Mission: Improbable: The Moth Radio Hour

In every Cubo capsule, you can find from special devices.

For espresso, coffee, cream, or coffee, you can go to Knopfdruck. The new Cubo1 works with premium design, compact and big, and small one-sticks price at 1920 Euro. Thanks to innovative press-brute technology, all kinds of special aromatis with the sampled cream. And here are the Cubo capsule machines in your Chibu fjale and on Chibu.de.

With these young children, I don't really think so.

“Really? I really think my story is total.”

Stoyer? How do you feel about the Stoyer? Yes. I've been to Euro for a long time.

Did you have your own connections?

No. Just like the Stoyer app. Wow. And that's easy. Sure. The macht fast, all is automatic. Absolutely, I feel like I'm so relaxed. Hold your money to go.

Tie it up with the Stoyer. [Music] This is the Moth Radio Hour. I'm your host, Jay Ellison. Life is littered with obstacles.

“Pretty much every day, if you're like me.”

Some days I glide over them, other days I bang my shins. Pretty hard. Today I'm gliding, but not expecting that to last. Everyone's in a while, we're faced with a challenge that feels impossible, or at least highly improbable.

Maybe not as extreme as scaling the world's tallest building or jumping in between airplanes, looking at you Tom Cruise, but ones that feel like our own personal mission improbable.

Our first storyteller is Gabby Rome.

She takes on the notoriously feudal task of cat training. Here's Gabby, to tell you all about it live at the Moth. [Applause]

“It's 2011, and I'm walking down the hallway of my apartment building.”

I'm headed to the management office, because I've decided I need to get a dog. I just moved into this apartment building, and it is not pet friendly. But I've done my research. I know all the laws and Michigan about emotional support animals. I've saved a month of my rent as collateral against damages.

If that doesn't work, I didn't put concealer over the deep purple bags under my eyes. It's about 88 days in to me getting maybe three hours a night of sleep. And I'm just hoping my sob story tugs at my landlord's heartstrings. You see, about three months prior, I was robbed while I was home. It started with a knock on my door, which in the grand scheme of things is a very courteous way to start a crime.

A man told me to get on my knees and face the wall. I was robbed. I called the police. I filed a report. I moved apartments. I spent my nights vigilantly lying awake listening. And I spent my days having panic attacks every time a friendly neighbor knocked on my door to introduce themselves. With a dog, I could train it to listen for me. And I could get some rest.

My landlord was like, "Oh my god, no, absolutely not. I hate dogs. You can't get a dog. I don't care what letter you get from the state. If you get a dog, I'll poison it." But I'm not hurtless. You can have a cat. Conveniently, his knees had just found some kittens behind the carport. And if I go to the sixth floor, I could have my pick of the litter.

A baby kitten is probably the animal, Luis Capable of protecting me. And conventional wisdom tells you, you cannot train a cat. But put between my sleep deprivation and my desperation. I figure, maybe I can defy the odds. Maybe I can train this cat to hear a knock and then hit a button that makes a sound of a dog bark.

Train it to launch itself at the heads of intruders. The orphaned Neo-Natal 14-ounce cat. I take home that day. Needs to be fed via syringe every two to four hours.

This kitten and I decide we're going to go to work.

I knock and then I feed her. And as she gets older, I knock and then I throw a treat at the door. Weirdly, it's working like she's responding to the knocks. And one day after a few hours of training, I'm standing in my kitchen, making some waffles in the toaster and just watching the freezer burn melt off under the hot orange coils. Day dreaming about when I used to feel safe enough to have pizza delivered.

And how my old apartment, there's this great pizza place. This is like non and popwood, fired place that would get the cheese to crust pop. The toaster startles me and I go into full fight or flight. I can't breathe. I'm shaking. I'm hyperventilating. I fall to my knees, but she pressed against the cold tile of the kitchen floor.

I'm thinking, oh, god, oh, god, oh, god, oh, god.

And I wonder, can I die from a panic attack when I feel a tap on my forehead? And through the tears, I see this little four pound cat looking at me.

“And I think, oh, my god, did all those nights of bottle feeding actually create like a close emotional bond?”

Where she's like checking on me? And then she taps me again. No, this cat does not care about me or my emotional breakdown. She heard a knock and she would like her treat. Please.

Silently, she's urging me. Can you just get over it already? I feel my heartbeat slow, and I have this moment where it dawns on me. I have a pet kitten. She's not a guard dog. She's not a security system. She's a cat named Ruby and she's not going to fix me. I reach for the container of Friske's party mixed yums.

And I realize I've been working on this internal issue with external solutions. It's taken this beautiful, perfect, selflessness of this cat. To show me, I need to get some help. I need to see a doctor, and I do. It takes me years of therapy and hard work to get over it.

But now, I sleep great. In fact, sometimes I'm amazed that I sleep so well and I'm not even possible.

“But then I remember anything is possible.”

I trained a cat. [Applause] That was Gabby Rowan. Gabby told this story to Martha Grandslam event in Detroit, where we partnered with Public Radio Station WDET.

Gabby lives in Detroit and has simple loves, gardening, writing her bike, and drinking coffee. She told us that Ruby the cat has passed on. But there were zero robberies under her watch. [Music]

Next up is Elliott Higgins. Elliott told this story at an open-mic story slam in Denver, where we partnered with Public Radio Station KUNC. Here's Elliott. [Applause]

Hi, everybody.

“My name is Elliott, and this story is a celebration of my 25,”

or no, my 45th year of anniversary of jumping out of an airplane in order to get into dental school. [Laughter] Now, let's go back to 1975, and I am a premed hippie at University of Oregon, and I'm a junior spring term.

And I desperately need another hour of A to pad my GPA. Now, a premed hippie has a huge hair. I had a bitch and a hippie bead necklace, and a super cool bell-bottom corduroy's, and a let's party attitude. [Laughter]

So, I am as desperate for this A, and all of the easy courses like bowling 101 were taken. So, you know, what am I supposed to do? And so, out of the blue, a miracle manifest itself

by U of O's first ever offered skydiving 101 for college students.

[Laughter] And so, yeah, I mean, what's to think about? I sign up immediately, what's the big deal, man? You get a parachute.

So, our jump master was, he looked like gambling

from Lord of the Rings.

“He was a -- he was a burly fellow about five foot one.”

Bushy hair, a bushy beard, a beady eyes, and he did not like -- he was serious man. And he did not like hippies, and we called him the leaping leprechaum. [Laughter] So, class -- our class met every Tuesday and Thursday night,

and we'd meet at the wrestling gym and jump off of bleachers and practice our landing on the mats. So, I go pretty high, and just have a fricking blast. And, you know, I -- I pull off some really nice landings, tuck and roll, and come up pumping my hand and go,

"Airborne, all the way, sir!" And I would -- I would salute the leprechaum, and then go head back in the back of line, and I thought I was hilarious. [Laughter]

So, Wednesday afternoon, we met in the same gym,

and we practiced folding our parachutes. And these are the parachutes. You're going to fold. It's going to be on your back, and you're going to jump with it. So, those were no weed Wednesdays.

[Laughter]

“So, now, after six weeks of our intense training,”

it's time to jump out of an airplane. And so, as a new jump cadet, you have to go up for observation ride, to make sure it's a good idea for said cadet. And so, they pile me in the back of a small plane.

We get up to jump height about 3000 feet. Three people pile out of the airplane. That's when reality hit this hippie in the face like a pie. I'm going to literally shit, man. I want to go back to the gym and just jump off and fold.

It would be interesting again. And so, we land, and I just sprint to the jump chat, and I call my father in the pay phone. I go, "Dad, I mean, I'm in a pickle here." And so, I listen, or he listens,

and there's a fatherly pause. And my father says, "Very clearly, son. You get your ass on that plane and out of that plane. No excuses."

“And I mean, that was like, "Well, no help here."”

And just then, the leprechaun comes up to me and goes, "Well, I will, Mr. Airborne. Are you going to jump? Are you a chicken?" And I go, "Dad, I want to be first out. I don't want to freak me out."

It goes, "All right, get your shirt and let's go. You're hauling up that show." And so, I struggle in my shirt, and I watered after the leprechaun. And I pile into the plane last.

Because I'm going to be first out. And we are at 3,000 feet. Way sooner than I want to be. There's a bunch of yelling. They cut the engine and the leprechaun turns to me and just goes,

"But your feet out, get out." And go.

Well, I've never done this before,

and it's windy out there, you know? So, I turned to leprechaun and I say, "Sir, I'm having a boom." He's stiff arms me out of the plane. And, you know, my first thought was,

"I just been thrown out of a plane." My second thought was, "I wasn't ready, and my third, there was no third thought." And I was, "Whoa, my personally packed parachute, deployed, beautiful."

"Oh, no!" I had it wrapped wrongly around my, around my testicles and it's like, "I'm floating to earth on my testicles." And so, what's a hippie to do?

I pull up on those risers, and I'm doing a pull-up, and I'm flying that shoot everywhere. And I am zooming. And so, just then,

the leprechaun comes flying by and one of those really cool, pair of foil shoots, and all I heard was, "What the hell are you doing?" And all he heard was, "My ball!"

And so, things are happening pretty fast. And so, now, Mother Earth is rushing up to caress me and her womanly bosom. And I am, I mean, "My balls are killing me." And I am, "I am not going, I abandon all training.

I'm flying the shoot, and I just plant this baby." And so, instead of a five-point landing-tuck-and-roll, I did feet, knees, helmet. And, I mean, I had my bell-wrong so badly. I was seeing stars, and I'm struggling to get up,

and I'm trying to manage my shoot and get out of my, and I deployed my federally-pat-reserved shoot.

And the leprechaun comes roaring up,

“because, "Well, Captain Airborne, it looks like you don't get an A.”

You're going to have to jump two more times to get that A. So, I did, and I barely got into dental school. [applause] That was Elliott Higgins. Elliott says that he got into dental school

with a skin of his teeth, and upon graduation, he was recruited to go to Southeast Asia and serve the expatriate community, which was a whole new world of friends and opportunities. He says, "1982 to 1995 was a blast,

and things continue to be a blast." In a moment, a medical intern finds herself in over her head when the moth radio hour continues. [music] The moth radio hour is produced by Atlantic public media,

and was whole Massachusetts. [music] This is the moth radio hour. I'm Jay Ellison.

“In this episode, we're hearing stories of people facing down challenges”

that seem insurmountable. My current insurmountable challenge, maybe shared with some of you, is finding ways to bridge devides. This didn't used to be that difficult. Being friends or family or neighbors took precedents

over our differences, but we have been transformed, mostly intentionally by outside forces, into focusing on our differences.

The challenge is remembering that humanity should come first,

and even though that seems obvious, it's a struggle to find our way back to it. That's the improbable mission I'm on every single day. If you're on it too, good luck to us. I'll say one thing, listening to other people's stories,

is a big help. [music] So with that, our next story of obstacles comes from Dr. Danielle Ofree. Here she is, live at a show we produced in partnership

with the World Science Festival in New York City. [applause] The most ominous day of the year, if you're becoming a doctor, is July 1st. Everything turns over in the medical world.

So medical students become doctors, they're now interns. Interns become residents, residents are now fellows, fellows become attendings. You're not supposed to remark on the bizarreness of being

ratcheted up a notch at the stroke of midnight. No. On July 1st, you walk into your untested role, cool as a cucumber, and you act as though the world of June 30th

and before never existed.

Or as the interns say, when in doubt, pretend. And so in June 30th, I was a measly medical student. And on July 1st, I was now one of those interns.

I've been scheduled to start internship on night float for a week straight of night shift only. At 10 o'clock at night, I walked down first avenue in the pitch darkness for my first day of internship.

Now, night float is supposed to be the direct continuation of medical care from the day teams. But as a night float intern, I had the patient load of four other interns. So this wasn't possible.

My paper never stopped. Mr. Rivera, myself, needs a new IV. Mr. Sodorone, 16 is having chest pain. Mrs. Ahmed and 17 north has a fever. Mr. Halal's daughter, she was a talk to a doctor.

Mrs. Rashid fell out of bed. Mrs. Quanz refusing her meds. Mr. Nolan's having a blood transfusion reaction. Mr. Rivera's IV is out again. And so, night float turned out to be

10 hours of damage control. I raised from one ward to the next, patching things up, putting out fires, just hoping to keep everyone alive until the sun came up over the East River

and the day teams came back.

So one night in my second week of night float,

I get paid from a resident around three or four o'clock in the morning. Elper Rodriguez's blood count just dropped 13 points. Get over to 16 north through a rectal. See if she's bleeding from her gut.

“Now, you should know them in the human body.”

There are only a few places where you can bleed briskly enough to drop your madacrit 13 points. And the GI tract is the prime suspect. And if you bleed anywhere long that line from the mouth

there'll be traces of blood in the stool.

So the way you check for a GI bleed is you get a stool sample. You put it on the card and you put a few drops of the special developer fluid on it. And if it turns blue, that's blood. And the way you get a stool sample is you send an intern

over to a rectal exam. [laughter] And so at this point in my career, I was very adept at taking orders. I didn't ask questions I did what I was told.

Mrs. Rodriguez was this tiny wrinkled Dominican woman with layers and layers of family at the bedside. So I can say hi, I'm one of the night docks. I'm not her regular doctor, but I'm just here to do the rectal. [laughter]

And I'm thinking, "Dr. Ofree, rectal specialist." And so the grand son steps forward, he says,

“"Well, we understand what you have to do, doctor.”

I'm actually a nurse." And if you don't mind, I want to stay with Abulita while you do the exam. Stay, while I do this, and I'm thinking, "What is the protocol for this situation?"

I've been a doctor now for two whole weeks, and I have no idea what to do when the family wants to stay. But I say, "Okay, we know whatever." So the rest of the family goes out to the hallway. We pull the curtain for some privacy from the other three patients.

The grand son and I roll Mrs. Rodriguez onto her left side, and I start discouraging my pockets. The gloves, the lubrication fluid, the chest cards, and then I realize I am missing the bottle of developer fluid. So I say to the grand son, "Can you just hold on for one second?

I need to get one more thing." So I dashed out of the room, and I void the gays of the family members there, and I run to the supply closet and start rifling through the shelves and the bins, no developer fluid. So I race down the hall to 16 West to their supply closet,

“and of course none there, all the other interns have pocketed them.”

The CCU.

The cardiac carrier unit was always well stocked.

But I knew the nurses guard their supplies like hawks, so I crept in from the back door of the CCU. And where they keep the dirty laundry in the used bed pans, and I tiptoed over to the supply shelf. I start going through the shelves, and there's gauze pads, and IV, IVs,

and blood tubes, and culture bottles, and glycerin swabs, and beta-dine swabs, right behind the chest tubes is a single yellow bottle developer fluid. I snatch it just as the nurse yells, "Hey, those are CCU supplies!" I crept into my pocket, and I run out with my head down,

because from the back, all interns look alike, or so I hope. So I get back to 16 North, and I'm out of breath, and I'm flustered and sweaty. And the grandstone is still commonly balancing Mrs. Rodriguez on her left side. And so I undo the floral house coat, the cardiac and sweater,

and the patient gown, I get down to her skin. And while I'm doing the exam, look a good nightfall intern, I'm running my scut list in my head. All right, I've got to do those blood cultures on 15 North, I've got to the chest text where to fall up on 17 West,

and that guy in 19 South used pulling out his IV. And so I'm doing the exam, running the scut list,

“and the grandson says, "I think that Abulita is no longer with us."”

No longer with us. What was he talking about? With his free hand, the grandson crossed himself, and remembered something in Spanish. And I'm still frozen in the middle of the exam.

No longer with us. Mrs. Rodriguez is dead. The grandson's side, Abulita lived a long and wonderful life. She didn't want any heroic measures or machines. She just wanted to drift off in peace.

We just need you to pronounce her dead doctor, and then we can take her home. And I'm staring at the grandson. Suddenly, my mind begins to race. I tear the glove off, and I'm thinking, "Okay, okay.

How do I declare a patient dead?" And I'm running through the file, having my head thinking, "Okay, okay." Ah. Ah.

Pupillary reflexes. That's it. So I whip out my handy penlight, and my shiny Mrs. Rodriguez is eyes. To my dismay, she's huge cataracts,

and probably wouldn't have had reflexes anyway. Okay, okay. Respirations dead people do not breathe. And so I whip out my stethoscope. By now, the family is filtered in from the hallway,

and they gather around a watch. They put in one earpiece and the other, and I plant the bell in her chest, and suddenly a twitch of vibrates through her body, and I jump it back.

Was this rigor mortise? Or might she still be alive?

Silly dawns on me that we never had a lecture in medical school

and how to declare a patient dead. I guess it was assumed to be pretty obvious. Dead is dead, and if you're not dead, then you're alive, right?

Dead people for sure do not have a pulse.

And so I run my fingers along her left-crotted, and then along her right.

“Of course, the only way you know you found the pulse,”

is when you found the pulse. (laughter) How do you document the absence of something? What is presences to find by hunting until you found it? Maybe I wasn't the wrong spot.

Maybe I'm pressing to her and I'm hard enough. So I suppose to go over her entire body to document the absence of a pulse, another twitch runs through Mrs. Rodriguez's body, and a family staring at me waiting for an answer. But how can I say anything?

What if I got it wrong? Okay. And EKG, that's it. If I get a flat line on EKG, nobody could argue with that.

So I run out and get the EKG machine wheeled back in. These old decrepit EKG machines that Bellevue had. You know, all the leads are tangled up, and these old machines have these red rubber suction cups to put on the chest.

And when you squeeze them, electro-jelly from EKG's gone by slithers out in crusted blue clubs. And Mrs. Rodriguez, the skinny little woman, doesn't have much bulk on her chest for the suction cups to stay onto.

So I'd squeeze one on and another one would pop off. And so I'd apply more jelly, and put it on another one would pop off. Back and forth in the families, like a watch, like a tennis match, back and forth as I...

Chasing down the extra per suction cups.

Finally, finally, I get the EKG set up.

All the chest leads, all the limb leads, and I press the start button. And we all stare at the skinny strip of bread paper that's sticking out of EKG machine number praying for something definitive.

It emerges with completely unreadable squiggles. Between the rattling air vents and the three Ivy pumps and next bit over, I can't get a stable baseline. And I readjust the leads, and two more suction cups pop off.

The grandson, Carl's his hand around his grandmother's wrists, and he says, "She's dead, doctor. You don't have to do any more tests." The family joins hands, begins to pray in Spanish. And I'm standing there with EKG,

jelly, crusted under my fingernails, burning with embarrassment. How could I not figure out whether or not Mrs. Rodriguez was dead? Isn't that what doctors do?

Pronouns the time of death? How could I ever be a doctor? If I couldn't tell a dead person from a live one. How could there exist so much to be ignorant of?

“When were these magical medical skills going to materialize?”

And what was I going to write on the death certificate as the immediate cause of death? The son came up over the East River as it always does, even after the longest hardest night of night float.

And as I'm signing out to the day teams, I'm thinking about Mrs. Rodriguez. And I imagine her as a young woman, a fresh immigrant, right off the boat to New York, and maybe she came to Bellevue every year for her annual check-up.

Maybe she had her children at Bellevue. Maybe she thought she would die at Bellevue. Wherever she was, I hoped she forgave me for the indignity she suffered at the hands of an inexperienced intern.

Now most of us only go home at the end of the day, the light is falling, twilight's coming dusk. But when you work at night, the end of the day, it's brilliant morning sun.

And I did night float the month of July. And so it was so bright and remember, I would go home every morning like this with my eyes covered. And when I look back at that time now, I realize that I spent so much of my medical training

with my eyes closed. Medicine, learning medicine is so internally focused, cramming, and all those facts, all those diseases,

I always had my head in a book.

But one of the things about becoming a doctor is that you need to open your eyes.

“You need to open your eyes to the world around us,”

to the experiences that teach us medicine. But our truths, teachers, our our patients and their families, whose lives and experiences, we are so privileged to be a part of.

Thank you. [applause] Daniel is still a doctor at Belty Hospital. She's co-founder and editor in Chief of Belview Literary Review,

writing about health, illness, and healing.

Her latest book is "When We Do Harm," a doctor confronts medical error.

“When we asked Daniel what near impossible task she's facing these days,”

she said, "I recently joined an orchestra. It's like jumping in the deep end of the pool, with her cello, and hoping you can keep your head above those thousands of notes swirling around."

She wrote an article about it, which you can find at themoth.org, along with photos of Daniel, and her roles as a "chelist, a doctor, and an editor in chief."

[music] In a moment, a woman contemplates the difficulty of eating mangoes,

and a man faces off with a refrigerator.

When the moth radio hour continues. [music] The moth radio hour is produced by Atlantic public media in wood's whole Massachusetts. This is the moth radio hour.

I'm Jay Allison, in this show, stories of struggling with obstacles, with mixed results. Our next story is from Wendy Irwin.

She told this at a grand slam at Queen Elizabeth Hall in London. [applause] Good evening. Give me a second.

I'm with you. Growing up in the '70s,

“an interesting time when you are the middle child of 11.”

I lived with an excitable Caribbean family,

and a thing that brought them joy, the thing that brought them to paroxysms of happiness was mangoes. [laughter] [applause]

I had an aunt, my aunt Mordy, and she became our resource investigator. She was a person that scoured markets up and down London every inch, every store,

every space was upturned and investigated because she brought back the mangoes. And it was generally on a Saturday during World Disport. She would announce the mangoes from the front gate,

and we'd all crowd round. Except Aunt Mordy wasn't that good at the kind of mango getting, like she had one job, and she messed it up. [laughter]

It was like the mangoes that she got couldn't survive the middle passage between where they were, where they actually grew,

“and where they were supposed to be eaten.”

They tasted of despair, desperation, not one thing good. And so when the rest of the family was crowding around Aunt Mordy, I realised I just didn't like mangoes,

and yes, I hear this, just how dare you, I dare. [laughter] I'm a black woman that just did not like mangoes. Forgive me.

[laughter] So Aunt Mordy would be in the centre, she'd be blocking out world of sport, and giant haystacks was going to do his thing, and I would just hang back

because I'd just preferred the crunch of an apple. [laughter] And I think it irritated her. It was her moment in the sun, and one day she says to me,

"You, Wendy, if you can't eat mangoes, what are you going to do with your life?" [laughter] If you can't eat a mango,

means that you can't do hard things. [laughter] And you know what? In that moment, as she pointed at me, and it must have been something about the light,

because it just glistened off her bracelets, and it must have been something about the length of her fingers, that seemed pretty naturally long at age five, and the rings that glittered. But somehow took on that identity,

I don't do hard things. And that worked for a long long time. It meant that I could avoid tough things, like disagreement, like a job that I just wasn't feeling,

a relationship that just had outlived its purpose, I didn't do tough things, and it worked. So roll forward a couple of decades later,

it's the coldest day in November that I have ever experienced, and I'm sitting in a doctor's office, when, in fact, I'm in a hospital,

“and I'm sitting on a really uncomfortable chair.”

My bladder is full, and I am debating whether or not I can... I can go to the toilet and risk being traumatized by the mess people have left in there. And I realise I can't.

But let me go back eight weeks from that day, when I met a person that I now call Miss Modi. And Miss Modi, let me be clear, is a thin, fibrous lump of tissue that I find in my left breast,

a hard thing in every sense. And at that moment,

I do what I've always done with hard things,

I ignore. And so I ignored her for eight weeks. She just wasn't there. And then for further seven weeks, I did the other thing that I do,

I pleaded, I begged. Maybe if you don't get any bigger, or maybe if you wouldn't mind just disappearing because you weren't there last month. Miss Modi has other ideas.

One night she says, "I'm just gonna do a little dance, make a little love to the healthy cells in your breast and multiply with my malignancy tonight." That pain was so bad,

it took me to A&E. And then about A&E trip, I ended up having an ultrasound, and that ultrasound then led to a biopsy, and that biopsy then led to an MRI,

and that led to this moment in that office, where that oncologist tells me, "I am so sorry one day, but it is breast cancer." And I recognize that I have lived long enough

to see those odd children from 1 in 100 to 1 in 10, now 1 in 2, now me. And the weirdest thing is, is that I find myself saying,

as the oncologist says,

“"You know, have you thought about freezing your eggs?”

I find myself saying out loud, the stuff I'm thinking, like,

I have never had to my knowledge,

knowingly eaten a frozen egg, and what are they like with avocados? Is that something we could maybe talk about, you know? And the oncologist laughs,

and the nurse laughs, and I laugh. And I realize, actually, we've got to go to work on Mordi. So Mordi and I fight.

And what really levels up the odds is this beautiful, wicked, brutal thing called chemotherapy. It enters the ring, takes both of us out. I am the only one left standing.

(audience cheers) What I have learned, is that chemotherapy gave me some brand new taste buds. And yesterday,

I tried a mango for the first time.

(audience cheers) It tasted like joy,

“and it smelled like the best part of summer.”

You know, those days when it's 24 degrees, cloudless and everyone looks good? I ate that mango. I gave thanks. And my name is Wendy Irwin.

I can do heart things. Thank you. (audience cheers) Wendy Irwin lives in East London, and has an ongoing love affair,

with homemade butter and feminist theory. Wendy spends far too much time. She says, making preparations for the impending zombie apocalypse. Story update Wendy is happy to report

that she has since discovered that there isn't a mango she doesn't like. And she remains cancer-free and grateful. (upbeat music) Our final story comes from Brian Kett,

who told this at a Chicago Storyslam, where we partner with Public Radio Station WBEZ. Live from the Moth. Here's Brian. (audience cheers)

Hi. Last year I was looking for work. I was out of work and I kept thinking that I'll joke. What's the difference between a pizza and someone with a liberal arts degree?

(audience laughs) The answer being that the pizza can actually feed a family of four. (audience laughs) I'm single, but that's just the joke.

I don't have a, there are no miles to feed at home. But every work opportunity I had would fall through

that I couldn't even bring myself to sit down

and follow up on my next job lead. So I left my apartment, I went for a walk. I thought that would help. And I was out walking when I came upon all these cars honking and driving around this station wagon

in the middle of the road. And it's hatchback was up. And next to it were these two guys who kind of look like the old man muppets that sit in the balcony and make fun of everyone.

(audience laughs) And they were speaking in Russian and they kept gesturing to this refrigerator covered in magnets that was sitting on the curb. And it was clear they were trying to move the fridge

into the back of the station wagon

“and it was a tight squeeze because the fridge was huge, right?”

It's a size of a fridge. (audience laughs) The two of them had these expressions that look so sad. They look like those animals that Sarah McLaughlin sings about in those commercials.

(audience laughs) And I was gonna keep walking, but I got stuck

waiting for the light to change.

So it was like, McLaughlin commercial was on and I couldn't switch the channel. And I became so overwhelmed with just emotion and guilt and just empathy. I turned to them and I said, "You guys need a hand

and they just looked at me." And so I mind lifting the fridge and they began nodding enthusiastically because turns on I'm a great mind. And so the three of us lifted up this fridge

and we tried to slide it into the back of the station wagon. It didn't fit like book barely, but didn't fit. We set it down and I thought, "Okay, I'm done." And then one of the muppets that he pulled out this wrench. It's the biggest lunch I've ever seen.

I don't know where it came from. And he began using it to try to take off the refrigerator door to get a little bit extra clearance. And now I couldn't bail because we were all in this together

and we were on to phase two. And so for the next 20 minutes,

“I watched this guy try to take off this door”

but the bolts on the door were so rusted. You need like a blow torch to get him off and by now the cars are honking more and more and I came to my senses and I thought, "What am I doing?"

And so I turned to the guys I said, "Hey, listen, good luck. I'm gonna go." And I turned to walk away and as I was walking away, I heard something in their voices

and I didn't know what they were saying but there was a tone that I recognized because it was a tone that I had been using a lot myself lately. Both of them were clearly very frustrated and defeated too. And in that moment I really saw myself

and both of those guys and something inside me just kind of snapped and in desperate need of a victory of my own, I rolled around and I said, "No." (audience laughing) And they looked at me a little alarmed

and I said, "We're gonna rotate it." And they stared at me and I'm gonna rotate and I imitated turning the fridge on its side 'cause again, you great mind. And so we all gathered around

and I was at the base of it and we picked this thing up. I was at the base of it by myself and we tipped it on its side. The refrigerator door flopped open. Hit the pavement.

The shelves inside the fridge slid out into uncommon traffic. So now the cars are honking like crazy. There's a big backup. When the door hit the ground,

all the magnets popped off

“and they just scattered everywhere like cockroaches.”

It was just, it was instant pandemonium. And if that wasn't enough, when the door opened, there was a sudden shift in weight and to maintain my grip, I lurch forward and when I did so,

my back went out. (audience laughing) And as these pains are shooting down my spine and into my leg, I think, yeah, okay, this is it.

This is how I die. (audience laughing) Middle the street. I just wanted to go for a walk. (audience laughing)

So we set the fridge down. My shirt is soaked through a sweat and then I don't know where this woman appeared. I think it was her fridge. I don't know.

(audience laughing) She starts yelling at the two guys. They start giving it right back to her. And all I can do is just hobble off to the side of the road

and sit down on the curb and I felt terrible. And not just because of my back, but because this, like everything I'll say had been trying lately,

was a total failure. And I must have seen pretty upset because the woman saw me. I then she gave the guys a look that said, "Why does this guy care so much

about my fridge?" (audience laughing) And so. (audience laughing) The three of them are sitting there

and they're talking with one another and I just sat on the curb and just reflecting on the futility of life. And I was sitting there doing that until she came over

and she put her hand on my shoulder. And she said, "Thank you for trying." Means a lot. And while her words didn't fix my back or the fridge that I probably broke,

they really did make a difference because she was right. And trying is a victory in and of itself. Regardless of outcome. Because some days,

yeah, you might not get the fridge back of the station wagon and some days you might throw out your back in the middle of rush hour. But if you keep trying, there might just be a day where it all works out.

And so I hobbled home. And when I got home,

the first thing I did was Google

what a herniated disk feels like. (audience laughing) And then reflecting upon what that woman said, I pulled up that next job lead.

Thanks. (audience applauding) That was Brian Kett.

Brian tells us that after this experience

whenever he's moved, he's hired professionals. Brian is a Los Angeles based screenwriter who has pilot projects in development here and in Australia,

which means he gets time zone conversions wrong a lot. Brian's pastimes include hunting for mid-century furniture, flyfishing, and getting stuck on a crossword puzzle. We asked Brian what improbable task he's currently attempting and he said,

"I'm trying to teach our dog mochi how to sick." I went into the process with such naive optimism, but she's seemingly unable to grasp the concept. She remains unbothered, unseated, and an absolute delight.

To see photos and find out more about any of our storytellers here, you can go to themos.org. And while you're there,

“have you ever felt like you have a story you'd like to tell us?”

About huge obstacles? Or small ones?

Or whatever makes a great story?

You can pitch it right on our site? That's themos.org. We're called 877-799-Moth. That's 877-799-MOTI-H. My name is Lisa Stump.

I live in Andover, Massachusetts, and this is my story. On New Year's Eve in 2009, I went to my ring box to put on my engagement ring and to my horror,

I realized that I had lost the ring at some point during the previous seven days. The ring was expensive, and had belonged to my husband's grandmother, and I was devastated.

So I went on this quest to see if there's anything I could do to find to this ring, and I did get a little obsessive. I saw the police record. I placed as in the paper and on Craigslist.

I bought a metal detector. I went to a hypnotist.

“I searched for this ring everywhere I could think of.”

I put up posters and all the places I had been. I talked to everybody. I just did everything I could. Not getting a little discouraged, but there had been a lot of snow

that year, and I thought maybe when the snow piles melted if the edges of these parking lots were. I had been that maybe I could find it. So one day in March,

there was so much rain that the schools were closed that day, and I had all the kids in the car, and I went to the supermarket. And I went over to the big snow pile,

and there where I had parked my car, and I looked down, and I saw something shiny, and I got out of the car, and I went over to it,

and it was a diamond ring, and I was so excited. I leaned on it, and I picked it up, and oh,

I was so disappointed. I had found a diamond ring, but it wasn't mine. But then I got a little encouraged, so I thought maybe I'd find it owner.

So then I realized this wasn't going to be easy to find the owner of this ring,

and I went through this incredible quest,

and I ended up on the featured on the front cover of the local newspaper, and then the radio stations called me, and the TV stations called me, and I was on the news,

and I was all very embarrassing, but very exciting and exhilarating, and I eventually did find the owner. And I was humbled to find that she thought I was crazy,

and she had replaced her ring a long time ago, and she was sort of grateful to have it back, but thought I was in that case,

“and I think that gave me the closure I needed”

to replace my own ring, and leave it behind me. Thank you. Remember, you can pitch us, find out all about how to do it

at themooth.org. That's it for this episode. We hope you'll join us next time, and that's the story from The Mooth. This episode of The Mooth Radio Hour

was produced and hosted by me, Jay Allison. Co-producer is Fiky Merrick, associate producer Emily Couch. The stories were directed by Catherine Burns, with additional grand slam coaching

by Sarah Austin, Genes, and Larry Rosen. The Mooth's leadership team includes Gina Duncan, Christina Norman, Marina Cluché, Jennifer Hickson, Jordan Cardinale, Caledonia Karen's Kate Teller's Suzanne Russ,

Sarah Jane Johnson, and Patricia Eurena. Mooth stories are true, as remembered and affirmed by the storytellers. Our theme music is by The Drift, other music in this hour is from Epidemic Sound,

and Blue Dot Sessions, podcast music, production support from Davy Sumner. The Mooth Radio Hour is produced by Atlantic Public Media

Special thanks to our friends at Odyssey,

“including Executive Producer Leo Rees Dennis.”

For more about our podcast,

for information on pitching us your own story,

and to learn all about the Mooth,

go to our website, Domoth.org.