Episode 46: Blessings in Disguise?

[0] We have lots of ways to describe the good that can sometimes come from bad, a blessing in disguise, a silver lining.

[1] But what if the bad that led to the good was truly awful?

[2] You could see that his face was starting to balloon to a size where I realized how bad it was that he had gotten hurt.

[3] This is Hidden Brain.

[4] I'm Shankar Vedantam.

[5] There's really just one way to look at a given event.

[6] A slight change in outcome can change the way we see and interpret an experience.

[7] This week, we have the story of three people who discover that an event the initially viewed as terrible might in fact have been just the opposite.

[8] Not awful, but a stroke of unimaginable good luck.

[9] Framing and Reframing, this week on Hidden Brain.

[10] December 21st is the winter solstice, the shortest day of the year.

[11] It's also the day our story begins.

[12] Three people have finished work.

[13] each is heading to a metro train station in Washington, D .C. And it was just before rush hour.

[14] I was planning to meet my wife, who works a few stations ahead of me. This is Colin Dale.

[15] He's at the center of our story.

[16] Colin is 42, happily married.

[17] He's got two teenage kids and a successful job as a technology consultant.

[18] He's also, as you can hear, originally from England.

[19] Colin was the first person in our story to reach the station and board a train.

[20] And that's where the trouble started.

[21] I do vaguely remember that a group of youths got on the train, and I must have thought that they were being somehow rambunctious or aggressive because I remember texting my wife, in a panic, really, to be honest with you, don't get on the train.

[22] Another woman did get on the train with Colin.

[23] Her name is Kristen Smith.

[24] Kristen had made a dash for the train and jumped into the first car.

[25] the same one in which Colin was writing.

[26] I could tell as soon as I had jumped in that it was a weird situation.

[27] I felt uncomfortable as soon as I got through the doors.

[28] The first thing she noticed was a group of boisterous teenagers.

[29] It felt like there were a lot of kids in all four seats that surround that middle door of the subway car.

[30] And there were also kids standing in the aisle in a way where it was clear they weren't going to make room for people coming on or off.

[31] You had to make your way around them.

[32] I'm Lori Kaplan, and I head up the Audience Insights Department at NPR.

[33] This is Colin's wife.

[34] She's a colleague of mine.

[35] Lori had timed her departure from work, so she'd arrive at her metro station just before Colin's train pulled in.

[36] As I was approaching the platform, I texted him to say, I'm here.

[37] I'm here, I'm almost here, and he said, don't get on.

[38] I had seen these text messages that arrived during my walk that said don't get on the first train because we normally get on the first car of the train.

[39] What happens next, on the train and in the days that follow, is what our story is about.

[40] It's a tragic story.

[41] But perhaps it's also a story of profound luck.

[42] It all depends on how you frame it, the lens through which you view what happened.

[43] Let me start by going back a bit into the lives of Colin and Laurie.

[44] The two first met when the company Colin worked for was hired by NPR for a contract project.

[45] It wasn't going well.

[46] The person who was leading that work said, I am going to Idaho, but if you have any problems, call this guy, Colin, he'll help you out.

[47] In fact, the project was a mess.

[48] So Lori called.

[49] She was really mad.

[50] Yelling.

[51] I was quite unpleasant, actually.

[52] But he fixed, he fixed the problem, and he's been fixing a lot of my problems.

[53] since.

[54] Eventually, they got married, had children.

[55] Lorry describes Colin this way.

[56] He's calm.

[57] He cares.

[58] He cares a lot.

[59] He's a great dad.

[60] I think he's all he ever wanted to be was probably a dad.

[61] He is a fixer and a doer, and I'm a doer, so he just do a lot of things together.

[62] They're both athletic, especially Colin.

[63] From his childhood, he used to bike all over the north of England.

[64] That's just what he would do.

[65] So he grew up biking and, and he was a Boy Scout leader and would kayak, and so he was very active.

[66] And then when he moved here, he would bike to work from our house to D .C. many times a week.

[67] And, yeah, we hike with our family, too.

[68] So he was very active.

[69] You might have noticed that Lori said Colin was very active.

[70] That's because in the last couple of years, he'd been having some trouble.

[71] He was having a lot of joint pain and discomfort.

[72] and it was just his knees hurt, his arms hurt, his legs hurt.

[73] He just had a lot of pain, and so it just made it challenging to bike because it was very uncomfortable.

[74] But it was challenging to walk, frankly.

[75] He would stop sometimes on the way to the metro, which felt really unusual to me. Colin had tried to figure out what was wrong.

[76] He'd seen a lot of doctors, a lot of specialists.

[77] Everyone was stumped.

[78] Colin was frustrated.

[79] And so when he stepped on to the train that evening, shortly before Christmas, he was taking a break from his quest for an answer.

[80] Colin would like to be able to explain what happened on that train ride, but he can't.

[81] After texting his wife, his memories of the ride are gone.

[82] Kristen Smith, on the other hand, has been haunted by memories of that commute.

[83] She says she took a seat and leaned her head up against the window.

[84] I have tried to think a lot about what it was that made me turn around and I can't quite remember but I think it was either a period of awkward silence or I heard scuffling and that made me turn around to look back at the middle of the car.

[85] Kristen says it was hard to tell exactly what was happening but you could see that the group of teenagers was surrounding one man. And he had a blue backpack and I remember he had his arms up through the backpack straps with the backpack facing up and he was shielding himself.

[86] He was using the blue backpack as a shield.

[87] It was Colin Dale.

[88] Christian says he tried to get away.

[89] And as he took a step, he got hit in rapid succession.

[90] I thought he got hit in rapid succession with maybe two hits, and he fell down to the ground.

[91] And then the kids all stepped away from him.

[92] And in my mind, that felt like a good thing that the kids had stepped or that the youth had stepped away from him and that it had stopped, like the violence had stopped in that moment.

[93] And I think that was my first thought was just relief that maybe this would stop and they'd leave him alone now.

[94] But I didn't realize that he was in such bad shape at that point.

[95] I could see his feet sticking out from between the metro car seats out into the aisle.

[96] Colin eventually got up and staggered toward Kristen and another commuter.

[97] They tried to comfort him.

[98] The train was nearing Lorry Station.

[99] Kristen says without drawing the attention of the teenagers, she tried to let the conductor know what was going on.

[100] And there's a little crack between the door and where the door connects to the wall, I guess.

[101] And I started saying through the door crack, you have to stop the train, you have to get medical help, you have to get the police, there's an attack.

[102] It worked.

[103] When the train came to a stop at the station, the doors to Collins' car remained closed.

[104] The teenagers panicked.

[105] And that's when they turned and there are emergency exit doors at the end of the car, which would have been at the end of the car away from me. And they all turned and they ran down and went through the exit door of the car.

[106] Lori, meanwhile, was on the escalator.

[107] When she reached the platform, she saw that the train had been unloaded.

[108] I just looked around.

[109] He should be here.

[110] So I walked further down the platform, even though he said he was going to get off the first car.

[111] I walked all the way to the front.

[112] And that was the only train car that was closed.

[113] The train doors were shut.

[114] And then I saw Colin on the train.

[115] and he looked terrible.

[116] He was looked like a ghost.

[117] I saw blood on his face, and he started hitting the glass on the front of the conductor's car, the driver's car, saying, that's my wife, that's my wife.

[118] And they let me on the train, and I took him off the train, and I sat him down on a bench.

[119] He was a little bench near the end of the platform.

[120] and I put his head down because I saw he was bleeding.

[121] Immediately one of the metro police officers approached me and he said we have an ambulance on the way.

[122] Colin was in very bad shape.

[123] His teeth were shattered.

[124] His jaw jotted out to one side like he'd stuffed a balloon into his cheek.

[125] He was disoriented.

[126] He kept asking the same questions over and over again.

[127] He would ask me, was I in an accident on my bike?

[128] Was there a terrorist attack?

[129] Was there, like, what happened?

[130] He didn't know, but he would just look and assess the situation and ask me, and then he would ask if I was okay.

[131] Even when he saw the ambulance, he thought maybe something was happening to me. At the hospital, a team of doctors took over.

[132] As soon as he was admitted, they realized he was complaining of neck problems, and so they immediately, that evening, had done CAT scans, and then MRI, a series of MRIs.

[133] And this is where our story takes a turn.

[134] Up to this point, I think most of us would agree that what happened to Colin was terrible, an unprovoked, brutal attack that left him badly injured, and his wife, children, and witnesses traumatized.

[135] It's hard to frame the incident any other way.

[136] But what comes next may change your mind.

[137] This is Hidden Brain.

[138] I'm Shankar Vedantam.

[139] After a brutal assault on a DC metro train, Colin Dale is in the hospital.

[140] Surgeons are preparing to repair his jaw with a titanium plate.

[141] He's wearing a brace for neck pain and waiting for scan results to figure out whether the attack caused any further harm.

[142] Colin says a doctor walked into the room.

[143] Someone, you know, he's wearing a blue outfit, looked like he fit in a hospital, came by my bed with a printout of the MRI and I'd had a neck brace on and he said, well, you know, Mr. Dale, you can take the neck brace off.

[144] But I just want to show you this part on the MRI.

[145] It looks like you have a tumor and your spinal cord.

[146] A tumor.

[147] Not a bruise or a fracture, but something else entirely.

[148] There was, in the contrast, there was a lump inside of his spinal cord.

[149] in his cervical spine, just up near your neck.

[150] And they said this is inside, and it's very large, and it really needs to come out.

[151] Instantly, this explained everything.

[152] The joint pain, Colin's balance issues, his fatigue, it was cancer, and it was almost too late.

[153] what was revealed to us was even more dire and they said had it been as it was growing had it been just another few millimeters further he would have already it would have affected his ability to breathe so let's think about that train right again the brutal assault was it a tragedy or was it the luckiest ride of his life it led to a life -saving diagnosis but it came at great cost.

[154] In a situation like this, does the good outweigh the bad?

[155] Can bad ever come to be seen as good?

[156] When I contacted Kristen Smith the witness for the story, I discovered she wasn't aware of what had happened to Colin and Laurie after the attack.

[157] The story was hard for Kristen to hear, in part because her uncle had just died of a brain tumor.

[158] It was also such a quick thing.

[159] We found out he was sick only maybe two and a half, three months ago, and that he's gone.

[160] And it's crazy to think that maybe if he had been attacked on a metro, they would have caught it sooner and stopped it.

[161] I don't know.

[162] It's all just so strange.

[163] But as the information sank in, Kristen began to reframe the way she viewed the attack on Colin.

[164] I think something good did come from it.

[165] But I'm still left with the feeling of maybe even, well, no, I guess that's not true.

[166] If I had stopped the attack sooner, I was thinking he probably still would have gone to the hospital and they still would have found the tumor.

[167] But maybe that's not true.

[168] Maybe he had to be hurt to a degree that they really were investigating him deeply to find the tumor.

[169] Exactly one month after being attacked on the train, Colin underwent a dangerous and difficult surgery to remove the cancerous tumor in his spine.

[170] By most measures, it was a huge success.

[171] Colin survived and he wasn't paralyzed, which was something the doctors feared might happen.

[172] But he was very far from his old self.

[173] I felt like my legs were floating in space, like several inches up from the bed and several inches over to the right, which I thought it was an amusing sensation at first, although I quickly didn't like that one.

[174] What soon became clear is that while he was able to move his body and feel heat, cold, and some strange electrical twinges, large parts of his body, were numb.

[175] Other parts of his body were racked by endless pain.

[176] And that's difficult when he, even taking a shower, feeling the water on his body will cause him to scream and my son's bedroom is next to the shower and, you know, that's difficult for the family, you know, just empathizing with his pain.

[177] So this is where the Dales are now.

[178] They're struggling to recover and make sense of a series of troubling and intertwined events.

[179] When I first heard about Colin and Laurie and the strange path to his diagnosis, I, the outsider, immediately thought of the train attack as a blessing in disguise.

[180] Our witness, Kristen, had a more nuanced view, tinted by her own actions that day.

[181] As for Laurie, she says she tries to see the good in what happened, she mentions unexpected moments of kindness she encountered, like the time a school crossing guard, a stranger, dropped off a meal on her porch.

[182] But for Lori and Colin, what happened on the train is still a recurring trauma.

[183] That's really hard because, you know, there's a sense of reliving it every day when you go every day to the same spot and get on the train at the same spot where your husband was lying down in his blood on his backpack.

[184] Did it have any silver linings at all?

[185] Everyone, you know, everyone refers to what happened to Kahn.

[186] Oh, well, you got your diagnosis and you got the cancer out.

[187] What a silver lining?

[188] We're like, well, we sure would have hoped that that could have been diagnosed earlier in some other way.

[189] It's not the most ideal way to have that diagnosed, but we're glad that he's alive and has a good, and he, they, the, what can we say that cancer is out?

[190] It doesn't seem to be growing back.

[191] He has a positive, a relatively positive outlook.

[192] So I can't help but think that you wouldn't have gotten that scan done when you did if it hadn't been for the incident.

[193] But the incident was truly horrible.

[194] Yep.

[195] I don't know how to process that.

[196] You and me both.

[197] I asked Colin how he views what happened.

[198] Collins considered the many ways of seeing what's happened.

[199] Was it coincidence, the intervention of a higher power, luck?

[200] For now, Colin says, the frame of understanding that feels most right to him is simply acknowledging that life is random.

[201] I mean, too, there's a lot of things about this story that just line up almost too perfectly.

[202] If this was an episode of a TV show, you'd be like, yeah, sure.

[203] Yeah, I get it.

[204] I don't know.

[205] I do like the random in many ways that sort of makes my universe more comfortable.

[206] And maybe that's the most powerful truth in this tale.

[207] We all see things through our own lens and we settle on the vision that gives us the greatest sense of comfort.

[208] When things happen to us, we sift and re -sift information to shape how we see the world.

[209] Imagine a group of people sitting around a campfire.

[210] One might see the fire as beautiful, the flames perhaps sparking memories of childhood and family.

[211] and friends.

[212] Another person who'd suffered serious burn injuries might see the very same fire as ugly and dangerous.

[213] There's no one reality.

[214] It's all in the framing.

[215] As for the Dales, long before Collins' train assault and tumor, the family had planned a trip, a walking tour across the whole of England from coast to coast, 260 miles on a rugged trail.

[216] They couldn't cancel, so they decided to go for it, despite everything that had happened.

[217] and the lore is that you pick up a stone from the west coast and you walk it across and then you put it in the East Coast when you go to the other side.

[218] And why do you carry a rock from west to east?

[219] What's the story?

[220] I think it just shows that you've made it.

[221] It's just a symbolic gesture to mark the end of that journey.

[222] For Colin, of course, this will be a milestone in his recovery, a chance to think.

[223] because the way we see something isn't always how it really is.

[224] This week's episode was produced and edited by Jenny Schmidt.

[225] Our staff also includes Maggie Penman, Chris Benderev, Kara McGurke Allison, and Renee Clare.

[226] Our supervising producer is Tara Boyle.

[227] Last week, we began acknowledging the unsung heroes who are vital to the success of this show, but aren't typically in the credits.

[228] This week, our unsung hero is Nicaela Matthews.

[229] Nicaela sits right near the Hidden Brain staff here at NPR and she's become something of an honorary team member.

[230] She helps us reach new audiences through Facebook and Twitter and we so appreciate her creative and collegial spirit.

[231] Thanks, Nikaela.

[232] Speaking of Facebook and Twitter, you can find more of my reporting on social media along with great videos and animations that bring to life the research we highlight on Hidden Brain.

[233] Check them out and while you're there, we'd love it if you would share this episode and our stories with friends who you think would enjoy our.

[234] show.

[235] I'm Shankar Vedantam, and this is NPR.