255: What if they didn't ask and you couldn't tell?
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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. The feeling is almost of arriving in your adulthood but being a child. You don't know very much about yourself and I was terrified to get to know myself as my real self.

From Wondery, I'm Witt Misseldein. You're listening to This Is Actually Happening. Episode 255. What if they didn't ask and you couldn't tell?

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Hello Prime members. Have you heard you can listen to your favorite podcasts like this is actually happening ad-free? It's good news. With Amazon Music, you have access to the largest catalog of ad-free top podcasts included with your Prime membership.

To start listening, download the Amazon Music app for free or go to amazon.com slash ad-free podcasts. That's amazon.com slash ad-free podcasts to catch up on the latest episodes without the ads. Check out our recently completed six-part series, The 82% Modern Stories of Love and Family, ad-free with your Prime membership. My mom was born in Paris, Texas.

I'm actually the only member of my family that wasn't born in Texas. I was born in Utah. My father was in the Army. He was Special Forces, and so we were relocated quite frequently while they were together. They weren't together for very long. They actually separated when I was three. Apparently, my father had a lot of anger issues, and it had been kind of escalating to a point where he took a golf club and killed my mother's cat.

From what I understand, that was kind of the final straw. And she scooped us up in the middle of the night and we fled. You know, I have a sister who is from a previous marriage. And in kind of a similar fashion, my mother kind of had to flee that person as well. Apparently they were involved in selling narcotics.

But we never really stayed in one place very long, and that, beyond the drama that had gone on with my father, was because we were so poor, we couldn't really afford to stay in one place for very long. I have memories of living with my uncle and his wife and their two kids, but my mother was always working, and so I was kind of left with my aunt and her, her two kids, and I think that we were kind of unwelcome in her eyes.

She would come up with some creative punishments for, you know, silly things that kids do. My aunt would heat water up on a stove and then make us put our hand in this near-boiling water, and that was our punishment. And of course, my mother never knew that this was going on. By the time she had come home from work, you know, it was well past my bedtime, so I never spent much time with her.

I was very shy, and I would describe myself as lost. I feel like I had been missing any kind of guidance, and the kind of parental figures that were there were, of course, my aunt, who would do these abusive things to us. Nobody really explained to me what was going on, and it just left me in a state of confusion.

we finally were able to get our own place. But my mother, the amount of hours she worked only increased once we finally got our own place. So I continued this theme of kind of being lost throughout my childhood, and I started to lash out

I would get into trouble with neighborhood kids. We would steal from local stores and skip school and throw rocks at windows and just do all kinds of unruly things. There comes a time where my mother meets this man on the internet, but she was all of a sudden much happier. Their relationship escalated and we decided to move in with him.

But before we moved in with him, we were staying with my mother's sister at her house. And the plan there was for my mother to find a job and set some roots down and establish herself before they got a place together. So she spent months and months trying to find a job in her career field. And I saw the depression just kind of creep into her.

It started to take a toll on her sister as well, because we were obviously kind of overstaying our welcome. And so she started lashing out in similar fashion to the other aunt that we were staying with. There wasn't any physical abuse involved with her, but there was a lot of emotional abuse, a lot of throwing dishes and telling me that my mother was ruining things for her. My mother's car had been repossessed.

So not only were we taking up her space and her food, we were using her car now to get to the job that my mother had gotten, which was a waitress at some buffet. So it was the beginning of a very dark time for my mother, and I was the one to receive the blame because I was there with my aunt. My mother was always working, and I was the one who could be there to take the blame.

There was some fallout between her and the man she had been seeing, this man that was so important to her and was her saving grace. And he became kind of this figure that wouldn't leave her alone, that became a sort of stalker, really. This cycle continued until a significant event where my mother was rushed to the hospital. And I was just so confused. I didn't know what was going on.

And so I was left alone for the rest of the night to just kind of wonder what was going on. I didn't learn until several years later what had actually happened. She had been pregnant and she had miscarried. I guess in the process of her miscarriage, she had a significant tear in her uterine wall and she was bleeding out.

They just kind of kept me from this in hopes that it would protect me, but in turn it just kind of did more damage because I was just left alone to wonder what was going on. It just contributed to this lost feeling I had as a child, and I was just kept in the dark about some of these secrets. So at this point I'm either 11 or 12, and I've just started middle school.

And I knew that I was gay. I didn't exactly know what that meant, but I knew that I was different in that way. And I knew that that was wrong. There was not fond conversation of gay people around me. And my aunt was very religious. So it was something that we were taught, you know, is wrong and sinful.

I quickly learned that if I didn't share myself with anybody, there was less chance of somebody finding out that I was gay. So I kind of lived in my own head for most of my adolescent years, and I became kind of an outcast for it. But that was okay with me. I could deal with that because it meant that I was protected from being judged for being gay because I saw what gay people were going through.

If somebody was suspected of being gay in school, they were bullied, they were beat up. And so I wanted to avoid that at all costs. I quickly became part of the alternative culture of the teens that I was with. There was a lot of very sad music, dark poetry, and I related to a lot of that material because it spoke to the struggle I was having within myself.

But that seemed to further my exclusion from the status quo. I was labeled as, you know, the weird emo kid, the weird goth kid. He's one of those.

This is kind of when Columbine was becoming the culture of schools. So I actually, one day at lunch in high school, I sat at a lunch table and I didn't understand that this is where the seniors sat and nobody else was allowed to sit there. But nobody ever said anything to me until one day one of the upperclassmen spoke to me and said, you know, we let you sit here because we're afraid you're going to shoot us up if you don't.

I, of course, didn't harbor any violence for anybody, but I was okay with receiving statements like that in a sense because, again, it shielded me from people actually figuring out who I was. By the time that I was in high school, my mother had actually gotten back together with this man, much to my aunt's dismay, and so they had a falling out.

So we had moved in with this man into a one-bedroom apartment. My room was the couch in the living room. That was kind of my space. I had this very big crush on this man who was on the football team. There was never any mention specifically of either of us being gay, but he was my first kiss, which unfortunately ended up with me contracting mono, and I was very sick for several months.

My mother was so frustrated because I just was not getting better. There was one morning where she had stormed out. I had written her this note that kind of explained what was going on. In the note, I had said, "I'm gay, and this is how I contracted mono." And I remember her coming back in after reading the letter, and she was crying, but she just kissed me on the forehead and told me to get some sleep.

But very quickly, it turned into questions from my mother of, is this just a phase? And maybe there's something else going on psychiatrically. So I was taken to a counselor, and the counselor told my mother that I didn't have the mannerisms of a typical homosexual, so he didn't think that I was gay. I kind of suspected that she thought that I may grow out of it, or maybe I was just confused, and it was just something that we didn't talk about.

I obviously was not comfortable expressing my identity in person. So I turned to the internet. So I spent a lot of time in gay chat rooms, just kind of exploring what it meant to be gay. And that led me to this person that I started dating who lived only a couple hours away. So we had been able to meet up. And so that was kind of my first relationship.

He had stayed the night, and I remember that my stepdad had been out of town for work or something, and that's why I felt like it was okay for him to stay the night, because I felt like obviously we wouldn't get caught. But for one reason or another, he had come home, and he had saw my boyfriend through the door, and he exploded into this rage, and I was kicked out.

I went to the mall. That was the first place that came to my mind because I was 15. I called my mother and she was sobbing as soon as she answered the phone because she knew as well that I was not going to be returning. She was financially dependent on him. So there wasn't much she could do because she would end up homeless as well.

After that phone call, I had spoken to my sister, who lived in the city in her own apartment, and it was decided that we could come up there and stay in her dining room on an air mattress, and I could work, get a job, and save up some money and try to find her own place. Very quickly, I was thrust into adulthood.

We worked the whole summer and miraculously we got an apartment before the school year started and I was able to return to school.

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And then next, something goes wrong. But with ADT's 24/7 professional monitoring, you still feel safe. Because when every second counts, count on ADT. Visit ADT.com today. My sister decided to enlist in the Army and she seemed happy, she seemed successful. And I thought to myself, you know, maybe that is something that I could pursue.

At this time, it's 2009, it's the height of the war in Afghanistan. They really need people to enlist. And so I speak with a recruiter and I actually have to have my mom sign for me to join because I was still 17.

But I went through the whole process and I enlisted with the understanding that I would be kind of going back into the closet because "don't ask, don't tell" was still a thing and you could be discharged for being gay. It wouldn't be honorable, it would be other than honorable.

So I shipped out to boot camp in July of 2009 at Fort Sill, Oklahoma. And immediately once you get there, it's people screaming at you and yelling at you, and I'm just taken back to all of the different abusive scenarios that I experienced. And I immediately think, "This is a mistake. I've made the wrong choice. I want to leave." But you don't have that option.

I was back into this space of, "I can't let anybody know who I am as a person because they'll figure out I'm gay. I'll get in trouble and I'll be discharged and all of this will be for nothing."

I was still dating my boyfriend at the time, and I had to write these love letters to my partner in this very kind of secretive language that if read by somebody else wouldn't make you think that this was a gay couple.

Homophobia was, I would say, at the same level as it was when I was in high school. It was very similar. Lots of inappropriate comments that people would make indicating their distaste and hate for gay people. And so I kind of had to put on a mask and become somebody else.

Alcohol has a very big role in the culture of the military, and very quickly I found that the alcohol calmed all of that nervous energy that I had building up. I very quickly became reliant on drinking every night to kind of keep me in a kind of medicated headspace.

Isolation had become almost part of my core personality. I feel like because I had been living that way for so long, it was the only way I knew how to be. And so I quickly became fond of drinking alone. I was afraid that I would say the wrong thing in some sort of drunken stupor and give away that I was gay. I was a very functional alcoholic for several years.

So I kind of had this feeling of invulnerability a little bit. So that was kind of a green light for me to keep going. I was trained as a combat medic. We were to be assigned to hospitals or field hospitals or attached to infantry units. And we were trained to adventure with the infantry and stabilize any kind of trauma that would happen from combat.

In the Iraq and Afghanistan war, there was a lot of IEDs and explosions from improvised bombs. So you would see a lot of partial and full amputations of limbs. And a huge focus of our training was being able to stop that bleeding or at least slow it down until they could be taken to a hospital.

My role was mainly in hospital environment and clinic environment. But the licensure for medical professionals in the military does not translate to civilian life very well. My licensure in the civilian world would be as a basic EMT. And so that was very discouraging to me because I felt like I did all of this training and work to be able to do pretty much nothing.

Unfortunately, the pay for the type of work that I would be qualified in the civilian world was very poor. So I had to kind of adventure out into working as kind of a nurse's aide. I had started initially in an inpatient psychiatric unit.

My role there was to maintain a safe environment for the patients who were there. And that involved keeping eyes on everybody at least every 15 minutes, helping those that were actively psychotic or hallucinating, making sure that people were not engaging in unsafe activities. It is so taxing. And you see so many sad stories and so many people who are just victims of the system

They've been sick their whole life and nobody has been able to kind of take good care of them, so they just get bounced around from one facility to the next. So it's very depressing. On top of that, it's dangerous work. You deal with some dangerous individuals who sometimes don't know what they're doing but can be very violent. And so there was a lot of times where I would be physically assaulted by patients.

That was also a major source of stress for me because I was afraid to go to work. I had to go to work because I needed to pay my bills, but I was terrified of getting hurt. And so all of that just contributed to my drinking. My tolerance had kind of built up and I had required more and more alcohol.

I was frequently sick. It was hard for me to keep solid food down. I would notice that if I went without drinking that I would start to experience withdrawal symptoms. And so now I'm kind of obligated to keep going in my mind because this is the only thing that makes me feel better. I would not be able to sleep unless I was drunk.

I would steal my boyfriend's money and buy alcohol. I would hide bottles in my dresser drawers because I didn't want my boyfriend to know how much I was consuming. And that's a pretty big part of addiction, too, is kind of hiding your shame. I had been used to living inside my head for so long that the hiding of my drinking almost came naturally to me.

That shame I carried by myself. Nobody else knew what I was going through because I wouldn't let them know.

At this point, my boyfriend at the time suspects that I'm an alcoholic, and we have frequent fights about the amount of my drinking every night. And, you know, I would say, oh, I'm going to have only two tonight. And then I would wait until he would go to sleep, and then I would have the other four. But on top of that, my health was kind of getting worse.

There were times where I would throw up so violently that I would start bleeding, and I would throw up bright red blood. Even then, it didn't stop me from continuing to drink.

When I was graduating from college, I was offered a job in the intensive care unit of a local hospital that was very renowned, and it was a level one trauma center, so it saw all the action. And this was such a great opportunity for me that I couldn't turn it down. But at the same time, my boyfriend had been offered a job in another city

By that point, my alcoholism had taken such a toll on our relationship that once we did end up living apart, it became freeing for him to understand what it's like to live without an alcoholic. And so we very quickly started to grow apart. And not more than two months after, it ended up in him breaking up with me.

This was the beginning of my descent into my rock bottom. I had all of the stress from work. I lost the one person I felt like I could lean on. I'm throwing up blood more frequently. I'm not eating. I'm not really drinking water. And so it very quickly just spiraled into a very deep depression that I really didn't see any way out of.

I felt so isolated and alone and that nobody would miss me if I were gone. Given my background in psychiatric nursing and in the ICU, I've seen a lot of failed attempts at suicide. So I kind of understood which ways would be better than others. And I started to think about how I would do it. This decision came to be right when COVID began.

I remember the first case that arrived in our hospital, and it was on another floor, but I remember feeling terrified, and it very quickly exploded into a huge problem. Everything changed in our day-to-day activity at work, overnight almost. All of these COVID patients were dying so quickly, and we didn't understand exactly why they were dying.

It's so depressing because these people's families weren't able to be with them as they were dying. It was just you as the nurse and the chaplain on speakerphone as this patient is in their final moments. It really just helped mount my feelings of hopelessness and isolation and suicidal ideation.

At this point, I'm working night shift mostly. So I would get off of work early in the morning and arrive at the grocery store as it's opening. I'm wearing my full PPE and I'm exposing myself and potentially other people to COVID so that I can buy my alcohol for the day, not really eating or taking care of myself otherwise. And that was kind of my daily ritual.

I'd taken off some time from work, and so I just used that week to try to get myself together. I reached out to a suicide hotline. It's a veteran-specific suicide hotline. And I figured they would understand what I'm going through because suicide is so rampant in the veteran community.

And so I reached out to this hotline and I broke down crying on the phone with this man. He almost didn't believe what I was telling him. He was telling me things like, "You know you're getting more sleep than that. I think you're exaggerating." And he was getting more and more frustrated with me. He was like, "Am I going to have to call the police or are you going to be okay?"

I felt so defeated in that moment that I just said, "I'll be fine," and I hung up. I reached out to a friend and explained some of what I was feeling, and so they offered to drive me to the ER to be assessed.

I arrived in the ER. They consulted a psychiatrist to come talk to me. And because I didn't have an active plan to commit suicide, they decided that it would be safer for me to be home than in the hospital, inpatient, because of COVID. And so they sent me home. This was just another level of disappointment. I thought, well, there's nothing I can really do about this except go through with it.

Working in the ICU, you have access to a lot of powerful medications and you have knowledge of how much of certain medications it would take to achieve certain effects. So I came to the plan of using fentanyl, which is a very powerful opioid, to overdose myself and drift off to sleep and die.

It was a night shift and I had taken a large amount of fentanyl that I knew would be enough and I had stuffed it into my backpack. My plan was to go home after my shift and kill myself in my apartment and just be done with it.

You get these medications from a machine called Apixis that dispenses the medication under your username that's attached to your fingerprint. So they know they can track who has taken what, and all of this is closely monitored given it's our narcotic medication.

you can override some of these safeguards to get medications out in an emergency, and then later after the emergency kind of take care of the discrepancies. So I had overridden all of this fentanyl, and I just put all the vials and, you know, the syringes I would need and everything into my backpack. There was a sense of relief because I knew I would feel better once this was all over.

At this point, I was in such a state of, I almost want to say euphoria, because I knew that this would be the end.

When you take a medication out by override, it's very apparent on the machine that something has been taken by override. And so nurses that were just retrieving routine medications to do their own scheduled tasks could see that all of this fentanyl was taken out. And of course, my name was attached to it. I was very quickly kind of questioned about it.

They reported me to upper administration, and I was taken into a separate area with the hospital administration and told that I needed to take a drug test. I did this blood test, and it came back negative. And to the administration's dismay, I was kind of released. There's nothing in his system, so why are we keeping him here sort of thing.

And somebody said, well, have they looked in his backpack? And that's when I knew that I was fucked. I turned my backpack over to the hospital security. They discovered the fentanyl vials and I could see the disappointment in the man's face as soon as he unzipped it. And I knew that that was it.

The humiliation and the shame, it had a delayed effect because I did feel so numb at that moment. I could see the disgust on the administrative lady's face. I could see the disappointment in the ER physician's face. And at that point, I just didn't care. I just wanted to go home. I was turned over to the hospital police.

The man told me that I would be free to go right now, but that I would need to turn myself in. Of course, I'm not thinking about any of this. I'm just thinking about wanting to die. And so I agree, and I just went home and got drunk. Once I had gotten home, I realized that's the end of my career, and now I have to go through with this, because otherwise, what am I going to do?

I wasn't able to stay in that state for very long because early the next day, the police came looking for me because I was supposed to turn myself in, and of course I did not. So they knocked on my door initially, and I did not answer. I had no intention of dealing with the police. They ended up leaving after several minutes of knocking on my door, and I figured that they had given up on trying to contact me.

But maybe an hour, hour and a half later, there's another knock on the door and I look through the peephole and it's the police again. But it's also my landlord.

And then my cell phone rings, and it's my landlord. I don't answer it, and she leaves a quick voicemail, and I very quickly open the voicemail to see what it is, and she says, the police are here, they're doing a welfare check, and they're asking for access to your apartment. And the next thing I know, I can hear them jiggling the keys to get in, and so now I'm in a panic. I have nowhere to go, that's the only exit.

This apartment was a kind of renovated factory, and so it had really high ceilings and kind of overhead spaces above the closet. And I don't know how, but I was able to climb up into that overhead space, and I hid behind the boxes, holding my breath as they entered my apartment.

I knew if they had found me, I would be stuck in a cell and I wouldn't be able to have access to the things that I would need to kill myself. That was my main motivation for hiding. It wasn't necessarily that I was scared of the police officers. It was I didn't want my plan to be foiled. They were about to give up when one of them said, "Hold on, let me look up here."

They had gotten up on a chair and moved some of the boxes and there I was, very disheveled. I hadn't showered. I was still drunk and suicidal. And it became this kind of violent situation where, you know, I had a gun pointed at me and I was being told to get down and get on the ground. And I was handcuffed and taken out to the squad car in front of all of my neighbors and my landlord.

And it was just this huge, dramatic situation. This season, Instacart has your back to school. As in, they've got your back to school lunch favorites, like snack packs and fresh fruit. And they've got your back to school supplies, like backpacks, binders, and pencils. And they've got your back when your kid casually tells you they have a huge school project due tomorrow.

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They debated with each other whether or not to take me to the hospital, but they were so ramped up, I think, that they just wanted to get this over with. They take me to the police station, and I'm wheeled off to the city jail. I was fingerprinted. I had my mugshots taken, all of that humiliating process. And then I went before a magistrate.

The magistrate looked over my record and my situation, and he let me go on unrestricted bond, which is just a promise that you'll appear for your court date. And I was very surprised. I didn't think that this would be the outcome of that explosive situation with the police and having guns pointed at me.

But there was a huge push to release as many inmates as possible that were, you know, of course non-violent because COVID was so rampant in the prison and jail populations. And so that was sort of my saving grace. I don't think that I would have been released otherwise. And so I was let go and I'm in the middle of downtown with no ride.

I didn't have any money. I started wandering in the direction of my apartment. Eventually, somebody kind of stopped and offered me a ride. The person gave me a ride back to my apartment, and I went back to trying to figure out what my next step would be.

I felt like I was at a real crossroad. I could try to gather what's left of my life and figure something out, or I can just go through with my plan to kill myself. And I really debated that for several days until the investigator with the Board of Nursing got in contact with me.

I knew that it could potentially be the end of this career that I had gone through so much to achieve. When I met with the investigator, we sat across from each other at this huge conference table, and it was probably the most intimidating experience of my life. She had already talked to all of my coworkers. She had already gotten my medical records. She knew pretty much everything about me.

She just wanted to see what I had to say about everything. I had already been arrested. I'm now facing two felonies. I've lost my job. I don't have any money. And so, what do I have to lose by being honest with this lady? So I just laid it all out. And this was probably the only person that I had been able to tell everything to. I told her about the plans I had made to kill myself, and that's why I took the fentanyl.

And by the end of our conversation, she was crying.

I was so taken aback by this because I thought that this person was against me. I thought this person was not on my side. And here she was weeping for me and she's telling me that I have so many people that care about me and all of the co-workers that she talked to told her that I'm a great nurse and they were so worried about what was going on with me. They could tell that I was dealing with something but they just didn't know what was going on.

She referred me to a monitoring program for licensed health professionals like physicians and nurses and pharmacists who suffer with addiction. And it's a way for them to maintain their license and practice safely, but also to be held accountable. She seemed to genuinely care about my well-being.

As I enrolled in the monitoring program, there were certain stipulations that came along with me being able to keep my license. And part of that was attending an intensive outpatient rehab three days a week for four hours a day of intense group therapy where you get very personal with each other and the counselors.

You are kind of forced to open up about these things that brought you to the place where you are now. It was very emotional and scary to tell other people my full story. It was like all of the emotions that I had been numbing were starting to flood back into me. I just remember crying in front of them.

There was no judgment. It was just acceptance and love, and it was just exactly what I needed at that moment. I knew for so long that I was an alcoholic, but I couldn't tell other people because it was just so shameful, and it just came with so much stigma. That was such a huge step for me, to be able to tell people that I suffer with this addiction, and they knew exactly what I was going through.

I think a big part of me blamed myself for being so isolated all throughout my childhood and early adulthood because...

I was gay and some of the hiding was done on purpose, but it was not my fault that I was so isolated by the rest of my family, whether it was on purpose or not, you know, it was still wrong. And it was just so healing to hear that from other people because for so long I carried that as it was my fault.

I felt as though I was not truly loved by other people. A lot of that had to do with being gay. I felt there was just something inherently wrong with me, and I was not lovable. But I kept myself from everybody. I thought that nobody would want to get to know me because there was something wrong with me.

And so I intentionally kept myself from other people for so long. In the initial stages of my experience with alcohol, there was a lot of relief and comfort. But of course, in retrospect, I understood that I was only using it to further keep myself from everybody, including myself.

I didn't even want to be with my own self, and so I would dissociate and punish myself by getting drunk. Getting drunk to try to become another person. And early on in my sobriety, I had several existential crises where I realized that I didn't know who I was. The feeling is almost of arriving in your adulthood but being a child.

You don't know very much about yourself. And I was terrified to get to know myself as my real self because my whole adult life was just spent drunk. And so since that was taken away, I had to figure out what I wanted to do with my life. My last drink was June 7th, 2020.

That was shortly before I met with the investigator of the Board of Nursing. I think that if that meeting had gone in another direction, I would have continued to drink. I think that if she hadn't been able to display that sense of caring and reach that hand out to help me, then I would have kept drinking.

Just seeing the sadness on the investigator's face when she cried, just knowing that my life actually mattered to somebody, that was really touching for me. This person, who was probably the last person I would suspect to be helpful to me, she was the one that did the most to save me. Every day is different. At this point, I'm two and a half years sober. I still have days where I

imagine, you know, a cold beer. But that is quickly an afterthought because the next thoughts that I have are of me having my backpack opened by the police and that disgust on the administrator's face as she saw the drugs in my backpack. And it just takes me back to the complete helplessness that I felt in those moments.

It's imperative for me to understand that addiction is a lifelong illness. But I think it's important that it does live with you because I have learned how to take care of myself finally. I've learned how to love myself. And I know that all of that is just one drink away from going back to how it was.

About three to four months into my monitoring program, I was allowed to return to work under several conditions. I could not have access to narcotic medication. I could not work night shifts. I could not work in specialized areas of nursing like the ICU or the ER.

I had to start in a most kind of basic setting. I worked in a nursing home for a year and I was just so grateful to be back at work and being able to use my license that I worked so hard to get. There were a lot of hard times. There was a lot of judgment from co-workers that found out my situation and I just continued to focus on taking care of myself.

And eventually I was able to have some of those stipulations taken off of my contract. I landed a job in the operating room, in the recovery room, taking care of patients right out of surgery. So I'm a registered nurse in the post-anesthesia care unit.

When you immediately leave the operating room after your surgery is completed, you go to the recovery room or the PACU. Nurses like me are there to help monitor your vital signs, make sure that your blood pressure is being maintained, as well as trying to make you comfortable after surgery, which can be difficult. People experience a lot of pain after surgery.

There's something very comforting about that role, being able to take care of people in such a vulnerable state. You're giving pain medications, you're keeping people warm, you're holding their hand while they cry, you're educating family and telling the family what they need to expect after the surgery. It's all very immediate and it's such an amazing experience to be able to do that and it's very rewarding.

It is said that connection is the opposite of addiction. The process of connecting with other people is so beyond your focus when you're addicted to something because you grow further and further away from everybody until you're just left with whatever substance has taken hold of you.

And I think that the most difficult part of the entire experience was combating the shame that comes along with addiction and the things that it inspires you to do, like stealing and lying and planning to commit suicide and leave everybody behind to mourn for you. Shame is something that I think people in recovery carry with them forever.

But through making amends and making connections with people, it helps combat that shame. You have to be able to manipulate your shame and use it in a way that's beneficial. And I've definitely found my humanity. I had to learn how to care and love for myself before I could start to offer that to my patients.

It takes a lot of practice to learn how to take care of yourself properly. And it's something that I had definitely neglected throughout my life because I didn't think that I was worth taking care of. But I have such a better grasp on myself. I'm able to take care of other people because I take care of myself.

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I'm Dan Taberski. In 2011, something strange began to happen at the high school in Leroy, New York. I was like at my locker and she came up to me and she was like stuttering super bad. I'm like, stop f***ing around. She's like, I can't. A mystery illness, bizarre symptoms, and spreading fast. It's like doubling and tripling and it's all these girls. With a diagnosis, the state tried to keep on the down low. Everybody thought I was holding something back. Well, you were holding something back intentionally. Yeah, yeah, well, yeah.

You know, it's hysteria. It's all in your head. It's not physical. Oh my gosh, you're exaggerating. Is this the largest mass hysteria since The Witches of Salem? Or is it something else entirely? Something's wrong here. Something's not right. Leroy was the new dateline and everyone was trying to solve the murder. A new limited series from Wondery and Pineapple Street Studios. Hysterical.

Follow Hysterical on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts. You can binge all episodes of Hysterical early and ad-free right now by joining Wondery+.