Global News Podcast - The Happy Pod: The surgeon who left his wedding to save a life

Episode Date: July 5, 2025

A surgeon who left his wedding to save a life says it's inspired him to help more people. Also: one man's adventures with a pet goose; a police officer reunited with a baby he rescued; and why we should eat more custard.

This is the HappyPod from the BBC World Service. I'm Debbie Russ and in this edition, the doctor who became a local hero by leaving his own wedding to perform life-saving surgery. Whether I operate on this patient or not, the outcome will affect my life totally in future, so I did whatever I can. Also...

I'm happy because now I have a travel companion. It follows me everywhere and when I sleep at night, it comes to sleep right next to me. ...where a man is walking the length of Vietnam with a goose. The unusual bond between two police officers in the US reunited 25 years after one saved the other as a baby. Plus she tends to go to school with him in the morning, follows him and his friends, sometimes comes home with them, sometimes hangs about for after school. You know they really have embraced her as part of the school community. The cat with a 100% attendance record and a 106 year old man shares his rather unexpected secret to a long life.

We start in Ethiopia with a surgeon who put aside his own wedding celebrations to save someone's life. Dr Brooke Weisha was getting ready for his big day when he received a call about a patient 40 kilometres away at the hospital where he'd begun working as the first surgical specialist just three weeks before. A 40-year-old man needed an urgent operation for a potentially fatal stomach condition. Dr Brooke has been speaking to the Happy Pod's Holly Gibbs about what happened on the day. I became in dilemma and I told my family

that I'm going to operate on this patient and in our culture on the week before and after like that on the time of your wedding, groom as well as the bride are not allowed to go outside of their home because something may happen. They said not to go, but I understand the patient's outcome. It will be grave. So whether I operate on this patient or not, the outcome will affect my life totally in future. So I decided if I am not operating on this patient, I will be blaming myself for my lifetime.

If I try on this patient and even the patient dies, I did whatever I can. And the outcome was so nice and the good thing about this patient was young. It was a nice, nice event for me. What did your colleagues say after they discovered it was your wedding day, the day that you did that surgery? So my colleagues were also being, they were so happy to be participating on this procedure and they were also amazed about this thing and they are happy actually. Could you tell me what was going through your mind when you got that call to say

we need you to come and perform surgery on your wedding day. I had two things on my mind while I was travelling there because it is about 14 kilometres from my wedding town. I had to use public bus. I was praying to make my travels safe. I was praying that the patient to get alive or safe after the surgery, as well as building the procedures. How does it feel to save someone's life? To be honest, I did not think anything about it. I just did my job. I did my job and I was not even considering anything to be to get praised. How was the rest of your wedding day? How was the celebrations? Did you have a good time?

Yeah, we had a good time. It went so nice after that. Even other people after seeing their own social media, they joined us and we celebrated like normal wedding. And how is the patient doing now? I saw him twice on a pull-up clinic and he's doing so nice. He's just like me and you. He's doing his job. He's now back to his job. Has he thanked you?

Oh my God! He's saying, you not saved me, you made my life again. And he's so happy. It gives you like, like you are doing something so good and it will positively affect your whole life. It makes me more eager to do more surgeries on other people too and make people's life safe. So it makes me so happy. What did your family say? They must be really proud. Yeah, they are so proud. People do not know me and they know my father and normally they say, are you Weshassan? They say me like that. Now it has been changed and they say my father, they know me very well now and they say my father, are you Brook's father? We are so

proud of your son, something like that and that makes him so proud and nothing makes me so proud than my father being, my family being proud of me. And if you have an unusual story about your wedding day you'd like to share, do send us an email or a voice note to globalpodcast.bbc.co.uk. To Vietnam now, where one man has been travelling with an unlikely companion. Nguyen Viet Vinh set off from the country's southern tip, aiming to walk the 2,000 kilometres to the most northerly point near the capital, Hanoi, with Donna, his pet goose.

Our reporter in Hanoi, Nga Pham, told me more. They've been travelling for over a year now, but only in the last two months or so, they became the talk of the town, literally, because they passed through an area where the goose decided to have a break. It got really tired. So the owner Nguyen Viet Vinh, but everyone called him Anh Thi, which is a very popular, endearing name for Vietnamese men, they decided in Vietnam. Mr T actually explained how he got the goose. I happened to buy some goose eggs to eat, but one hatched. So now I suddenly have a gosling. It wasn't intentional, but here we are. I think it's fate. He used to be a businessman, I learned,

but he was quite disappointed with the business he was doing. He decided to start a new life. So he quit everything and start traveling. He has a motorbike which actually got broken. Now he's pushing it from the south of Vietnam to the north of Vietnam. And the goose is traveling with him, stepping behind him all the way. She's stepping and not flying. Stepping, yeah. Not flying because it probably doesn't learn how to fly, you know, being

live with a man for so long. The man actually made several pairs of really cute tiny boots for the goose. It broke quite a few pairs, so he kept getting people making boots for the goose. Lots of them are really, really making boots for the goose. Lots of them are really really nice boots and the goose loved it. How fantastic. And how does his feathered friend make him feel? Definitely. I think it's a very good relationship, very good friendship that anyone would love to have. According to Mr. D, he's super happy too.

I'm happy because now I have a travel companion. It follows me everywhere and when I sleep at night, it comes to sleep right next to me. I'd be devastated if the goose weren't with me anymore. I'm quite jealous with him as well because, you know, when you have a loyal friend to accompany you everywhere, he's there for you, he never demands anything from you. He's actually really, really nice a friendship, isn't it? So he's got that friend that he travels with,

who is with him 24 hours a day and who never asks him anything, never causing any trouble. Actually, thanks to the goose, he gets lots of support from the people around, people give him food and give him drinks and he's welcomed everywhere, maybe because of the goose as well. What a fantastic friendship, what a fantastic story. And what's the general reaction? It sounds like it's been really positive. Yes, they love it. I haven't seen any comment from the people that they don't like the story. Everyone said it's really happy for him, it's a new life, it's quite a hardship because walking at the goose pace is actually

quite difficult. It's not that fast. He said that he reduced his normal average speed from 40 kilometres a day down to 20 kilometres. But everyone's happy for him happy, everyone's happy for him. And I think the story will have a happy ending. It certainly sounds like it will. And what's next for the duo? So at the moment, they are near the central Highland, kind of midway. So they still have another 1000 kilometers walk. But slowly they're moving upward up north and they will reach near the border with China you know hopefully by the end of this year there's a long way and a very slow slow movement but yeah I think they'll get there.

I hope they do and our next story is about two European bears who decided to make some mischief one sunny afternoon in Devon in South West England. They'd escaped from a wildlife park. And as the Happy Pods Vanessa Heaney reports, their adventure would have delighted Winnie the Pooh, a fictional lovable bear created by A.A. Milne. He also had a taste for honey. Pooh, do you think it might rain today? Hmm I'm not sure Piglet but I do know that it is a very good day for honey. Isn't every day a good day for honey? Yes but some days are especially honey-ish.

You can feel it in the air, a sort of golden glow. Like a honey forecast? Exactly! Today is a 90% chance of honey with a drizzle of delight. And indeed it was for two cheeky bears, Mish and Lucy. I've travelled up from Kent just to really help with the investigation to find out exactly how Mish and Lucy evaded their enclosure for a period of time and went for a wander into an off-show area where they raided their enrichment and honey stores.

That's Mark Habben, director of zoological operations at Wildwood Trust in South West England. CCTV of the great escape shows the two bears having a marvellous time. This is an animal with the most incredible olfactory sense. There's no hiding honey from a brown bear. The pair got their paws on a week's worth of honey and even snouted out the peanut butter supplies too. Images show them playing and pulling some rope whilst on the run. Meanwhile,

the park went into lockdown and the police were called, but no arrests were made. After 45 minutes, Miesch eventually took himself back to his enclosure. Lucy was lured back with a bell and her favourite foods. After gorging on all that honey, the two bears, like toddlers, had a huge sugar rush, charging around for a few hours, climbing trees and jumping into their pond. So how did these clever bears get out? Well that's what we're trying to establish at the moment. We know that the enclosure hasn't been damaged,

so we're just looking at what means of error could have taken place to allow the two young bears to get out. So what are Meesh and Lucy like? Extremely charismatic, wonderful animals that have really had a significant mark on people's lives since arriving to the Trust. The bears were found abandoned in a snowdrift in Albania. WWF tried to reintroduce them back into the wild, but they were too used to people. So Wildwood, with its long history of rescuing bears, stepped

in to give the young pair a forever home. Now, if you're worrying that the pair have no honey left, no need. The antics of these beautiful 180 kilo creatures have charmed the internet. Members of the public have been donating kilos of honey to replenish the bears' supplies. Poo! Didn't you have a full jar of honey this morning? I did, Piglet. I remember it quite clearly. I even said hello to it. And now it's empty? Yes. It's the strangest thing. I only meant to have a little taste, and then another, and then perhaps just one more for good measure.

Maybe the jar was smaller than it looked. That must be it. A very sneaky jar. Vanessa Heaney reporting with the help of her children Cassia and Ludo and A.A. Milne. and A. A. Milne. Coming up in this podcast, the artists using sounds to reconnect people with the planets and encourage us all to do more to help it. It's just works that are opening up the faculties of listening so it can help us be more attentive and maybe make better choices, I mean, for ourselves and for the world. Now to Indiana in the United States, where a former police officer has discovered the fate of a baby he rescued decades ago. The child had been abandoned in a cardboard

box and was later adopted. Then, unexpectedly, their paths crossed again in a remarkable way. Carla Conte has the story. 25 years ago in South Bend, a police officer was on routine patrol through a quiet neighbourhood when an unexpected call came through. That was one of the strangest calls I think I've ever had. We have a found baby in a box. This is retired Police Lieutenant Gene Eister, who answered the call on December 22, 2000. A newborn baby had been left in the hallway of an apartment block, wrapped in just cardboard

and blankets. The boy was taken to hospital and after making sure he was safe, Gene returned with a small gift. I went back with a teddy bear, just a symbol. Let everyone that walked past know that he was cared about. The baby was put up for adoption and as such records are confidential, Gene Eister spent more than 20 years wondering what had happened to him. Then a fellow officer called him out of the blue, asking if he remembered the baby in the box. And he says, he's sitting next to me. I said, he's what? He says, he's my rookie.

The rookie in question was Matthew Agados Stewart, who had joined the police unaware that the man who had rescued him decades earlier had once worn the same of his only son Nick, who died unexpectedly at the age of 36, just months before the two men reconnected. In his eyes, a chance encounter became something far more meaningful, a new beginning born from an old act of care. Karl O'Quincy, now what does a melting glacier have in common with a speaker covered in feathers hanging from a tree and an archway full of jars of oil? Well, they're all art installations that can be found on a small island in Norway as part of a project that's hoping to use nature and sounds to make people look at social and environmental challenges in new ways. Stephanie Prentiss

went to Moss, south of Oslo for Between Worlds Resonant Ecologies to learn about the positive impact listening can have. I'm sitting on a bench in the forest on an island in Norway and I'm with a group of artists teaching us about immersive ecological soundscapes. There are a number of devices hanging very high up in the trees and the sounds of nature are louder than usual. Artist Natasha Barrett put this together. Natasha, why is it important that we're hearing nature in this way? I'm trying to reveal the exciting, fascinating, wonderful sounds that we normally miss. I'm processing them to draw out beautiful qualities and I want to show how beautiful nature can be even if we maybe normally ignore it. And why

is it important to really ground people and bring people back to their senses with this sort of thing? I think if you can enjoy and really feel the qualities of something, then you will want to preserve it and look after it. The concept of deep listening to natural sounds runs through the pieces on display. The exhibition is set across multiple sites, including Dents Woodland, a church and galleries. Inside one gallery a bowl of crude oil sits within an arch rigged up as a transmitter to radios next to it. It's the work of artists Freya Zinoviev and Amanda Houtierrez. Outside Freya told me what the guests are hearing.

So they are hearing the sounds of Russian submarines, they're hearing the sounds of Texan pump jacks pulling oil out of oil fields, they're hearing the sounds of the oil rigs in the North Sea, and they are hearing the sounds of geopolitics in motion and how oil is this contested substance that is politically dividing our world. On a wide patch of grass outside, substance that is politically dividing our world.

On a wide patch of grass outside there's more than a hundred brass domes positioned into a grid. The artist says they're capturing cosmic rays and high energy particles. The sound behind me he calls cosmic popcorn. My name is Christian Skudhesselström and I'm from Copenhagen in Denmark. So what I can hear around me I'm told is called cosmic popcorn. Could you tell me what that is, how you generate it, why is it important? Basically you can call it a sort of a listening station of cosmic rays. And I work out of this idea that one of the reasons we are in this mess as

a species is due to the limitation of our perception. If we cannot see or hear or touch things then somehow they don't really exist to us." The exhibition is showing 39 works with artists representing 17 countries. Morten Sundegard is the lead curator and aims to tackle a social listening deficit. What I call the social listening deficit is really about us not attending to what is around us. The politics and everything that is around us is also about listening to each other. But it's just works that are opening up, there are faculties of listening, so it can help us be more attentive and maybe make better choices, I mean, for ourselves and for the world.

How important is art for humans, if you can just summarize that for me. I mean you could ask like Churchill I think did once, what would happen if we didn't have art and isn't that what we're fighting for? And I kind of like that notion, what would happen if we didn't have art? We cannot process the world without art I would say. Morten Sondergaard ending that report from Stephanie Prentice. Cats may generally be seen as independent creatures, but one feline has achieved local fame for faithfully walking her person to school every day. Kiki accompanies 10-year-old Sonny and his friends, waits in the playground and escorts them home safely. And the two-year-old from Glasgow in Scotland, who's white with tabby patches has even been nominated for an award for cats who play a big part in their community.

Sonny's mother, Michelle Scott, spoke to Laura Maxwell and Gary Robertson. Kiki is our two-year-old cat. She's my son's cat. She was a birthday gift. And quite soon after she started going outside, we realized that her new favorite place was the school. My son told me that she would come down to school. She's in the playground amongst the children. She doesn't shy away at all from them. She seems to be known by 400 children. There's people who think that she's the school cat. She just loves it down there. And she spends, that's what she spends most of her day. She tends to go to school with him in the morning, follows him and his friends. Sometimes comes home with them, sometimes hangs about for after school. Just depends

how she feels. So that's what she does with her day. Did you not, initially, did you not sort of get, get worried when she just disappeared for an entire day? So I did a little bit, yeah, because she was quite young and initially when she did go out there was a couple of times we thought, well she did get a little bit lost and then she ended up like up a tree. But we now know where she is generally, we've had to put a little air tag on her just to be clear that we know exactly where she is. But there's woodland at the school, they're quite lucky, they've got kind of a little wooded area and that she loves it there. And we know that she's quite safe and the school has really embraced

her so we know she's pretty safe, we know where she is most of the time and it tends to be around and about the school. I was going to ask about that because sometimes schools have to meet certain health and safety standards and I suppose a cat knocking about the playground might break a few of them. Yes, but I mean I think she has tried to go in the school and they've very quickly got her out or they've got my son to go and collect her and take her out of classrooms, that's happened as well. But the school have been fantastic, you know they really have embraced her as part of the school community and I think it's been quite nice for some of them to have her around, they seem to just have

any health and safety things seem to have been put aside. She's part of the school. And what do you think the attraction is? I don't know. From the moment we had her as a kitten, she seemed to like being around children. She would immediately, if my son had a friend here, she would go upstairs and spend time with them.

She would just sit there and watch them playing. And as soon as she hears children's voices, she just seems to be attracted to them. I'm not sure if she's got an identity crisis or she's got what she is, but she just seems to really like children and seems to trust them. What does she do during the school holidays? She must be breathed. She's completely lost. That's when we see the most of her as school holidays. She just tends to be out the front, looking a bit lost and she'll go down to school and come back again and doesn't really seem to know what to do with herself

at all when the school holidays happen. You just have to have lots of play dates at your house. What about the school prize giving? She should get an attendance award. Well this was the joke I think. I think one time I emailed the teacher saying, no Sonny's not well or he has to go on an appointment. Well, Kiki has 100% attendance. So yeah, I think he's part of the school role on register now. If he's not there, they're like, well, is she OK? You know, where is she? Michelle Scott on Faithful Cat Kiki.

And just before we go, we wanted to share some unusual advice on how to live a long and healthy life. The fabulously named Leslie Lemon, who's just turned 106, fought with the British Army in the Second World War and received the Légion d'honneur for his role in helping to liberate France. He still lives in his own home, says he has no aches and pains and enjoys regular visits from his family, including eight grandchildren, nine great-grandchildren and two great-great-grandchildren. Alex Pope went to find out his secret. Don't take any tablets, never see a doctor. Marvellous isn't it?

When you finished serving in the war then what did you do? I went to the labour exchange, getting a job off me, income tax. I was an income tax man. I worked for 44 years and I've been retired for 45 years. Now we've been told that there is something that you eat every single day that you love. Custard, custard, custard. Roo rye and custard. Roovah at the garden and custard. Yes. And do you have custard? Every day, yeah.

Why? Well, I love it. I love it. Can't beat it. Do you like custard or not? I do. I do. Yeah, absolutely. You're a fan, aren't you? Yes, that's good. So your secret to life? Custard. Custard, custard, custard. And for anyone else hoping to live to a ripe old age, Leslie also advises taking things as they come, being prepared to adjust and not being too set in your ways.

I'm quite happy as I am, he says. I'm quite happy as I am, he says. voice notes, its global podcast at bbc.co.uk. And you can now watch some of our interviews on YouTube. Just search for the Happy Pod. This edition was mixed by Jack Wilfan and the producers were Holly Gibbs and Rachel Bulkley. The editor is Karen Martin. I'm Debbie Russ. Until next time, goodbye.