Surviving

Every year, Jacky Grossman talks on social media about her family--and how so many lost their lives in the Holocaust. In this episode, Jacky talks about the stories of how her parents and grandmother survived--and the special emphasis that she places on making sure those stories live on.

"...As we were headed towards the airport, a large convoy of military personnel in armored vehicles were entering the city. I looked out the side window to my left, looked out to my right, where my wife was sitting, and I said, 'this doesn't look good.'" Dustin Watson and his wife escaped Myanmar on February 20, 2021, the same day that security forces opened fire on innocent people protesting the month-old military coup. His story kicks off a new season for the Surviving podcast.

The trauma is forgotten, but a single act of warmth and kindness provided a lifetime of giving back. That's how Tomi Holmes lives her life after passing through the foster care system when she was little. She is an inspiration for how to live a life full of love, perhaps her biggest gift of all. Tomi is a volunteer for CASA, Court Assisted Special Advocates of Prince George's County--I served two terms on the organization's board of directors, which is how our paths initially crossed. For more information about CASA or to become a volunteer, please visit www.pgcasa.org

Multiple Sclerosis has sent Saurabh Chowdhry on several career detours, but he views each experience as a triumph. From medical student to science teacher to scientific writer to inspirational author, he keeps pressing onward and refusing to let MS bend his will. Saurabh has two motivational books--the second one, Step by Step, just came out this month--and you can learn more about his journey through his author's page.

It took Uvi Naidoo, a South African pediatrician, three long years to get through extensively drug resistant tuberculosis. Now, he's working through long-haul COVID symptoms, after contracting the infection twice. But even though he still needs oxygen when he gets around every day, he won't stop talking about TB. Uvi and I met several years ago (through email and phone calls, not zoom) as I edited an essay that he wrote about TB. We kept in touch afterwards, and supported each other last year as we both went through our own health crises. That TB essay can be found here: https://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/19/opinion/eliminate-the-tb-scourge.html

Baseball season this year starts on April Fools Day, which is a perfect metaphor for Mets fans. Seeing as how this episode is launching the same week, my good friend Woo Jin Ho joins me to take a look at what it's like to survive as a fan of the franchise. Woo Jin grew up in Queens, rooting for the Yankees--but then switched allegiances because of a Mets-Padres doubleheader of all things. In this conversation, we touch on how being a Mets fan fits into my own cancer journey, talk through the importance of winning the offseason, ponder our prospects for actually winning this year, and joyfully take a few cheap shots at Yankee fans. Bonus trivia question that is part of the discussion:

In November of 2019, Connie White bought a pair of maternity tights by accident--she wasn't actually pregnant. In trying them on though, she fell down the rabbit hole of tests, cancer diagnosis and treatment. What's worse, most of her journey with ovarian, uterine, and falopian cancer took place in the midst of the COVID 19 pandemic. To get through this journey emotionally intact, she drew three lines in the sand: How she came to these lines, and how she follows them still--and how she gets to wear dinosaur tape (!)--make for quite a compelling journey.

The last time the world freaked out about a global pandemic, it was 2014. The Ebola virus devastated Liberia and two other West African countries, but only about a dozen people were treated in Europe and North America. Ashoka Mukpo was an American journalist who had spent two previous years in Liberia, and returned to Monrovia to cover the pandemic. He lasted a month before getting sick. Seven years later, he's fully recovered and still working as a journalist. And the perspectives he learned from being the focus of a media storm inform how he works with the people he covers today. Samples of his work can be found at https://www.ashokamukpo.net/ * This episode is marked for explicit material due to cursing.

When Dan Powers relocated to Truckee, California, he was not expecting to test out the emergency room at the local hospital so quickly. But when he woke up with chest pain shortly after the winter holidays, he needed medical help. While the incident was a scare and not a life-threatening heart attack, he embraced the lessons it taught him--most importantly, the days of eating and drinking anything he wanted were over.

The start of the COVID-19 pandemic put a new wrinkle into March Madness, the most frenzied month in the college basketball season. Adam Zagoria, a journalist who covers college hoops and other sports, attended a concert one night and the Big East tournament the next, and then the pandemic paused everything. One week later he started feeling sick, and that's how weirdest year in Adam's personal and professional life began. Adam wrote about his bout with COVID-19, of course, because that's what he does. His website, Zagsblog, will keep you up to date on college hoops recruiting and other sports news.

At the end of July, 2017, Paul Tekwsbury wasn't feeling so great. One month later, he learned he had leukemia; one month after that, the chemotherapy that was treating his cancer left him dead of a heart attack--but only for 35 minutes. His personal journey there and back filled him with so much gratitude he wrote and recorded an album's worth of music to express his thanks. Paul's album can be found on his website or on Spotify, Apple Music, Google Play, etc. Paul's journey was also written up in the Washington Post and Bethesda Magazine.

When Debbie Salamone was bitten by a shark, she had no idea how much it would transform her life. After recovering, she went back to school to get her master's degree and changed her career from journalism to advocacy. She organized a group of like-minded shark attack survivors and pushed for conservation measures to help endangered shark populations recover after decades of overfishing. More information on her survivor group can be found on their Facebook page.

Victoria Tauli-Corpuz began advocating for Indigenous rights as a teenager and still hasn't let up, first working to improve the health and welfare of her Kankanaey Igorot community in the Philippines and then for Indigenous communities around the world. We met during an extended collaboration when she was United Nations special rapporteur on the rights of indigenous peoples and pressing for increased respect and recognition of Indigenous property rights. At times, her life's work has brought legal troubles and threats of violence from the political powers threatened by her challenges to the status quo. For more information on her work, please see her New York Times profile or her op-ed in the Financial Times.

Peter Dykstra is an accomplished environmental journalist, advocate, and, on a personal level, a dear mentor of mine. In a few short months, from the end of 2016 to early 2017, he lost his eldest son to suicide, the results of the presidential election threatened certain doom for all that he had accomplished in his career, and a freak bacterial infection left him a a paraplegic. This conversation explores how he moves forward despite the obstacles he still confronts every day. Peter's commentary on environmental politics can be found at NPR's Living on Earth and Environmental Health News.