. I showed up, a new director of coaching. I knew something was up when he didn't offer to shake my hand. And he went on to tell me, okay, here's your team. You're coaching the C team of under 13s or 12 year olds. And by the way, you know, we want you to keep the parents happy because we need the C teams in the club to keep us afloat. But I saw something in them that actually, you know, parallel me. My kids were smaller and they tended to lack confidence. They didn't fare so well in a tryout setting. These kids that people didn't think much of. And I saw these kids as we're going to prove them wrong, folks. We're going to do this together. What happened with these kids was the final piece to me not being depressed, being able to feel good about myself, not worried how I might have looked, not worried about, you know, how people might perceive me. But here I was with this group of kids that I could be focused on. And it was also, I guess, an out for me from the marriage. We went our first match, but I knew that, okay, they're feeling pretty good about themselves after winning a match. I'm going to let them lose this next match. And they did because they were playing arrogantly. I needed them to learn this lesson. I always followed a mantra. My mission is not to teach you, but put you into position to learn. At the same time, I had asked the B team coach, if he would scrimmage on a weekly basis, the B team coach said, yeah, it's a great idea, Scott. Let's do it. First match, time we played the B team, they killed us. But as the summer went, we made it into the playoffs, our second tournament. We made it to the championship of our final three tournaments. And during the same time, we beat the B team. But we lost in every championship. So we got to the end of summer. We sit down and the last question I asked each one of those kids after evaluating them on different areas of the game, how did losing in the championship match of that final tournament feel? All of them were mad. They said, this is not going to happen again. Now we have 18 matches coming up ahead of us. And I knew we're in pretty good shape. Those kids got their act together. They didn't lose a single match out of 18 in the state league season. One state championship. And we finally ended up having an end of the year gala. You know, I was so proud of those kids. How far they had come, but also how much they approved to other people wrong. It also fit with me. I proved everybody wrong. I was alive. I proved myself wrong too. I got through all of that. Part of me just wants to prove people wrong, to prove those people wrong that didn't hire me, that didn't even want to interview me, that the coaches before matches that would shake my hand and think that they had me because I was disabled. All of those people, I want to prove those people wrong. I'm freaking really disabled folks, but I can still do all of this. And I have done all of this. I've accomplished a lot. When I was 19, I was a DJ at a disco. The night before this disco opened, a 17 year old high school senior walks in. I saw her and just went, oh, wow. I knew something was special about this person, but I also realized that I wasn't mature enough yet to get into a relationship. So 40 years later, just as the season was wrapping up, I get a message on messenger. She tracked me down. Right time, right place. It was the right thing. The whole thing fit. And Sue and I are coming up on our sixth year of being married in a couple of weeks. I think if we try to find a thread that connects all of this, it's not just going back to my parents divorcing and wanting to help my mother, but it's growing up through the 1960s, through the time of the Vietnam War and through the civil rights movement. And always wanting to be part of the group that helps, that wants to make a difference in life. My mission is not to teach you, but to put you in a position to learn. That is probably the thread that has always carried through everything that I've done. It's to be part of helping others figure it out for themselves. That thread was a nice, heavy duty thread before I got sick. And then the illness leading up through the time of the depression. Of course, it's all going to get jumbled up like a cat playing with it on the floor. You know, all come out of it all lumpy and clumpy and everything being thrown up in the air and chaotic. It had to be put into a messy ball of string. I didn't know how to unweave it. Through the adoptions, I think I settled into it's okay to have this ball and not know how to unwind it. But it just so happened that when I started working with this group of 12 year olds and I knew my kids were okay, I think I found that thread again and I pulled it. I finally got to the point of not just taking the thread that was at the end of that ball, I think I have now gone through that ball and I've unwound it. So it's now a straight thread through before the illness, past the illness into now. It's a hell of a lot of work to unwind that ball. And a lot of people can say the same thing that they've been able to go through it or are in it and accepting things how they are is the key. That's hard though. It's really hard and everybody knows that when they go through these really difficult times, it's so hard to accept failure. You don't want to. But at least for me, how do you react from hitting that bottom is the key. Now my thread is clean and it's straight and sometimes it gets a little jumbled, but it's the same thread or yarn that was before the ball and before the illness. I mean, I'm totally back to being me. I am with my soulmate now, my person, my partner I was always supposed to be with that has a positive attitude and is supportive. That was the cherry on top. She was my person that pulled me out of this all the way too. So it's just amazing. I have come pretty much full circle. I'm back in Wisconsin. I'm comfortable with where I am. Life is still a struggle. Hey, quite amputee life is going to be a struggle, but I'm in that fourth quarter of life and I'm loving it. Today's episode featured Scott Martin. Scott has written a book titled Play From Your Heart, available wherever books are sold. If you'd like to contact Scott, you can find his email and socials in the show notes. If you'd like to hear some deeper reflections on Scott's story as well as reflections on the last few episodes and updates about the show, please subscribe to my sub-stack called Beyond The Story at witmissildine.substack.com. From Audible Originals, you are listening to This Is Actually Happening. If you love what we do, please rate and review the show. You can subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music to listen ad-free, and get access to the entire back catalog. In the episode notes, you'll find some links and offers from our sponsors. By supporting them, you help us bring you our show for free. I'm your host, witmissildine. 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