Officer Galen Hinshaw heard the call over the radio: A fellow officer was in trouble. A crowd protesting police violence around the country had surrounded a police cruiser at Louisville, Kentucky’s Clark Memorial Bridge. The officer inside radioed for help as demonstrators banged on his hood and windshield.

Hinshaw, part of Louisville Metro Police Department’s Special Response Team, drove to the scene. As he 
got out of his cruiser, he was immediately surrounded by protesters. Some yelled profanities. Others balled 
their fists. As the crowd grew, 
Hinshaw, wearing a vest, a helmet, and body armor, made his way to the front of Bearno’s, a pizzeria, so he could keep his back to the wall. He needed to be sure that nobody could get behind him.

The crowd moved closer, and the yelling got angrier. “Are you one of the good ones?” someone asked.

“How do you think we feel?” shouted another.

“We do care, man, we do care,” Hinshaw yelled back, trying to make his voice heard over the din. The 32-year-old was scared. He knew it could take only one person to escalate the situation, and then everyone would jump in.

It was then that a man emerged from the crowd, wearing a red University of Louisville mask that covered the lower half of his face. He put himself between the closest protester and Hinshaw. Day care operator Darrin Lee Jr. had also noticed the crowd advancing on Hinshaw. He jumped in and linked arms with the stranger in the red mask.

“Once I saw the guy with the red mask step up, I said, ‘I gotta step up,’” says Lee. “I really thought at that moment, ‘Protect [the cop]. It really isn’t his fault.’”

Suddenly the protesters turned on Lee. One man shouted, “How can you protect him?” Lee got nervous.

Then Ricky McClellan, a factory worker, stepped up and stood to Lee’s left. “A human was in trouble, and right is right,” he explains.

McClellan watched as the crowd around them grew larger and louder. Then he heard Lee yell, “Lock arms! Lock arms!”

At that point, local businessman ­Julian De La Cruz joined in. “I saw the guys link up, and I saw a weak spot,” he says. He took up a position on the end of the line, feeling nervous and scared. “Things could’ve gotten really bad.”

Ultimately, five men formed a human shield to protect Hinshaw. All of them were strangers to one another. Nobody knew the name of the man to his left or to his right. Three were Black, one was White, and one was Dominican—all linking arms to keep harm away from Hinshaw, himself half Pakistani.

The standoff lasted just two minutes, though it felt much longer to those who were there. Hinshaw’s squad arrived and whisked him away. But the officer knows who his real saviors were. “Those guys, they saved me,” he says of the five men who stood between him and an angry crowd. “It was a moment where strangers came together to help another stranger, and that stranger was me.”

So why would five strangers stick their necks out for Hinshaw? For De La Cruz, whose uncle is a police officer, the moment was about accountability. “If I can march with my brothers and turn against them to say, ‘This isn’t right,’ that’s where the accountability comes in,” he says. “In the end, that’s all that we are asking for. We need those great cops to hold their brothers and sisters accountable at all times.”

Lee’s equally humane explanation of his actions: “He’s somebody’s son,” he says of Hinshaw. “He’s somebody’s loved one.”

Here's What It's Like to Be a Black Police Officer Right Now

Here's What "Defunding the Police" Means to Me

Everyday Acts of Racism That Don't Get Talked About Enough

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“I hope it will be a girl this time,” Prince Charles said to a well-wisher in London, according to the Daily Mail. The year? 2014. The occasion? Kate Middleton’s pregnancy. But for some close to the late Princess Diana, the comment brought back bitter memories of the moment the beloved “People’s Princess” knew her already-troubled marriage to Prince Charles was doomed.

In the 21 years since Princess Diana’s tragic death, many secrets about her marriage to Prince Charles have surfaced. One of those secrets had been revealed by Diana to her biographer, Andrew Morton, who wrote of it in his 1992 book, Diana: Her True Story, but it appears to have been largely glossed over by the public until the birth of Princess Charlotte in 2015. And it’s come to light again recently as Prince Harry and Meghan Markle start their family. The revelation of the remark is only part of what has emerged about what really happened between Prince Charles and Princess Diana.

That secret is that when Diana was pregnant with Prince Harry, Prince Charles had been desperately hoping for a baby girl, and upon Prince Harry’s birth, Prince Charles’ very first comment cut Princess Diana to the core: “Oh God, it’s a boy,” he reportedly said.

Although Charles dismissed his comment as mere “joking,” new mummy Diana felt deeply hurt for a number of reasons. First, in the weeks leading up to Prince Harry’s birth, Diana and Charles had been working at their marriage, and had grown “very, very close,” The Mirror reports. Knowing that Charles had been hoping for a daughter when Diana learned she was carrying a baby boy, she kept it from Charles so as not to spoil their bonding and hoped that the birth of a healthy son would delight Charles and make him forget his preference. That is, of course, not what happened. Take a look at these rarely seen photos of Prince Harry with Princess Diana.

Add to that Charles’ second comment: “And he’s even got red hair.” Another “joke” that went right to Diana’s heart. For one thing, Diana’s family tree was chock full of redheads, so the comment was insulting on a primal level. Additionally, Diana may have felt that Charles was needling Diana about the extramarital affair she had had with red-headed James Hewitt (the affair had ended two years earlier, so Hewitt couldn’t have been the father).

Finally, Diana had just endured nine hours of natural birth, which followed a miscarriage before she became pregnant with Harry.

Although Charles knew that Diana was sensitive about the topic, at Prince Harry’s christening, he brought it up again, this time to Diana’s own mother. “We were so disappointed—we thought it would be a girl,” he reportedly said to Frances Kydd, who bristled at the comment and reported it to Diana.

And with that, “something inside me closed off,” Diana told Morton. As “suddenly as Harry was born it just went bang, our marriage, the whole thing went down the drain.” The couple didn’t officially divorce until 1996, 12 years later. Read on to find out how Diana really spent the final weeks of her life.

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The Entire Royal Family Tree, Explained in One Easy Chart

Rarely Seen Photos of the Royal Family

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On 9/11, I was 12 years old and in middle school three blocks away from the World Trade Center, separated only by a highway and a few sidewalks.

I remember when the bomb squad burst through the doors of the classroom, along with droves of hysterical parents crying and screaming.

Outside the school building, the acrid smell instantly stung our eyes and our nostrils, and the buildings vomited paper and people. The jam-packed crowds were almost impossible to move through, but we had one objective: Get home to the East side, to our neighborhood, which was also just three blocks away from the World Trade Center, on the other side of town.

Soon, we were running from a giant cloud of smoke and debris that we were told not to look at.

“Just cover your faces, don’t look back, and run!” The scene for the next hour, as we tried every possible way to get into our own neighborhood, was the stuff that nightmares are made of. People covered in blood and debris, piercing, blood-curdling screams, loud cries and low moans. I was covered in debris myself and kept forgetting to pull my shirt over my face to protect it. We spent an hour navigating the horror, trying to get home, normally a 10-minute walk from school, but police blocked every possible route

Once we finally made it back to our apartment, we found that our neighborhood had become a war zone.

The next years of my life were spent coming of age with undiagnosed—then misdiagnosed and incorrectly medicated dozens of times—symptoms of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder that turned my teenage years into a living nightmare.

At 18, when I felt ready to take my own life, I reached out for help one last time, from one last therapist. That e-mail saved my life, and I went on to spend years recovering through various forms of therapy, programs, and support.

Fast forward 10 years, and I’ve come to be able to share what I’ve learned and what I know to be true—not just for me, but for many people.

When you go through something traumatic, it tends to color everything else you experience through a filter of darkness, fear. You start to unconsciously see the danger and “badness” in the world. Part of my recovery was learning to see the good with the bad, because the truth is the world is pretty horrific at times, but it can also be very beautiful and kind.

It’s pretty easy to see what’s wrong with a situation, but it takes effort to see what’s right. These tools have been invaluable to me in that effort. This powerful story will convince you to stop saying, “Let me know if you need anything” to someone who has just gone through a tragedy.

Knowing that for almost all bad news you see, there is good news that you don’t see.

When the news features a raging flood wreaking havoc on the city, what they don’t feature is the people who rally together as volunteers to help rescue people’s pets and raise money to feed and board them. Communities band together and volunteers fly into action because people really do care about and try to take care of each other.

Remembering that there are always people who are way worse off than you.

This one can be tricky—you don’t want to go down the rabbit hole of feeling even more hopeless, sad, or upset. Just know you are lucky to have basic things like a roof over your head, a friend to talk to, access to clean water. There is so much we take for granted that we can focus on being grateful for. Better yet, let this motivate you to do something to help those people, in any small way possible.

Realizing that you can actually control a lot of what you let into your world.

You don’t have to know everything and be aware of every current event. Bottled water isn’t poisonous. All men are not cheaters. We still have not been hit with nuclear missiles. It’s OK to occasionally turn off the negative news and skip the articles your friend is always sending. When you need to, block out the mental noise: Don’t let your mind be an open door for chaotic thoughts that other people try to shove in there.

Knowing that when someone is hurtful, nasty, or rude, they are probably suffering.

People who are generally happy don’t usually say or do mean things. When you get a nasty e-mail from a coworker or someone bumps into you and curses at you in the supermarket, know that they are currently struggling with something (or many things). They may be getting pressure from someone else and dealing with a personal issue. Practice compassion, and if you’re feeling really generous, wish for them to have everything they want in life that you would want for yourself. Here are the questions young people ask Helaina the most about surviving 9/11.

Staying in the present moment. Everything is usually OK there.

If you don’t feel “OK,” chances are you’re thinking about some past event and stewing in it, or you’re fearful of some possible future event that might happen. Chances are, right now, you are at the baseline definition of OK.

Believing in something that is bigger than you, but that doesn’t control negative events.

You don’t have to be religious to have faith in something. It can be the ocean. A crystal. Morning sun on your porch. Whatever this concept of something greater is, however, it does not allow bad things to happen or cause bad things to happen. Instead, imagine it as something nurturing that is always there giving you personal strength to endure life’s challenges.

Recognizing that bad things in the world don’t have to affect the good things you bring into it.

Focus on bringing as much good as you can into your own universe, your everyday life and the people who enter or pass through it. You can’t control millions of voters or bodies of government or sick criminals, but you can control whether you wait an extra beat to hold a door open, bring your dog over to visit an elderly neighbor you’ve caught admiring them, or writing a sweet message to a friend just because.

Knowing that most of your fears are staring right back at you.

On a personal level, a lot of what we worry others will think or do starts within. Do we write stories about people or comment on what they look like, say, who they date, what they wear? Spoiler alert: We don’t all think the same way, but once you start controlling, and stopping, any negative thought chains in your own mind, it’s amazing how quickly those worries about what people think of you start to dissolve over time as well.

Learning who you can actually trust when the world feels untrustworthy.

When the world feels out of control or you’ve been betrayed by someone, which we all have at one point or another, you need points of reference and awareness to stay strong. Don’t over share with the first person you meet; build a friendship slowly over time and test out small secrets you wouldn’t mind getting out. See how a person talks about other people—that’ll give you a good idea of where you’ll land.

Always having hope.

When it feels like the world is going to the dogs and you have no hope, surprise, you actually do. I saw the hilarious and insightful comedian Louise C.K. put it bluntly when he performed at Madison Square Garden last year. And while he takes this subject a little lightly, he’s right: We have a choice whether to live this day. “Every day that we wake up and choose to live this day again is incredibly brave. It’s always in your control.” If you are living, you have hope. It may feel like just a glimmer of a sparkly nugget buried under a pile of mud and poop, and maybe you can’t see it at all, but it’s there.

Accepting that nothing can ever stay up or down.

If you’re down right now, that means at some point—maybe not on your timeline, maybe not exactly the way you want it—things will get better.

Learning that there is power in powerlessness.

There are so many things that are out of our control, yet we feel we have to make things happen, move things along to feel OK. Oftentimes, when we push, it makes things worse. Pick your battles, and know that sometimes shrugging and having patience or accepting something that isn’t very likely to change is actually a huge relief, and a lot less stressful than the other option, which will likely get you more frustrated.

Feelings of impending disaster can be a positive.

I had to learn to turn fear into positive energy. We don’t know always if a loved one will make it home. We don’t know if we’ll make it home. We don’t know when the chance will come to finally say what we need to say to someone, whether it’s “I love you” or “I’m sorry” or “I think I’m the one for the job.” Instead of dwelling in the terror of what the end could and might look like for you and everyone you care about, use it as motivation to live your life to the fullest.

I hope this list helps you navigate the larger world and your own world just a bit more smoothly and peacefully than you did before. Next, read the story of the woman who was personally blamed for the terrorist attacks on 9/11.

Helaina Hovitz is an editor, writer, and author of the memoir After 9/11. She has written for The New York Times, Salon, Newsweek, Glamour, Forbes, Women’s Health, VICE, and many others. She is currently The Editor of Content Collaborations at Upworthy/GOOD. Follow her on Twitter: @HelainaHovitz, www.HelainaHovitz.com and Facebook.com/HelainaNHovitz

Fascinating Facts About One World Trade Center

Questions People Still Have About 9/11

Twists of Fate That Saved These People's Lives on 9/11

The post 13 Powerful Things Surviving a Terrorist Attack Taught Me About Life appeared first on Reader's Digest.

The post Twists of Fate That Saved These People’s Lives on 9/11 appeared first on Reader's Digest.

The theory: Engineers designed the Twin Towers to withstand the impact of a commercial jet airplane. Yet, both towers collapsed within two hours of being hit. Could the towers have been rigged with explosives (demolition-style) prior to the planes hitting?

The consensus: Snopes discredited this as not scientifically sound, and the world may never know how these optimally-engineered towers collapsed so quickly. All of these conspiracy theories actually turned out to be true.

The post 12 Questions People Still Have About 9/11 appeared first on Reader's Digest.

I was 12 years old, sitting in school three blocks away from the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, when the planes hit the twin towers. Our teachers had us all gather in the cafeteria. I remember parents rushing in to pull out their children amid the chaos. I began panicking, wondering how I would get home to my apartment building on the other side of the Towers where my elderly grandparents also lived. Then, my neighbor and her 13-year-old son appeared in the doorway, arriving late for the day after an appointment, to walk me home. We left just minutes before the first tower collapsed. What we ran from, saw, heard, smelled, and experienced as we pushed through crowds and ran for our lives from the collapsing towers—the first, then the second—as we tried to get home with police stopping us at every way in and bloody, ash-covered bodies running past us—has become common knowledge in the past decade. But it’s very different to live through it in real-time as a child, with no idea if we would be killed in an instant, what was going to happen next, and if the world was going to end before I could see my family again and say goodbye. I survived, but that morning was just the beginning of my trauma.

In 2016, I wrote a book, After 9/11 about my experiences and that of over a dozen of my former classmates, I began to receive emails from children across the country asking me questions and telling me their feelings about the day. I started video chatting with them in their classrooms as well. These are the questions I’m asked most frequently—along with my heartfelt answers. Also, read the story of the woman who was personally blamed for the terrorist attacks on 9/11.

The post I Survived 9/11—These Are the 15 Questions Young People Ask Me the Most appeared first on Reader's Digest.

September 11, 2001, is a day I’ll never forget, like anyone else who lived through it. It was a devastating day on which so many innocent lives were lost, and it was also the day my life was hijacked by a national narrative I couldn’t control. I was the CEO of the Massachusetts Port Authority at the time, and in the aftermath, I was personally blamed for the attacks—a burden that proved to be almost too much to bear. I lost my job, my colleagues, and the respect of my nation. I’ve decided to tell my story now because it’s one of redemption against all odds, and if redemption is possible for me, then it is really is possible for anyone.

A day like any other

On the morning of September 11th, I was a working mom with a two-year-old son, and I was five weeks pregnant with my daughter. I was 36 at the time and had been appointed the CEO of the Massachusetts Port Authority, which also meant that I was the head of Logan International Airport for two years prior. The position was a politically appointed one, and I had already served as Chief of Staff to two Massachusetts governors. It was going well, up until that day. We had been working on getting support to build a new runway, and we were making good progress.

The call that changed everything

That Tuesday morning, I was actually on my way to Logan to catch a flight to D.C. I was scheduled to meet with the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA). I was listening to the radio when I heard the report of the plane hitting the first tower. I thought it must have been an accident like a lot of people did, and then, I listened live as they reported the second plane hitting the other tower. Then I knew it was terrorism. A staff member called me and said the six words that haunt me to this day: “Two planes are off the radar.” Those two planes had been hijacked and were the ones that had hit the towers—and they were from Logan. I wanted to weep as I heard the reports coming out of New York, but I knew I couldn’t freeze in the face of the horror that was happening. I could not scream. I could not cry. I had to do my job, and I had to lead Logan through this.

The center of a firestorm

No one knew at the time how the hijackers could have gotten through security. We know now that they carried small knives or box cutters through that went undiscovered. (Editor’s note: Blades four inches or less were permitted on flights at the time, so the ones the hijackers used would not have been confiscated.) This sparked a lot of anger, most of it directed at me. Suddenly, I found myself in the middle of a media firestorm. Story after story, and columnist after columnist, said I had no business running Logan. Some even went so far as to say that Logan was targeted because of me. Other airports had been compromised, too, but mine was the one whose planes took the towers down.

The long way down

It just got worse from there. The governor at the time, Jane Swift, forced me to resign six weeks later. It was either that or she was going to fire me. Then, the family of one of the victims sued me for wrongful death. That was absolutely shattering for me, to think that a widow and the mother of two children held me personally responsible for the death of her husband.

Nights were filled with horrifying dreams that I tossed and turned my way through. Peaceful sleep was a thing of the past. I feared that my name would forever be linked to that disastrous day, instead of what it used to be: a good, hardworking person—someone who would never dream of hurting someone else. And I kept wondering: Could I have prevented this? Were the deaths of all those people my fault?

While those around me urged me to move on, to put it behind me, I wondered how moving on from something so horrific as 9/11 was even possible. I didn’t know if I would ever find an answer to the question that haunted me endlessly: Was I to blame for this? The idea that I could end the pain was a powerful one. So much so that one evening, I entertained the idea of suicide. But instead, I listened to the voice within that told me to hang on. It was incredibly difficult to do.

Ultimately, the wrongful death case was dropped, but the suit against Logan lasted ten years. It was a long time, and it felt every bit of it.

The quest for redemption

When the 9/11 Commission Report was compiled, I testified before the Commission investigators, a panel authorized by Congress. I said, “If you find that Logan security was no different than any other airport that day, please say that. Say it for all of us feeling this burden.” It was their first footnote on the report—that Logan International Airport security had been no different than any other airport that day. Still, it wasn’t enough to help me move forward. I wanted some form of external exoneration, like for the president or someone else to say something about it. I wanted to know that others finally saw that I wasn’t to blame and that there was nothing I could have done to stop those planes from hitting the towers.

Being the hero in our own stories

The only thing that saved me was listening to myself. I had to listen to the belief I held within that I could not have done anything else. The security at Logan on 9/11 was exactly the same as it was at every other airport in America that day. None of us could have foreseen that planes themselves would have ever been used as weapons.

This entire experience has shown me that when terrible things happen, it’s scary. We want to blame someone for it; it makes us feel safer somehow. But that’s really no different than blaming a crime victim by saying she wore the wrong thing and that it wouldn’t have happened if she didn’t. I have also realized that it’s so hard—especially as a woman—to be your own hero. We tend to want someone else to come in and be the hero for us. But we can be the hero we need and save ourselves—we have it within us.

Moving beyond brokenness

I had my daughter the spring after I resigned, and about a year later, I began looking for work again. I’ve always defined myself by my work, but I needed to find a new career path. I have always loved writing—getting paid to choose the correct words is such a joy—and I couldn’t believe it when I got a job writing for the Boston Herald. Unfortunately, that became controversial because of my political past. Several writers there signed a petition for my termination, but I ended up working there for four years until I made the move to the private sector, working in public affairs.

Over that period of time, I just felt a sense of failure. I was failing to heal emotionally and mentally. I realized that our cultural definition of resilience isn’t a good fit for everyone. There’s this idea that you can bounce back better than ever, like the trauma never happened, but that isn’t true for all of us. It certainly isn’t true for me.

The lessons in sea glass

I wrote the book On My Watch (which will be released on April 14, 2020) to give meaning to it all. If one person finds that it helps them through a difficult time, then writing it was worth it. In terms of getting through trauma and ultimately healing, I often think of sea glass. It begins with a bottle broken by waves but eventually turns into something beautiful. I felt very broken for a long time, but I am still able to bring beauty to this life I live. I want people to know that in order to really get through something, you have to accept that you are forever changed. But you also need to know that you can carry joy right next to your pain and still have a wonderful life.

Next, read about the questions people still have about 9/11.

What Surviving a Terror Attack Taught Me

The Questions Young People Ask the Most About Surviving 9/11

Twists of Fate That Saved Lives on 9/11

The post I Was Personally Blamed for the Terrorist Attacks on 9/11—Here’s What Happened appeared first on Reader's Digest.

It was January 2016, and Jeremy and his girlfriend, Molei Wright, were leaving Denver for a weekend of fun with friends on the slopes in Breckenridge, Colorado. They were two like-minded Colorado natives: ambitious, gregarious, and thoughtful, both lovers of books, plays, music, the outdoors. Jeremy, then 29, was a public relations specialist who moonlighted as a mixed martial arts fighter; Molei (pronounced “Molly”), then 28, was the first in her family to graduate from college and worked selling mutual funds to financial advisers. They’d been together for less than a year, but it had taken only a few dates to realize that they clicked. They’d never formally professed their love for each other, but Jeremy was pretty sure that Molei was the one. As the car began the twisting climb toward the resort town, Jeremy felt an overwhelming wave of gratitude.

The odds were 100 to one

“Life was really great,” he says. “Probably the best moment of my life, just feeling so good about what was ahead for us. Then, within a blink of an eye, everything was shattered.”

The truck that hit them came out of nowhere. One minute, Jeremy’s Mitsubishi Montero was rolling smoothly through the falling snow; the next, he was sitting by the side of the road in a mangled SUV, pinned to his seat by the steering wheel, his body screaming with pain. To his right he saw Molei. Her eyes were open, but Jeremy could tell they saw nothing. He could think of only one thing to say: “Don’t die. I love you. Don’t die …”

Statistically, she should have died. Inside her neck, Molei’s vertebrae had basically been crushed. Her head was attached to her shoulders by nothing but skin and muscle. Doctors call it cervical occipital dislocation. The more common description is internal decapitation. The odds of survival: a hundred to one.

Henry Rodriquez, a vacationing Army lieutenant trained in emergency medicine, was driving on the same highway not far behind the Mitsubishi and pulled over instantly when he saw the wreck.

While his wife calmed the trapped and terrified Jeremy, Rodriquez worked swiftly. One wrong move could have left Molei dead or paralyzed. Protecting her head and neck, he carefully extracted her from the twisted wreckage—“scrap metal,” he said at the time—and laid her on the road by the side of the car, covering her with coats to keep her warm. Learn about 6 people who froze to death—and came back to life.

She’s a fighter

For 45 harrowing minutes, as snow whirled down from the ink black sky, Rodriquez pounded her chest to bring her heart back to life. As the ambulance rushed to her, she showed flickers of consciousness and movement. Those signs would soon be gone. The fact that she made it to Lakewood’s St. Anthony Hospital alive was a miracle.

By the time her mother, Mo Wright, finally saw her, Molei had sunk into a coma and was hooked up to a half-dozen tubes and machines. The doctors could tell Mo almost nothing beyond the obvious: It was extremely serious. At any moment, fever, infection—anything—could carry her off. And even if her body stabilized, her brain might never recover.

“One doctor took me aside and said, ‘I need to be honest. There’s a chance she’s not going to make this,’” says Mo. “And I remember saying, ‘Molei is a fighter. She’s competitive. She’s not one to just lie back and take this.’”

But doctors knew it might not be up to Molei. In addition to her shattered neck, Molei had suffered fractures in her ribs and other vertebrae, bruises on her lungs, and damage to the major arteries bringing blood to her brain. Scans showed what Philip Yarnell, MD, a trauma neurologist since 1967, called multi­focal shearing injury inside her skull—hemorrhages all across the surface, blood vessels, and brain stem.

Letting the brain heal

Like anyone who has suffered a traumatic brain injury, she’d entered a realm of mystery. How well a given mind recovers is completely unpredictable. In fact, doctors have a saying: If you’ve seen one brain injury, you’ve seen one brain injury. Sometimes victims come back fully capable and healthy. Sometimes they linger forever in the twilight of consciousness.

And sometimes their brains survive but their personalities don’t. “They get angry, they have temper problems, their families are afraid to be around them,” says Dr. Yarnell. Such cases can be devastating, shattering relationships and ending marriages. “You’re with one person, and then you’re with another, and it’s not the one you started with.”

Dr. Yarnell knew the Wright family would want answers. But he knew that only time would tell the full story.

“You don’t give a long-term prognosis,” he says. “You can be fooled.”

So as Molei lay silent and still, the best the doctors could do to save her brain was to save her body: Drugs to fend off fevers and infections. Machines for food and oxygen. Surgeries for injuries. Constant monitoring for signs of consciousness. And above all, patience.

“We don’t have a medicine to make the brain heal,” Dr. Yarnell says. “We try to let the brain heal by itself.” These people who came back to life reveal what they saw on the other side.

Looking for signs

In the weeks after the crash, a pattern set in. Molei lay in her bed being fed through a tube, breathing on a ventilator. Dr. Yarnell and his team would come in every day to test her reactions and see whether her brain was responding. Poke her arms and feet. Pinch her shoulders. Move objects in front of her face to see whether her eyes would track them.

But as the doctor’s log documented, Molei showed little reaction:

February 6:
Not following commands

February 11:
Not following commands

February 15:
Not following commands

“It was killing us,” Mo says. “Every morning I would get in the car and drive to the hospital, and every morning was my lowest moment … What are they going to tell us?”

Jeremy, who by now had recovered from his own serious injuries—a broken hip and scapula, as well as heart and lung contusions—followed the nurses’ cues and talked to Molei as if she could hear him, clinging to the slender hope Dr. Yarnell had given them: that she could recover.

“I just kept thinking, She’s going to come back to me. I know it, I know it,” he says.

Signs of life

But with every passing day, Jeremy also knew that Molei’s chances of recovery grew worse. At one point, her wrists and hands started to curl inward, a phenomenon called posturing that can indicate serious irreversible regression.

“I was heartbroken,” says Jeremy.

And then, about three weeks after the crash, Molei began to show signs of life.

February 25:
Moving the right leg spontaneously

February 29:
A focused gaze

March 1:
Off the ventilator all day. Looks to both sides

The signs were tiny—sometimes so tiny that only Dr. Yarnell could see them.

But they were enough. Somebody was in there. But was it Molei? This woman was run over by a truck and nearly killed—and then ran a half marathon less than a year later.

Helping and hoping

Molei can still remember seeing the date on the whiteboard at the foot of her bed and realizing that three full months of her life had disappeared.

“It said, ‘Hello, Molei! Today is Wednesday, May 18,’” she says. “It was confusing … like, Wait! What happened to February and March and April?”

Molei didn’t know it, but she was now in Craig Hospital in Englewood, one of the nation’s leading rehabilitation centers for brain and spinal injuries. Three months after the crash, Dr. Yarnell had seen enough consistent response to get Molei admitted to Craig. There, therapists worked to revive her with regimens of wake-up drugs and physical therapy.

Molei was largely in a fog the first several weeks after coming to. She knew she was still Molei, but she also knew she couldn’t connect with staff or even loved ones, and she didn’t know whether she ever would.

And then one day, Jeremy made her laugh. It happened in the workout room at Craig. Jeremy had taken her there himself.

By this point, Molei was in a sort of half-conscious limbo. She couldn’t direct her own movements or talk. But if Jeremy or her therapists moved her limbs, she could sit up and even stand. That day, Jeremy was doing just what he’d been doing for weeks: helping and hoping.

First he hoisted her from the bed and onto a kind of hanging chair that moved on tracks, which in turn took her to a wheelchair. From there, it was down to a room full of padded platforms designed for massage and therapy. His plan was to stretch her limbs a bit while he talked to her. So he laid her on the therapy bed, sat at her feet, and started flexing her legs, chattering and spouting, as he called it, “nonsense,” just as he’d been doing for months.

He wasn’t surprised when Molei’s body suddenly spasmed and she sat up abruptly. Without even thinking, Jeremy responded, “Hey, we’re not doing sit-ups. What are you doing?”

And she laughed.

Jeremy’s eyes lit up. “Oh my God!” he shouted. “You hear me! You’re in there!”

Learning all over again

It was a watershed moment. “I don’t know if I’ve ever laughed so much or smiled so hard,” he says. “I knew then that she knew who I was. She thought my stupid jokes were funny still. She knew who I was.”

It was a breakthrough for Molei as well. “The way he laughed back, I just knew,” she says. “He could tell, ‘Hey, she’s still in there!’ I’m not just this girl in a coma.”

In the weeks that followed, Molei improved dramatically. Soon she was watching, listening, focusing, and responding.

She still couldn’t talk, so she tried to communicate using the sign language she’d learned in college. Jeremy knew some sign language, too, so he understood the first thing she told him.

“It was, ‘I love you,’” Molei said. “That’s the first thing I said to him.”

Molei had spent a total of six months in hospitals after the crash, including two months at Craig, where she learned to eat (carefully), talk (slowly), and walk short distances with a walker. Cognitive rehabilitation therapy—puzzles, tests, medication for focus and attention—had helped her mind come back to life. The brain is a remarkable thing, Dr. Yarnell often says. If you keep exercising it, it can find all sorts of ways to work around its problems.

So when the doctors said she was ready, she moved back to her family’s home. There were setbacks and frustrations; the simplest decision, such as whether to use the walker or the wheelchair to get to the living room, could be fraught with stress or danger. But every month, Molei made progress. And eventually, once again, the everyday became the norm: using the bathroom, folding laundry, riding the exercise bike. As her body revived, her mind sharpened, just as Dr. Yarnell had predicted. This man beheaded a poisonous snake—and it still bit him.

Conquering the mountain

In what may have been her biggest step of all, Molei moved in with Jeremy, 18 months after the crash. The life they’d once imagined sharing began to take shape. And even if it isn’t exactly the life they’d expected, Jeremy says, the love they share is just as deep—maybe deeper.

“I liken it to going to war with someone,” says Jeremy. “We went through something that is unfathomable to other people. I shared some things with her that I can’t quite explain.”

Today, Molei Wright still faces her share of challenges. Her left side is still weak, her grip uncertain; her fused spine means she can’t turn her neck. Dr. Yarnell says Molei will probably always have some cognitive deficits. Multitasking will tire her out. Holding down a high-stress job might never be possible.

And yet she now manages the couple’s household along with her own recovery. She meets with friends, shares books and podcasts with Jeremy, and volunteers to visit classrooms and talk to students. She’s training for a bike race. She’s considering a new career as an occupational therapist.

She’s the Molei Jeremy fell in love with, the one who’d never settle for anything less than the best. “You just can’t turn off this wild ambition,” he says. “You can’t go through something like this and be exactly the same person, but the core of who she is is the exact same.”

Two years after she and Jeremy almost died in the snow driving to Breckenridge, Molei finally arrived at the resort town. Using outriggers (poles with skis on them), she skied down the mountain, plowing through the snow as the trees blurred by and her cheeks tingled in the delicious crisp air.

She wasn’t a crash victim anymore. She was just Molei Wright, out in the sun with the man she loved, conquering the mountain she’d first set out to run two years earlier. Next, read the story of a climber who was left for dead on Mount Everest until others stopped their climb to help.

This post was originally published on The Healthy.

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Everyday Fixes to Survive Basically Anything

The post After a Horrible Car Crash, Her Odds of Survival Were Just 100 to One appeared first on Reader's Digest.

All, a 44-year-old scientist, had come to Nepal on a research expedition to collect snow samples for his study of pollution. His two climbing partners had retreated down to base camp until one of them could recover from a stomach ailment. They were expected back in a day or two, but for now, All was alone at 20,000 feet. Climbing solo in the Himalayas is never advisable, but All’s plan was to remain cautious, stick near camp, and begin collecting samples. But first, he was dying for a cup of coffee.

He grabbed his snow axes and walked toward a flat area a short distance away that looked like an ideal spot to gather fresh snow to melt for water. The temperature was between 25 and 30 degrees. After weeks at high elevation, that felt positively balmy, so All was dressed lightly in wind pants, a thin jacket over a T-shirt, and hiking boots with crampons—metal spikes that help climbers traverse icy terrain. He took a step and then another. Suddenly the ground gave way beneath him, and he plunged into darkness.

All’s face smashed into something hard as he plummeted downward. He instinctively reached out with his right hand, trying to jab an ax into the ice to slow his progress, but the weight of his falling body wrenched his arm out of its shoulder socket, leaving behind a mess of shattered bone and torn soft tissue. As he careened against the icy walls with growing speed, his mind seemed to slow down. He realized with horror what had happened: He had stepped into a crevasse, a crack that had opened in the glacier and extended down who knew how deep.

How did I make this mistake? he thought. Then he had another thought: There’s no way you can survive a crevasse fall.

All’s right side slammed into something hard, his fall stopping with a crunch of bones. I’m dead, he thought. Then he felt his lungs heaving, straining to suck wind back into his body, each gasp bringing a jolt of excruciating pain. He looked down and saw his legs hanging over a chasm. He had landed on a shelf of ice suspended above the blackness. Overhead was a pale halo of blue-white light, seven stories up, where he had punched through the crust of snow. The entire right side of his body had been crushed. He couldn’t move. But for now, he was alive. When this farmer’s leg was caught in an auger, he did the unthinkable to save himself.

How he got there

John All was not supposed to be on Mount Himlung. A month earlier, he had been at Mount Everest Base Camp sharing black tea with a young Sherpa. Asman Tamang, a shy father of a nine-month-old, was climbing Everest for the first time, and All teased him, saying Tamang would make record speed up the mountain. All had climbed Everest before, but this time he was leading an expedition of scientists to Everest’s sister peak, Mount Lhotse, to collect evidence of “black dust,” emissions from factories thousands of miles away. For All, a professor at Western Kentucky University, the mountains were a second home—the rare place where the six-foot-five former triathlete could combine his love of physical adventure with his scientific curiosity.

On the morning of April 18, All woke to the ground rumbling. An ice shelf had collapsed, sending a chunk of ice the size of an apartment building tumbling down the side of Everest. Sixteen climbers were killed, Asman Tamang among them.

Everest and Lhotse were shut down for the season. After a week of mourning his friend, All and his two partners headed to nearby Mount Himlung to continue their work. Learn about another man that was left for dead on Everest—until climbers stopped their trek to save him.

From his icy seat 70 feet deep in the earth, John All gasped for breath and tried to gather his thoughts. Climbers fall into crevasses all the time, but those who survive usually fall only a short way, aren’t by themselves, and certainly aren’t badly injured. All knew of only one person who had made it through such a long fall and climbed out by himself: the mountaineer Joe Simpson, who had survived a fall in Peru. All would try to become the second.

Six hours to make it to the surface

Taking in his surroundings, All ­realized he wasn’t on a shelf but a chunk of ice that had fallen through the fissure and become wedged between the walls. In an ever-moving, ever-shifting glacier, how long would it stay wedged? He rocked his body slightly, testing his limitations, and a jolt of pain radiated through him, leaving him dizzy. He had 15 broken bones in total, he would learn later, including six crushed vertebrae. His right arm was entirely useless, and the ribs on his right side were shattered, making every breath agony. His abdomen felt sore and stiff, a sign of internal bleeding, and he had a coppery taste in his mouth, an indication of possible kidney or liver damage. He touched his face and found that blood from gouges in his eye socket and forehead had congealed in the cold, stopping the bleeding momentarily.

It took All almost ten minutes just to wrench himself upright and squirm over to a secure perch on his block of ice. The effort left him panting. Icy air blew up from the depths of the glacier. Already he could feel his body shivering and his fingers freezing, quickly becoming numb. By 4 p.m., the shadows cast by the high mountain peaks would leave him in the dark and unable to climb. His research partners weren’t scheduled to come back to camp until the next day or possibly even the day after. By then, he would have frozen to death. He had roughly six hours to make it to the surface and to his tent, or he would die. This 92-year-old man was still an accomplished hiker—but then he got lost.

All is a researcher, someone who makes a record of everything he does. Now, out of instinct, he reached into his pocket, brought out his camera, and pressed record. “Thank God I stopped on this ledge,” he said to the camera, his breath ragged, spatters of blood visible in the snow. “How do I get back up there, though?” Above him, the snow was soft; the air from the crevasse condensed on the walls and left a surface the consistency of whipped cream. Where he had landed, the width of the crevasse was about eight feet, but looking to his right, he saw a spot hundreds of feet away where the fissure appeared to narrow. If he was lucky, it just might be narrow enough for him to “chimney” his way up, or climb by bracing his body against both sides of the crevasse until he reached the surface, all while using only one arm. First, though, he would need to get there, using his crampons and snow axes to move across the wall of sheer ice.

All kicked the points of his crampons into the ice until they held. With his left hand, he planted one ax at eye level, then he reached the same hand across his body to plant the other ax as far to the right as possible.

Clutching the first ax, he shuffled his feet to the right, kicked his crampons into the ice, shifted his weight, and then grabbed the second ax, again with his left hand. His body screamed with pain, but he had moved. Now he just had to do this a few thousand more times.

Functioning well in dangerous situations

Stab with the ax, kick his feet, shift his weight, repeat. All was free-climbing inside a crack in the mountain, trying not to dwell on the fact that one misstep would send him tumbling to his death. Instead, he concentrated on getting to another slab of ice that had become lodged in the crevasse about 50 feet up. Over the years, All had found that he functioned well in dangerous situations. He had a tattoo of a black mamba on his calf—a token of the time he had kicked a six-foot-long poisonous snake in Botswana before it could strike. He tried to make the climb an academic puzzle, a question of geometry. If he could figure it out, he would live. This man beheaded a poisonous snake—and it still bit him.

Stab, kick, shift, repeat. At times the ice gave way beneath All’s crampons, sending chunks of the wall tumbling into the chasm, but his ax held him tight.

After about half an hour, he had reached the slab of ice. He rested, gratefully gulping the meat-locker–cold air into his lungs. The sound of his own jagged breath as he struggled to get enough oxygen at this altitude mixed with the cracking of the glacier, that living, moving mass of ice that surrounded him. He knew that if he didn’t make his way out, his body would likely remain there for years. Perhaps when the glacier had retreated, future generations would discover the corpse in the green windbreaker and wonder who had been foolish enough to go climbing alone.

He started moving again, his eyes fixed on the next ice block, about 50 feet to his right. Suddenly, a jolt of inexpressible pain struck. He looked down and saw the void beneath him, the cavern disappearing into a black infinity. Against his will, the thought flashed through his mind: I’m going to die. He thought of his 67-year-old mother and imagined her sadness on receiving the news. Then he gathered himself again and forced himself on, stabbing the ax back into the wall.

Now the edges of the crevasse were narrowing, the surface of the walls a tangle of icy protrusions and deceptively fragile crystalline formations that All scraped aside with his frozen fingers. Slowly he began to climb upward, swinging his ice tools into the walls and finding his footing, each step taking excruciating minutes as he tried to gather his energy. The crevasse was tight enough for him to chimney his way up now, and he braced his back against the wall. Stab, kick, shift, repeat. Time moved strangely in the crevasse—marked by uneven breaths—but he was making progress. After about four hours in the crevasse, All could see the glow of the sun beneath a thin crust of snow.

Back on solid ground

Finally he swung an ax upward and broke through. A tiny patch of blue sky appeared. As All cleared the snow, making the hole wider, he had the distinct feeling that he had just dug himself out of his own grave. He hauled himself up and lay there, halfway in and halfway out, utterly exhausted and unable to move. Five minutes later, with a final burst of energy, he forced his body to flop forward onto solid ground. He staggered to his feet and immediately collapsed again. He couldn’t walk. He could barely get to his knees. That’s when he realized just how truly broken his body was and how much trouble he was still in.

In the Himalayas, death from hypo­thermia comes quickly. All was a three-minute walk away from his tent, but it might as well have been three miles. You didn’t come this far to not make it, he told himself. He pulled his body forward on his stomach. His face plowed through the snow. All shivered in agony as he dragged his broken ribs across the ground.

The short walk took two hours of crawling. It was late afternoon and the shadows were deepening when he finally lunged into the tent. All reached for his handheld satellite communicator. He knew he wouldn’t survive until his partners reached him. He was bleeding internally and needed to be rescued. The walkie-talkie–sized ­machine could only send messages, not make phone calls, and at the moment, it was connected to the ­Facebook page of an organization he’d cofounded, the American Climber Science Program. Back home in Kentucky, it was 4 a.m. Everyone he knew was likely asleep, but he prayed someone would see his cry for help. With numb fingers he typed out a message: “Please call Global Rescue. John broken arm, ribs, internal bleeding. Fell 70 ft crevasse. Climbed out. Himlung camp 2,” he posted. “Please hurry.” These two cave divers were trapped underwater with only enough oxygen for one.

Arranging rescue from around the world

From her house on the Big Island of Hawaii, biologist Rebecca Cole was getting ready for bed when she decided to log on to Facebook. When she saw John All’s message, her heart sank.

Cole and her husband, Carl Schmitt, had cofounded the American Climber Science Program with All. He was the guy they referred to as their “charismatic megafauna”—a big, fun presence with a magnetic personality who drew people to the organization. When Cole read her friend’s cry for help, she quickly began pinging messages across the globe, trying to arrange a helicopter rescue.

On Mount Himlung, All was spending the longest night of his life. His throat was parched, but with only one working arm, he couldn’t manage to open his water bottle. He sucked down two energy gels, tried to cover his body with his sleeping bag, and lay in a dazed pain in the dark.

Finally the light outside began to change, the sun creeping up the edges of the tent and warming his chilled body. On the other side of the world, his friends were trying to find a rescue team willing to take a helicopter to such an altitude, where the air is thin and aircraft can act erratically.

After 18 hours on his back—his broken body had tensed up, leaving him near paralysis—All heard the faint whir of a helicopter. Soon after, the tent’s door unzipped and a Nepali rescuer poked his head through the flap. The rescuer dragged All on his sleeping mat before hauling him into the helicopter.

As the copter twisted through the Himalayas, All finally allowed the relief to flood through him. “I’m alive,” he whispered.

The start of his true recovery

As All recovered from his injuries, he sometimes felt as if a part of him had never escaped the crevasse. He talked freely about Tamang’s death and his own escape, but he kept himself the teller of the story, not the subject. “It was all so raw and overwhelming,” says All. “I had to keep it in the third person.”

In March 2015, almost a year after his near-death experience, All visited Rebecca Cole in Hawaii. By now he was physically healed, but Cole could see that her friend was still shaken. So, she says, “I took a week off to take John on as many hikes and adventures as he was physically able to handle.” One day, they climbed Mauna Loa, the largest volcano in the world. As they trekked, it began to snow—a rarity in tropical Hawaii—and soon they were breaking trail through three feet of snow on their way to the summit. Being in the snowy mountains for the first time since his accident and discovering that the experience still made him feel happy and at peace marked the beginning of All’s true recovery.

All is now a research professor at Western Washington University. He is also fulfilling a lifelong desire to train the next generation of climber scientists at the Mountain Environments Research Institute, which he founded in 2016. “We all have dreams, but we usually say, ‘I’ll do it when I get a chance,’” says All. “Lying on that mountain, I realized you get only one chance to live.” Next, learn about 5 split-second decisions people made that saved their own lives.

Read John All’s book: Icefall: Adventures at the Wild Edges of Our Dangerous, Changing Planet.

This post was originally published on The Healthy.

People Who Fell from Great Heights and Survived

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People Who Froze to Death and Came Back to Life

The post This Man Broke 15 Bones When He Fell into a Glacier—Here’s How He Survived appeared first on Reader's Digest.

Brace yourselves—Hurricane Laura is here and gearing up to be one of the harshest hurricanes in recent memory. The Category Four storm has already been felt and those affected have faced heavy flooding, chemical fires, and strong wind. In much of Louisiana, Texas, and nearby parts of the South, Laura has already caused widespread power losses and structural damages with 150 miles per hour wind as it continues up and East.

If you’re in one of the affected areas and plan on riding it out, proper preparation is key. First, here’s what you need to do to prep your home. And there is one thing you should have around at all times: a plastic water bottle (this is what really happens to recycled plastic).

Why? When the weather takes a turn for the worse, a water bottle is one of the most versatile things you have in your home. Plus, it might even save your life. Just don’t forget to check out these tips on keeping your pet safe during a storm, too.

Severe flooding caused by a hurricane can contaminate the local drinking water with bacteria, sewage, chemicals, and other dangerous substances. To avoid a serious illness, it’s best to stock up on plenty of bottled water to keep yourself hydrated.

That’s pretty obvious, of course. But keep those empty plastic bottles around after you drink, too, because they have lots of uncommon uses. For one, an empty water bottle can turn into an improvised water filter if you need to drink from the tap. Watch this video to learn how.

If your electricity goes out, don’t go the old-fashioned route with candles; you can rely on your handy plastic water bottles once again. Simply tape a small flashlight to the bottom of the bottle, and its plastic (and the water inside) will amplify the glow. Now you can use the little light to illuminate a room or send signals to rescue personnel.

There are some things you should never do with water bottles, though. Next, learn what hurricane categories really mean so you can prepare the best way possible. These scary weather events caught on camera are extraordinary. 

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This Is How Hurricanes Get Their Names

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The post This Is How a Water Bottle Could Save Your Life in a Hurricane appeared first on Reader's Digest.

Burkhart was swimming with some friends off the coast in North Carolina during summer vacation after his freshman year of college. He had just spent his first year majoring in video production at Ohio University. A former Boy Scout and lacrosse goalie from Columbus, Ohio, Burkhart’s ill-fated dive left him unable to use his arms and legs. In a freak accident, a woman was shot with an arrow—and it saved her life.

At the time, the devastated 19-year-old knew only that an experimental study at nearby Ohio State University Wexner Medical School offered hope. Burkhart’s spinal injury had severed the communication pathway between the motor cortex in his brain and the muscles in his limbs, but this study proposed a detour.

Doctors had Burkhart think about moving his hand while researchers took functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scans to light up key brain areas. Based on those coordinates, in April 2014, Ali Rezai, MD, director of Ohio State’s Center for Neuromodulation, placed a microchip smaller than a pea in the motor cortex, which controls the hand. The chip was connected via a computer to an electrode-studded sleeve on Burkhart’s arm that stimulated his muscles. Burkhart’s thoughts now had a new bypass to his hand.

Two months later, Dr. Rezai was standing behind his patient in a lab crowded with cameras, physicians, engineers, and family, all eyes on Burkhart’s right hand. When it moved for the first time, Burkhart made history. “It was a surreal moment,” Dr. Rezai remembers. “The whole team was amazed, but then we said, ‘OK, the work is just beginning. He’s got to be able to pick up a cup of coffee.’” Take a look at these stories of people who literally came back to life.

The brain and computer working together

In the years since, subject and software have been learning from each other. “The machine is continuously improving its algorithms, and Ian is able to think about things with more fluidity,” says Dr. Rezai. “It’s phenomenal seeing the brain and computer coming together.”

Since those early days, Burkhart has learned to pick up a glass, pour liquid from a bottle, pinch his thumb and index finger together, and play the video game Guitar Hero.

Rezai and his team published their findings in a 2016 study about restoring movement using neuroprosthetic devices in the journal Nature.

“This is the first demonstration to our knowledge of successful control of muscle activation using intracortically recorded signals in a paralyzed human,” the researchers wrote. “These results have significant implications in advancing neuroprosthetic technology for people worldwide living with the effects of paralysis.”

Burkhart went on to pursue a degree in accounting at Ohio State and he became a high school lacrosse assistant coach. He volunteers at the Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center helping spinal cord injured patients adjust to their new life as a peer support mentor with the Christopher and Dana Reeve Foundation. He created the Ian Burkhart Foundation dedicated to restoring lives and providing hope to people who have spinal cord injuries. Next, learn about these split-second decisions people made that saved their own lives.

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People Who Came Back to Life Reveal What It Was Like

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The post How This Quadriplegic Man Learned How to Move His Limbs…with His Mind appeared first on Reader's Digest.

While I drive, I shove scrambled eggs and link sausages into my mouth and slurp down a large unsweetened tea. Another message comes in through the alert system: five of them, only three of us. Once I get there, we will be almost even. Soon, more of us will appear, and we will outnumber them, as we always do.

I park out of sight, blocks away from the spot where they like to gather. I don’t want them taking photos of my license plate and finding out my home address. They show up to these protests armed. I don’t carry a gun; I’ve never even fired one. But I won’t let them intimidate me, and their show of force won’t keep me away. This is too important.

Growing up in the shadows of racism

I was born six years after the passage of the Civil Rights Act. I grew up in the ’70s and attended an integrated school where I had four Black teachers by the time I turned 10. My parents made sure of this. They had been born into the segregated South, and they grew up separated from their Black neighbors by an invisible but unquestionably real scrim of hatred. They felt the wrongness of segregation from their earliest childhood. My mother would tell the story, in hushed tones of shame, of elderly Black men stepping off the sidewalk as she, a little girl of five, passed by.

Even in my own childhood, though, the undercurrent of racism persisted. When adult conversations in the front room at my grandparents’ house threatened to take certain turns, my father silenced uncles and neighbors with an icy glance. This hushing and silencing was always chosen over open conflict in my WASP family. To yell and shout would be unacceptably rude and trashy, but that yelling and shouting might also release a torrent of ugly truths—like the fact that our family had been complicit in slavery once upon a time…all the way back, on all sides.

The very real threat of White supremacy

I stop in at the café that has been supportive to us these past several months. I’ve gotten to know the young Black woman who works there a little bit. Before I arrived today, one of the racists—an enormous White man, known to be violent, who’d driven here from several states away—had come up to the door of the shop and started waving his huge Confederate flag in her face. She was alone.

My heart hasn’t stopped pounding since I heard what happened. Even though these people had been terrorizing this town for months and even though they had physically attacked us more than once, I’m still shocked. Why, though? My shock is nothing more complicated than White privilege. Everyday acts of racism are nothing new to people of color.

I come in the back door of the café and hug her. She is not shaking or crying, as many White women would be. She is nervous but also angry. I look out the window to see the five of them, all my age or older, standing in a sad clump at the spot where the Confederate monument—removed months ago by the county—once stood. They look at once both menacing and utterly lumpy and ridiculous. I start to laugh. She joins in, and we both laugh until tears roll.

This is part of what it means to be an ally in the movement toward equality.

Infuriating double standards

Things change when George Floyd is murdered. Movements spring up in every city. Monuments start to topple like dominoes. Positive changes begin rippling throughout the country. I know they’re definitely not happening in one place, though—another small town 20 minutes from my house. The sheriff there has brazenly targeted people of color for two decades. Black people do not patronize the downtown area—at all—and the square feels like it has been imported whole cloth from 1955. A Black friend says: “The Civil Rights movement never arrived here.”

Once again, I witness the sickening sight of a stone monument to a treasonous band of traitors surrounded by scores of heavily armed police. It’s as though this cheap, ugly, mass-produced granite slab were a living, breathing, feeling human being. I hear thinly veiled threats from racists as they pass by, one older White woman loudly commenting that the huge German Shepherd she is walking “might snap.” I see armed White supremacists protesting in a public space without being arrested.

If my sign had even a simple paint stirrer attached as a handle, I would be approached by police and told that I cannot carry weapons at a protest. If I fail to comply—to ditch this flimsy wooden stick that weighs exactly one-third of an ounce—I will be arrested. This blatant double standard exists in every city, in every town.

Staying the course

A video appears on Twitter: Employees at one of the many downtown businesses owned by a city councilwoman film themselves inside the building after hours, showing off their stockpiled long guns and bragging about shooting at the five-person BLM protest across the street. At another, larger protest, the sheriff puts his arm around the most vocal and visible White supremacist in town, despite the many cameras documenting this public gesture of support.

During this protest, I stand in front of a Black-owned business, the only one in the entire downtown area. A White man wearing a hat, sunglasses, and star-spangled scarf over his entire face walks over from the café (also owned by the city councilwoman) where the racists hang out and stands in front of me, arms crossed. A minute passes. I do not move away, but begin—low, almost under my breath—to sing a gospel song about suffering and keeping the faith. After three minutes, he walks away.

For more on this important issue, see our guide to the Fight Against Racism.

Jessica Harrison is a pseudonym to protect the author’s identity.

Editor’s note: The opinions here belong to the author. To submit your own idea for an essay, email letters@rd.com.

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The post What It’s Really Like to Protest in a Small Town appeared first on Reader's Digest.

There may be several reasons for these neurological symptoms, explains Pravin George, DO, a board-certified neurologist, Neurology-ICU, at the Cleveland Clinic where Schneider works. The infection can lead to low oxygen saturation and cause some damage to the brain or seizures; the sedatives doctors give to keep ventilated patients relaxed may play a role, as well. “Some people are also getting brain inflammation from COVID-19,” says Dr. George. “This is usually from the severe form of COVID-19 disease.” 

Schneider spent seven days on a ventilator and was discharged six days after that. Here’s her story in her own words. 

I started in denial

On March 27, all of us at the Cleveland Clinic Fairview Hospital who could work from home packed up our office necessities so we could self-quarantine. That evening around 7 p.m., I felt excruciatingly cold. It felt like someone stood behind me and dropped a bucket of ice water on me. I couldn’t get warm, so I stood in a very hot shower until my skin turned red. When I went to lift my leg over the tub, it felt like someone had put a rusty old rebar spike through my knee caps. I think I was still in denial that I could have COVID-19. I checked my temperature, and within a half-hour, it went from 101 to 104.5. It was then that I knew without a test I had COVID-19. I called my supervisor, who gave me the caregiver COVID-19 hotline number. When the healthcare provider on the caregiver hotline realized that I was immunosuppressed—I’m a breast cancer survivor—she advised me to get tested. Meanwhile, I couldn’t shake my fever and had trouble breathing, along with two other COVID-19 symptoms, a loss of appetite and my sense of smell. The next day, which was Saturday, I had an appointment at 4:30 p.m. to get a COVID-19 test. By 5 a.m. on Sunday, I got a message that I was positive and to continue to quarantine and wait for more directions, which came later that morning.

My behavior turned bizarre during quarantine

By April 1, I was starting to question things and just not myself. I found notes around the house that said, “Remember to feed the dog,” “Remember to put the dog out,” which is odd since my dog died six years ago. I also kept thinking my son was in the house and needed me. Yet, he is a graduate student at university and doesn’t live with me. He did encourage me to go to the hospital each time we talked or texted on the phone, but I refused to go because I didn’t think I was sick enough. It was very frustrating for my family and me because the world was on lockdown, and they couldn’t come to me. My sister told me I called her and told her I was going to call the squad—that’s what I call the ambulance. She thought that was a good idea too, but I didn’t do it right away.

The COVID-19 hallucination that saved my life

Early on the morning of April 2, I was lying in bed and wondering why I heard voices and sounds since I live alone. When I turned in my bed, I saw a duplicate of myself staring back at me, reaching out to me, pleading for my assistance. Scary doesn’t even come close to describing this experience! Yet, this was my wake-up call. In the days prior, I believed the coronavirus symptoms were something I could handle myself. It took seeing the mirrored image of myself to jar me back to reality.

Once I reached through myself for the phone, I called 911; my next memory is standing in the street outside my home, waving down the ambulance. The moment of clarity following that was calling my mother from the ER. It was her 81st birthday, but I wasn’t calling to wish her a happy birthday; I was telling her that I was in the emergency department and I was not making it home. At that time, I truly felt I had nothing left in my arsenal to fight this virus.

While I was in the hospital, two friends who are health care workers went to clean my house and told me they saw clear evidence that I was struggling. There were blankets, pillows, and sheets scattered and my iPad was open. Notes to myself were everywhere. My wallet contents were thrown about, along with medications and thermometers. I guess this was a true snapshot of when my life was taken over by COVID-19. These true stories show what happens when you don’t social distance.

Going on a ventilator—and a family “reunion”

When I got to the hospital, they started working on me right away. In the blink of an eye, I was in the ICU. Once I realized I was safe, I put my efforts into doing what was asked of me—prepping my mind and body for the ventilator. Everything seemed to be moving so fast. I just wanted to sleep. At the time I was intubated, my blood pressure spiked to 200/100 and then fell to 30/40.

I stopped breathing for a moment and had what some might say was a medication-driven vision, or hallucination, or a spiritual message. I entered a place where I was met by my husband, who had died when he was 37, a sister who died 50 years ago at the age of five, my father who passed seven years ago, my maternal grandmother, and my aunt—who was also my godmother.

In this hallucination, all of them insisted that I had to return to reality. My aunt and grandmother were nurses when they were alive. My aunt said, “I don’t know how to fix her.” And my grandmother said, “we’re not supposed to, we have been away from nursing too long.” Then my grandmother pointed to the ICU staff and said, “They are supposed to fix her.” The next thing I remember is a nurse calling my name and asking me to give a sign that I was with them (I was still on a ventilator). I gave them a thumbs up.

The hospital staff was incredible

My condition improved and declined a few times while hospitalized. I remember a time when one of the caregivers was holding my hand. I was alone, confused, and my blood pressure was erratic. I was told my blood pressure would go down when someone held my hand, so a nurse held my hand for a couple of hours—I needed it. Everyone at the hospital was amazing and encouraging. These nurses shared stories of positive moments behind the scenes of COVID-19.

I was on a ventilator for seven days but remained in the hospital for an additional six days before being discharged. My family communicated with my caregivers virtually. Every day when the environmental services department came in to clean my room, they always said, “I hope you feel better” when they left. I wouldn’t wish this on anyone, but I could not have been in a better place. I’m fully recovered but still experience exhaustion. This disease is a huge unfinished puzzle with a lot of missing pieces. I’m just willing to be one of those pieces to help others.

My hallucinations served a purpose

I talk about my hallucinations not to sensationalize but to educate. I think that all these things happened so I could fill my arsenal and continue to fight. I felt like I was in a horror movie, and that if I shut my eyes, COVID-19 would consume me and take me away. Dr. George has mentioned in his talks that sometimes the patient gets lost in the hallucination, and living alone might have meant that I would not have survived. I tell people that the first hallucination I’ve ever had in my life saved my life!

—As told to Lisa Marie Conklin

For more on this developing situation, see our comprehensive Coronavirus Guide.

Sources:

• Pravin George, DO, board-certified neurologist, Neurology-ICU, at the Cleveland Clinic, Cleveland
• Cleveland Clinic Newsroom: “What We Know about Delirium and COVID-19”

Why COVID-19 Hits People of Color Harder

How Coronavirus Is Different from All Epidemics Through History

Does Your Blood Type Increase Your Coronavirus Risk?

The post How My COVID-19 Hallucinations May Have Saved My Life appeared first on Reader's Digest.

As protests against systemic racism continue across the United States, people of color are sharing more and more heartbreaking stories about how racism has impacted and even ended lives. Healthcare is a major, often overlooked, area of racism. Black and Brown people are less likely to have access to health insurance, less likely to be believed about their symptoms, less likely to receive proper treatment, and less likely to get healthcare overall, according to decades of research. Here, Yendelela Neely, a mother of one and a lawyer in Atlanta, shares how racism nearly killed her when she went into labor with her son and had postpartum health complications.

Going into labor as a woman of color

By the time I was 39 weeks pregnant with my son I was ready to evict him. It had been great having a live-in roommate (literally) but it was time for him to move out. So I started doing everything I could to get labor going, eating all the spicy food, and taking long swims. Apparently he was ready too because by the next morning I was in labor. I labored on my own until the contractions became regular and close together, finally heading to the hospital around 2:30 in the afternoon. I was in a lot of pain but so excited to finally meet my baby boy.

That excitement was squelched as soon as I arrived at check-in. The nurse assigned to me took more than an hour to even examine me and when she finally did, it was a quick poke of my cervix and then, “You’re not dilated or effaced, you’re not in labor, go home.”

I knew my body and I knew I was in labor but she refused to listen. I refused to leave and she became annoyed. Exasperated, she called my OB/GYN who instructed her to admit me. The nurse came to the room where I was waiting and said, “She said to just induce you and get this over with since she is leaving the country tomorrow.”

A delayed labor induction

Excuse me, what? I was surprised by her attitude and getting more frustrated by the minute. (Being in agonizing pain every one to three minutes wasn’t helping either.) Was she like this with all her patients? Why did she have such disregard for my pain or my thoughts on my delivery of my baby? My race factors into most of my everyday experiences but I was not prepared for it to creep into this moment. I was in labor but, like so many times in my life, I didn’t have a choice whether or not to consider if my race was a factor.

My doctor arrived an hour later and entered my room with the nurse. “Have you induced her yet?” my doctor asked. The nurse sheepishly looked at the doctor and said “I was just about to,” even though she’d been stalling since the moment I’d been admitted. My doctor started to walk out of the room and then turned on her heels, deciding she would check my cervix herself. As soon as she did she exclaimed, “What are you talking about? She’s dilated to a seven and almost completely effaced. Not only is she definitely in labor but she’s almost done!”

The nurse left in a huff but because of her stalling, I wasn’t able to get a shot that I was told I’d need before my baby was born. Then my doctor broke my water and we discovered meconium in the amniotic fluid—a condition that can lead to lung problems or even death in infants. My sense of unease grew. Would my baby and I be able to get the care we needed—nay, deserved—at this hospital?

I gave birth to Joshua Bakari, the most perfect, beautiful baby I’d ever seen, just a few hours later. After he was born and my placenta had been delivered, I specifically asked the doctor “if she got it all.” Through all of my pregnancy readings, I had learned of the dangers of retained placenta. The doctor stated that the placenta was all out and intact. I finally felt like maybe I could relax and all of this would just be a story I’d tell my friends later.

Growing pains after birth as a woman of color

After delivering on Sunday, I was set to be discharged the following Tuesday but something didn’t feel right. My belly was swollen bigger than it had been immediately after I delivered Joshua. My doctor had to go out of the country and a nurse handled my discharge. I pointed out the size of my stomach and how it had grown. She assured me that it was fine, that I was fine, and that I should go home.

Struggles with breastfeeding

Things only got more stressful at home. I hadn’t been able to breastfeed in the hospital but I thought it would get better at home. Unfortunately, it seemed as if my efforts at breastfeeding were in vain. Despite all of my trying, my son always seemed hungry, like I was not feeding him. I visited my lactation nurse the following day and she stated that everything was fine and to keep trying. When it was not better by Friday, I made another appointment.

As soon as the lactation consultant saw me, she said, “Don’t worry about the baby, give him some formula, we need to worry about you!” My whole body was swollen; she insisted I go to the doctor immediately.

Postpartum swelling and a lack of care

Because my OB/GYN was not available, another doctor in her practice saw me. He, like the nurse at the hospital, seemed annoyed by my very presence. However, I overlooked it and explained to him that my son’s pediatrician’s office had sent me after concerns raised about my health by the lactation consultant. “Why are you here?” he demanded.

“This can’t be right,” I said to him, pointing to my swollen abdomen, legs, ankles, and even feet.

“You just gave birth, what do you expect?” he snapped. He then looked at me as if to say you can leave. When I did not, he huffed and listened to my breathing with his stethoscope. He then declared I was fine, told me to go home and left, without even looking below my waist or otherwise examining me. Again, there was the unnecessary rudeness, not to mention a lack of appropriate care. As I walked painfully back to my car I realized his true priorities when he beat me to the parking lot where I saw him tossing his golf clubs in the back of his car, before speeding off. He clearly valued his golf game over my life.

Passing a blood clot

The next morning, just six days after giving birth, I passed a blood clot the size of a softball while trying to pump milk for my son. Now I knew something was desperately wrong. Unfortunately, Dr. Golf Clubs was the doctor on call and he told me to meet him at the hospital. After my experience the day before, he was the last person I wanted to treat me. However, I never even made it to him; I didn’t even make it past the driveway. As soon I walked out of the house, I started hemorrhaging so badly I actually thought that I might die. My husband called an ambulance and in between going in and out of consciousness, I wrote a good-bye note to my son, telling him that I loved him and I was so sorry I wasn’t going to be there to raise him.

Another delayed treatment

At the hospital they left me in an exam room, bleeding out, for over four hours while I just tried to stay conscious. Something in me felt that if I let myself go to sleep I wouldn’t wake up. Why were they taking so long to help me?

Later, my husband would tell me that he’d overheard the doctors discussing different treatment options, based on what we could pay. They assumed I didn’t have health insurance and were surprised to find that I did and it came back approved. This one was easy: Black people are less likely to have access to health insurance and they’d clearly judged me based on my skin. Even when I showed them my insurance card.

At that point, they finally decided to take me into surgery. By this point, my distrust of the medical community was so high that I refused to allow them to give me general anesthesia for the surgery. I wanted to be awake; I need to know what was happening at all times. I had to be able to advocate for myself. The anesthesiologist finally agreed to a local anesthetic.

Retained placenta surgery

During the surgery, they discovered that a bit of the placenta had been missed during the delivery and had remained attached to my uterus. My body had thought it was still pregnant and kept pumping blood to the “placenta,” which explained my swelling and bleeding. This condition, called retained placenta, affects about 3 percent of pregnant women and is extremely serious, leading to death if not treated. The surgeon was able to successfully remove it but she told me she’d never seen someone lose as much blood as I had and still survive. I was right, I had been dying.

I would later learn one more fact that made my blood boil: Not having breastmilk come in is an early warning sign of retained placenta. Dr. Golf Clubs was not only rude and negligent but he nearly cost me my life and my ability to be a mother. And, yes, I do think it was because I’m Black.

Racism in healthcare

Here’s why: Black women are four times more likely to die from pregnancy or childbirth, according to the Centers for Disease Control. We are more likely to have pregnancy complications including preeclampsia and gestational diabetes, and more likely to have problems after birth, like hemorrhaging.

It gets worse. Modern obstetrics and gynecology was founded by J. Marion Sims, a doctor who used live, unanesthetized, enslaved women to experiment on because he didn’t think they could feel pain. And that’s not an idea that got left in the last century with using cocaine for baby teething pain. Today, people of color are more likely to have their symptoms dismissed or ignored by medical professionals and are less likely to receive pain medication, according to a 2012 study published in the American Journal of Public Health. Alarmingly, a separate 2016 study published in PNAS found that half of the medical students reported believing one or more health myths about Black people including “Black people’s nerve endings are less sensitive than White people’s” and “Black people’s skin is thicker than White people’s.” And these are people training to be doctors!

Dismissal of concerns about racism in healthcare

I’ve heard a lot of people dismiss concerns about racism in American healthcare by pointing out the connection between being Black and being poor. They argue that not having money is the real reason for not getting good healthcare. (As if that makes it better.) Well, I want you to know something else about me: I’m an attorney with a law degree from Duke. I made partner at my large, international firm in 2013, while I was on maternity leave from having my son. Money, education, resources, none of that was an issue for me. And yet I was still treated horribly.

I wish I could say this was the last time I’ve encountered racism in the healthcare industry. Unfortunately, I’ve had to confront it over and over again as I’ve sought to get an accurate diagnosis and appropriate treatment for my son’s vision problems. And I’m sure there will be more incidents in the future.

As this country reexamines how it treats people of color, I hope we include the healthcare system. Doctors are supposed to take care of us, they even swore an oath to do so, yet black women have learned the hard way that many of them won’t even listen to us, much less give us good care. And we’re dying because of it.

—As told to Charlotte Hilton Andersen

For more on this important issue, see our guide to the Fight Against Racism.

This post was originally published on The Healthy.

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The post Racism in Healthcare: What It’s Like Giving Birth as a Black Woman appeared first on Reader's Digest.

Jack Powers is a sixth-grader from South County, Mo. who started mowing lawns in his neighborhood in early June. Instead of keeping the money for himself, he’s donating it all to the Black Lives Matter Foundation, one of the charities and organizations that need your support right now.

“I just wanted to make a change and I didn’t like how people were being treated,” Jack told KMOV-TV.

Jack was inspired to make a change for social justice following the tragic death of George Floyd in late May. He quickly put up flyers around his neighborhood advertising his new philanthropic business plan.

“I saw what happened to George Floyd and saw how people were being treated and I decided to make a change,” Jack added.

According to KMOV, the response to Jack’s flyers has been overwhelming. One of his neighbors, April Strelinger, says that the boy’s actions were enough to create a conversation in her family about how they could personally fight for social justice reform.

“There’s been a lot of change, flux, and hardship,” said Strelinger. “So to see Jack’s poster and find a helper, it actually opened up a great conversation with my son about how he can be a helper.”

Jack had raised $110 before KMOV picked up his story. If you want to donate, you can email Jack here at JackforBLM@gmail.com. Plus, find out more ways you can help dismantle racism every day.

For more on this important issue, see our guide to the Fight Against Racism.

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The post This 11-Year-Old Mows Lawns to Raise Money for Social Justice appeared first on Reader's Digest.

It was just the three of us—my parents and me. My dad is a truck driver, and when I was little, he was gone most of the time, delivering barbed wire and other livestock supplies around the Midwest. So my mom was almost like a single mother.

We lived in a small house in Brighton, Colorado, in a neighborhood of 1970s ranch houses. We had red shag carpeting and wood paneling and faux brick in the finished part of the basement, and a big yard with plenty of room for our five dogs and two cats to run around.

We moved there on my third birthday. My first memory is our neighbor Arlene handing me strawberries from her garden through a hole in the chain-link fence. She and her husband, Bill, lived next door.

Arlene spent a lot of time working in the garden, and I was always talking to her from our yard. I was a chatterbox. I think what drew me to Arlene and Bill is that they never got tired of listening to me gab. I also think Arlene saw a lot of herself in me—we were both lonely, anxious kids—and that may be why she always took the time to listen to me. Bill too. It was a wonderful connection.

There weren’t any kids my age in the neighborhood, so I mostly played in the yard with the dogs. I had a lot of imaginary friends—a whole family, actually, with a husband, in-laws, children, a best friend…no joke. Weird kid.

One day, my parents asked Bill and Arlene whether they’d watch me while they went out on a date. This worked well for everyone, so it became a some­what monthly occurrence. Arlene and Bill didn’t have kids. They had a spare room in their house, which became “my” room. I had a cabinet and boxes of toys and books in that room.

Arlene and I would do crafts together. We were always putting tiny sequins on things. Bill taught me how to ride a bike and later how to drive the lawn tractor and eventually a car (stick and automatic). He was always fixing something in his garage and always smelled like oil. I would wander over to chatter at him, and he would always stop and listen to me, just like Arlene did.

When I was about five, I had an idea. My parents were watching TV when I spit it out: “What if I adopted Bill and Arlene as my grandparents?”

My parents said I could go over and ask them tomorrow. The next day, 
I knocked on Bill and Arlene’s door, sat down in their living room, and said, “Will you guys be my grand­parents?” They started crying and enthusiastically accepted. Soon after, they printed out an adoption certificate, and it hung on their living room wall from then on.

I remember being surprised that they took my offer so seriously—not because I wasn’t serious but because I was just a kid. They could have laughed it off. Thinking of that moment still brings tears to my eyes. There is something truly magnificent about a child offering up her love and adults being so ecstatic to accept it. Every child in this world deserves 
enthusiastically reciprocated love.

From the day I adopted them, I called Bill and Arlene Grandpa and Grandma. Pretty soon, my parents were calling them Mom and Dad. Even our animals loved Bill and Arlene and would often sneak out of our yard to go visit them. Arlene always kept treats in her pockets for them.

In the winter, Bill would attach a snowplow to the front of the lawn tractor and we would plow the block and all the neighbors’ driveways together. One of my first times on the tractor, I plowed down our chain-link fence, and Bill just chuckled in his laid-back way. We eventually replaced it with a nice, tall wooden “privacy” fence. My dad and Bill installed it together. They cut a small gate in the top of one section so we could open it and still chat. They also added a window at the bottom for the dogs.

Over the years, Bill and Arlene Howe supported me in all my dreams. They encouraged me to apply for college, even though I didn’t have the money to go. And when I got accepted to Colorado State University, they presented me with a fund. They told me they’d been putting away money since the day I adopted them.

It took me five years, but I graduated with a degree in forest management, and now I work as a forest health technician for the Colorado State Forest Service.

Since I’ve become an adult, I’ve learned more about my grand­parents. They both grew up poor. Bill’s mother died when he was eight, and he and his siblings—there were eight of them—went to live with relatives. Arlene had some health problems and struggled with alcoholism when she was young. Their lives weren’t as perfect as they appeared to be through the fence. But the two of them always seemed genuinely happy in each other’s company. Bill told me that once on a trip in their RV he listened to Arlene talk about raising honeybees for 200 miles and he never tired of the sound of 
her voice.

Arlene passed away in 2013, two days before our adoption anniversary. Bill gave her eulogy. At the end, he said, “Arlene leaves behind her husband, Bill. And the greatest joy of her life, her granddaughter, Katie.”

After the funeral, Bill gave me the ring he’d gifted to Arlene on their 25th wedding anniversary. It’s a simple gold band that I wear on my ring finger as a reminder of the kind of love I wish to put into this world. Next, read what happened when a girl wrote a simple thank you note to her postman and got hundreds of responses.

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The post The Heartwarming Story of a Five-Year-Old Girl Who Asked Her Neighbors to Be Her Grandparents appeared first on Reader's Digest.

We realized that we were pretty young to be taking such a big gamble; I was 17, Jorge 16. But we were both determined to escape from Cuba, and our plans had been made carefully. We knew that departing airliners taxied to the end of the 11,500-foot runway, stopped momentarily after turning around, and then roared at full throttle down the runway to take off. We wore rubber-soled shoes to aid us in crawling up the wheels and carried ropes to secure ourselves inside the wheel well. We had also stuffed cotton in our ears as protection against the shriek of the four jet engines. Now we lay sweating with fear as the massive craft swung into its about-face, the jet blast flattening the grass all around us. “Let’s run!” I shouted to Jorge.

We dashed onto the runway and sprinted toward the left-hand wheels of the momentarily stationary plane. As Jorge began to scramble up the 42-inch-high tires, I saw there was not room for us both in the single well. “I’ll try the other side!” I shouted. I climbed quickly onto the right wheels, grabbed a strut, and, twisting and wriggling, pulled myself into the semidark well. The plane began rolling immediately, and I grabbed some machinery to keep from falling out. The roar of the engines nearly deafened me.

As we became airborne, the huge double wheels, scorching hot from takeoff, began folding into the compartment. I tried to flatten myself against the overhead as they came closer and closer; then, in despera­tion, I pushed at them with my feet. But they pressed powerfully upward, squeezing me against the roof of the well. Just when I felt that I would be crushed, the wheels locked in place and the bay doors beneath them closed, plunging me into darkness. So there I was, my five­-foot-four, 140-pound frame literally wedged in amid a spaghetti-like maze of conduits and machinery. I could not move enough to tie myself to anything.

Then, before I had time to catch my breath, the bay doors suddenly dropped open again and the wheels stretched out into their landing posi­tion. I held on for dear life, swinging over the abyss, wondering whether I had been spotted, whether even now the plane was turning back to hand me over to Castro’s police.

By the time the wheels began retracting again, I had seen a bit of extra space among all the machinery where I could safely squeeze. Now I knew there was room for me, even though I could scarcely breathe. After a few minutes, I touched one of the tires and found that it had cooled off. I swallowed some aspirin tablets against the head-splitting noise and began to wish that I had worn something warmer than my light sport shirt and green fatigues.

Up in the cockpit of the DC-8, Captain Valentin Vara del Rey, 44, had settled into the routine of the overnight flight, which would last eight hours and 20 minutes. Takeoff had been normal, with the aircraft and its 147 passengers, plus a crew of ten, lifting off at 170 mph. But right after liftoff, something unusual had happened. A light on the instrument panel had remained on, indicating improper retraction of the landing gear.

“Are you having difficulty?” the control tower asked.

“Yes,” replied Vara del Rey. “There is an indication that the right wheel hasn’t closed properly. I’ll repeat the procedure.”

The captain lowered the landing gear, then raised it again. This time, the red light blinked out.

Dismissing the incident as a minor malfunction, the captain turned his attention to climbing to assigned cruising altitude. On leveling out, he observed that the temperature outside was 41 degrees below zero.

Shivering uncontrollably from the bitter cold, I wondered if Jorge had made it into the other wheel well, and I began thinking about what had brought me to this desperate situation. I thought about my parents and my girlfriend, María Esther, and wondered what they would think when they learned what I had done.

My father is a plumber, and I have four brothers and a sister. We are poor, like most Cubans. Our house in Havana has just one large room. Food was scarce and strictly rationed. About the only fun I had was playing baseball and walking with María Esther along the seawall. When I turned 16, the government shipped me off to vocational school in Betancourt, a sugarcane village in Matanzas Province. There, I was supposed to learn welding, but classes were often interrupted to send us off to plant cane.

Young as I was, I was tired of living in a state that controlled every­one’s life. I dreamed of freedom. I wanted to become an artist and live in the United States, where I had an uncle. I knew that thousands of Cubans had gotten to America and done well there. As the time approached when I would be drafted, I thought more and more of trying to get away. But how? I knew that two planeloads of people were allowed to leave Havana for Miami each day, but there was a waiting list of 800,000 for these flights. Also, if you signed up to leave, the government looked at you as a gusano­—a worm—and life became even less bearable.

My hopes seemed futile. Then I met Jorge at a Havana baseball game. We got to talking. I found out that Jorge, like me, was disillusioned with Cuba. “The system takes away your freedom—for­ever,” he complained.

Jorge told me about the weekly flight to Madrid. Twice we went to the airport to reconnoiter. Once, a DC-8 took off and flew directly over us; the wheels were still down, and we could see into the well compart­ments. “There’s enough room in there for me,” I remember saying.

These were my thoughts as I lay in the freezing darkness more than five miles above the Atlantic Ocean. By now we had been in the air about an hour, and I was getting light-headed. Was it really only a few hours earlier that I had bicycled through the rain with Jorge and hidden in the grass? Was Jorge safe? My parents? María Esther? I drifted into unconsciousness.

The sun rose over the Atlantic like a great golden globe, its rays glinting off the ­silver-and-red fuselage of Iberia’s DC-8 as it crossed the European coast high over Portugal. With the end of the 5,563‑mile flight in sight, Captain Vara del Rey began his descent toward ­Madrid’s Barajas Airport. Arrival would be at 8 a.m. local time, he told his passengers over the inter­com, and the weather in Madrid was sunny and pleasant.

Shortly after passing over Toledo, Vara del Rey let down his landing gear. As always, the maneuver was accompanied by a buffeting as the wheels hit the slipstream and a 200 mph 
turbulence swirled through the wheel wells. Now the plane went into its 
final approach; now, a spurt of flame and smoke from the tires as the DC-8 touched down at about 140 mph. It was a perfect landing—no bumps. After a brief post­flight check, Vara del Rey walked down the ramp steps and stood by the nose of the plane waiting for a car to pick him up, along with his crew.

Nearby, there was a sudden, soft plop as the frozen body of Armando Socarras Ramirez fell to the concrete apron beneath the plane. José Rocha Lorenzana, a security guard, was the first to reach the crumpled figure. “When I touched his clothes, they were frozen as stiff as wood,” Rocha Lorenzana said. “All he did was make a strange sound, a kind of moan.”

“I couldn’t believe it at first,” Vara del Rey said. “But then I went over to see him. He had ice over his nose and mouth. And his color …” As he watched the unconscious boy being bundled into a truck, the captain kept exclaiming to himself, “Impossible! Impossible!”

The first thing I remember after losing consciousness was hitting the ground at the Madrid airport. Then I blacked out again and woke up later at the Gran Hospital de la Beneficencia in downtown Madrid, more dead than alive. When they took my temperature, it was so low that it did not even register on the thermometer. “Am I in Spain?” was my first question. And then, “Where’s Jorge?” (Jorge is believed to have been knocked down by the jet blast while trying to climb into the other wheel well, and to have been put in prison in Cuba.)

Doctors said later that my condition was comparable to that of a patient undergoing “deep freeze” surgery—a delicate process performed only under carefully controlled conditions. Dr. José María Pajares, who cared for me, called my survival a medical miracle, and, in truth, I feel lucky to be alive. (Editor’s note: Experts cited at the time of Socarras Ramirez’s flight estimated that at an altitude of 29,000 feet and a temperature of 41 degrees below zero—the approximate conditions in the wheel bed that day—a person would be expected to live only a few minutes. An engineer said the chances of not being crushed by the retracting double wheels were “one in a million.”)

A few days after my escape, I was up and around the hospital, play­ing cards with my police guard and reading stacks of letters from all over the world. I especially liked one from a girl in California. “You are a hero,” she wrote, “but not very wise.”

My uncle, who lives in New Jersey, telephoned and invited me to come live with him. The International Rescue Commit­tee arranged my passage and has continued to help me.

I am fine now. I live with my uncle and go to school to learn English. I still hope to study to be an artist. I want to be a good citizen and contribute something to this country, for I love it here. You can smell freedom in the air.

I often think of my friend Jorge. We both knew the risk we were tak­ing and that we might be killed in our attempt to escape Cuba. But it seemed worth the chance. Even knowing the risks, I would try to escape again if I had to.

***

Armando Socarras Ramirez is now 69 and lives in Virginia. He retired from the transportation industry. He and his wife have four children and 12 grandchildren.

This story originally appeared in the January 1970 issue of Reader’s Digest.

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The post How I Escaped from Cuba in 1969 in the Wheel Well of a Jet appeared first on Reader's Digest.

We think of kids playing video games as being in a sort of solitary confinement, sequestered in their darkened bedrooms. In truth, they are usually communicating with other gamers, via audio or text, about the action on the screen. And sometimes the chatter veers from the world of fantasy to real life.

That’s what happened to 14-year-old Reilly Howard from East Hampton, Connecticut, last October. While playing Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, he noticed that an online friend, a 13-year-old from Florida, was not his normal effusive self. Reilly’s hunch was confirmed when the friend messaged him, “Yo, we need to talk.” Reilly immediately called him.

“He starts to open up about what’s going on in his life: ‘I have nothing to live for; I’m going to kill myself,’ ” Reilly told nbcconnecticut.com. “He couldn’t even talk, he was crying so much.” Unable to verbally convey his anguish, his friend typed out, “Tonight is going to be the night.”

Suicide is a lot to throw at a high school kid, but Reilly, a sophomore at the time, resolved to stay on the line for as long as he was needed.

“I knew he didn’t want to be alone, and I didn’t want him to go,” he told WFSB. “He’s my friend. I didn’t want him to die.”

For two hours, Reilly said everything he could think of to persuade his friend to embrace life. “I just kept reassuring him, ‘You’ve got a lot to live for,’ ” says Reilly. “I said, ‘I’ll see you tomorrow. I’m going to be playing with you tomorrow. You promise, nothing is going to happen tonight.’ ”

About that time, Reilly’s parents came home from dinner. He filled them in, and they contacted Florida police, who tracked down the boy.

The troubled teen is doing well now, thanks to a good friend—one he’d never met in person—who was willing to put down the keyboard and lend an ear. Says Reilly’s mother, Sheila Reilly, “You just have to show up and talk to people. And listen.”

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The post A 14-Year-Old Boy Helped Save Another Boy’s Life After Meeting Him Through a Video Game appeared first on Reader's Digest.

Mark Bertram, 46, lost the tips of two fingers at work in 2018 when his hand became trapped in a fan belt. “It’s life-changing but it’s not life-ending,” he says. “Doing work is harder now. Everything is just a little different.”

After two surgeries and occupational therapy, Bertram decided to make light of his condition by asking Eric Catalano, an auto-finance manager turned tattoo artist, to create fingernail tattoos. The idea made everyone in the studio laugh—until they saw the final result. “The mood changed,” Catalano recalls from his Eternal Ink Tattoo Studio in Hecker, ­Illinois. “Every­thing turned from funny to ‘wow.’”

When Catalano posted a photo of the tattoos, a pair of fingernails that looked so real no one could believe their eyes, he had no idea the image would eventually be viewed by millions of people around the world.

The viral photo pushed Catalano, 40, further into the world of para­medical tattooing. Now people with life-
altering scars come from as far away as Ireland to visit his shop. They enter Eternal Ink looking for the artistic healing they saw online. Using flesh-toned inks and a needle, Catalano transforms his clients’ view of themselves.

Leslie Pollan, 32, a dog breeder in Oxford, Mississippi, was bitten on the face by a puppy in 2014. She underwent countless surgeries to correct a scar on her lip.

“Plastic surgery gave me no hope,” she says. “So I looked for other options.” She ultimately traveled six hours for a session with Catalano. He camouflaged Pollan’s lip scar, giving her back a piece of her confidence. “You don’t understand until you’ve been through it,” Pollan says. “It made me have a different outlook on life.”

Using tattoos to blend in rather than stand out is a relatively new field, but it is growing, thanks in part to interest in cosmetic and plastic surgery. In fact, Americans spent more than $16.5 billion on cosmetic procedures in 2018. After tummy tucks, breast augmentations, and other procedures, some patients want to cover the scars that are a product of such operations.

Though he is now known for his talent with intricate fingernails, Catalano uses the techniques he picked up years ago while helping breast cancer survivors who wanted tattoos of ­areolas—the darker areas around the nipples—after having mastectomies. Those tattoos are among the most common paramedical requests. His grandmother had breast cancer, and her battle with the disease is one reason Catalano is so dedicated to helping those with the diagnosis.

“Cancer took away a part of my body I can never get back,” says Sarah Penberthy, a breast cancer survivor who came from Festus, Missouri, to receive areola tattoos. “I felt like I wasn’t even human.” Penberthy, 40, says she was grateful for her life but felt incomplete until Catalano stepped in. He tattooed nipples and a creative design of a ship’s anchor on her chest, with the words I REFUSE TO SINK.

Catalano, who inks traditional tattoos out of the studio he established more than ten years ago, performs up to eight reconstructive tattoos each “Wellness Wednesday,” drawing in nail beds on finger amputees, mocking up belly buttons after tummy tucks, and more. While he charges $100 per regular tattoo, he doesn’t charge for paramedical tattoos: A ­GoFundMe page established last year brought in more than $16,000, allowing Catalano to donate his work.

“Financially, it doesn’t make sense,” Catalano says. “But every time I see that emotion from my customers, I’m 100 percent sure this is something that I can’t stop doing.”

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The post This Tattoo Artist Helps People with Scars Love Their Body Again appeared first on Reader's Digest.

For a week, the environment grew hostile. The promotion I was promised months in advance after my 90-day trial period was denied. No one on the team spoke of the incident or to me. The strongest feeling I had was shame—I was embarrassed about the way I was treated. I did not retaliate. I simply packed my things and left Ohio for New York. It would be years before I could articulate the trauma of that experience.

Hindsight is 20/20 and I now know that I am not alone. These incidents of Black people experiencing racism at their workplaces happen all the time and they are not isolated. Here is what other Black professionals, who like me were also the only Black people in their offices, wish they could have told their colleagues.

Touching hair or remarking on a specific appearance? Please don’t

“I have had people come up and touch my hair out of nowhere,” says Diane, a marketing and law professional who has been freelancing in the adventure travel sector. In a professional environment, remarking on someone’s looks is highly inappropriate and the problem is exacerbated when you are the only Black person on the team. This is especially the case in the outdoor/adventure sector that has historically lacked diversity.

For Diane, traveling and broadening your perspective is one antidote for ignorant behavior. “Go see the world, insert yourself into the narrative of someone who is different from you, learn, and absorb what people are saying and try to have a willingness to understand,” Diane says. “Get out of this box of comfort and stability and travel to see how vast this world is.” If you can’t travel, open yourself up to movies, TV shows, and books about different cultures that expand your perspective. Then, rather than focusing on someone’s appearance because they wear their hair differently than you, try to get to know them. Find ways to connect that are not centered around the tokenization of the only Black person in your vicinity; this will surely shift your lens and lead to more fruitful interactions. You can start by reading these 15 essential books for understanding race in America.

Be more intentional with inclusivity

Bianca recently found herself on a distressing Zoom call on with her colleagues. ” I’m a permalancer, but I was booked only one day that week and it was Juneteeth,” she recalls. “No one acknowledged the day; the insensitivity hit me hard.” (Juneteenth is a widely celebrated holiday that took on a more poignant meaning this year after George Floyd was killed sparking major protests around the United States.) Then, on the same day, her superiors asked her to consult—for free—on their Black Lives Matter social media messaging, she says.

Bianca’s experience highlights the need for companies to foster a sense of belonging for their Black employees and it speaks to the problems that this oversight creates. It is not appropriate to ask a Black employee to consult on BLM especially when you are not acknowledging the grief that they are experiencing. Black people are often put in these positions which come with an emotional toll. White colleagues and leaders must be cognizant of the Black experience in light of this challenging time of social unrest. Still, it is even more crucial to put forth intentional and well-planned efforts to alleviate such hurtful incidents. Companies and organizations have been devising their own diversity and inclusion statements but none of that matters if it is not extended to Black employees. A commitment to social justice cannot take shape in a memo. Instead, it must be practiced and developed. It should be implemented in daily agendas so professionals like Bianca do not have to shoulder the burden of ineffective leadership.

Don’t buy into stereotypes

“Don’t think you know the extent of my capabilities based on where I am from when I show up,” Matt, a Wildlife Biologist in the Southwest, says. “My field of study is incredibly White; we network a lot and share our findings on projects. It is hard to establish that professional rapport when assumptions and unfounded stereotypes get in the way,” he continues. These stereotypes have plagued Black people for a long time, including assumptions that all Black people are “urban,” that they only listen to certain kinds of music, or worse, that they’re not educated. “When you base your perception on someone’s physical appearance, you are not respecting the aptitude, the skill, and the many gifts this person can bring to the team,” Matt says. It also hinders connection and professional development because it creates an environment where Black people feel othered. The isolation that comes with being othered is not conducive to a healthy work environment.

A shifting paradigm

When I evaluate my career today, I can see how my earlier experiences were a catalyst for my pursuing equity work. While I do not perceive my silence as weakness during that fateful day at the parking lot, if I were to see my former employer today, I would tell him that the violent tone coupled with the blatant disrespect he had for me further divided the humanity in which we all share. Moreover, refugees and immigrants are not less than anyone—they are whole people with dreams, intellect, insight, and unparalleled resilience. It is unfortunate that this man, at the time in his 70s, who had a biracial granddaughter, had lived all his life under the grips of White privilege and comfortable misogyny. And yes, he does fall under the problematic “old White man” box, but it is not enough to “cancel” old White men. I am more interested in disrupting the system that continues to amplify and multiply these perspectives; that is the paradigm that needs to be shifted as inevitably we cannot condone a new breed of the same justification for violent ignorance.

Next, read on to find out why one Black woman thinks you should stop saying, “I don’t see color.”

For more on this important issue, see our guide to the Fight Against Racism.

Editor’s note: The opinions here belong to the author. To submit your own idea for an essay, email letters@rd.com.

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The post I’m the Only Black Person in My Office, Here’s What I Wish My Coworkers Knew appeared first on Reader's Digest.

People often ask me how I did it. After I left New York City in 2006 to move to Buenos Aires, I spent the next 13 years living abroad and traveling on multiple continents—South America, Australia, Asia, Africa, and Europe—without winning the lottery or scoring a massive inheritance. Here’s my secret (well, one of them): It’s all in the planning. The more you know about traveling on a budget, the more you can do. On my first night in Tel Aviv in 2013, when a bartender presented me with a $15 bill for a beer, I thought he was joking. He wasn’t. I wrote a mental note to myself: Always Google “How expensive is [insert city name here]” before hitting the road to any destination to avoid moments like that one. (In comparison, in Cape Town and Belgrade, Serbia, that same bottle of beer would have set me back less than $2.)
Thankfully, I knew enough about traveling cheaply to not let the nearly six weeks I spent in Israel break my bank account, and I incorporated that knowledge into my plan after I left my editing job in Sydney in 2017 and hit the road. After several months hanging out in Bangkok and touring India, I headed to Europe, where I spent the next 15 months country-hopping before eventually returning home to the United States. Here are some tricks of travel that should help you keep the price of adventure a bit more manageable. They’ll definitely come in handy when you plan your next vacation, perhaps to one of these must-visit places that travel agents highly recommend.

Take the roads less traveled

Everybody wants to head to London, or Paris, or Rome, and the hospitality industries in those cities know it. They jack up the price of everything from accommodations to a glass of wine to reflect the high demand for location, location, location. The result: One night in Bangkok will cost a lot less than a night to remember in Florence. I learned this fact of travel while spending more than a decade living in cities in countries with developing economies—Buenos Aires, Cape Town, and, yes, Bangkok—and living like a prince at pauper-friendly prices.

When I toured Europe for those 15 months, I focused mostly on countries in the Balkans and the former Soviet bloc that most people don’t flock to: Serbia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro, North Macedonia, Albania, Romania, Bulgaria, Ukraine, Moldova. That cut my cost of living expenses in half. Greece, Turkey, and Croatia were a tad pricier but worth the cost of admission. In Belgrade and Kiev (Ukraine), I ate some of my yummiest meals on the road and spent no more than $10 in one day on food. More on how I did that later.

Stay for more than a few days

You can’t truly get to know and appreciate a place in just two or three days. You need at least a week to begin to feel at home, and if you take your vacation days in bulk, you can afford to spend more time soaking up local cultures and saving money. Many hotels and Airbnb rentals offer heavily discounted rates when you stay for a week or more. I’ve had as much as a third slashed off apartment rentals in certain cities because I stayed for seven nights instead of two. Also, if you’re going to be paying an Airbnb cleaning fee, you might as well stick around long enough to make it worth the extra expense; some renters even waive that fee for longer stays. Here are the new post-coronavirus safety protocols adopted by hotels and Airbnbs.

Choose an Airbnb over a hotel

A night or two in a hotel here and there is good for a little bit of all-inclusive pampering, but the trick to keeping accommodation rates down is to think Airbnb. I had an unofficial rule while touring around the Balkans and Eastern Europe that I wouldn’t spend more than $250 a week for an apartment, whether I found it on Airbnb, Vrbo, Agoda, or Booking.com (the latter two specialize in hotels but have great apartment options, too). Aside from in a few hot-ticket cities like Istanbul and Prague, I usually got away with spending between $150 and $200 a week for a one-bedroom pad. And keep in mind that my standards are high—lots of natural sunlight, hardwood floors, a glass shower stall in the bathroom in lieu of a shower curtain—and I demand spotlessness. Although you forfeit four- and five-star hotel staples like a gym, a pool, and a concierge, you avoid having to pay up for extras like Wi-Fi and you get to save money by eating in. You’ll definitely want to check out these helpful tips for renting an Airbnb in the age of coronavirus.

Live slightly off-center

It’s perfectly normal to want to stay in the center of everything, but in most cities, you’ll pay for it. Budapest, where I was able to find spacious and spotless rentals for under $30 a night, was a rare exception. In most cities, it pays to find a rental one or two neighborhoods outside of ground zero for tourists but close enough to get there on foot or by public transportation. In Lviv (Ukraine) and Prague, this made a $50 to $100 difference in weekly rates. Cities like Belgrade and Prague are perfect for off-center stays because they have plenty of beautiful, bustling areas removed from the hot tourism spots. I spent most of my three months in Belgrade in Dorćol, and the bulk of my three on-off months in Prague unfolded in Anděl and Vinohrady. Not only do accommodation prices drop significantly off-center, but so do the price of goods and services. If you travel to Prague, though, remember to be extra careful with your wallet.

Walk, don’t ride

Ubers are considerably less costly in places like India, where you can travel for an hour by car and pay less than $3, and taxis in Bangkok are both plentiful and dirt cheap. But I’d recommend them only when going far distances or commuting in wet or excruciatingly hot weather. Walking not only offers exercise and views of the city you might otherwise miss, but it’s free. If time is of the essence, or if you’re in cities like Berlin or Budapest, where points of interest are too far apart for walking, get a weekly public transportation card and enjoy the city like you live in it. If you do hop in a car, make sure to watch out for these 10 Uber scams.

Ride, don’t fly

There’s minimal rail service in the Balkans, and for those accustomed to premium train travel, riding the rails in places like Thailand and India might be daunting, especially when it comes to dealing with agents who don’t speak a word of English. I did my country-hopping around the Balkans exclusively by bus and saved myself hundreds of dollars I otherwise would have spent flying. Plus, I got to see so much more of the jagged, mountainous countryside by land than I would have by air. If you go to websites like Rome2rio and GetByBus, you can score a bus ticket from Belgrade to Sarajevo (an eight-hour drive) for $14 to $20 and not have to worry about luggage limitations and dealing with security.

A warning: Going through customs by land can take a bit longer than it does at the airport, but the breathtaking views you get en route from city to city by car are usually more than worth the extra time. Before you start crossing borders, brush up on the things you should never do in foreign countries.

Eat in

In many countries around the world (India being a frustrating exception), you won’t have to worry about sales tax and tips on top of menu prices, but eating out for every meal still can wreak havoc on your budget. It’s possible to get pretty much everything you need to eat well in a supermarket, and if you’re staying in an apartment rental, you’ll have a kitchen where you can store and prepare it.

Naturally, the price tag for groceries will vary from country to country. They were cheapest for me in Belgrade, Kiev, and Prague, where I had my grocery shopping down to a science (pastries for breakfast, veggies and chicken for lunch and dinner), and on days when I didn’t eat out, I usually spent between $5 and $10 on food. Sometimes I even splurged on a bottle of red wine for a couple of bucks at IDEA in Belgrade, or, at the EKO Market across the street from my Airbnb in Kiev, a large take-away cheese pizza prepared in an on-site wood-burning oven for 60 Ukranian hryvnia ($2). Billa, Carrefour, Edeka, Lidl, Spar, and Tesco are all dependable chains that can be found throughout Europe that, while not necessarily as supersized as Whole Foods, offer prices that would make Trader Joe’s fans more than happy. Believe it or not, supermarkets and grocery stores are not interchangeable. Here’s how to tell the difference.

Go dry(ish) or go home

It pays to know how to have a good time sober. Unless you end up in places where getting toasted in bars and clubs will barely cost a thing (Belgrade, Cape Town, and Buenos Aires in the ’00s), consider doing your drinking at home (those under-$5 bottles of wine I’ve found in supermarkets everywhere from Buenos Aires to Sydney will come in really handy there) or not at all.

If you prefer social drinking and teetotaling isn’t your style, the key is to head to pubs and clubs that cater to students who are less flush with cash. Just don’t get so blitzed that you start throwing money around. Beer and wine, by the way, are the best options to avoid weak, expensive cocktails and low-quality local booze. Happy hours are also a good idea because you’ll get to drink with the grown-ups at discounted prices, and you’ll be on your way home before things get out of hand. Another thing to consider: As long as COVID-19 continues to be a global issue, bars are one of the riskiest places for transmission, so the safest spot to spend happy hour might be at home.

Use local SIM cards or one that covers an entire region

One of the most surprising things about many countries in Europe and Asia is how easy it is to get a local phone connection with a cheap SIM card. You can just pop it into your phone instead of racking up roaming fees or paying for an international plan. In Albania, I bought a Vodafone SIM card and a 30-day 4G plan upon arrival for about 15 euros ($17). It gave me 3,000 national minutes, 500 national SMS, and 5GB of data, and I still thought that was expensive. I was so spoiled by my experience in Serbia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Montenegro, where I bought commensurate monthly plans for nearly half that price, that paying 15 euros felt like being ripped off.

Even better but somewhat pricier are international SIM cards that cover entire geographical areas, like the European Union, so you don’t have to worry about getting a new SIM card every time you cross a border. (Make sure you can recharge online using an international credit card.) These will come in especially handy when you arrive in Budapest from Prague and want to take an Uber to your rental instead of a taxi. Bangkok aside, I’ve found it’s hard not to get ripped off when catching a taxi at a bus station, train station, or airport. Drivers tend to bump up the price and add on random extras, so a phone with service will help you avoid haggling drama.

Bring euros

ATM withdrawal fees can add up pretty quickly, and even if you have a travel ATM/credit card from your bank that doesn’t charge foreign exchange fees, getting cash in each country still can leave you with a lot of useless currency once you head to your next destination. It’s a smart idea to look for an ATM that releases euros and withdraw enough to last you several weeks. Then you can exchange 20 euros at a time and keep the rest in a safe place, preferably one with a lock on it. Be sure to check the exchange rate, and always try to trade at banks. They generally offer lower rates than the independent exchange places, as I learned from a very helpful local in Dubrovnik, Croatia. These other currency exchange tips will help to prevent you from spending more money than you have.

Forget guided city tours—just wander

If you’re a guided tour kind of person, use your next vacation as an opportunity to try the DIY approach. Google is your friend, and as Zac Efron revealed on his new Netflix travelogue series Down to Earth with Zac Efron, it can tell you a lot more than most guides. When I was in a particularly touristy mood, I’d use the Internet to compile a list of must-see places, read up on all of them, and then visit them on my own. You’ll not only save money, but you’ll also learn more than you probably would on a tour, and you can do it all at your own pace. While you’re waiting for your next vacation to begin, take a few virtual tours of the world’s greatest landmarks online.

Skip some “must-see” attractions and “must-do” activities that aren’t free

Everyone has different tastes, so don’t think you have to see everything people on the Internet say you do. Many are overpriced and overrated tourist traps. I still can’t believe adults who want to see the Crown Jewels up close have to pay 25 pounds ($32) just to get inside the Tower of London, where they’re housed. Thankfully, you can enjoy some attractions for free. The Eiffel Tower, for one, looks best at a distance, and most churches in Europe don’t charge an entrance fee, an arrangement that is particularly welcome in the Balkan countries, where the Orthodox cathedrals are architectural marvels, inside and out. After seeing Gothic architecture in Romania, I found the outside view of Dracula’s Castle in Bran sufficiently satisfying and didn’t feel compelled to wait several hours in line for the privilege of paying the $10 adult fee to go inside.

Sometimes, however, the extra cost is worth it. Tourist companies in Sarajevo have vans that will take you from one breathtaking aerial view to another. For $20, it beats climbing uphill on foot in the summer sun or winter chill. Like I said, everyone has different tastes, but I wouldn’t recommend traveling all the way to India and missing the Taj Mahal. During the five weeks I spent touring the country in 2017, it may have been the best $15 I spent. Taj Mahal is one of the awe-inspiring UNESCO World Heritage sites everyone needs to visit.

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The post How I Visited 20 Countries in One Year for $250 a Week appeared first on Reader's Digest.

We spoke to Kat Pham, a 20-year-old student from Vietnam, who is entering her senior year at Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania for her perspective.

In March when the coronavirus started to hit Europe and the United States, I was studying in France in a semester study abroad program. Then, my in-person classes were canceled in mid-March and I had to return to the United States. Not only did I have to fly back to campus quickly, which was stressful in and of itself, but I had to self-quarantine for two weeks when I arrived back on campus. Now, I’m living on campus in an apartment assigned to me by my school.

I’m from Hanoi, Vietnam—and that city is my entire life, but at this moment I’m living in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, where I attend Dickinson College. I’m the only person in my family, including my parents and my siblings, who is not in Hanoi right now. I first came to the United States in 2017 to attend college.

A few weeks after my return to campus, I hit rock bottom, uncertain of what my future looked like. I was mainly afraid of three things: contracting the virus, being unable to find a job in the United States, and being unable to go home after graduating in spring 2021.

International students are so often overlooked

When ICE instituted its policy, I felt very hopeless because you can have lobbyists for almost anything related to Americans’ life, but international students are apparently not related to Americans’ life, so who is going to stand up for us? For days, I felt like we were being bullied defenselessly and I was extremely happy that Harvard and MIT stood up with a legal case. However, now as the discussion on the policy by ICE dies down, once again international students will become anonymous and head back to the casual struggle of keeping themselves physically, financially, and mentally in shape without any notice from the society at large.

When you look into the discussion on whether a university should be open for in-person classes in the fall—or not—you hardly see any mention of international students who cannot go home, who cannot work outside of their school, who most likely have no relatives in the United States, who still have to pay rent and buy food with the little to no money that they have, who live in fear every day because if they contract the virus, they may not be treated well because of not having the proper insurance. The truth is that international students are often not considered as a core component of U.S. society. We are “international,” not American, so society doesn’t have to be responsible for us even though we pay taxes just like every American.

Even before the COVID-19 pandemic, international students have suffered from misleading media portraits. We suffer from racist stereotypes on social media by our peers; people think that we are the rich kids; people think that we are trying to stay in the United States and take jobs away from young Americans. We are always “them” to the general American population, never “one of us.” I always think that the media are the voices of people, and if the media doesn’t understand us, our backgrounds, circumstances, and our true selves, the rest of the world will get it wrong too. Inspired to help? Start with these 14 ways you can fight racism every day.

I fear that my job prospects as an international student look dim

To be honest, I have no idea what to plan after graduation. Before COVID-19, my initial plan for the future was to find a job in the field of actuarial sciences (which I’m pursuing) in the United States within the 12 months duration of my Optional Practical Training, then to move back to Vietnam to work permanently and be with my family. Even then, I was not certain about this plan either because, to be frank, I fear that the majority of companies will eliminate my application just because I’m not a U.S. citizen. I was traumatized by a phone interview last October which ended within three minutes when the HR person learned that I’m not a U.S. citizen.

With the rising unemployment rate and an increasing sentiment of xenophobia in the United States, I see little chance of my finding a job upon graduation. I was very fortunate that I got my internship offer for this summer in November last year. My internship was supposed to be in Charlotte, South Carolina, but it transitioned to a remote position. I’m grateful they didn’t cancel it outright.

I’m scared I won’t get to go back home

Vietnam is still banning visitors from the United States; as long as the United States remains the pandemic epicenter—which it may still be upon my graduation next spring—I may not be able to go home. There aren’t any commercial flights to Vietnam. I have to wait for the next plane that Vietnam sends to rescue its citizens. The cost is around $1,000 one way; typically, you get a roundtrip flight for that price—I don’t currently have the money for that. Plus, it’s risky to travel so far since the flights home only go from big airports like Washington Dulles and New York City’s JFK.

With things changing so rapidly, I’ve decided the best solution is to have no plan and be flexible—there is no point in having a plan when situations can change dramatically and your plan no longer make sense in the new situation. I try not to be stressed as much as possible, but I don’t know whether I can keep it up until my graduation approaches next May.

Next, read on to find out what colleges could look like when they reopen.

Editor’s note: The opinions here belong to the author. To submit your own idea for an essay, email letters@rd.com.

For more on this developing situation, including how life might be different post-lockdown, see our comprehensive Coronavirus Guide.

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The post I’m an International Student at Dickinson College—Now I’m Anxious About My Future appeared first on Reader's Digest.

Families fight–that’s just what they do. Usually, when a family has a rift within it, it’s kept within the home and dealt with internally. That is, of course, only when the family isn’t famous. For those in the public eye, every little problem is broadcast to the world.

While all families have a few skeletons in the closet (and sometimes you only learn unbelievable family secrets after someone dies), famous families seem to have more than their fair share. For these famous female siblings, their dirty laundry was flaunted for the whole world. No one can drive you crazy like family!

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“I was attacked by a tiger shark in late October 1997. It was near my home on the island of Kauai—a typical fall morning with friends. The waves were really good, so nothing was stopping us.” That is until a large shark came right up under Mike and sank his teeth into Mike’s lower leg. There’d been no splashing, no noise, no dorsal fin, and Mike felt no pain, only immense pressure on his lower body.

As he tried to pry himself free, the shark bit down harder, shaking its head back and forth and tossing Mike around like a rag doll. Mike followed his instinct: He punched the shark in the face, again and again (which happens to be what the experts recommend) until the shark released him. As Mike swam back into shore, he felt his lower right leg spasming; when he looked down, he realized it was gone. The shark had bit his lower leg off. Mike’s friends rushed to his aid, and one of them fashioned a tourniquet out of the leash from his board. The doctors later told Mike that’s probably what kept him alive during the drive to the hospital.

It was another day before the “fog” lifted, at which point Mike opened his eyes and realized he was in the hospital—a below-the-knee amputee. For the next few bedridden weeks, Mike spent time with his family, researched prosthetics, and considered the future.

As soon as Mike was given the OK by his doctors, he did what many of us might consider unthinkable: he started riding the waves again. In fact, his first time back was near the site of his attack. But Mike was unshaken. Instead, he was curious—why was he attacked? “Was it because of the tides? The phase of the moon?” Mike also recalled that the morning of the attack the water had a fishy smell. Was that what attracted the shark? Find out 13 more things about shark attacks you didn’t know.

His curiosity led him to research sharks, and while he never figured out why he became a target, Mike did learn something that would change his life: Humans are far more dangerous to sharks than the other way around, Mike tells Reader’s Digest. “I watched a documentary called Sharkwater, and I learned about the demand for shark fin soup and the fact that 70 million sharks a year are killed for their fins alone.”

His unique situation as a shark survivor empowered him to give sharks a voice, Mike says. He began working with the Hawaii state legislature to help pass a ban on shark-derived products. “I partnered with other like-minded shark attack survivors and marine biologists, and we headed to Washington to urge senators to create a nationwide bill protecting sharks. I was also fortunate to speak to United Nations about the importance of shark sanctuaries.”

After the attack, Mike also discovered how much he loved photography, and it has become his profession. He also likes using his photos to spread the message about what’s happening to sharks and why it matters. “Sharks have survived mass extinction when everything else on earth was wiped away. They’re here on earth for a very important reason, holding together the web of biodiversity, and without them, our seas cannot survive.”

Through social media (here’s his phenomenal Instagram account), Mike found a platform to tell his stories, including debunking the myth that all sharks are mindless killers. Now, check out these fascinating and super-reassuring facts about sharks we bet you never knew.

8 Reasons Sharks Are So Misunderstood

The Most Shark-Infested Waters in the World

9 of the Weirdest, Wildest Sharks in the World

The post Here’s How I Survived a Shark Attack appeared first on Reader's Digest.

It’s easy to shrug off those miraculous stories about people who were effectively dead and then returned to life. But sometimes, this really does happen, and it’s not a hoax but is in fact reality! Sometimes modern medicine proves its worth; other times the shocking recovery amazes even the doctors. Here are some incredible-but-true stories of people who were, for all intents and purposes, dead—until they weren’t. These stories of people who froze to death and came back to life are equally incredible.

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Cradling his hard hat and bag of sandwiches, Mario Cockrell sprinted for the elevator and shoved his way among the miners jammed inside. Many of them grumbled at him: “Late again!” The doors slammed shut, signal bells rang, and the cramped, two-level cage began a 16-minute, mile-long descent into the President Steyn gold mine in Welkom, South Africa. It was 8:15 p.m. on March 23, 1993.

Known as the “Mary Ann,” the passenger elevator carried 21 men this trip, its bare aluminum interior lit only by their cap lamps. For nearly ten minutes the ride went smoothly. Then, suddenly, the elevator cage lurched and stopped dead.

Rassie Erasmus, the Mary Ann’s silver-haired attendant, was unworried. “Hold still,” Mario heard him say. “She’ll move in a minute.”

Mario wasn’t so sure. He heard a strange slapping sound from the darkness overhead. Then it hit him. Great coils of heavy steel-wire rope were piling up on the elevator roof. The huge winch that had been lowering the cage was still running!

We’re in trouble, thought Mario. Something had blocked the cage’s descent, and whatever had snagged it could give way at any moment. The cable heaping on the roof, even a vibration from the men inside, could nudge the 2.4-ton cage into free fall. The slack wire would snap as it was jerked tight. Nothing then would stop them from plunging 2,000 feet to the bottom—the height of two Eiffel Towers.

Mario shouldered Rassie aside to reach the door. “We’ve got to get out,” he said.

***

From boyhood, Mario Cockrell, one of 11 children, had learned to fend for himself. His father had died when Mario was 12. During his teens, he had hunted in the Kalahari Desert with friends among the Bushmen, living off the land with a homemade bow and arrows.

As a young man, Mario had been an amateur boxer and a physical trainer with the South African army, before settling down with his Belgian wife, Connie, and hiring on at the mine. Now 31, he was saving for his dream: a couple of trucks to run as a small business, and a few acres of land for Connie and their sons, three-year-old Etienne and five-month-old Mario, Jr.

Mario forced open the elevator door and looked out. His cap lamp shone on a sheer concrete wall plunging almost a half-mile straight down. Between him and the wall lay a five-foot-wide abyss. To his right, the wall cornered and ran along the elevator’s side. To his left was empty space—a series of six adjoining shafts used by other elevators.

By luck, the Mary Ann had stopped exactly level with a horizontal reinforcement beam that provided an 18-inch-wide ledge. Stepping gingerly onto this beam with his back to the abyss, Mario shuffled halfway around the elevator, kicking rubble over the edge but hearing nothing hit bottom. Leaning on the rear of the elevator, still with a five-foot-wide chasm at his back, he spied a cluster of vertical pipes strapped to the outside of the beam.

Below him, the shaft seemed to recede into infinity. Every ten feet, it was ringed by another set of cross-beams. And every 200 feet, he could see a platform where a brightly lit tunnel led into a working stope of the mine. Because of the nightshift change, all the tunnels were now deserted.

Then Mario felt a trembling that grew until the whole framework of girders hummed. Falling stones and dust sprayed his face as he peered upward. Another car was coming!

The whooshing sound, like a distant train, grew louder and louder. It was the No. 6 cage, plummeting down the shaft just left of the Mary Ann, carrying tons of gravel for mixing cement. Now less than half a mile above, it would speed past in under 60 seconds. As it did, Mario realized, it would catch the loops of cable spilling off the Mary Ann’s roof and drag the cage and men into the void. God help us! he prayed.

Just 30 feet below the stranded cage, Mario saw the station for “37 level”—3,700 feet beneath the surface. It would have a telephone and emergency button for halting all cars in the shaft. I’ve got to get to it, Mario thought. But how?

His eye fell on the cluster of vertical pipes. Most were too bulky to grip. Then he noticed a galvanized-steel water pipe, barely an inch in diameter and encrusted with dried mud. There was no time to descend the pipe hand over hand. He grasped it and stepped off the ledge. Then he relaxed his grip.

For an instant, Mario fell free. He squeezed the pipe again to brake himself, the rough surface ripping the skin off his palms. Now halfway between crossbeams, he felt the pipe begin to bend away from the wall. He let himself drop to where the pipe was more secure.

At last, his boots hit the crossbeam level with the station. But he was still five feet out from the platform. Between him and safety was the yawning shaft. He took a leaping stride across it, grabbing a gutter pipe on the other side to haul himself forward. As he did, the gutter came away in his hands.

For a split second, Mario teetered in space. With a desperate heave he got his right foot barely onto the lip of the platform, straddling the dark gap. Then he lunged frantically, hooked his fingertips into the platform gate and pulled his other leg across. He could hear his fellow miners’ shouts of fear as Cage 6 roared closer.

The emergency alarm should have been in a red box bolted to the rock wall. Where was it? With the mind-numbing roar of the big cage was nearly on top of him, he saw the alarm, obscured under a coating of dust.

At that instant, Cage 6 whooshed past the Mary Ann, snagging its cable and filling the shaft with dust, sparks, and thunder. Leaping to the red box, Mario smashed his fist through the glass and punched the button.

There was a great squealing sound as Cage 6 ground to a halt 70 feet below. Loops of the Mary Ann’s cable were hooked beneath it. A few more feet would have meant catastrophe.

With the telephone, Mario reached the elevator supervisor. “Keep the brakes on! Move nothing!” he shouted.

In the cage above, men were praying and weeping. “We’re going to die!” one cried. As the dust cleared, Rassie Erasmus glanced down and was stunned to see Mario climbing back toward them, hand over hand.

***

When Mario reached the men, he found them round-eyed with fear. “It’s all right,” he said. “Everything’s stopped. You can come down now.” Not one dared move.

During his army service, Mario had always led by example. “Pass me my bag,” he said now, adopting an angry tone. The frightened men passed his sandwich bag out of the Mary Ann. “Look at what I’m doing and just follow.”

With the bag hooked over one shoulder, he started to lower himself down the pipe. But as the beam of his lamp played underneath the Mary Ann, he saw something that made his blood run cold.

Somehow, the Mary Ann’s vertical guide rails had become twisted, throwing it out of alignment. This had caused a corner of the elevator to catch on a bracket clamped to a girder. The weight of the elevator and its men was now resting on barely an inch of thin metal and a couple of screws. If I don’t get those men down, they’ll die, Mario thought. Help me, God!

Climbing back to their level, Mario told them, “This thing’s going to drop at any second. Don’t touch it, just hold your breath and come down the pipe with me.”

Nobody moved.

Mario picked out the smallest miner, a man of about 130 pounds. Holding the pipe with one hand, he reached out with the other, grasped the front of the man’s jacket and jerked him toward him. The miner screamed and tried to cling to the crossbeam. But Mario was not a man to be disobeyed. He punched the miner in the ribs.

As the miner slumped, Mario seized the man’s jacket again and pulled him off the ledge. As if curling a barbell, he held the miner in midair so their faces were level.

“You see?” he said curtly. “I can hold you with one hand. Trust me.”

The man threw his arms around Mario’s neck but, terrified, would not hold on to the pipe. Mario loosened his own grip for a split second so they’d fall a short distance. Jolted, the man grabbed the pipe. With Mario cradling him, they inched lower. Watching in horror, the men on the crowded ledge above were sure the flimsy pipe would break.

Finally, Mario and the miner reached the crossbeam at level 37. Now Mario had to figure out how to make the five-foot leap to the station platform. The young miner in his arms was in no condition to jump for it.

Leaving the man standing on the crossbeam, clinging to the pipe, Mario stepped out into space once more. At their utmost stretch, his legs just straddled the gap. He twisted his powerful body around and gripped the man’s jacket. “Let go of the pipe exactly when I say!”

The man nodded fearfully.

“Let go!” Mario bellowed. The man obeyed, and Mario swung him across the gap, throwing him onto the platform and using the momentum to fling himself after.

Mario dusted off his bleeding hands, and, hand over hand, pulled himself back up the pipe.

***

Next to be brought down was Mario’s stocky assistant, Jan Buys. “Don’t look down!” Mario instructed. They descended the pipe to the crossbeam. But Jan’s legs were too short to span the gap to the platform, and he was too heavy to lift. Now what?

In his army years, Mario had often performed an old barroom trick he learned from a book by Houdini. With shoulders on one chair and heels on another, he tensed his body into a bridge and challenged anyone to stand on his belly. It always won him a beer. Now he would do the same—but with a difference.

Standing on the crossbeam, he let himself fall forward, his hands grabbing the end of the platform. Bracing himself by holding a piece of ironwork, he rolled to face upward. With shoulders on the lip of the platform, heels on the beam and muscles locked, Mario became a human girder.

“OK,” he told Jan, “come across on your hands and knees.”

“I can’t—you’ll never hold me.”

“Yes, I will. Believe in me.”

Trembling, Jan crouched and grabbed Mario around the knees. Slowly at first, then rushing, Jan scrambled across.

Seeing the two men reach safety made the others more confident. Aaron Koetse came down the pipe sitting on Mario’s shoulders. Thabo Phatsoane, a tall, athletic 34-year-old, took his own weight on trembling arms while Mario guided his feet. With many hands reaching out from the platform, they had no trouble crossing the gap.

***

Mario had escorted 13 men to safety and climbed 16 times up and down a pipe that was slippery with blood from his hands. After two more trips, his arms trembled uncontrollably, and his shredded palms burned as though he were holding hot coals. But when he rested to catch his breath, the men in the tottering cage above pleaded, “Don’t stop!”

“God, give me the strength to save these last few,” Mario prayed. Still gasping, he focused all his will. His arms were charged with strength as he climbed and descended four more times, then went back for the last man—Rassie Erasmus.

Scared stiff, the elderly Rassie grabbed the pipe and forced himself to step on Mario’s shoulders. Bit by bit, they descended. Near the end, Mario’s grip slackened. For the first time, he slipped. But his boots struck the crossbeam, and they were saved.

Now, as Mario again stretched his body across the void, Rassie watched in horror. How could he risk Mario’s life, and his own, by loading his 200 pounds upon his friend’s exhausted body? Even with men reaching for him, it seemed impossible.

But then Rassie read the look of total certainty in Mario’s eyes. He took three brisk steps along Mario’s taut body. A score of hands reached out to seize him and he was over.

There were cheers and tears as Mario was helped up. Shaking, he poured a cup of tea from his thermos for Rassie, who was slumped against a wall. Then he phoned the surface: “We’re all safe.” It was 10 p.m.

Minutes later, a group of mine managers and engineers arrived in another cage. One grabbed Mario’s hand for a hearty shake. Mario winced in agony. When he had punched through the alarm-box glass, he’d cracked a bone in his hand.

It was after midnight when Mario climbed into bed beside Connie, careful not to wake her. Next morning, he cuddled his boys. Only when Connie saw his raw, puffy hands did Mario confess there’d been some trouble at the mine.

Six months later, Mario Cockrell was awarded the South African mining industry’s highest decoration for bravery. But no award speaks louder than the story miners tell, of the tough, quiet man who saved 20 lives, one by one, trip by trip, hand over broken hand.

Next, learn about 5 split-second decisions people made that saved their lives.

Conductor Saves Baby from Oncoming Train

Six Men Venture Into a Cave—Four Come Out

Three Explorers Trapped in a Frozen Cave

 

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