Sometimes you find yourself in a situation that you didn’t ever expect, and you are faced with a decision that you never thought you’d have to make.
Joe was an EMT in New York. He had just finished his evening shift, and he did what he always did after leaving work. He stopped by the local Dunkin’ Donuts for his regular nightly coffee. But this time was a little different – he happened to be carrying his newly acquired carbon monoxide detector with him.
When he entered the store, that detector started sounding an alarm. But Joe was skeptical. There was only one employee working at this late hour, and Joe asked her if she felt okay. The donut worker said she felt fine, so Joe thought that the detector might be malfunctioning. And he could have just forgotten about it at that point. But he made the decision to double check. He reset that alarm, and got permission to go back and inspect the area near the ovens. Sure enough, this time the detector confirmed dangerous levels of carbon monoxide – and it was all throughout the store.
Joe quickly evacuated the premises and contacted the proper authorities. The decision he made, just on instinct, probably saved the life of that employee.
My guest today is Lemon – yes, just like the fruit. And you’ll hear how she got that nickname. Lemon was suddenly and unexpectedly put in a place of making a life-changing decision.
And she had to do that while she was at home, and her house was on fire.
Full show notes and pictures for this episode are here:
https://WhatWasThatLike.com/233
Graphics for this episode by Bob Bretz. Transcription was done by James Lai.
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Episode transcript (download transcript PDF):
Sometimes you find yourself in a situation that you didn’t ever expect, and you are faced with a decision that you never thought you’d have to make.
Joe was an EMT in New York. He had just finished his evening shift, and he did what he always did after leaving work. He stopped by the local Dunkin’ Donuts for his regular nightly coffee. But this time was a little different – he happened to be carrying his newly acquired carbon monoxide detector with him.
When he entered the store, that detector started sounding an alarm. But Joe was skeptical. There was only one employee working at this late hour, and Joe asked her if she felt okay. The donut worker said she felt fine, so Joe thought that the detector might be malfunctioning. And he could have just forgotten about it at that point. But he made the decision to double check. He reset that alarm, and got permission to go back and inspect the area near the ovens. Sure enough, this time the detector confirmed dangerous levels of carbon monoxide – and it was all throughout the store.
Joe quickly evacuated the premises and contacted the proper authorities. The decision he made, just on instinct, probably saved the life of that employee.
My guest today is Lemon – yes, just like the fruit. And you’ll hear how she got that nickname. Lemon was suddenly and unexpectedly put in a place of making a life-changing decision.
And she had to do that while she was at home, and her house was on fire.
Scott
I got to get this question out of the way right in the beginning. I’ve done more than 200 episodes, and with that many episodes, some of the episodes are duplicating some common names like John or Mary or whatever. I have never had a guest with a nickname Lemon. Can you just tell us how that came about? I assume it is a nickname.
Lemon
Yeah. My mom did not name me Lemon at birth.
Scott
Okay. How did you end up with that?
Lemon
For 10 years now, I have played the wonderful sport of roller derby, and part of that is a lot of us have fun nicknames – roller derby names. So my roller derby name is Lemon Teeny because I am five foot one. I’m a small person and I’m also a bartender. So it’s kind of a play on being a small person and a lemon martini, and then it stuck. It got shortened to lemon. And most of my friends are also derby people, so that’s just the common name that they call me.
Scott
I did not even know that roller derby was still in existence. I remember seeing it when I was a kid. I was seeing it on TV and you just see these women going around in a circle. It’s always women for some reason. Is there men roller derby?
Lemon
Yes. So there is men’s roller derby as well, and it’s evolving to be more open gender. So it’s an ever evolving sport. It’s very different from what you’re probably used to, but you really should check it out. It’s a lot of fun to watch.
Scott
Okay. That’s obviously completely unrelated to the story other than the fact that you are one of the main characters in the story and that’s your nickname. Let’s talk about when this happened. You were living in Dayton, Ohio at the time. Who was in your family?
Lemon
I have a family of four. It’s myself, my husband, John, and our two daughters, Alana and Lola.
Scott
How old were your daughters at the time?
Lemon
16 and 10.
Scott
You went back to school, is that correct?
Lemon
I did. At this point in time, I was returning to school after a long hiatus to finish my bachelor’s degree in journalism. My husband was working, so I was staying at home with the two girls while studying at home full-time
Scott
With you being involved with school and being a wife and a mother, was the household a little bit chaotic sometimes?
Lemon
All the time. We have children, we have animals. There’s never really a whole lot of quiet or peace, but it’s a joyful chaos. It’s a little extra complicated because my older daughter, Alana, is disabled. She is autistic and epileptic, so she requires a great deal of care around the clock. So, typically, our dynamic is one of us staying home with her full-time.
Scott
I know, when you told me about Alana, she has a history of what you called elopement. Usually, when I think of eloping, marriage comes to mind, but how does that look with Alana?
Lemon
Elopement in autism is the act of a child or any person with autism wandering away from where they are supposed to be. They leave their safe place and go and explore into another place and it’s extremely common.
Scott
Is there an example of how that happened one time and did you just look around the house and Alana’s not there?
Lemon
Yes. This began around the time she was diagnosed. She was about 3 years old. At the time, we were actually living in Panama City Beach, Florida, where most of my family’s from. A common theme with children with autism is many of them are attracted to bodies of water. We were right across the street from the beach and, the first time that she eloped, she was attempting to go to the beach by herself. Very much like you described, we kind of just look around and we say, “Where is Alana?” And realize that she is not inside the home, and then we just found her kind of strolling up the street, getting ready to go to the beach.
Scott
Wow. How old was she then?
Lemon
She was 3. It’s a terrifying reality for everybody involved because so many children are attracted to water and they may lack the ability to swim or self rescue. There are many incidents of children drowning or otherwise being hurt or dying in accidents from elopement. So it’s one of the scariest aspects of Alana’s autism diagnosis.
Scott
The day this happened, it was a Friday afternoon and it was July. So, school was out. Who was at home and what happened that day?
Lemon
The two children are at home for a summer vacation. I am home continuing to study because I did not break for summer and John is working. So it’s myself and the two girls at home. Usually, what my routine looked like is I would get the girls settled down, put a movie on for both of them. Even with Alana’s diagnosis, she’s pretty independent for the most part. We mentioned elopement. There’s been a really significant period of time since her last elopement. It’s been over 10 years, so we have relaxed a little bit from that. I no longer feel like I have to be in the same room with her all the time. Instead, I would pop on a movie, get her a snack, get her comfortable, and then leave the room and go focus on what I needed to focus on at this time.
I was in my own room with the door shut, doing some homework, just doing what I would do while working on my degree so I can hear everything going on in the house. Nothing is really sounding unusual. Some time passes and I remember looking up and around the room. I just thought to myself, “It looks really hazy in here. Somewhere in the distance, maybe there’s a fire.” Sometimes, if there’s a wildfire many miles away, you kind of get that haze in the air, and that’s exactly what it looked like to me.
My bedroom at the time had previously been a garage, so I had a very thick utility door and there wasn’t a lot of smoke penetrating through that door. When I opened it, I realized very quickly that my house was on fire. Even though there was only a little bit of smokey haze in my bedroom, my kitchen was engulfed. So, immediately, I just walked into a wall of thick black smoke and I looked over and realized that there was a laundry basket sitting on top of my stove, which was a blaze, and that the fire had spread up to my cabinets and across the ceiling. My laundry room was attached to my kitchen at the time, not a lot of counter space. One way or another, that laundry basket ended up on top of the stove, and one way or another, the stove was turned on. I have no idea how the laundry basket got on the stove, and I do not have any idea how the stove was turned on at this point. That’s kind of a fact that I chose not to investigate any further because it is what it is.
Scott
Did you have a fire extinguisher nearby?
Lemon
Did not have a fire extinguisher. I also didn’t have a working smoking alarm. That was a mistake that was made that day. If you can picture yourself sitting in the living room and the batteries die, they start beeping, they’re annoying. You realize that you don’t have another set of batteries, so you just take those ones out and make a mental note to change them later, and then you move on. That was just one of the many mistakes that we had made that led up to this.
Scott
Have you been in any kind of emergency situation like this previously? I mean, did you have any idea how you would react?
Lemon
Not to this degree. I kind of thought back to situations in childhood when they practice fire drills and they tell you what you’re supposed to do. When I look back on that, none of those things entered my mind. I did think really clearly. Immediately, my thought process in this emergency– my mind was very clear and I started thinking, “Okay, step one, I knew not to put the fire out. I knew to not bother putting the fire out. Don’t try to save the house, don’t take any items, get the girls and get out of the house.” That had been drilled into me from a young age – if you’re in this circumstance, you don’t try to save your belongings or even your pets. I did have several pets at the tim, but I knew that my job was to get the two children and get out of the house.
Scott
And what was the visibility in the house at that point?
Lemon
Non-existent. I couldn’t see my hand in front of my face. It’s very thick, black smoke. I can’t really see, I can’t really breathe. I lived in a ranch home, so there was a long hallway to get to the other end of the house where the two girls’ bedrooms were, and I knew I had to walk down that hallway to go and get them. I couldn’t even really navigate to find the hallway. I was putting my hands up to touch walls and to familiarize myself with the room that I’ve lived in for the past few years because I couldn’t see or recognize anything.
Scott
Okay. So at this point. You just had that one job to get the girls and yourself out of the house safely, but there was a problem.
Lemon
Yes.
Scott
Tell us about this problem and how it came about.
Lemon
So the problem is, because of Alana’s elopement, we had installed a series of locks so that she could be kept in the house safely and that would require a key to get in or out of the house. I always kept my key in the same place and I knew where it was. It was in a little cubby right by the front door. I knew where it was and I was trying to find that key because I knew that the first thing I needed to do was open the door to walk outside or to walk the girls outside. So that was difficult. I am blind, basically just touching and feeling around the room to try and find this space where I keep this key. As this is happening, I hear the sound of my neighbor banging on the door and she’s crying and screaming because she thinks I’m inside asleep. She’s screaming, “Please wake up. Your house is on fire. You need to get out.” And I’m screaming back, “I’m awake. I can’t open my door.” So I was scrambling around trying to find this key for– it felt like a long time. It was probably only seconds or a couple minutes at most.
Scott
And was it in that spot where you kept it?
Lemon
Yes.
Scott
But you just couldn’t get to that spot. You couldn’t find that spot.
Lemon
Right. I couldn’t find that spot to get the key out, but I did find it and I opened the door. There was a moment, as soon as I opened the door, I was thinking to myself, like, “Oh, this is going to be fine. I’m just going to air out the house and let the smoke out and it’s going to be fine. Just like when you burn something on the stove.” So, at the time, my mind hadn’t really like fully grasped just the severity of the situation,
Scott
It had to be going pretty well. If it could be seen from the outside, your neighbor could see that the house was on fire.
Lemon
Yes.
Scott
As you’re walking around trying to find the key, you are breathing in that smoke, right? Or were you staying down under it?
Lemon
That’s another thing that they tell you to do that I didn’t remember to do. I was upright walking through the smoke, inhaling it. I think I was aware that I was breathing in the smoke and that it was painful, it was burning, but that wasn’t really at the forefront of my mind because my mind was focused on getting out of the house.
Scott
So you found the key. Now you’ve got to get the girls.
Lemon
Yes. I was calling out their names. They were not responding. There was a moment where I thought, “Oh good. They got out.” They didn’t get out because there was no way for them to get out. So my neighbor reached out her hand and she grabbed onto my wrist and she was trying to pull me outside and I pulled my arm away from her. That is when I went down the hallway. My two daughters had bedrooms right next to each other. Alana’s room is where I went first because she is the one who would need the most help. I went into her room. I saw that she was laying underneath her blanket, as she often does. She had the bedroom door open and I said, “Alana, come on. We need to go.” And I pulled the blanket off of her, and this is when I kind of realized just how dire everything was, because I could see that she was only semi-conscious at this point. It was really shocking that I could see that she had her eyes open and she was breathing, but she was really struggling to breathe and her eyes were just fixated on the ceiling. So she wasn’t tracking me or looking or responding to my voice.
Scott
And do you think her condition at that point was because of smoke inhalation?
Lemon
It was. At this point, she had carbon monoxide poisoning because her door was left open and she inhaled the most smoke out of everybody. So I tried to get her to get up and walk and she couldn’t. I tried to pull her off of her bed, but she is as large as I am, maybe even a little bit heavier than me – because I’m a very small person – and it’s just becoming apparent to me at this point that I have been breathing in smoke for a long time and I am starting to feel it at that point. So I felt dizzy, nauseous, and on the verge of passing out.
Scott
At this point, you’re having some physical exertion trying to get her, so you’re going to be breathing even heavier.
Lemon
Yes. Heavier. And there’s this emotionless, almost kind of robotic survival mindset that kicked in at that point because I just started thinking, “Okay. I’m going to fall over if I don’t breathe soon,” and I cannot move her. I have to go get Lola. I looked at Alana and I said, “I’m coming back for you.” And I knew at that time, in my mind, that I thought I was lying to her. I thought that I would not be back for her and I was telling her that. I don’t know why I was telling her that – apologize to her for leaving her there – because that was the hardest decision that I ever had to make.
Scott
I can’t imagine having to make that decision.
Lemon
It’s an impossible one. And the thing is I have to emphasize that my mind at that time wasn’t thinking, “This is my child, the person I love more than anybody, the person I would sacrifice my own life for in a heartbeat.” It was thinking, “We have to go get oxygen right now and there’s another child that we also have to save.” All those pieces were being put together in a way that is really difficult to describe because it wasn’t really an emotional experience for me because I had kind of tapped out at that point. I feel like I had checked out, I was on autopilot. Something in my brain was taking the wheel and just saying, “This is what you need to do to get out and we’re going to figure the rest out later.” So I went to my younger daughter’s door and opened it and she was awake, fully conscious, and she ran to me and I grabbed her and we walked out of the house together and outside.
My neighbor, Robin was standing there and I immediately yelled at her that Alana was still inside the house. Her cousin was outside as well. He was a former Marine, so he is a large man and she looked at him and she said, “Come on, cousin.” And they ran into the house together. They did not hesitate for even a second. I feel like I have to take a minute to give you just a little bit of a picture of kind of who she is and the relationship that we had, because Robin and I were different people. We were never unkind to each other, but we weren’t really close. We didn’t have much of a relationship outside of being neighbors.
The first day that I met her was a little funny because she asked me for a ride to help her pick up her food truck that was broken down and what she didn’t tell me is that the food truck was broken down an hour away. I gave her a ride around midnight. Never met this woman in my life and we hitched up her food truck and brought it back to the house. I had a hitch on the back of my SUV at the time and she saw that, and she knocked on my door and she said, “Hey, I’m Robin. I see you’ve got this hitch on the back of your SUV. Can you help me?” And I’m thinking like, “This food truck’s a couple blocks away,” but it wasn’t. It was like almost an hour away. But we did it. We went and we hitched up her food truck and we towed it back home. That was kind of the comradery that she built with people. We’re like neighbors. You help your neighbors. She asked me if I go to church. My husband and I aren’t very religious people, but we’re not offended as long as somebody is genuine in their invitation or their intentions with us and how they hold us in their thoughts.
Robin would frequently bring me meals from church, or she would bring toys or a giant platter of cookies for the kids, and she would bring it to me and she would say things like, “Oh, praise God for blessing me so that I can bless other people.” It makes me really emotional to talk about it because that’s just the person that she was. She was very sincere in her generosity and in her love for her neighbors.
To come back to that moment, she didn’t hesitate at all. When she ran inside of the house, she yelled out, “Come on cousin. This is what we’re doing.” She ran inside and they knew what to do. They crawled under the smoke, got to my daughter’s bedroom, each grabbed her by the wrist and pulled her through the hallway and pulled her out of the house.
At this point, my daughter has been affected a lot. The effects of carbon monoxide poisoning are very disturbing. It’s very scary to look at. Don’t Google it, whatever you do. Her eyes were very bloodshot. She was still conscious, but she wasn’t aware of her surroundings and she was breathing. I could tell she was breathing even if she was struggling to breathe. I wrapped one arm around one child and the other arm around the other one. Lola was hysterical. She was just staring at her sister and covering her mouth and just screaming and crying. I just kept telling her, “It’s okay. It’s okay. We’re out of the house. It’s okay.” And it wasn’t okay. But that’s what you say to your kids.
Scott
Were they worried about your dogs also?
Lemon
Nobody was worried about the dogs. Nobody was thinking about the dogs because you just don’t. That’s another part of it that surprised me – that it was so easy to leave behind my animals. I love my dogs. I love them so much. I had an extremely close relationship with my dogs and they weren’t a thought at the time because I was thinking about my kids and myself.
Scott
It’s interesting. I mean, I have two dogs myself and, even now, I would say, if there’s a fire, obviously, I’m getting all the people out and I’m getting the dogs out, for sure, because they’re family. There’s no way I’m leaving them behind. But you just don’t know until it happens.
Lemon
You don’t know until you’re there, yeah. One of my dogs– she’s no longer with us. She did survive the fire, but she was very large. She was a Bernese Mountain dog. I look back on it. I’m like, “How did I miss you? Weren’t you right there in the hallway? Where were you?”
Scott
So you are out on the lawn holding your girls and you realized something that most people would realize sooner than this. What did you discover at that point?
Lemon
So I realized that– when I’m at home, I like to hang around naked if I’m just home by myself. I realized at this time that I was on my front lawn naked. I had underwear on. That was another thing that really surprised me – that was not a thought. During this process, you don’t stop and you don’t think about, “Oh, I have to pause and put a shirt on.” I did not care. It’s one of those moments that shouldn’t be funny but, to me, it’s a little funny. I’ve always been kind of good about finding, like, little slivers of humor, even in the most traumatic things. And for me, like, “Oh shit, I’m topless on my front lawn right now,” was kind of funny.
Scott
When you’re in trauma like that, your brain has to focus. All these side decisions – get the dogs and put clothes on and all that – that’s all secondary to surviving.
Lemon
Yeah, because that’s hierarchical. The kids come out first. You come outside. You worry about your things last. You worry about your pets after you’ve taken care of everything else. And the least important thing was putting a shirt on.
Scott
So you didn’t run back in to get a shirt?
Lemon
No. My neighbor’s cousin had, I think, the same thought that I had. He might’ve seen that look on my face of realization, and he actually said, “Here, I’m going to give you my shirt.” He was the perfect gentleman and literally gave me the shirt off his back, and he did that right before the fireman pulled up. So thank God that I had a shirt on before the news truck got there. That was telling where my mind was at the time because my shame didn’t matter. My nudity didn’t matter. None of that mattered. The only thing that mattered was getting my kids out of the house, getting myself out of the house.
Scott
So they start putting the fire out now?
Lemon
Yeah, the firetruck pulled up and I screamed, “We need an ambulance.” They said, “Oh, it’s on its way.” At this point, I’m just looking down at my daughter and I am so sure she’s going to die. I’m just looking at her and it’s an eerie sense of calm because my brain was just thinking, “Okay, she’s going to die. This is our reality now.” I was in shock. This is what I’ve come to accept. I felt frozen in that moment and incapable because I didn’t know what could be done other than what had been done. I knew an ambulance was on the way, but what could I do?
Scott
Right. If she was breathing, you didn’t need to do CPR.
Lemon
Yeah.
Scott
What else could have been done?
Lemon
I actually tried to do CPR on her and the fireman stopped me and they said, “No, she’s breathing. It’s okay.” But to me, it looked like she was about to die and they stopped me and they said, “No, it’s okay. She’s breathing.” And some of the things that happened were a little shocking. They did not run across my lawn to put the fire out. You would imagine, if you see it on TV or in a movie, they walked across the lawn. They went inside, they put the fire out, and they asked me, “Is there anybody else inside?” And this is the point where I said, “Oh my God, my dogs are inside.” This is the point where I’m like, “Oh my God, wait a second. What the fuck happened to my dogs?” So just in time, my Bernese Mountain dog, who is a lover of people, sprinted out onto the yard and she was very excited because she was like, “Oh, it’s a party. There are all kinds of people out here.” She wagged her tail and leaned up against the firemen for scratches and she was thrilled. So I’m like, “Okay, well you’re alive.”
They went inside and they found my– I also have a chihuahua mix. They found him hiding under the bed and they brought him out to me. He is not a friendly dog at all. Like, he bites. They carried him out and he looked very grateful to be carried out so he could tell that they were there to rescue him. He was very clearly traumatized
Scott
And I would guess that they did okay because they are lower to the ground, under the smoke. They’re walking around under where the smoke was for the most part, especially under the bed.
Lemon
Yeah. They have very sharp animal instincts. When I mentioned that, I was surprised that I didn’t trip over my large dog at any point in time. I imagine she had found a clever place to hide until it was time to come out.
Scott
You had more animals than just dogs though, right?
Lemon
Yeah. I also had three ferrets and they brought them out. They were all rescued and brought out and they all survived. So, every living thing in the house, everything with a heartbeat survived.
Scott
And is Alana at this point still mostly unconscious? What did you see in her?
Lemon
She was slowly starting to come on the lawn. As she was exposed to oxygen, she was slowly becoming more and more aware. I was still waiting for the ambulance for quite a while, or it felt like quite a while. I can’t say how much time had passed, but it felt like a long time. I was really confused because the firemen weren’t really doing anything for her while she was still on the ground. I’m like, “You don’t have an oxygen mask? You don’t have something, anything?”
Scott
Yeah. They should have had oxygen to give her. You just said she was getting oxygen. I thought that’s because of a mask. She was just breathing the air. Is that what you’re saying?
Lemon
Oh, I’m sorry. Yes. To clarify, she was breathing fresh air, but she wasn’t given an oxygen mask until the ambulance arrived. When the ambulance arrived, it was a little bit of a whirlwind because my neighbors said, “Okay, we’ll take the dogs.” And two more neighbors came out and they said, “We’ll take the ferrets, we’ll put them in our garage.” And it was very much, like, everybody who was on my block that day just came and said, “What can I do?” Everybody stepped in. How can I help right now? Each child was put into an ambulance and I declined medical care for myself because I wanted to ride in the ambulance with Alana at that time. So I hopped into the ambulance with Alana. Well, I had a conversation with Lola who was very conscious and upright, and I said, “Everything’s going to be okay. You’re going to go to the hospital, you’re going to get checked out. I’m going to meet you there. I have to be with your sister right now.” So unfortunately, Lola was alone in a separate ambulance, and I was riding in the ambulance with Alana to the hospital.
Scott
To make that decision. Obviously, you can’t ride in both ambulances, but was this, like, a second instance of sort of abandoning one of your daughters?
Lemon
Yeah. Because from Lola’s perspective, she’s very confused, alarmed and traumatized. She often gets defaulted into this role of having to be very independent because of her sister’s high level of needs. That’s something that she herself is working through in counseling and I hate that for her. I hate that that must have been the most terrifying moment of her life too. She was kind of a second priority at the time because, okay, clearly you can walk and you can breathe and you don’t need me as much right now, but she does need me still. So I got into the ambulance with Alana and I was riding in the front seat and in the back she was. Now, she was receiving oxygen and we were flying to Dayton Children’s Hospital and the EMT was trying to make conversation with me to just keep my mind off of what was happening, keep me calm. I remember looking around at traffic and thinking about how life was just going on as normal for all of these people. None of them have any idea what’s happening in my world. They don’t know that two of my children are being taken by ambulance to the hospital for this reason. A lot of people ignored the ambulance sirens and didn’t yield to it, and I got very angry. I was yelling at traffic a lot. The EMT next to me, he is driving and he is just, “Story of my life. These people are assholes. They don’t care.” And it felt so routine and uncaring, even though this was by far the most traumatic moment of my life.
Scott
I’ve driven an ambulance. I know what that’s like. And it’s interesting. All of us have been out driving our cars and we hear the ambulance or we see the lights, we pull over, they go by and we are just going on with our day and we have no idea the trauma that’s happening inside that ambulance.
Lemon
The world just keeps spinning because it has to. What else can we really do?
Scott
Your husband, John, is at work this whole time. How did he find out what happened?
Lemon
He was called by our neighbor Brian, who told him what had happened. “Your house is on fire and two of them are okay, and one of them is not responsive,” this is what he was told. So he knew that this had happened and he knew that one of us was in real danger, but he didn’t know which one of us or the extent of the injuries. So he had to leave work and drive to the hospital without a lot of answers about what was happening.
Scott
I wanted to hear from John what it was like trying to get to his family and only having partial information. This is John.
John
Ironically, out of the entire process, that was by far the most difficult. I am the kind of person that is actually usually calm in those moments because I need to have a clear head and I need to be there and do whatever needs to be done in an emergency. But I was given little to no information practically on who was hurt and what the extent of the harm was, and I wasn’t there. So, I had to get there. Luckily, me and my boss both left at the same time, so I didn’t have to drive, which I could have driven. But, at that moment, in my mind, I honestly couldn’t. I couldn’t even go into my mind. I just couldn’t do it. I was focusing on traffic. I was tapping my foot. I was just staying in the moment, just impatiently waiting. Time was extremely slow.
Scott
How far was the drive from work to the hospital for him?
Lemon
Instead of driving straight to the hospital, he did drive to the house first.
Scott
Did he think you were still there?
Lemon
Yes. He arrived at the time that they were loading Alana into the ambulance. I guess I was in the front of the ambulance at the time because I did not see him or I don’t remember seeing him. I definitely didn’t talk to him and it felt like an eternity for him. But the actual drive was only about 10 minutes.
Scott
So he wasn’t that far away. That’s why he went home – just to maybe catch you there. But still, that’s 10 minutes of driving, not knowing who in his family is unresponsive. It almost would’ve been better to not say anything. Just say, “Hey, there’s been a fire. You need to contact your wife.” I don’t know. That’s, of course, again, an emergency situation and I’m sure Brian felt that he was helping by communicating.
Lemon
Brian was just tossed a phone and said, “Call this number, talk to John. Look here, Brian. Here’s the phone. Call John. Deal with this. I can’t help anymore. I have to be here.” From there, they left the house, followed us to the hospital, and met us there.
Scott
So the first time you talked to John was at the hospital then?
Lemon
Yes, so we arrived at the hospital. We arrived before the second ambulance. I did ask them immediately, “Where is my younger daughter? She’s also being admitted.” It took some time for her to arrive. By the time I got there, John, my dad, my mom and John’s aunt were all there. So we had some family members and John was pretty calm and collected because that’s just kind of his response in these emergency situations. He tends to find himself in kind of a supportive role, like he is just prepared to do whatever he needs to do at that time.
He was with Alana and I told him, “Go with Alana and stay with her. I’m going to figure everything else out.” Because that’s what I do in emergencies. I go, “Okay, what do I need to do to fix this?” I kind of snap into action, which aligns with everything that happened. Like in the fire itself, my brain is just checking through a series of what we need to do first. So I told John, “Just stay with Alana. She is in a bed, being given oxygen.” Again, it’s kind of a whirlwind of figuring everything out. Lola had not gotten there yet. The firemen were there and I felt like there were a million things that I needed to do until somebody kind of sat me down and just said, “Go sit down in the family support room. You’re not wearing pants. We’re going to go find you some pants.” So that’s when I stopped and I think that was actually the moment when the emotional flood started to hit me because, until then, I was very busy and I was operative and focused on doing things. When I stopped was when I started actually feeling things.
Scott
Now you just have your thoughts, thinking – I don’t want to think for you, but it would seem like you’d be thinking – “Wow, what could have happened?” And then also wondering what’s going to happen.
Lemon
The first thought that went through my head– the first person I spoke with was John’s aunt. I didn’t recognize her at first. I actually walked past her and I came back and I’m like, “Oh my God, I’m so sorry I didn’t recognize you.” She sat with me for a while and I just kept saying over and over, “I can’t believe that happened. Oh my God. This is something on the news that happens to other people. I cannot believe that happened.” She said, “You’re in shock. That’s why you feel this way.” It was this enormous wave of feeling that rushed over me, that everything that I’d done wrong, every decision I had to make, and this was when I was hit by the crushing wave of realization that I had left Alana alone in a burning house while I saved myself and my younger child. That’s when I was bawling and babbling about how terrible I am, how terrible I feel. And she just kept telling me, “You’re in shock right now.” That was what she was repeating to me over and over again. There wasn’t a sense in trying to reason with me in that moment because I was reeling from everything that had happened and it was still so fresh and so new.
I wanted to go and see Alana at that time, so I did. She was just laying on a bed receiving oxygen, and the doctors talked to me. They told me that they would be intubating her. She would be put on a ventilator. This is when my brain switched back over to what will happen because I’m still terrified of the prospect that she is going to die. If you’ve ever been in a hospital situation, you know that doctors don’t really give you any answers that they don’t have yet. So, it was kind of the idiom of, well, we’re doing everything we can, but they let me know what they would do. They let me know that the treatment for carbon monoxide poisoning is oxygen and that it was good that she had come around on her own in the ambulance. At this point, she was sedated just for her own comfort because she is a person with a disability and a limited ability to realize what’s happening. It was easier and better on her if she were sedated and she would ultimately be intubated so that she can receive that care.
Lola arrived not too long after and she was chatting away with the nurses, just being herself, being her. She’s a very sweet, friendly, sociable child, so I knew she was okay at that point.
Scott
The difference for her was the fact that her bedroom door was closed, wasn’t it?
Lemon
That was 100% the difference for both of us. If either of us had left our doors open, we would’ve been in the exact same position as Alana.
Scott
But you may have discovered the fire sooner, though, if your door was open.
Lemon
Yes, right. Any number of things could have been done differently, ultimately. When I spoke with the doctor, I had to give a report about everything that had happened. I had to give a report to the fireman too. When I told the doctor, I felt like I was confessing to him that I’d done something terrible because I left Alana inside and he said, “If you hadn’t done that, all three of you would’ve died.” He wanted me to know I did the right thing because I helped the mobile person walk out and I myself was mobile, but that wasn’t something that I could wrap my head around. Because I just kept going back to the thought of, “Okay, but I left her behind. Why aren’t you getting this? That’s terrible. How can you leave your own child behind when you’re a parent?”
I think, when you think of these situations, in abstract, you think to yourself that you’re going to have these amazing feats of strength or ability that we don’t actually have. You think you could lift a car off of your own child if you had to, you’d have the superhuman strength to do that, and I didn’t. I did not have the strength to even pull her out of the room. And I thought, “What the hell? Where was my superhuman ability? Why didn’t that happen for me?” This doctor is a very rational, very reasonable man, and he is attempting to reason with me, and he’s saying, “No, you made the right choice. You did exactly what you were supposed to do. You asked for help when you realized that you weren’t able to move her. If you hadn’t done that, you wouldn’t be here right now. Neither was she.” I understand that logically, but that was not a narrative I was willing to accept at that time.
Scott
Yeah. Emotionally, it feels very different.
Lemon
Yes, it feels wrong. It feels like a terrible betrayal. I was terrified to face John, my husband and my parents because I felt awful about what had happened. I think I saw my mom first, and I came up and gave her a hug, and I asked her, “Do you still love me?” Because I wasn’t sure that she would. I thought she would just see me as awful, negligent and unworthy of love. She said, “Of course. Of course, I do.” And then I said, “Okay, good. Can you please go be with Lola? Because Lola needs somebody to be with her right now.” And my mom took Lola home because Lola was very quickly discharged from the hospital. I came to Alana’s room and I saw my dad, who is not an emotional person. He does not express himself emotionally at all. He just came up to me and he just gave me the tightest hug of my life. At that moment, it kind of hit me that he almost lost his child too. So no one was mad at me. That was good.
Scott
Of course, the only person mad at you was you.
Lemon
Yeah. I went home later that day and Alana was still in the hospital. I did get to leave after talking to a very merciful doctor because he did what he wasn’t supposed to do. He told me, “I do not think she’s going to die in this hospital.” He broke away from his doctor’s speech of, “We’re doing everything we can.” He told me, “Look, this is what she needs. She needs oxygen. She’s getting oxygen right now. She’s responding to that. It’s going to take time. She needs to be on oxygen for a while, and I can’t tell you how long that will be, but I do not think she’s going to die in this hospital right now.”
Scott
How long did it take?
Lemon
She was intubated for five days. At this time, I sprung into action again because we did not have a home anymore. We lost everything materially. We lost the house and everything in it, but we didn’t lose each other or our animals. Our entire lives were gone as we knew them. I had a lot of phone calls to make because I didn’t know where I was going to sleep that night. I called my landlord and I said, “This is what happened.” Again, I’m kind of terrified of, “Everybody’s mad at me right now. Everybody thinks this is my fault.” So I was really scared to talk to the landlord, but she said, “Okay, first and foremost, are you okay?” And I’m like, “Yes, everybody’s okay-ish. The house is not livable. Do you have another rental?” And she said, “Yes, I have a place that we can put you” almost immediately. “It is not really, like, we’re rehabbing it. It’s not really the greatest place, but it’s yours if you want it.” And I said, “Yes, of course. I just need a roof over my head. I don’t care where it is.” So, within an hour of all of this happening, once we got everybody situated at the hospital and Alana was admitted, we flipped to the other side, like the very rude real life side, because life still goes on.
I secured another living situation and a friend of mine started a GoFundMe. We made arrangements for things. We went to Dollar General and got clothes because none of us had clothes. We went through the list. We checked off boxes. In this way, it was almost a strange relief and comfort that Alana was still in the hospital because I didn’t have a place to bring her home to. So what was I supposed to do?
Scott
And she’s being taken care of while you handle all these other details?
Lemon
Yes. John stayed in the hospital with Alana almost the entire time. Of course, I still came to see her at least once a day, but I would wake up very early and I would have a list of things to do that day. Everything from just replacing all the things that we needed and rebuilding our lives.
Scott
Did you have renter’s insurance?
Lemon
Nope. That’s another thing on the list of everything we did wrong and everything that I’ll never do again. We didn’t have renter’s insurance, and my landlady was like, “Fuck the house. I’ve got insurance on the house. I don’t care about the house.”
Scott
You told me you’ve read stories in the news about house fires, but this experience that you had was nothing like that. Why was that? What was different?
Lemon
I feel like people don’t realize how truly debilitating it is when you are actually in it because, if you watch it on TV or in a movie, you’ll see people having conversations and walking around and maybe there are flames around them, but they’re not choking on smoke and they’re not struggling to breathe and they don’t capture the feeling of what it’s like for your lungs to burn while you struggle to move around in a room that you’ve lived in for years. They don’t appropriately capture just how you have a short window to get outside before you lose consciousness and die. So, if you’re very lucky, maybe you’re in a room with a closed door far away from the fire– that was the case with Lola. If you were to open her bedroom door, it looked untouched. So what they tell you is true. Being behind a closed door is by far the safest thing. But if you are in a position like Alana was in where you’re breathing in smoke, it’s only a matter of time until you succumb to it and it’s horrific. It’s absolutely horrific. It’s quiet. It’s completely silent. If I had not looked around and realized something was happening, I would’ve had no idea that my house was on fire. It’s just the scariest situation I could possibly imagine. I wouldn’t wish it on my worst enemy to go through something like that.
Scott
And Alana fully recovered?
Lemon
After five days of intubation, Alana fully recovered and was released from the hospital. It was actually very funny because she was supposed to have at least another day of being intubated, but she woke up and decided to pull out her own breathing tube. She said, “I’m done with this place.” She is a very spunky girl. She is feisty just by nature. She woke up and she realized that she didn’t want to be on that breathing tube anymore, and she pulled it out, and the nurses said, “Okay, well if she’s ready to go home, she can go home.”
Scott
I’ve heard that extubation is pretty painful, and she just did it herself. If that’s what she wants, then she’s okay.
Lemon
She’s a strong person. She’s strong-willed and it was very hard to see her looking fragile and helpless because that’s just not her, that’s not who she is.
Scott
Your emotional turmoil with having to make that decision to leave her and go get Lola– how long did it take you to process that and realize it was the right decision?
Lemon
At the time, I was very lucky because I had a wonderful therapist who was on call. I was already receiving therapy from some of the things that I’d mentioned before, like Alana’s previous elopement and everything that we’d experienced with that. So once I was at home and I was settled, I called my therapist and I told her what happened, and my therapist started to cry. That’s when I realized it was kind of real. I told her everything and she’s like, “You ran outside naked to save your children? You’re my hero! What are you talking about?”
I stayed with my mom temporarily while I was waiting for my new house to be ready, and I had this conversation with my mom over and over again. I would say things like, “I want to trade places with Alana. I want to go back in time and trade places with her.” And my mom would say things like, “Why would you do that? She couldn’t have done what you did.” The people around me were trying to convince me that this was the right choice and I sank into this terrible place of just self-loathing. I was okay during the day because I was busy and occupied but, at night, it was really hard, especially the first night. I would deprive myself of sleep or eating because I wanted to prove to Alana that I loved her. So I felt like I had to punish myself to show her how bad it hurt me that I left her behind.
Scott
Did you realize that’s what you were doing at the time? Or did therapy explain that that’s what was going on?
Lemon
Yes. I knew I was punishing myself on purpose. I remember thinking of myself and just thinking that I was unworthy of good feelings, of comfort, peace. So, I didn’t allow myself to relax or to exhale. And if I started to feel anything other than those bad feelings, I would consciously replay the image of Alana’s face in my head to remember, “You did this. This is because you left her in there.” That was my state of mind for a long time for many months afterward. So the path to self-forgiveness for me was a very long one, and it didn’t really matter how much people tried to talk me out of that because I wasn’t willing to accept it. Eventually, after so long of not sleeping and not eating, my body just shut down because I am a human being with physical needs, and that was a little bit of a turning point when I finally rested for a long time. I think it was close to the end of the week while Alana was still in the hospital.
After I got an appropriate amount of rest, I was able to think a little bit more clearly, and then I was thinking about things like, this is something that I need to work through in therapy. Most of my initial healing process in therapy was focused on not engaging in behaviors that aren’t helpful like depriving myself of food and sleep, or deliberately subjecting myself to thoughts that I knew were designed to punish myself because those things weren’t helpful. They weren’t helpful to me. They weren’t helpful to Alana. It’s been two years and I can’t say that I’ve fully forgiven myself for that. I can only say that I am grateful that we’re all here. However, that happened.
Another significant moment for me is I got to talk to Robin on the phone. She checked in with me often after everything had happened, and I just remember telling her like, “Robin, I can’t believe you did that. You didn’t have to do that.” And she just said, “Oh, baby, that’s what neighbors do.” It was so simple for her to say that because she was so genuine in her love for her neighbors. She also told me, “It took me and my cousin, who is a Marine, to pull her out of that house, and she told me we struggled to do that.” It took two large adults to pull her out, and it was hard for them. So, of course, I couldn’t move her by myself. Of course, I didn’t have human strength to get her out of the house by myself.
Scott
That had to help you knowing that, right? Knowing that you couldn’t have even– regardless if you made a different decision, you couldn’t have done it.
Lemon
Yes. But that is a narrative that I feel like we’re subjected to as parents – we should die for our kids. We should be willing to die for our kids. That went against the choices that I made because I chose to get myself and my younger daughter out of the house. Even though that ultimately saved our lives, I felt like I didn’t do what I was supposed to do – I was supposed to be willing to die for my kid.
Scott
That’s the irony here. The decision that you have so much emotional turmoil about is the decision that saved your lives.
Lemon
Yes. So nobody had to die. Everybody lived. It’s the best possible outcome.
Scott
Okay. You had no working smoke alarms. You had no fire extinguishers. I think the thing that some people listening to the story might focus on is being locked in the house, requiring a key to get out of the house. When you decided to do that, I mean, you had been dealing with Alana’s elopement– you said she’s clever, she knows how to open doors and get out. You were at that point, probably kind of in denial that, “I know it’s not safe, but what else can we do?” Right?
Lemon
At the time, we knew that there was a risk, like it was a fire hazard, but the risk of elopement was greater than the risk of fire. She was an incredible danger to herself at the time because she was so determined to leave the house. That actually was part of the reason that we left Florida and moved to Ohio because we were living next to a beach. We moved away from the body of water that she was attracted to, and it was a long battle to find something that would finally keep her in the house. We tried everything. We tried chain locks at the top of the doors. We tried alarm systems, just everything, and then that’s what it finally took. We were still trying to do everything the right way. I gave a copy of my key to the fire department that they could have theoretically used to open my door if I hadn’t gotten out in time. I’m sure, if we’d been stuck in there that long, we would’ve been dead.
Scott
Yeah, for the time for the fire department to get there. Plus, how do they keep track of, “Okay. This is the address. We’ve got a key around here somewhere.” I would not count on that at all. So what’s your solution? How do you do it now?
Lemon
Well, now the risk of elopement is less because – knock on everything – she has not eloped in over 10 years. She’s no longer attempting to elope. I have cameras throughout my house because she’s also epileptic, so it’s important for me to be able to look at her at any time and monitor for seizure activity. I’m never very far away. This was also a really significant part of the aftermath of the fire because, for a long time, I refused to be away from Alana.
Once we were in our new house and settled in, we did not install the deadbolts on the door again because, clearly, it’s flip flopped and now the risk of fire is greater than the risk of elopement. So we said, “Okay, we don’t need these anymore. I’m just going to hover over her and stay nearby.” That very quickly escalated into my diagnosis of PTSD and OCD because I refused to leave Alana’s side to an extreme point. I was completely convinced that if I left the house, something terrible would happen. Either she would have a seizure or there would be a fire, something along those lines. So my brain was attempting to connect those dots of cause and effect. It’s an effort to protect me by telling me that I would be safe and Alana would be safe if I stayed at home. It resulted in me not leaving to go to the grocery store or to visit a friend.
We talked about my love for roller derby and I took a step back from that and didn’t go to practice or engage with any of my friends or community. I had people in my life who realized how unhealthy this was. So they would invite me to do things. “Why don’t you just come over for a little while? I live nearby.” I have a good friend in the neighborhood who was saying this to me, “Just come to my house. I live nearby. You can go home if anything happens.” And I would say, “What are you talking about? I can’t leave.” I’m saying this like everybody else around me is crazy for thinking that. “Why would you even ask me that? You know that I can’t leave the house?” So it got to a really extreme point.
Now, at this point, the shift was away from recovering from the actual fire and the trauma that in and of itself caused. Now, it was about keeping a lot of safety, but to an extremely unhealthy degree. I spent a long time– it’s been two years, and I was actively being treated in therapy for PTSD and OCD because, at this point, my brain had designed patterns of cause and effect, and I felt like I had to take multiple steps to prevent terrible things from happening. Just recently, we passed through the 2 year anniversary of the house fire, and I took my first vacation that I’ve taken in the past two years. I went to South Dakota to celebrate a good friend’s wedding. It was a long way away without my car or without a reasonable means of going home if anything were to happen. I went with my best friend and I said, “I’m doing this. It’s scary, but I know that if anything happens at home, John is prepared to deal with it. We have a support system around us who can help. This doesn’t just have to be me. If I need support, then I’ll reach out to my support system.” So this is when I started engaging with some of those tools that I had learned in therapy to accept that these terrible accidents happen against our best efforts, but we still have to live our lives as normally as we possibly can.
Scott
And you’re making progress
Lemon
Considering there was a time two years ago where I thought the most sane and rational thing to do was to lock myself in the house and to not sleep or eat or function like a normal person, enormous progress. I’m still worried. I still think about these things all the time and it gets the best of me sometimes. I have screamed at John for setting things on the stove like a pizza box or something, anything that could replicate that situation that resulted in the house fire. Those are the things that I’m still kind of working to overcome. But I’m learning that there are reasonable steps we can take to keep ourselves as safe as possible. At the same time, we can’t ever be guaranteed that these things won’t happen. We just have to do our best.
Scott
And you’re doing better now than you did before. You’ve got the smoke alarms and you’re aware. That’s a big thing. I mean, most people will not experience a fire, so it’s natural for us to think, “That happens to other people. I see it on the news, but obviously we’re not going to have that.”
Lemon
I think everybody lives in that state of mind of, “This is just something that happens on the news and it could never happen to me.” Everybody lives that way. After everything that happened, everyone was so eager to replace my things. Everyone came through to replace all the material things that I’d lost. For me, those things were the easiest things to let go of. I had never been too attached to stuff. I was able to recover a couple things that were truly irreplaceable. We were able to reenter the house and get some things that we wanted to try and salvage, but we let the rest go and everybody’s response was kind of the same, “Oh my God, you lost everything.” I was thinking, “That is the easy part. Things can be replaced. People can’t be replaced.” Although this was the most difficult, painful, traumatic moment of my life, I also felt enormous gratitude for everything that I had. The house that the landlady moved us into was a dump. It was a shithole, it had a mouse infestation, it was gross, but I had never felt more grateful to be anywhere. I had everything I needed. I had a roof over my head. I had my children, I had clothes on my back and I even had my animals. So I felt like the luckiest person alive. I felt like I had literally won the lottery and I felt if this hadn’t happened, I never would’ve experienced that. So there is still a part of me that’s grateful for that, not that I would ever care to repeat it.
After some time went by, I went back to being the same. I’m a grateful bastard – I’ve always been– because we slip into complacency so easily. I try to touch back on that place when I feel like things are hard, ordinary problems in my life seem much more trivial now and, for that, I’m very grateful.
Scott
It’s so easy to slip into that mode, taking things for granted. So we’ve got to be deliberate about realizing how grateful we should be. I agree with you.
Lemon
Yeah. Just every day that we get to wake up and be surrounded by our loved ones, which sounds cliche, it’s not something that you can truly appreciate until you almost lose it. And like you mentioned, you never know what’s going on in somebody’s life when they’re riding in the back of that ambulance. You just don’t know. Now, that’s something that I am much more aware of and much more empathetic for. So I like to begin and end each day with the same mantra of saying, “Thank you for this day. Thank you for the breath in my body. Thank you for my children and my animals and my loved ones” because I came so close to losing all of that.
Scott
I really appreciate Lemon coming on here to tell her story, and especially for her to talk about the things they did wrong, and how they’ve corrected those things.
And if you heard her talking about the different ways they were unprepared and now you’ve realized that YOU are just as unprepared for a housefire, I’d love to hear about the changes you’re making so that you are ready for an emergency like that. Call in the Podcast Voicemail line and tell us about it – 727-386-9468 and you can call anytime night or day.
October is National Fire Prevention Month and this is the third episode we’ve done this month about people who experienced a housefire. I know I have good smoke alarms with strong batteries and hopefully you do as well.
Here’s a question for anyone who works in the service industry – what’s an advance sign that a customer is going to be a bad tipper? If you’ve been a server of some type for a while, you can probably spot these people a mile away. That was the question posted earlier this week in the Facebook group. If you have an idea or comment about that, we want to hear it! You can join the discussion along with 9243 other listeners, at WhatWasThatLike.com/facebook.
Graphics for this episode were created by Bob Bretz. Full episode transcription was created by James Lai.
Every morning I drink my coffee from a What Was That Like coffee mug. You can get yours at WhatWasThatLike.com/merch
And now we have the Listener Story. I have to tell you, I just love this segment of the show. It’s just a short story, like 5-10 minutes, sent in by a listener. And it doesn’t have to be anything earth-shattering. Just something interesting that happened to you. Record it on your phone and email it to me – Scott@WhatWasThatLike.com.
This listener has a fun hobby, and it led her to finding something really important.
Stay safe, and we’ll see you next time.
(Listener story)
The question was, what makes you weird? My answer is that I collect golf balls every single day. It’s the ultimate adult Easter egg hunt. We live on a private golf course, but the land near it is public because school’s back up to it. Every day, I walk 2.5 mile outer course to collect golf balls, and I usually hit the jackpot. Most days, I find about 15 balls on average, but my most for a day is 30. If you’re thinking that I find balls just laying on a golf green type surface, think again. Only about 1 out of 10 is an easy find. I walk through tall grass and weeds to find them, and most of my walk is spent looking down. I’ve learned to shuffle my feet so that I know what a golf ball feels like underneath my shoes, and I know that a golf ball hidden in grass looks blue, not white. It’s a really fun hobby. I put them in the fanny pack as I go, and the more I find the happier I am.
I did it for a long time, came home and threw them in a 5 gallon bucket, and then I realized that I could actually organize them, which would make me much happier. And when I realized how many I had, I thought maybe this could actually be profitable as well. So I had about 3-5 gallon buckets and this took me a while. I sorted by brand and type. I realized, at this point, that golfers do certain things with their balls to keep them from getting mixed up with their playing partner’s balls. They have special balls, special markings, etc. So I’ve seen some fun things. Balls with hamburgers and hot dogs. Monogram balls. Balls with college logos. Balls with band followings like Dave Matthews band has a fire dancer, the Grateful Dead Stealie, or they just make three dots in a certain color, or they mark through the type of ball that it is, which really irritates me because I have to clean that with alcohol so that I can later sort it.
Someone asks me if there has ever been a ball so cool or unusual that I couldn’t get rid of it. Well, I’m really not a sentimental person. I’ll pretty much sell anything if it’ll bring money, but my dad used to play this course too as he also lived in this neighborhood, and I had been collecting these buckets of balls for a long time before I decided to sort them. My dad had passed away about a year at this time. So when I first jumped them out and was going through them, I definitely wasn’t expecting anything sentimental. I was just learning my way and seeing these different types of balls and figuring it out. But I did come upon one that felt sort of odd, and I figured that I just got a scuffed up ball that would end up going in the trash – nobody wants those – but no. It happened to be my dad’s golf ball. Like I said, I just put them in a fanny pack and emptied them into the 5 gallon bucket. At the time, I never looked at him, so I didn’t know this was in there. But my dad was a military guy so, as was his nature, he had his own special system. Apparently, this was to take white out to every single golf ball, wait for it to dry, and then mark his initials, which was of course cheaper, more efficient, and just as neat as a monogram machine, if you could see his handwriting.
I was beside myself, of course, I FaceTimed my brother, showed it to him, and we both cried, and this is the only ball I have ever kept and definitely my most awesome find to date. Who knew that golf ball was out there waiting for me? I now sort golf balls every day when I get home from my walk. This is my weird, fun, relaxing hobby. I get sun, podcast time, alone time, exercise, and of course, I also now sell these balls on Facebook marketplace. I have repeat customers and I make enough fun money through each summer that I definitely consider it well worth it. That’s what makes me weird. And thanks for listening.