Anna Sale
speaker
304 appearances
8 recordings
5 series
first heard Oct 2024
last heard 28 May
Anna Sale’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in May 2026 with 1.
Appearances
Yeah.
Yeah, yeah.
Mm-hmm. When you realized you couldn't feel anything from below your sternum, was it scary? What do you remember feeling? Was it like mystifying, like confused?
What were you joking about?
That makes me emotional. You're immediately thinking, how will I spend my time? You're casting forward on this backboard. That's interesting.
It took a few hours, but eventually Jim was transported to a hospital in a small Chilean city.
So you were in a foreign country in the southern hemisphere in a hospital. Were you comfortable with Spanish?
Jim had the use of his arms but was paralyzed below his rib cage. He had full lung function, but his abdominal muscles didn't work. He stayed in Chile for another week and then was transported back to the U.S. for surgery. Coming up, Jim begins the slow and hard process of rehabilitation.
This is Death, Sex, and Money from Slate. I'm Anna Sale. After Jim was transported to the U.S., he was confronted with the extent of his injuries. He'd fractured nine vertebrae, and he had surgery to relieve the pressure on his spine and fuse five vertebrae. That went well, restoring some nerve function and proper blood flow that had been cut off.
And a few days after the surgery, he was able to move his right big toe. A few weeks later, he could lift his right leg a bit. But Jim did not know how hopeful he ought to be.
Jim transferred to a different hospital, Craig Hospital in Colorado, which specializes in treating brain and spinal cord injuries. He spent five months there doing intense physical therapy. Eventually, he made enough progress that he was able to become an outpatient.
You were in a literal old folks home?
Would you compare walkers with your neighbors? I like this idea of you're surrounded by people who are also using walkers.
Okay. That's a lot.
Yeah. I will say that's a bold couples counselor.
Oh, given the proximity of that breakup to your accident, I wonder, are you all, are you still in touch with that, that ex? Did you all stay in touch throughout your recovery?
By the summer of 2015, months into his recovery, Jim was ready for a change of scenery. A nonprofit that supports injured adventure athletes called the High Fives Foundation offered him free physical therapy in Northern California. Jim flew there and stayed in a buddy's rec room for the summer. In July, he joined a crew of people at a big music festival near Tahoe.
String Cheese Incident was playing. It was the kind of concert where people are dancing and laying around on blankets.
Jim was avoiding alcohol during his rehab, but most everyone around him was drinking. Then someone gave him a large psilocybin chocolate bar, one with magic mushrooms, and he ate it. This was not a microdose.
Psychedelics, including psilocybin, have been reported to cause muscle spasms in people with spinal cord injuries, causing the muscles to flex involuntarily, and it's hard for your brain to tell them to stop. Scientists don't know why. And for Jim, right as his psychedelic experience began to peak, his right quad muscles and knee began to vibrate and kept wanting to lock.
Showing 261–280 of 304 · page 14 of 16
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