Dave Barry
speaker
175 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Feb 2025
last heard Feb 2025
Dave Barry’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
She'd been accepted to where she wanted to go. Two days before, on August 18th, 2018, she's getting ready to go to Duke and she wakes up and she, she can't move. Can't move her from her chest down. She cannot move. And like at first we're like, this is like, okay, some kind of nervous panic, you know, it's not like her, but maybe that's what it is. Pretty quickly think, no, it's something else.
And so we take her into the hospital and a neurologist, thank God diagnosed immediately what it was. And it's something called transverse myelitis. And so like our daughter's in there getting scanned in this way. She comes out, this neurologist, and sits down with me and Michelle and says, it's not good. That's the first thing she said.
She said, I think this is, I'm pretty sure this is called transverse myelitis, and it's when your immune system attacks your spinal cord. And a third of the time, people recover completely, and a third of the time, they only partly recover, and a third of the time, they never recover at all, never walk again.
This is what we're being told as our daughter is in the other room two days from going to Duke. And so just to get quickly through to the good part, she did recover. It took, you know.
couple of months a lot an intense therapy and everything and she recovered and got got to duke a semester late they wanted to make her a year late but she said no i'm class of 2022 and i want to be she and she graduated with honors and and is now fine but we went through the like the absolute like most unimaginably horrible time I mean, no, that's not true.
People have lost their children, which is obviously worse. But at the time, I could not imagine anything worse. I remember like the day, the next day, Michelle never left the hospital. She stayed in the hospital like 45 straight days with Sophie until Sophie was able to come home. The next day, I would go home every night to walk the dog and bring clothes in to Michelle and Sophie.
I remember the next morning, I'm driving to the hospital, the Baptist hospital, and drove by Sophie's elementary school, and there were Little kids were walking across the street, just where Sophie used to walk across the street. And I'm thinking, like, I'm thinking, my daughter's never going to walk again. This is it. And I had to pull off the road. I was just sobbing.
And every night when I would leave the hospital, I would just proceed to get in the car and just cry for, like, half an hour. I'm crying now. And so... The result of it was that, first of all, I decided she was the most amazing human being on the face of the earth. She never complained. She never said, why me? She, to this day, never says, oh, I'm a victim of transverse myelitis.
She has become a person who counsels other people who have trans, but you would never hear her bring it up, ever. I'm bringing it up because it changed everything. But the lesson of that was going right back to what you were talking about, the amount of love you feel.
the feeling that the three of us had michelle sophie and me in that hospital room day after day where there's all these tubes in and out of her and doctors come in all the time and can she move yet it was like 11 days before she even moved a toe like during which we thought she's this is it when she and every day they'd come and say she moved nope nothing they'd come and say sophie can you feel anything nope nothing you know day after day of that when it finally finally came through
What we all three came away from and we Michelle and I talk about this like almost every day is that if you think that you have trouble in your life, you probably don't. You know, like the things that we go around worrying about and the things people get upset about. They don't matter. Did you get up this morning? Can you walk around? Are the people you love still around? Are they alive?
That's all that matters. It doesn't matter if your roof is leaking and your car is messed up. It doesn't matter who got elected president of the United States, whether you like them or you don't like them. That does not matter. What really matters is the things absolutely closest to you, your kids, your loved ones. And are they OK? You know, are you OK with them? That's all that matters.
When you say it changed your life, is it because you now live yourself since that hospital room? Absolutely. Every single day when something bad happens that I think is something bad, I think about Sophie and lying there. And she couldn't move. And that's, you know, that looked like for a while, that looked like that was it. You know, she'll never get to Duke and she'll never walk again.
And thank you, you know, because there are people, plenty of people who didn't, who were in the same situation and didn't get out of it. So every single day that anything remotely bad happens to me, I think about that immediately goes to there. I go to there. you were not like that before that hospital experience.
Okay. Well, I'm not like, I was never like a, just like an idiot about, you know, anything that bothers me is the worst thing in the world. I mean, we all know people like that. And I was never that, but I was like, I was, I could get, be upset for days about pretty minor things before it takes off.
an incredible amount to get me upset about anything for more than 10 minutes now because my mind goes right back to that. So that did change me. That changed me more than anything else that ever happened to me.
I'm going to just say it. She is the best. My other kid is two. I have a son, Robin. He's an incredible kid, too.
Well, I picked him up in the Wienermobile at school. So like that was. Yes, he got the celebrity journalist Dave Barry as the father. Well, he told me he was he was went back to his school for the reunion last last spring. And he and he said the thing that most people still remember was that I picked him up in the Oscar Mayer Wienermobile. So that was a gift.
And like not many fathers can give their children that.
Yeah. No, I'm a big believer in having kids later in life because of that. Yeah. Because you you get more you appreciate it more and you have more. I think you have more time for them. But you're less selfish. I think so. And you also usually have more resources. The other view of it is if you have your kids early, then you can start partying in your 50s. Right, you can get your life back.
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