The Way I Heard It with Mike Rowe - 145: Does This Look Infected

Episode Date: November 19, 2019

Yes, as a matter of fact, it does.  But penicillin won't help...

This is the way I heard it. Sometime in the early morning hours of December 11th, on the two-year anniversary of the diagnosis, Mark decided he'd had enough. The virus showed no sign of abating, and the pain had become unmanageable. And so, the 46-year-old father of two hung himself as his two-year-old son slept in the adjacent room. He used a dog leash instead of a rope. his father-in-law found the body. Mark was not the only victim who chose not to endure the symptoms of a deadly virus that left 37,000 people hopelessly crippled.

Like smallpox, polio, the Spanish flu, and the black death, this disease did not discriminate. It infected people of all races, all ethnicities, and all ages, although the elderly were hit particularly hard. In one retirement community, considered to be ground zero of the epidemic, eight people died while waiting for a cure. Many more have since joined them, victims of a lingering plague that continues to afflict thousands. Like Mark, the victims who took their own lives did so because they could no longer take the pain. William Foxton, for instance, a 65-year-old British war hero and pensioner, shot himself in the head shortly after being diagnosed.

Better to go out this way, he wrote, than to live in hell the rest of my days. More recently, a 56-year-old entrepreneur named Charles Murphy dove out the window of his hotel room in Manhattan. After ten years of torment, he could no longer endure the agony. Then, of course, there was René de Villischet, a French aristocrat, who, as far as we know, was the first suicide in the wake of the outbreak.

When Villischet realized what the virus would do to him, he swallowed a fistful of pills and slid his wrist. Interestingly, he let his arm dangle into a trash can as he slowly bled to death, so as not to ruin the carpet in his tasteful office were leave to untidy a mess for the cleaning lady. Though most of the victims were everyday people, a number of celebrities were also infected.

Steven Spielberg, Zha Jajah Gabor, Larry King. They all suffered terribly, but survived the ordeal. So too did John Malkovich, who was remarkably sanguine about the scourge that left him crippled. I no longer view the whole thing as a negative experience, he said.

Looking back, I see it as a valuable life lesson. Perhaps the most enlightening perspective, was that of Ellie Vizel, the Holocaust survivor who died a few years after being diagnosed. As you may recall, Vizel had written 57 books and was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1986, at which time the Norwegian Nobel Committee proclaimed, quote, through his struggle to come to terms with his own personal experience of total humiliation in Hitler's death camps, he has successfully delivered a message of peace, and atonement to all mankind.

Perhaps that's why his reaction to the virus was so memorable, when Oprah Winfrey asked him to describe the exact moment he learned that he and his wife had been infected. We were stunned, said Vizel, but the feeling quickly passed, and seconds later I looked at Marianne and said, we have seen worse, my darling. and so we simply got on with our lives as best we could.

In the end, the scourge of 2008 left in its wake a trail of heartbreak and loss. Some of the victims recovered completely. Some took their own lives, but most, like Ily Vizel, endured the agony as best they could, waiting and hoping that somehow a cure would be found to make them whole again. but only one of the virus's victims died of shame. Mark, the 46-year-old father of two, who hung himself with a dog leash on the second anniversary of the outbreak, exactly two years after he and the rest of the world

learned the truth about the despicable huckster whose contemptible lies had spread around the world like a virus. The truth of a conman, whose bottom-loom. greed was the contagion that wiped out $65 billion in savings and crippled 37,000 investors. A human pestilence whose name was simply too painful for Mark to live with. A name inherited by his son from a father who broke his heart. Madoff. Anyway, that's the way I heard it.

What do you think? Did I go too far? Is it wrong to compare a man to a virus, an infection? Personally, I don't think so. I think of myself is a fairly forgiving type of guy, but when it comes to this kind of graft, this kind of con, what Madoff did was just deplorable. And I remember reading about his victims

and just feeling so bad for them because, if you've read my book, you'll know, I was also feeling sorry for myself. I was not caught up in Bernie Madoff's web, but I did get caught up once upon a time in a Ponzi scheme. On a much smaller level, I was in my late 30s and had a trusted financial advisor with whom I had invested every penny I'd ever earned.

And it was revealed to my shock and dismay, along with the shock and dismay of dozens of others, that the money simply wasn't there. The whole thing had been a ruse. And I don't write about the details, of this because legally I'm not allowed to. There was a settlement and in the end I came out okay. But a lot of people didn't. And the feeling, oh, God, the feeling of realizing the safety net you thought you had beneath you was not really there. That is something worth writing about for me

anyway. So I did in my book the way I heard it, which, apropos of nothing, would look terrific in a stocking this Christmas, don't you think? As for Mr. Madoff, I doubt seriously if I'll be able to conjure up any sympathy for him when he shuffles off his mortal coil. And I suspect I'm not alone. If you disagree, tell me all about it over on my Facebook page. In the meantime, I'll be back next week with another true story for the curious mind with a short attention span. Until then.