Armchair Anonymous: Blessing in Disguise
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- Welcome, welcome, welcome to Armchair Anonymous. I say it throughout the episode and I'm gonna say it again publicly. I was way wrong on this prompt. - Thank you. - I have very low expectations. I thought it was gonna be really earnest and saccharine and a new word we just learned, triphio? - Treacle. - Treacle. Just learned treacle. Still don't have my hands around it. I would not be able to use it for a while with confidence. - Okay, we'll work on it. - But I thought it was gonna be a little bit of that.

And this turned out to be one of our best prompts ever. It was so fun. I mean, there's murder afoot. Well. Yeah. Ding, ding, ding. Easter egg. Easter egg. But it could come in any one of these stories. True. I really do want to get a board in here that has words we're learning. Oh, that would be fun. Yeah. Treacle would be the first. Is there another one that we've been circling? No, that's the first. That's the first one. Okay. First submission, treacle. Yeah, I think you can listen to this.

Unless you've been murdered. Yeah, it would be triggering if you've been murdered and you hear this. It would remind you of being murdered for sure. Please enjoy Blessings in Disguise. We are supported by Audible. We know you love audio content. Thanks for listening to the show. But if your ears are craving more audio, Audible is the place to go. I probably, in truth, spend more time on Audible than any other place. Any other app? Yeah, I'm listening every night for an hour before bed.

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Hello. Hey. Is this Mandy? Yeah. Why do you have such a wonderful recording setup? My friend has a podcast, so he gave me this microphone. I think you might be our best sounding caller to date. Wow, that's a big, I don't know. I shouldn't say that because we did have a musician today. We'll put you in top 10.

I'm going to let him know because he was like, you're going to be on a podcast. I have the whole setup. I'm going to give you everything in headphones. And I was like, no, no, no. Just the mic is fine. Oh, this is great. Where are you at? I am in Durham, North Carolina from Tennessee originally. And what town were you from in Tennessee? A small town right outside of Knoxville. It's called Oak Ridge. It's actually part of the Manhattan Project. What part of the Manhattan Project were they doing there? I think they were building part of the bomb there.

But that's the reason the town started in the 40s. And now there's like a big national lab that's still there. And that gets only claimed to fame, but kind of a cool one. I like that. Okay. So you experienced a blessing in disguise. Yes. So this is the summer between freshman and sophomore year of college for me. And I'm back home for the summer. Growing up, I had pretty strict parents and we had a particularly rough summer.

Right before I went to freshman year of college, I was sneaking out. They were doubling down. They were trying to be like, okay, you're 18, but here are still the boundaries when you're living here. And I'm like, well, I'm 19 now. I've been living on my own for a whole year. I have all this wisdom. So we're kind of trying to figure out our boundaries. And I decide I'm going to get a job at the only bar in my hometown.

And it's like a bar and grill. So it's open at 11 a.m. and open until like 3 a.m. on Thursday, Friday, Saturday. And I'm one of five or six servers that's working there. And everyone else is showing up late, showing up drunk, not showing up at all. A couple people got fired for selling drugs at work. Like it's the most unhinged place I've worked at in the service industry. And

At 19, I'm loving it. I'm like, this is great. There's drama all the time. It's interesting. These people are fun. I'm trying to like hang out with people after work, testing boundaries with my parents about like, am I just going to say I'm working later? How much am I going to disclose? And so anyway, I'm opening and closing.

pretty regularly because everyone else is not showing up. So I'm the lead server within a couple of weeks. And I was opening with this guy who was the head cook. We'll call him James. And so he's like 25, 30 years older than me. And he is one of the only dependable people in the kitchen at the time. So we're regularly like opening. Okay. I just want to be clear. Did you say he's 25 or 30 years older?

older than you or he's 25 or 30 years old? He's like 45 or 50. Just think of me. Okay. Young at heart. Same as you. He's super friendly, kind of a hippie vibe, hanging out with everyone that's in their 20s and 30s working there. And he's part of the group. It doesn't seem weird to me at all that we're opening together. A couple of weeks into this, he decides to ask me out. Oh, sure. I can friend zone this. We can keep it cool. Like we just have the rest of the summer. He's really friendly.

And I'm like, there's no harm in going to see a movie with him and then meeting up with other friends. So I'm like, okay, this is on my day off. How do I broach this subject to my parents? I'm like, I'm just gonna be very casual about it. I'm just catching a movie with a coworker. It's no big deal.

And my dad, he was in the service industry for 10 years. He was a bartender when he met my mom. He knows what the fuck's going on. Exactly. So he kind of knew the vibe of this place. And so he starts asking, like, what do you mean your coworker? Who? And I'm like, oh, you know, it's just the head cook. I'm thinking I'm going to say he's dependable. My dad's like, he's how old? You're 19. Absolutely not. You're not hanging out with this guy. And so I'm upset because they're yet again being strict. I'm like, listen, I can suss people out on my own.

You barely wanted to do it, but now that you can't, you're probably like, I'm going to. Right. Now I want to. This is how it backfires. Yeah. Parents, listen up. Well, I don't know. We're going to hear this story. Okay. Okay. Okay. And so I actually didn't go. I didn't try to sneak around. It was a daytime thing. So I was like, okay, there's really not even a way for me to sneak out. I'll just be upset with them. It's fine. I'll go and hang out with people after work another day. So we finished out the summer still just hanging out with the larger group and never hung out with him alone.

Uh-oh.

So that was in August of 2018 that I went back to school. Nothing happens until August 2020. I get a message from this girl I went to high school with on Instagram. Shout out to Caroline. And she goes, Mandy, I know this is very random, but how do you know this man? And sends a screenshot of his Facebook profile and shows that I'm friends with him. And she says, isn't he the guy who murdered that girl that's on the news? Uh-huh.

No, I thought, okay, whoa, I was prepared for some sexual impropriety. Whoa, what? So definitely still think of Dax. Remember when you equated? Yeah, keep that image in your mind. So I was like, yeah, I know him. I used to work with him. Can you send me the link to the article or whatever it is that you're looking at? The article title is Suspects Raped and Tortured a Woman Before Killing Her and Stuffing Her Body in the Freezer. Oh, okay.

Oh my. Wait, is it at the freezer of the restaurant? No, he apparently rented a freezer for his house after this happened. So my next message is what? I worked with him every day for a summer and she was like, what was he like? I looked back at my message and I said, oh, he was actually really nice, super friendly. And I'm like still defending him thinking like something must be wrong. I must not be this guy. I actually sent in Rob should have the picture. I'm going to flip it over. The screenshot of his Facebook is first. Oh, oh.

Oh, okay. Whoa, whoa, whoa. Or no, is that the mugshot? Well, there's both. And so what I want to say is do not picture me any longer now that I've seen him. I don't know. Fuck you. I don't know. In the Facebook profile, he's got like three feet of silver hair, middle part, huge shades, orange top. That's.

That's a look. He looked like that when you knew him. He had long hair, but he looked a little younger and basically like that. I know we're not supposed to do this, but it feels fair now. He gives murder vibes. Well, definitely in the mugshot. You know what he looks like is Charlie Manson. He looks just like Charlie Manson. Maybe he took some inspiration. I love that you're protecting his name, though. That's kind of comical because it's like public record that he's been arrested for murder. We're going to protect his name.

Right. I'm sure if anyone hears this story, they're going to find it immediately. Did you ever learn the sordid details like from soup to nuts? What happened? Was it a coworker? Was it a date gone wrong? What happened? Yeah. OK, so this is the funny part and kind of sim. So on Monday, I got the email from Emma and I started looking things up to try to like fit together timeline. I was like, when was this article posted? What actually happened to him?

Is he in prison forever? What's going on? Monday of this week, four years later, is when they actually convicted him. And his trial ended on Monday of this week. No way. That is so... Oh, that's creepy, Sim. I know. The Sim's been...

been deathy lately because the Phil Donahue thing. Oh, yeah. We had this. Unfortunately, hopefully it's not continuing to be murdery. So I was reading some of the article and I actually watched a clip of the trial from this week where they were doing their closing statements and talking about it. So apparently this is what happened. He knew this girl from his next job at the next restaurant he worked at. He and his girlfriend at the time were

who was 22, so also 30 years younger than him. They told this girl that they knew from work at the restaurant that they could give her a place to stay for a few days or said something to her to get her to come back and then ended up chaining her to a bed and kept her there for like four days, drugged her with their parents' medication. Sounds like it was morphine. They said in their questioning that because of what happened in those four days, like they weren't planning to kill her, but then...

They couldn't let her go without consequences. They painted themselves into a corner. Yeah. What else are you going to do once you've tied someone to a bed? Also, what is the plan? What was ever the plan? Like as soon as you have chained someone to a bed, you have to expect consequences. One of the things that they did not get convicted for, one of the only two counts was like premeditated murder and kidnapping. They

They convinced her to go, but like she also went willingly with them. And then that's when the kidnapping happened. Oh, that's horrifying. Wow.

There's a little bit of the story left. So they actually found her body eight months after this happened. So she was there from December of 2019 to August of 2020. And the reason they found her was the girlfriend went to the neighbor and said, hey, I need to help getting to a women's shelter. I'm not in a safe relationship. Also, there's a body in the freezer. And the neighbor's like, what? And then the police show up without a warrant. And they're like, hey, do you have a body in the freezer? And he's like, nope. And

And so they leave. It takes them a few days to get the search warrant. Again, small town stuff. It's not very organized. They come back with a search warrant. And all he's done to try to cover his tracks is he started to clean out the freezer. And so to clean out the freezer, he took the body parts and put them under his bed. Holy smokes. Did you call your parents and tell them?

and admit that they were right. No, I'm going to send them. You're going to send them this episode? This is the first time I will ever say you were right for being strict. This is how they'll know. I wonder if they've heard about it now because this week it's like national news. Just all of that, like with it being someone he knew from another job and wasn't really truthful with them about what they were doing when hanging out. It makes me really glad that I didn't even get close to that person.

scenario with him. Listen to your parents, y'all. Exactly. Strict parents are good sometimes. Maybe life-saving. Oh, wow. That's a new one for us. And great mic. Double whammy.

I was nervous about this prompt because it could be too earnest. He's always worried about my prompts. Yeah, like me. Anything earnest, I'm just a little nervous about. But boy, this was anything but earnest. I'm going to throw out there because I missed one detail of his Facebook profile. Behind his image is a kind of cartoon of what looks like a rabid Rottweiler in a chain choker with a huge chain attached.

leading to what looks like a warlock holding the dog. What a off-putting... It's very ominous. I didn't notice that until today. I was like sending this over in the email. I'm a little worried about you, man. Thank God your parents... You say they're strict. They might just be totally regular. No,

to be completely normal. There's a lot of other things where I was like, there's no reason for you to tell me no to this, that or the other. And this thing I'm looking back and I'm like, oh, my God, there were some questionable decisions on my part. Yeah, there's quite a few red flags. Wow. Well, that was a great story. Yes. Yeah. Thanks for having me on. This is so cool to see you guys and say hi. And I wanted to give a little shout out to my friend Olivia. She actually just texted me and was like, how was recording earlier?

Oh, lovely. Shout out. We like talk about the show every week and we always accidentally bring up something that we've just heard you guys talking about. And then we turn to each other and we're like, did you listen to Armchair this week? Well, it's great meeting you and I'm certainly glad you're alive. Me too. I'll have to say thank you to my parents for real after this. Yeah. Good job, parents. Well, nice meeting you guys. You too. Take care. Bye.

Do you remember in Seven when Brad Pitt's like, no, he's not smart. He's probably walking around in his fucking grandma's underwear. Oh, yeah. And Morgan Freeman's just like, so disappointed with how immature he is. Oh, I love that. Me too. I love Brad Pitt in that. Oh, he's so good and hot. He was so willing to. Be stupid. Be stupid, yeah. But also. Oh, but gorgeous. Oh.

I want to watch it right now. Me too. Let's stop. Sorry. Sorry, guys. We couldn't finish. We had to call the other people. Hi, guys. Hi. Can you hear us? I can.

Okay, so we're going to pick a fake name for you. Do you have one picked out already? I do. It's Stacy. Oh, great. I can see that. Yeah, if you introduce yourself as Stacy, that would feel like a fit to me. Do you have a girlfriend that you love that's named Stacy? Why that name? You'll find out, Dax. Oh, snap. Okay. Easter egg. Where are you? I'm in Orange County. Oh!

Oh, not too far. Then are you from there? Yeah, I'm from Southern California, so close by. Let's hop in. Yeah, let it rip. My Blessing in Disguise takes place when I was in college. So that was about 1998. Oh, me too, girl. But I'm going to take you back a little earlier so you'll have some background. I knew as a very young girl that I was gay. I didn't know what to do with that.

growing up in the 80s and 90s. It's not like it is today, which I'm so happy for the youth. They have options. I just felt like I didn't. And were you most nervous about your peer group or your parents? Probably peer group. Parents are awesome, but that too. I mean, it's all scary. My plan was that I was just going to not date

and wait until I leave California. Oh, God. Which is ironic because most people will move to California to be gay. Yeah, exactly. I'm going to move to the South. Right. But the generations of living in California, like I had never really left the state and it was time. That was my long term plan. Also growing up, I realized I wanted to be a nurse. And so when it came time to pick a college, I was going to be out of state. Let's

Get out of here and become gay. For no reason, I want to take a stab at where that landed you. Can I? I just have a feeling. Did you go to Washington? Damn it. Okay, sorry. Midwest. I get there and I'm realizing that it's a very conservative, straight, white town, like zero diversity. Sure.

Yeah. Not the greatest place to come out, maybe. Thankfully, I found an amazing therapist. She's like, there's one gay bar downtown and just see what it's like. I walk in. There's nothing but old white gay men at the bar.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I got a bad hunch. My memory and my stereotype of it is that, yeah, gay bars existed, but it was always dudes. There wasn't like lesbian bars that were super known. I feel like they're still kind of new. Yeah. Even in West Hollywood, when you walk through, it's like primarily dudes. The lesbians are at home nesting. That's what they say. Shut up.

So I'm getting depressed. I'm not dating anyone. And I'm like, OK, it's time. Like, I'm just going to start dating guys. And I did. I didn't date a lot, but I did date some guys and they were awesome. The interesting part is that I felt obligated to tell these guys.

guys that I'm gay. I like that. I think it was just you being honest. There's probably going to be a limit to where this goes because I'm ultimately. But it is a little bit shooting yourself in the foot if the point is to find a partner and then you're like, and just letting you know, like, I am gay. Yeah. I like that you did it too, but I see that it's complicated. For people who are attracted to unavailable people, you were the hottest thing in the world. Oh,

I end up meeting this older guy at a bar who's super good looking. We end up dating. And to my surprise, I'm really falling for him. Oh, wow. We're going to call him Tom. Tom wasn't really into the relationship. I could tell.

And I could play it off by like, oh, I'm not either. But I was. Time went on, a couple months. It was confusing. It was hard. I didn't know what was going on. And so I'm 19 now. I was like, I'm going to confront him. I'm going to call him up and say, what is this all about? Are you seeing someone else? And he says, yes, but you're going to laugh. And he goes, okay. Her name is Stacy. She wants to be a nurse.

And her door swings both ways, too. Oh, interesting. You guys, devastated. I knew he had a friend. It was a small town. And I was like, not her. And I hang up the phone. I pack up my stuff. And I literally get in the car. And I drive home. To California. Oh, yeah. Dropped out of school. Whoa. Whoa.

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why do you say you're going to laugh? I mean, I know there's so much coincidence, but I thought he was going to say, yeah, but it's a man. I'm gay. That would have been something that maybe you could laugh at. But just like, oh, it's another girl that's just like you. But I like her instead is not that funny. Yeah. So you can get the devastation. It was about six months.

I was just heartbroken, confused. I still had some good friends that I didn't even say goodbye to in college. They literally got in the car, came out to get me. See, here's the upside of the Midwest. That's a very Midwest gesture. We don't know if they were from the Midwest. They weren't.

In the car on the road trip back, we're planning out my life. So I'm going to live with so-and-so. My other friend's going to get me a job at this really great restaurant that I know is successful. And so I'm feeling good. I get an interview at the restaurant and it's like right after the lunch shift. So there's not too many people in the restaurant.

And this super cute girl starts walking by a waitress at the restaurant. And I see that her name tag says Stacy. No. Oh, yes. It was her. And I needed money. I end up working there. I had covered for her. And she was super awesome.

Awesome and great, which made her even worse in my eyes. But she's like, I'll buy you a beer after work one time. And I'm like, OK, whatever. And so that one time came. The one beer turns into two and three and four. And I'm like, Stacey, I need to tell you what I know about you.

And she had already broken up with Tom. I was like, look, not only am I the girl that he was dating, but like he told me that your torn swings both ways. In that drunken moment, something changed. And we were immediately drawn to each other. We totally hook up that night. 24 years later, nothing.

No! I love this story! This is a cute Anna blessing in disguise. Anna bad ex. Three prompts. Oh, wow. Wow. That's great. Love that. I love her so much. She's incredible. And your person's out there. If you're looking for that person, you never know where you're going to find that person. Besides having my son, that's like the best story that I have. I

I love it. I also love my favorite friends are mine where I hated them first and then we became friends. That's kind of my favorite group of friends. You didn't hate me ever. Excluding you. I liked Aaron at first. But I have a lot that I thought I didn't like. That is always a fun story. Oh, this is great. And you guys have been together forever. Thank you for sharing that. That was lovely. I wonder what Tom's up to. Hopefully he's got his hands full still. Hopefully he found love. Fulfillment. We're somewhat...

acquaintances. We keep in touch. He's doing fine. On some level. We have him to thank a little bit. Yeah. Thank him, honey. And he reminds us that. Of course he does. He's a man. Oh, well, this was a blast and I'm happy for you and Stacy. Thank you guys. Very nice to meet you. Yeah. Really fun. Take care. Bye-bye.

Looks like we're two for two on blessings in disguise. Total slam dunk thus far. Hello. Hello. I thought maybe I was being pranked. This is real. This is real. Who would prank you? Do you have a friend that could have possibly set this up? Maybe Emma thought it was a funny joke. I don't know. She's such a prankster. She's bored. She's in New York, bored out of her mind. She's like, well, let's fuck with Ryan. Okay.

How are you, sir? Doing well. How are you guys? Wonderful. Where are you? I am in my closet in Aurora, Colorado. How long have you lived there? Since April of 2022. Oh, okay. So semi-recently. Did you have like a COVID change of heart? I'm going to go in a different direction. Yeah, that's actually part of my story. Oh.

Okay, okay. I won't jump to the end then. First things first, I also went to UCLA. Oh, you did? What years? 2012 to 14. I transferred in from Santa Barbara City College and then finished. I went there for a year myself. Wow. It's the path. And were you from California? Yeah, I actually grew up just north of Santa Barbara.

in like the Santa Ynez Valley area. - Oh, I know it. Well, dirt bike country, you're already used to the beauty of Santa Barbara, but I moved from Detroit and went to Santa Barbara City College, and there's a lawn there that's like five acres of grass just on a cliff looking at the ocean. And I would be there studying, and I just thought, this is impossible. - I would park it at Better Beach and then have to turn around and walk away from the sand to go to class.

Yeah, a real force of will to attend there and actually go to class. Okay, so you went to UCLA. What did you major in? I studied physiological sciences. All right, let's hear your blessing in disguise. Okay, so I'm a bit hesitant to say it because I know it was such a traumatic event for so many people, and I don't want to minimize or project myself.

toxic positivity, but the pandemic itself is actually my blessing in disguise. So it's January of 2020. I have moved back to Los Angeles to start a postdoctoral fellowship. I'm about a month out from having finished my PhD. So I'm living alone and walking distance from Cedars. Fast forward a couple of months, we are now basically shut down. All research studies are no longer allowed to continue unless they're like life-saving important cure and treatments.

which is not the nature of the study I was working on. So my supervisor gives me a call and says, we have to shut down the research study. We're not able to be withdrawing any funds from this study because we're not actually collecting any data, which means we have no money to pay you. So you have until basically the end of June to find something else. And then that's all the money we have that we can give you. So of course, my entire field research is...

in the same situation. So I can't get another job anywhere. So at the end of June, I have to make the decision to move in with my mom back in the San Dines Valley. We get along well. Fast forward some more. It's the Tuesday before Thanksgiving of 2020.

And I'm sitting at my desk. And the next thing I'm aware of, I have thrown up in the toilet and I'm rinsing my mouth out in the sink. So I flush and I have no idea how I made it down the hall into the bathroom, closed the door, lifted the lid, lifted the seat, got it all in there.

And I'm now aware of where I am because of the pandemic. My mom is working from home and she's heard me spewing. So when I opened the door, she's standing right there and she says, are you okay? Were you just throwing up? And I'm like, it tastes like I was throwing up. And she's like, okay, well, was it something you had for breakfast?

I was like, I don't remember. And she says, well, we had the same thing for dinner and I feel fine. What did we have for dinner? And I'm like, I can't remember.

And she says, okay, that's it. Get in the car. We're going to the hospital. And I was like, no, mom, it's fine. I'm done throwing up. I feel totally good. You're overreacting. She's like, no, we're going to the hospital. Ryan, were you having any problem processing other stuff other than just your memory was absent? I didn't think so. But when they were asking me obvious questions, like what day of the week is it? I'm like,

It's Tuesday, right, mom? So she was definitely detecting some disorientation. I had an altered level of consciousness. My brain was not functioning properly at the time. About eight hours later, I have a CT and an MRI done. And they're coming back and telling me that I have

a mass the size of a walnut in my right frontal lobe. I sent pictures. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. We have them. Let me see. So those are more recent MRIs, but you're able to see the gap. Oh, no. That's just missing from where that was. Oh, wow. Because I thought you had a stroke. No. Thankfully, it was just brain cancer. Oh, my God. Thank God. Thankfully, it was just brain cancer.

I guess you're allowed to make that joke. You're entitled to it. So it was malignant. Oh my God. Yeah. So over the next couple of weeks, I have Zoom consults with neurosurgeons, oncologists, neurologists. We get insurance sorted out and we schedule surgery for January 5th, 2021 back at Cedars. So I...

go in, have surgery done. You can see the huge thing that they melon balled out of my noggin, medical terminology. Just for the listener, it's like a cross section of your brain. And if I had to say what percentage this melon ball is taking up, it's like a good 15%, the black spot. I mean, it's a considerable size. It's not small. I have

Have surgery, a couple nights in the hospital, have another seizure, and then get discharged back to go home with my mom. February, start five days a week of radiation treatment, daily chemotherapy. And then in March of 2021, I start one week on, three weeks off of chemo.

chemotherapy cycles and those go for basically 12 months. Oh my gosh. Things go pretty smoothly. Few minimal complications. End up finishing my last round of chemo in March of 22. April of 22, I move out here. May of 22, I start a new postdoctoral fellowship at the Antutu Medical Campus here. Had dozens of scans since then and everything looks pretty clean. No evidence that it's going back.

The way that I have processed the pandemic as being a blessing in disguise is that if I had been living alone in an apartment by myself and had any sort of symptoms, I never would have gotten them checked out. I would have been like, I threw up and then forgot about it. That happens all the time. I'm good. Yes, you're right. The next time something had happened, I might have been driving and I might have killed someone else or myself, or I might have been in a shower and fallen and drowned. So...

blessing. I'm still here. And I also might let it just keep growing. Well, that's what I was going to say. Yeah. Who knows how fast moving it was? It could have been inoperable at the point. That's sort of number one. Two, because I'd only worked for five months, I had made such little money that I was still well below the poverty threshold in California.

So I qualified for state-funded health insurance. Surgery, chemo, radiation, follow-up scans, medication, all of it, totally covered. I could have been in hundreds of thousands of dollars of crippling medical debt. And then the most persistent, sustained...

blessing that I can take out of this has been that it really forced me to stop and recalibrate my values and to sort of reevaluate work-life balance. I had spent a lot of my 20s with the mindset of, I'm just going to work, work, work, put my head down, and I will enjoy myself when I get where I'm going. When I get to the top of the mountain, I'll look around and enjoy the scenery.

And that allowed me to be very productive and make it through school and a PhD quickly. But that's not a good formula when the next season of life is just adulthood. If it had not been for COVID, I don't think I would have been forced into that hard reboot sort of situation. And then I would have probably still had been just like,

most of the grindstone, I'll enjoy myself when I'm finished working. The great lie we all tell ourselves. There is no finish. I got to have a balanced life where I'm able to actually enjoy what I do outside and the work that I do. Wow. Yeah, it's almost unimaginable to think someone would have a positive spin on getting brain cancer at your young age. But yeah, that is all very legit. Yeah, and true. Another important one, if it hadn't been for COVID, I would not have moved here.

And I would not have met my friend Molly. Shout out to Molly, who introduced me to the podcast. So we wouldn't be doing this if it wasn't for the pandemic. We'll just call that the cherry, maybe. The arm cherry. The arm cherry on the cake. Thank her for us. Yeah, that we got to meet you. Well, my goodness. What a crazy story. That's very impactful. I think that will hit a lot of people. I hope so.

I'm now in a position to share that story and be able to come out from that kind of experience with some processing and being able to work through it and go, okay, well, that was not great at the time. Don't

don't get me wrong, zero for 10 would not recommend brain cancer, but it's nudged me into a positive direction and a positive sort of perspective on things. Does it at all, Ryan, change your worldview? My fear of like, if something like that happened to me, I feel like I would forever feel vulnerable. Like, well, fuck, if that could happen, could it happen again? Certainly. I mean, having a back

ground in physiology and sort of medical adjacent knowledge. The first thing I did was go on the internet and start looking up like, okay, what's the prognosis? Do these things come back? If so, did they come back worse? What's the timeline on all of that? And I brought all that information to my oncologist and he was like, okay,

What you got to understand is that there's so many other factors. So you're young and you were healthy before this happened, which means that your body is going to be able to withstand the chemo and also help your body. When the chemo kills off cancer cells, your body is going to clear those out. But also, if you could pick a place to put a tumor...

That's the place to put it because the functions of the left and right frontal lobe are a lot more shared than other parts of the brain. One of my questions was like, well, when you do surgery, are you going to be like digging out grad school? And they're like, no, we think it's been in there for a while. And so whatever that tissue should have been doing,

It hasn't been doing this whole time. So whatever should have been there is already on the left side of your brain. So they were able to go in and be very aggressive and get not just the cancer, but some extra margin around it and take out some healthy tissue just to be sure.

Boy, thank God we have figured out how to do that. That's wild that we can get into the brain. Oh, well, Ryan, that's an incredible story. Thank you so much. Of course. Thanks for having me on the show. Yes. Please tell your friend we said hi, and we hope you stick around with us. Absolutely. All right. Take care. See, Ernest can be good. Yeah, you're right. There's a lot of I told you so's happening in this episode. We should change the name of this prop to I told you so. Can you not call me that?

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Hello. Hi. Where are you, Shaina? I am sitting in my daughter's cubby little hideout. It's like the American Girl doll. And also we have some Squishmallows just to kind of help with the sound. Very good choice. Yes. And I live in Pittsburgh. And have you your whole life? I have my whole life. Okay. So you have a blessing in disguise story. I'm going to be honest with you. I was not...

wild about this prompt and we have three for three they've been great so i stand corrected i submitted this to something else that the prompt was still up and then it aired and then i saw this one pop up and i was like i think they wrote this for me oh i have a daughter she's 10 years old

And like most 10 year old little girls is fully obsessed with Taylor Swift. Oh, yeah. Oh, I already love this story. I thought you would. Okay. So when Taylor came, it was last year. So like June of 23. And then the tickets went on sale months prior. So this whole Taylor obsession, it was not really present then. And especially not when the tickets went on sale. So actually,

I turned down tickets. I thought they were too expensive. Hindsight, haha. They were like pennies. Oh, no. Fast forward six months from the concert, and now my daughter's entire life revolves around Taylor Swift. And all of her friends and who's going. Yeah, the concert came and went. Most of her friends went. Her best friend was there. I take her to the movie and...

She knows all the words. She knows all the dances. And I was like, where the hell did this come from? We had a Taylor Swift birthday party. And I'm like, I fucked up bad. I should have taken her. I probably have to take her. And if I'm being perfectly honest, you cannot get wrapped up in that.

and like only listen to Taylor Swift in the car for months on end and see the Heiress Tour movie over and over and not want to go. I want to go too. Same experience. I took her to the movie and I'm like, fuck, I wish I had gone to that show. Yeah. This is now this winter. So I start looking on StubHub for tickets for anything North America this fall. And I kind of zero in on Toronto. It's like five hours from here. It's not a bad drive. And of the shows that were left,

they were the most reasonable. And I use that term very loosely. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Some also pertinent information into me making this decision is that we also have a 13-year-old son. He plays soccer at a really high level, which means we travel a ton. My husband travels for work and he doesn't really want to travel on the weekend. So I end up doing all this with him. We spend a lot of one-on-one time together. And Lucy, that's my daughter, is

is home with my husband. Ordering pizza. Lots of pizza, lots of spicy fried chicken sandwiches. I really start thinking that this is something I have to do for her. I'm looking at StubHub one day and, you know, if you look at the homepage, it lists

all the shows. And it'll say tickets from and give a price. And as I'm scrolling, because you see all the European shows listed first, and the prices are a fraction of what the North American shows are. And I start doing some math, looking at some flights and realize we can go to Europe all in for four or five days for basically the same price as to drive

to Toronto for one night. I just want to commiserate. Yeah, when I was in Lisbon, everyone there was in that same situation. They had done the math and like, fuck, we can get a European vacation for the same price as going in our hometown. It's because they have regulations on the ticketing. Resale? We have passports. We took the kids to Spain and Portugal last summer, which makes us sound bougie. I'm a teacher. We

We do like one big vacation every couple of years. Very Pittsburgh of you to apologize for that. I do a similar thing quite often. So I knew my daughter could handle the flight and the time difference. The place that I zeroed in on, I had been before with my husband, but like 20 years ago. And I just remember how easy it was to navigate. This is like free smartphone. I felt very comfortable getting around the city. So I knew...

that this would be a really good place for me to be alone with her. And so six weeks prior to the concert, I pull the trigger. I buy the plane tickets. I buy the tickets to the show on StubHub. I find us a cute little boutique hotel. And I am terrible with surprises and secrets. I just want to tell everybody when it's exciting. By some miracle, I am able to keep this secret from her. I made it all the way to the day before we're going to leave. And it is a Monday.

My daughter goes to her friend's house for the afternoon. I'm packing. I got her a cute little reputation bodysuit. That's her album. I had a little lover bodysuit. You know, we're all set. And the last thing I needed to do was put all of our passport information into the airline app to get our boarding passes and stuff.

So I had been packing in my room and now I sit down on my bed with my phone and the passports and my dog, his name's Walter. He jumps up on the bed and kind of like lays across me while I'm doing this. The app had like a scanner to scan my passport, but it would not work. It just kept spinning and wouldn't load. So I typed in the numbers, but it said I would still have to go to the ticket counter to get our boarding passes. So then I set our passports on my nightstand because...

Sweet Walter was laying across me. I don't want to disturb my dog. I'm getting PTSD hearing this story. Then I look at my phone and I'm like, oh shit, I have to go pick up Lucy. I just run out the house. Lucy is around the corner. This is a five, six minute round trip. So we are walking back in the house. She's in front of me. And Walter runs out of the hallway where my bedroom is to greet her first. And I hear her go, what do you have? Oh, God.

And I peek my head around the corner. It's her passport. He has her passport. And time stops. I grab it out of his mouth and I run to my bedroom and there's my passport on the floor.

in way worse shape than hers. Oh, Walter, you bastard. I have them here to show you and I'll explain too. He had chewed basically like all four corners of the covers and we had renewed specifically mine and hers last spring.

So we have the new ones. I don't know when the last time you guys renewed, but like our photo pages are plastic. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. There were very obvious bite marks on all the corners. So this is one of them. Oh, yeah. And on mine in particular, he did chew through my photo page. This is happening. And I'm trying to not let Lucy see just how much I'm about to lose my mind because I'm not going to ruin the surprise like this. So I run...

and I call my husband, I don't really remember him

all of this, but based on the tone in my voice and what I said, he thought something tragic had happened to one of the children. He was out to dinner for work. He stood up so abruptly from the table. The entire restaurant is looking at him. And now his tone is matching mine until he can get, he's like, okay, you need to breathe. You need to tell me what's going on. And finally I spit out, well, to shoot our passports. I don't remember getting off the phone with him. I start Googling. What do you do with a damaged passport?

So I call the passport agency and I explain what happened. As it turns out, I'm not the first person that this has happened to. Our flight was at 1130 a.m. the next day. And she said, this is great. I can get you an appointment at 830 tomorrow morning to get a new passport. Like, OK, great. I'll be there. Starts giving me the address. Buffalo, New York. Mm.

And I said, Buffalo, I just told you I live in Pittsburgh. That's a four-hour drive. Also, what's important is that I bought non-refundable plane tickets because they were cheaper. Yeah. Based on the travel time, layovers, day in which the concert was taking place, we had to travel that day. I exhausted every option. It was 6 p.m. Could I...

get in the car and drive the five hours to Philly right now, get an appointment in Philly Tuesday morning, and then fly from Philly to Boston to get my connection overseas. And no one had appointments. So I get off the phone with this woman with basically her saying, you know, if your photo page is still intact and all the information is there and you can read it, I think you're going to be okay. I got off the phone. I felt pretty good. I then text

text pictures of our passports to everybody I know that does a lot of international travel. And every single person said the same thing. You're gonna be fine. You might have to tell the story. They might laugh. But you know, you're gonna be there with your adorable little daughter. It'll be fine. That wasn't good enough for me because I started Googling. And everything Google told me was the exact opposite. Like there is no way we are traveling with these. So I called the passport agency back. I get a different person who immediately was like, you can't travel with

with the damaged passport. We ended the call with, listen, I can't see them. If you want to go to the airport. Yeah, you got to. What else are you going to do? My husband comes home from dinner and he saw the passports and was like, you're fine. He was so confident. I was not. But,

We did agree to go through with the whole surprise for Lucy. The whole time I intended to wake her up the morning of the flight and tell her. So we do it. You know, we come in filming 6 a.m., wake her up out of a dead sleep, say, hey, remember how we were going to go back to school shopping? We're actually going to go to the airport and go fly to Europe to see Taylor Swift. Everything that you want, the screaming, the happy tears, the disbelief, the hugs. We got that moment. And then I had to remind her what Walter did to the passports and everything.

Like, remember why I was upset last night? And that's why the passports were out. So I don't know if they're going to let us, but we're going to try. And if this doesn't work out, we're going to figure something out. So we go to the airport three and a half hours early. Aaron, my husband, he's so sure he doesn't even wait. He just heads home, drops us off and goes home. And we walk up to the ticket counter and she asked for our passports. And I'm friendly and confident and make a joke about my dog and pull out the passports. And

And this woman looks at me like I am fucking insane. Like I am absolutely crazy to think that anybody is going to let me travel with these passports. I start pleading my case, but the lady on the phone said, you can see my picture and she gets a supervisor. He comes over and says exactly the same thing. Technically, if there is any amount of damage to even the cover of your passport, it invalidates it in any foreign country.

can refuse you entry. So even if we gave you a boarding pass, you're going to step off the plane. They're going to deny and they're going to put you right back on a plane home. You know, I was trying to keep it together for her and not cause the scene because she's crying hysterically in the adorable I'm coming for you, Taylor t-shirt that I made her just for the trip. That was it. We walked away. And as we walked away, she goes, you know, this

This is like the craziest passport story I've ever heard. You should just put it online and maybe Taylor will see it.

So my daughter took that to heart. And when we got home and, you know, she'd composed herself, she goes up to her room, she records herself explaining exactly what had happened the night before that morning. And she posted on YouTube. I didn't even know she had a YouTube channel. Right. I share it on my Facebook. And if anything, it was very heartwarming. The amount of people that reached out to us that wanted to help because my friends, friends shared our story and

people that are friends with our state representative, you know, they're trying to get me in contact to get a passport or to get me a refund on my flight. Like it was really, really sweet. It meant nothing to my daughter, but it made me feel better. But we certainly went to bed really sad that night. And then it's now Wednesday morning, we wake up and I had joined several Facebook groups for the Taylor Swift shows in the city. And there

there are a lot of other moms like me coming from the United States with a daughter Lucy's age and we were going to meet up do some sightseeing and I'm seeing their posts they've landed at the airport they're in line at the merch tent and it is just like a dagger through the heart now is a good time to tell you that the show that we were going to see was in Vienna

Oh, my God. Oh, no. So about two hours later in the same Facebook group, that's the first place because a lot of these people in this group live in Vienna. So that's the first place that I see the news break. First of the arrest from the terror plot.

Oh my gosh. I run into my husband's office, holding my phone, showing him the headline. He's like, oh my God, this is why. I knew there was a reason you were not supposed to get on this plane. And this is why I would have been worried sick. Can you imagine being there with her to find out the concerts had been canceled? Yes. Yeah. All of a sudden it was like, oh my God, did Walter know? Right.

Now we're thanking Walter. Maybe Walter's like a great grandpa or something that's reincarnated. Oh, wow. Yeah. So in the end, Walter chewing our passports and ruining the trip of a lifetime actually ended up saving us from an even worse disappointment. I know that people that ended up being there made the best of it, but

But they were still investigating for hours and even days past. So I imagine that I would have been very nervous to even leave our hotel room with her. I mean, initially they were saying not to.

to gather and wear your Taylor Swift stuff. Even if we had been there, I think it would have been pretty awful. Yeah. StubHub refunded the money for the tickets. I was able to cancel the hotels. We did have to eat the plane tickets, but I've been telling everybody that being able to tell this story for the rest of my life is probably worth $2,000. And that was before I got to tell it to you guys.

So, I mean, that's the icing on the cake. Happy to have missed the Taylor Swift concerts. I didn't see that coming. Boy, the pressure we put on ourselves for these things. I went through the whole thing myself. You make it so enormous. Wow.

Wow. Well, that really worked out. What if you had gotten on the plane, they did get you a boarding pass, and then you flew all the way there, and then they did not let you enter, and you had to fly all the way home, and then it was canceled? Oh, my God. What if I paid all this extra money? I drove through the night to Philadelphia, then I paid extra money to fly to Boston and do all that stuff. Yes.

Only to get there and then have it be canceled. Oof. I'm kind of still hung up on the dad going like, you're going to be fine. There's no problem. And then when it didn't work, I was like, I told you there was a reason. I'm such a dad move. Like, I knew it. He had like multiple I told you so's and he was wrong the whole time. Yeah. That is...

Very dad. Well, Shana, there's no way that your daughter can tell the story as she gets older and not recognize how much effort you put into making her happy. And that's really what it's all about. It's not really about Taylor. Well, she's pretty cool. You know, we did get that moment when I did surprise her.

We were on the local news. I went to the post office today and he asked me if that was me on the news. Oh, that's great. Local celebs. Yes, that could have been a prompt to tell us about a time you were on the news, which we have. Yeah, that was a prompt. Well, Shana, thank you for telling us that story. That was terrible for you, yet I guess worked out. But entertaining for us. Yes. Just real quick, I need to give a shout out to my best friend, Amber, because we listen every week and compare notes. We both have had...

Several other prompts that we've thought about writing in for. But as I mentioned before, I'm a teacher and this was the one I felt safe. Non-canceling. Well, send her our love. So nice meeting you. Yeah. Thanks for chatting. So nice meeting you guys, too. Have a wonderful rest of your day. You too. Take care.

You love when poop makes its way. I love it when Taylor makes her way. Oh, right. When a prompt that has nothing to do with poop ends up being about poop. Yes. Well, that was a great prompt. I'm pretty proud of myself. It was. It was fantastic. And those were great stories. Big guy told you so. You're like her husband. No, because I'm right. No. No. Just like her husband. Oh, you're like her husband. Look, your turn. I'm like the wife.

I'm the one who went to Taylor Swift and had a passport issue. I'm very much like the wife. No, you're the head cook. No, I'm not the head cook. Okay, bye. Alright, love you. Do you want to sing a tune or something? We know a theme song.

Okay, great. We don't have a theme song for this new show, so here I go, go, go. We're gonna ask some random questions, and with the help of our cherries, we'll get some suggestions. On the fly, I rhyme-ish. On the fly, I rhyme-ish. Enjoy. Enjoy.

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In a quiet suburb, a community is shattered by the death of a beloved wife and mother. But this tragic loss of life quickly turns into something even darker. Her husband had tried to hire a hitman on the dark web to kill her. And she wasn't the only target. Because buried in the depths of the internet is the Kill List, a cache of chilling documents containing names, photos, addresses, and specific instructions for people's murders.

This podcast is the true story of how I ended up in a race against time to warn those who lives were in danger. And it turns out convincing a total stranger someone wants them dead is not easy. Follow Kill List on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen to Kill List and more Exhibit C True Crime shows like Morbid early and ad-free right now by joining Wondery Plus. Check out Exhibit C in the Wondery app for all your true crime listening.