Hidden Brain - Episode 46: Blessings in Disguise?

Episode Date: October 4, 2016

We have lots of ways to describe the good that can come from bad: a blessing in disguise, a silver lining — but what if the bad thing was truly awful? This week on Hidden Brain, framing and re-framing a tragedy.

We have lots of ways to describe the good that can sometimes come from bad. A blessing in disguise, a silver lining. But what if the bad that led to the good was truly awful? You could see that his face was starting to balloon to a size where I realized how bad it was that he had gotten hurt. This is Hidden Brain, I'm Shankar Vedantan. There's really just one way to look at a given event. it got in her. This is Hidden Brain, I'm Shankar Vedantam. There's really just one way to look at a given event. A slight change in outcome can change the way we see and interpret an experience.

This week we have the story of three people who discover that an event the initially viewed as terrible might in fact have been just the opposite. Not awful, but a stroke of unimaginable good luck. Framing and reframing, this week on Hidden Brain. December 21st is the Winter Solstice, the shortest day of the year. It's also the day our story begins. Three people have finished work, each is heading to a metro train station in Washington, DC.

And it was just before rush hour, I was planning to meet my wife who works a few stations ahead of me. This is Colin Dale, he's at the centre of our story. Colin is 42, happily married. He's got two teenage kids and a successful job as a technology consultant. He's also, as you can hear, originally from England. Colin was the first person in our story to reach the station and board a train. And that's where the trouble started. I do vaguely remember that a group of youth

got on the train and I must have thought that there would be somehow around punctures or aggressive because I remember texting my wife in a panic really to be honest with you don't get on the train. Another woman did get on the train with Colin. Her name is Christian Smith. Christian had made a dash for the train. Another woman did get on the train with Colin. Her name is Kristen Smith. Kristen had made a dash for the train and jumped into the first car, the same one in which Colin was riding. I could tell as soon as I had jumped in that it was a weird situation,

I felt uncomfortable as soon as I got through the doors. The first thing she noticed was a group of boisterous teenagers. It felt like there were a lot of kids on all four seats that surround that middle door of the subway car, and there were also kids standing in the aisle in a way where it was clear they weren't going to make room for people coming on or off. You had to make your way around them.

I'm Lori Kaplan, and I head up Audiences' Sites Department at NPR. This is Colin's wife. She's a colleague of mine. Laurie had timed her departure from work, so she'd arrive at her metro station just before Colin's train pulled in. As I was approaching the platform, I texted him to say, I'm here. I'm here, I'm almost here, and he said, don't get on. I had seen these text messages that arrived during my walk that said, don't get on the first train, because we normally get on the first car of the train.

What happens next on the train and in the days that follow is what our story is about. It's a tragic story, but perhaps it's also a story of profound luck. It all depends on how you frame it, the lens through which you view what happened. Let me start by going back a bit into the lives of Colin and Laurie. The two first met when the company Colin worked for was hired by NPR for a contract project. It wasn't going well. The person who was leading that work said,

I'm going to Idaho, but if you have any problems, call this guy Colin, he'll help you out. In fact, the project was a mess. So Lori called. She was really mad. Yelling, and I was quite unpleasant, actually. But he fixed the problem and he's been fixing a lot of my problems ever since. Eventually, they got married, had children. Laurie describes Colin this way. He's calm. He cares.

He cares a lot. He's a great dad. I think he's all he ever wanted to be. He was probably a dad. He is a fixer and a doer and I'm a doer, so we just do a lot of things together. They're both athletic, especially Colin. From his childhood, he used to bike all over the North

of England, that's just what he would do. So he grew up biking and he was a boy scout leader and would kayak. And so he was very active. And then when he moved here, he would bike to work from our house to DC many times a week. And yeah we hike with we hike with our family too so he was very active. You might have noticed that Laurie said Colin was very active.

That's because in the last couple of years he'd been having some trouble. He was having a lot of joint pain and discomfort, and it was just his knees hurt, his arms hurt, his legs hurt, he just had a lot of pain, and so it just made it challenging to bite because it was very uncomfortable. But it was challenging to walk frankly. He would stop sometimes on the weight of the metro,

which felt really unusual to me. Colin had tried to figure out what was wrong. He'd seen a lot of doctors, a lot of specialists. Everyone was stumped. Colin was frustrated. And so, when he stepped onto the train that evening, shortly before Christmas, he was taking a break from his quest for an answer. Colin would like to be able to explain what happened on that train ride, but he can't.

After texting his wife, his memories of the ride are gone. Kristen Smith, on the other hand, has been haunted by memories of that commute. She seshied took a seat and leaned her head up against the window. I have tried to think a lot about what it was that made me turn around and I can't quite remember, but I think it was either a period of awkward silence or I heard scuffling and that made me turn around to look back at the middle of the car. Christian says it was hard to tell exactly what was happening, which it could see that the group of teenagers was surrounding one man.

And he had a blue backpack and I remember he had his arms up through the backpack straps with the backpack facing up, and he was shielding himself. He was using the blue backpack as a shield. It was Colin Dale. Christian says he tried to get away. And as he took a step, he got hit in rapid succession, I thought he got hit in rapid succession with maybe two hits and he fell down to the ground and then the kids all stepped away from him and in my mind that felt like

a good thing that the kids had stepped or that the youth had stepped away from him and that it had stopped like the violence had stopped in that moment and I think that was my first thought was just relief that maybe this would stop and they leave him alone now but I didn't realize that he was in such bad shape at that point. I could see his feet sticking out from the between the metro car seats out into the aisle. Colin eventually got up and staggered toward Kristen and another commuter. They tried to comfort him.

The train was nearing Laurie's station. Kristen says without drawing the attention of the teenagers, she tried to let the conductor know what was going on. And there's a little crack between the door and where the door connects to the wall, I guess. And I started saying through the door crack, you have to stop the train, you have to get medical help, you have to get the police, there's an attack. It worked.

When the train came to a stop at the station, the doors to Collins car remained closed. The teenagers panicked. And that's when they turned and there are emergency exit doors at the end of the car, which would have been at the end of the car away from me. And they all turned and they ran down and went through the exit door of the car. Laurie meanwhile was on the escalator. When she reached the platform, she saw that the train had been unloaded. Yeah, I just looked around. He should be here.

So I walked further down the platform even though he said he was going to get off the first car. I walked all the way to the front and that was the only train car that was closed. The train doors were shut and then I saw Colin on the train. And he looked terrible. He was like a ghost. I saw blood on his face and he started hitting the glass on the front because of the conductor's car, the driver's car. the conductor's car, the driver's car. Saying that's my wife, that's my wife. And they let me on the train, and I took them off the train. And I sat them down on a bench.

It was a little bench near the end of the platform. And I put his head down, because I saw his bleeding immediately. One of the Metro police officers approached me and he said we have an ambulance on the way. Colin was in very bad shape. His teeth were shattered. His jaw jotted out to one side like he'd stuffed a balloon into his cheek. He was disoriented.

He kept asking the same questions over and over again. He would ask me, was there, was I in an accident on my bike? Was there a terrorist attack? Was there like what happened? He didn't know. He would just look and assess the situation and then ask me. And then he would ask if I was okay. Even when he saw the ambulance, he thought maybe something was happening to me. At the hospital, a team of doctors took over. As soon as he was admitted, they realized he was complaining of neck problems, and so they immediately that evening had done CAT scans and then MRI, a series of MRIs.

And this is where our story takes a turn. Up to this point, I think most of us would agree that what happened to Colin was terrible and unprovoked brutal attack that left him badly in short and his wife, children, and witnesses traumatized. It's hard to frame the incident any other way. But what comes next may change your mind. This is Hidden Brain, I'm Shankar Vedanta. After a brutal assault on a DC metro train, Colin Dale is in the hospital. Surgeons are preparing to repair his jaw with a titanium plate. He's wearing a brace for neck pain and waiting for scan results to figure out whether the

attack caused any further harm. Colin says a doctor walked into the room. Someone, you know, he's wearing a blue outfit looked like he fit in a hospital, came by my bed with a printout of the MRI and I'd had a neck brace on and he said, well, you know, Mr. Day, you can take the neck brace off, but I just want to show you this part on the MRI, it looks like you have a tumour in your spinal cord. A tumour, not a bruise or a fracture, but something else entirely. There was a contrast, there was a lump inside of his spinal cord and a cervical spine. I just happened to have a neck. And they said this is inside and it's very large and it really needs to come out.

Instantly, this explained everything. The joint pain, Collins' balance issues, his fatigue, it was cancer and it was almost too late. and it was almost too late. What was revealed to us was even more dire, you know, as it had been, as it was growing, it had been just another few millimeters further. He would have already, he would have affected his ability to breathe. So... So, let's think about that train ride again, the brutal assault. Was it a tragedy? Or was it the luckiest ride of his life? It led to a life-saving diagnosis, but it came at

great cost. In a situation like this, does the good outweigh the bad? Can bad ever come to be seen as good? When I contacted Kristen Smith, the witness for the story, I discovered she wasn't aware of what had happened to Colin and Laurie after the attack. The story was hard for Kristen to hear, in part because her uncle had just died of a brain tumor. It was also such a quick thing we found out he was sick only maybe two and a half, three months ago, and that was gone.

And, um, it's crazy the thing that I had maybe have been attacked on a Metro, they would have caught it sooner and stopped it. I don't know if I'll do such a strange. But as the information sank in, Christian began to reframe the way she viewed the attack on Colin. I think something did come, something good to come from it, but I'm still left with the feeling of maybe even, well, no I guess that's not true. If I had stopped the attack sooner, I was thinking he probably would have gone to the hospital and they still would have found the tumor, but maybe that's not true. Maybe he had to be hurt to a degree that they really were investigating him deeply to find the tumor.

Exactly one month after being attacked on the train, Colin underwent a dangerous and difficult surgery to remove the cancerous tumor in his spine. By most measures, it was a huge success. Colin survived and he wasn't paralyzed, which was something the doctor's fear it might happen. But he was very far from his old self. I felt like my legs were floating in space, like several inches up from the bed and several inches over and feel heat, cold, and some strange electrical twinges, large parts of his body were numb. Other parts of his body were racked by endless pain. And that's difficult when he even taking a shower and feeling the water in his body. It will cause him to scream and my son's bedroom is next

to the shower and that's difficult for the family, just empathizing with his pain. So this is where the Dales are now. They're struggling to recover and make sense of a series of troubling and intertwined events. When I first heard about Colin and Laurie and the strange path to his diagnosis, I, the outsider, immediately thought of the train attack as a blessing in disguise. Our witness Christian had a more nuanced view, tinted by her own actions that day. As for Laurie, she says she tries to see the good in what happened, she mentions unexpected moments of kindness she encountered,

like the time a school crossing guard, a stranger, dropped off a meal on her porch. But for Laurie and Colin, what happened on the train is still a recurring trauma. That's really hard because, you know, there's a sense of reliving it every day. When you go every day to the same spot and get on the train at the same spot where your husband was lying down in his blood on his backpack. Did it have any silver linings at all? Everyone, you know, everyone refers to what happened to Colin oh well you got your diagnosis and you got the cancer out what is

over like well we sure would have hoped that that could have been diagnosed earlier in some other way it's not that most ideal way to have that diagnosed but we're glad that he's alive and has a good... and he... they... the... what can we say? That cancer is out, it doesn't seem to be growing, it doesn't seem to be growing back, he has a positive... a relatively positive outlook. So I can't help but think that you wouldn't have gotten that scan down when you did, if it hadn't been for the incident. But the incident was truly horrible. I don't know how to process that.

He and me both. I asked Colin how he views what happened. Colin's considered the many ways of seeing what's happened. Was it coincidence? The intervention of a higher power? Luck? For now, Colin says, the frame of understanding that feels most right to him is simply acknowledging that life is random. It means he does a lot of things about this story that just line up almost too perfectly.

If this was an episode of a TV show, you'd be like, yeah, sure. Yeah, I got it. I don't know. I do like the random in many ways that sort of makes my universe more comfortable. And maybe that's the most powerful truth in this tale. We all see things through our own lens and we settle on the vision that gives us the greatest sense of comfort. When things happen to us, we sift and re-sift information to shape how we see the world. Imagine a group of people sitting around a campfire. One might see the fire as beautiful, the flames perhaps sparking memories of

childhood and family and friends. Another person who'd suffered serious burn injuries might see the very same fire as ugly and dangerous. There's no one reality, it's all in the framing. As for the dails, long before Collins train assault and tumour, the family had planned a trip, a walking tour across the whole of England from coast to coast, 260 miles on a rugged trail. They couldn't cancel, so they decided to go for it, despite everything that had happened. And the the lures that you pick up are stone from from the west coast and you you walk it across and then you put it in the east coast when you go to the other side. And why do you carry a rock from west to east? What's the story?

It just just shows that you've made it, you know, it's just a symbolic gesture to mark your the end of that journey. For Colin, of course, this will be a milestone in his recovery, a chance to think. Because the way we see something isn't always how it really is. This week's episode was produced and edited by Jenny Schmidt. Our staff also includes Maggie Penman, Chris Benderef, Karamogar Galison and René Clarre. Our supervising producer is Tara Boyle. Last week we began acknowledging the unsung heroes who are vital to the success of this show, but aren't typically in the credits. This week, our unsung hero is Nikela Matthews.

Nikela sits right near the Hidden Brain staff here at NPR, and she's become something of an honorary team member. She helps us reach new audiences through Facebook and Twitter, and we so appreciate her creative and collegial spirit. Thanks, Nikola. Speaking of Facebook and Twitter, you can find more of my reporting on social media, along with great videos and animations that bring to life the research we highlight on Hidden Brain. Check them out, and while you're there, we'd love it if you would share this episode and our stories, with friends who you think would enjoy our show.

I'm Shankar Vedantam and this is NPR.