Scott woke up from a coma

I wonder if this ever happens to you.

Maybe you’re visiting someone and you’re staying overnight. Or you’re on a trip and you’re staying in a hotel or an Airbnb. And that first time you wake up, you have a brief few seconds where you’re a little disoriented. Like, “Hey, where am I? This is not my bedroom. This is not my bed”. But then it comes back to you – oh yeah, I’m away from home right now.

I would think it would be even worse if you woke up and realized you’re in a hospital bed.

For the podcast, I typically don’t do stories that are mainly centered around the guest being in a coma. It’s an interesting concept for sure, but just the fact that someone was in a coma would make for a difficult episode. I mean, how can you tell a detailed story when you were asleep for most of it?

Today we’re going to hear from Scott. He was in a coma for a while. And then he had that experience of trying to figure out “why am I in a hospital…what is going on”. But his story is not really about him being in a coma.

It’s about what the doctor told him when he woke up.

 

 

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Full show notes and pictures for this episode are here:
https://WhatWasThatLike.com/243

Graphics for this episode by Bob Bretz. Transcription was done by James Lai.

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Episode transcript (download transcript PDF):

I wonder if this ever happens to you.

Maybe you’re visiting someone and you’re staying overnight. Or you’re on a trip and you’re staying in a hotel or an Airbnb. And that first time you wake up, you have a brief few seconds where you’re a little disoriented. Like, “Hey, where am I? This is not my bedroom. This is not my bed”. But then it comes back to you – oh yeah, I’m away from home right now.

I would think it would be even worse if you woke up and realized you’re in a hospital bed.

For the podcast, I typically don’t do stories that are mainly centered around the guest being in a coma. It’s an interesting concept for sure, but just the fact that someone was in a coma would make for a difficult episode. I mean, how can you tell a detailed story when you were asleep for most of it?

Today we’re going to hear from Scott. He was in a coma for a while. And then he had that experience of trying to figure out “why am I in a hospital…what is going on”. But his story is not really about him being in a coma.

It’s about what the doctor told him when he woke up.

Scott J
Your job at the time when this happened was soccer coach.

Scott M
Correct.

Scott J
But, when reading your book, you were more than just a coach for soccer though. You were more like a coach for life and having the right priorities and that kind of thing. What was your outlook on that?

Scott M
Oh my goodness. Incident we’re talking about– I had just finished my first year as a head coach at the college level, so my primary focus was just improving that program and winning a national championship. A little more than a year ago, prior to me starting at the university, my long term girlfriend and I had broken up, so I was footloose and fancy-free, and it was for me to go after what I really wanted to do with my future, and that was soccer.

Scott J
Okay. So at the time, you were really, I would say maybe the word would be, intellectual about the game and strategy, and you were really independent and you were confident. Are all those terms accurate, you would think, in describing you?

Scott M
I would say, yeah. What really was setting me apart and was starting to help me boost me up the ladder, so to speak, in coaching was talking to the right people about my analytical background and what my view was on the game. It was different at the time, especially.

Scott J
It kind of makes me think of– have you seen the movie, Moneyball, with Brad Pitt?

Scott M
Yeah.

Scott J
It’s kind of like they approached it from a very much more analytical type of idea as opposed to the traditional way of bringing in players and training and stuff like that. So that’s an interesting thing.

Scott M
Exactly, yeah. Mine was a combination of– at the time, we didn’t have some of the video equipment that’s available today that can take an entire match, break it down to certain sequences, and be able to analyze it and then present it to players. I just did it all in my head and I used mathematics by looking at percentages and angles, especially in certain parts of the field. That’s what really made me kind of an oddball in the coaching field.

Scott J
In a good way though.

Scott M
Yeah, in a good way. Yeah, We were winning

Scott J
The day that this all started, you were at a Nike soccer camp.  What happened that first told you, “Something’s wrong.”

Scott M
I had to take myself out of the coaches’ match. We had national team players there doing some instruction and coaches from across the country. This was not just a recruiting trip for me. It was also to start meeting more and more people and branching out because it’s not what you know necessarily, it’s who you know. I had never done this before. I mean, I walked off the field and sat down. Something was really strange.

Scott J
And what were your symptoms? It was mostly leg pain. Is that right?

Scott M
Leg cramps a week prior because I was in training to go over to Europe and my summers were often spent coaching and there were guest player opportunities. The year before, I was a guest player against the Dutch Olympic team because I had known the coach. So, yeah, when an opportunity, something like that pops up, I wanted to be ready for it physically, so I had been in training and I had pulled a muscle in my chest about a week prior. So, I thought things might have had something to do with that. But boy, once I started feeling fatigued and other things were happening, I knew it wasn’t a pulled muscle.

Scott J
Yeah. It was severe fatigue. The next day though, you were able to drive to your mom’s house.

Scott M
Yeah. The Nike camp was outside of Chicago. I mean, sure, hospitals are going to be far away. I had no clue. This was before we had cell phones. To be able to track and get you to a hospital, I couldn’t just say, “Hey, take you to a hospital.” I mean, my mom was an hour and a half away, so I pulled into a fast food place, grabbed a 7UP, and started chomping on the straw and little sips of 7UP during my drive. It was an hour and a half drive to get to mom’s. Again, we didn’t have cell phones, so she didn’t know I was even coming that day. I was supposed to come the next day. As wise as women are, especially mothers, as soon as she saw me, she said, “You get your butt over to the emergency room. Something’s wrong.” She didn’t have any idea.

Scott J
That intuition.  And, of course, she knows you, she knows what you’re supposed to look like, and that’s not how you look.

Scott M
No.

Scott J
Yeah. So you went to the ER.

Scott M
Well, I presented myself twice, Scott. The first time was, “Here, drink some Gatorade. You’re going to be fine.” Yeah. No problems. I had a temperature of 102.8. That should have been triggering some things but didn’t. Being a male, I guess it was, “Okay, I’ll go home. I’ll get up the next day.” I was supposed to be driving to Minneapolis, St. Paul later in the day for recruiting trips, but I continued throwing up in my mom’s kitchen, which wasn’t cool. So it was time to get back over to the emergency room. The last thing I remember was my stepfather and I backing out of the driveway with him in the driver’s seat and my mom standing outside her kitchen door just looking freaked out. She knew things had advanced. Something even more was going on. Then, it was a time of slumber, let’s just say.

Scott J
Extended slumber, wasn’t it?

Scott M
Extended slumber, yes.

Scott J
Let’s hear about when you woke up.

Scott M
Wow. There’s a story that goes along with it. I presented in my book how I was wondering what was going on because I had been comatose. I heard some women laughing and it seemed like it was an athletic event. So really, Scott, I thought I was thinking that it was part of my dream and I had no clue what was going on. And I saw the back of a woman dressed in scrubs, looking at a television and talking to me and saying my name like she had said it many times before. This is weird. When she turned around, she was taken aback. “Hang on a minute, I’m going to go get someone to let him know that you’re awake.” A couple minutes later, someone came into my room. I had no idea what was going on, who this was, but then it started making sense. Here comes a guy, a dress shirt, a tie, and a white lab coat, “Oh, it’s a doctor.” Still thinking this is part of this weird dream. Then, when he put his hand on my shoulder, I could feel that it’s now starting to feel like this is real. What’s going on? So he started introducing himself and talking to me.

Scott J
Yeah, I can imagine it. You said you were comatose.

Scott M
Yeah.

Scott J
You don’t really just snap right out of that and realize, “Oh, where am I?” Whatever. You were kind of gradually waking up.

Scott M
Exactly.

Scott J
But you knew you were in a hospital or in a hospital bed.

Scott M
Figured that, yeah. He was a nice guy because he was gentle at the news and he introduced himself and said right away that it was great to see me because I had a lot of people worried for quite a while, which started me thinking about, “Quite a while? What does that mean?” And then as he was talking to me, I realized I couldn’t move. That’s when I think my mind started really waking up and wondering, “Why can’t I move?” I had a neck brace on. I couldn’t see what was going on unless it was directly in front of me. I was wondering if I was paralyzed. “Had I been in a car accident?” But then I thought back to the last time I was awake and pulled out of the driveway and there wouldn’t have been a car accident. We’re just in the city of Janesville. So it was still quite confusing until he started talking about what I had contracted and what I had gone through. Then it started really seeping in on what had happened.

Scott J
One of the first things that the doctor explained– I don’t know how I would’ve even reacted to this, but he told you that machines were keeping you alive.

Scott M
Yeah. Imagine that.

Scott J
How do you process that? What were your thoughts when you heard that?

Scott M
I was able to look out of the corner of my eye because there were a lot of machines, a lot of things going, a lot of noises. Of course, again, I couldn’t see them, Scott, because of the neck brace, but I could catch, out of the very corner of my right eye, a machine that was like an accordion going up and down. I connected that up and down motion with my breaths. So as that was going on, that clicked into place. It was like puzzle pieces – working on the edges first. Those edges were all starting to fit together, and now it was how the rest of the picture was starting to shape up. As he told me about something called Group A strep with necrotizing fasciitis. When he mentioned what the media liked to call it at the time, that’s when it really hit home.

Scott J
What did the media like to call it?

Scott M
The Flesh Eating Disease.

Scott J
The Flesh Eating Disease…

Scott M
I remember hearing about it. It was popular in the media at the time. It was bigger headlines. Yeah.

Scott J
I’ve heard of it as well. Normally, that happens to someone that goes to a third world country and goes waiting in shallow water that’s got stuff in it that you shouldn’t touch. You didn’t do any of that.

Scott M
Jim Henson died from that.

Scott J
Oh, I didn’t realize that. Yeah. The Muppet guy.

Scott M
Yep.

Scott J
Okay.

Scott M
So that hit home with, “Wow. It’s not just the world. More and more people have been contracting it.”

Scott J
How long have you been in a coma?

Scott M
Looking at all the cards on the wall, I knew that it had taken a little bit of time, somehow, for people to know– we’re talking dozens of cards. But then the telltale sign, Scott, was sagging get-well-wishes balloons. They were sagging. So, I extrapolated that as, “Oh man, I’ve been out for a while because mylar balloons take a while for them to get to the point where they’re sagging. He hadn’t told me how long it was yet, but I was starting to put these pieces together and boy, there was a definite image coming through on that puzzle that was being put together.

Scott J
I’m trying to put myself in your situation and it seems like, as these little bits of data come in – human nature – it feels like you’d want to be in denial. “I must be missing something here. There’s no way I could have been asleep for this long. What’s really going on?”

Scott M
That’s exactly that. That was probably the point when my mind was starting to shut down– or I wouldn’t say shut down– guard against any more negative words coming from this doctor’s mouth. And I write that in the book. “I don’t hear you. I don’t know what’s going on.” But every once in a while, I had to focus on what he was saying. So, eventually, he provided more and more information and that puzzle really came together at one point. He was telling me about the history of Group A Strep and then also what necrotizing fasciitis is. Necrotizing fasciitis is the death of the body and the skin – deterioration of the body and the skin. Hearing that was, I think, a struggle between my mind wanting to know what’s going on and my mind wanting to say, “I don’t hear anything.” And some of it did have to be absorbed and it was coming in loud and clear. I think he was very cautious about how he was providing me with this information because I think he knew, at one point, there was going to be a trigger that might trip.

Scott J
Of course, he knew.

Scott M
Oh yeah.

Scott J
But you had all these questions. Were you able to speak?

Scott M
No, because I had a big tube down my throat. There was no way for me to communicate except for blinking my eyes.

Scott J
And you hadn’t quite worked out that system yet.

Scott M
Yeah, we hadn’t done that yet.

Scott J
What was the news that he gave you?

Scott M
In order to save your life, we had to amputate both of your hands and parts of your feet. I’ll be honest with you, Scott. The first thing that shot through my mind was, “Guess I’m done playing. Here goes my playing career.” I think I hung on that for a while. It’s something to attach to because, holy cow, what a load of information. Not just the amputations– here I am without parts of my body, but why did you have to do that in order for me to not die? That would’ve been a deeper conversation sometime down the road, but I think then he started noticing that I was trying to figure this out inside of my head and trying to put everything together. So, with that bit of information, that’s what really maybe sent me down the rabbit hole, to follow Alice. That’s when I started learning how to check out and not need to know what was going on. It also started me down a bad path, Scott with– this may be more of a male thing than a female thing, but I just shut it out. I don’t want to have to deal with it. What’s up next?

When he gave me the information, how long I had been in the coma, I put it together with, “We were supposed to be in Europe by now.” I was taking a hand-selected team of college players over to Europe playing the three major tournaments there. Well, I’m not, because it must have been middle of August by now with those Mylar balloons and it just fit. So, that’s when I think I also started falling off the cliff of, “This is bad news. I missed Europe. Next up, my players were supposed to be arriving anytime for preseason training. I got to get out of here.” Well, that wasn’t happening. My mind must have been firing all on all cylinders or else it’d shut down. I don’t know which one happens, Scott.

Scott J
It seems like information overload.

Scott M
Yeah.

Scott J
It’s interesting that, as you got this news that your hands and parts of your feet had been amputated, you immediately related it to your job, like, “What am I going to do? I guess I’m not going to play soccer anymore. How’s this going to affect my career?” In reality, as you step back now and look at it, the real thought was, “How am I going to live without my hands?” That’s kind of a much more broad way to look at it.

Scott M
Yeah.

Scott J
But was that kind of self preservation, sort of.

Scott M
Looking back and you brought up, now we can look back. It’s been so many years that it was not just self preservation, but I think it also started me down the problem of what I was going to get into five years later with running into the brick wall of depression. That was me starting down that path. And during that whole time, I didn’t really focus on me, on my head and my heart. I didn’t work on those two things. It was to go back to work, keep building, keep creating that program.

Scott J
Was anyone else from your family in the room at the time when you got that news?

Scott M
No. The doctor said that my mother and stepfather and some of the other family would be there in a little while. So, it was just me. I was left alone for a little bit. I’m sure that he calculated how long I would be alone. I think he realized that, psychologically, I needed to be alone in order to help absorb some of this without him being there. I mean, there were some tears, but then how am I going to wipe them? I’ve never been in that situation before, so how do I deal with it? I tried to lift my arms. I couldn’t until he told me during the long month that I was in the coma, and that’s when I first knew, “Oh, okay. For sure. The calendar was correct.” I had lost 40 pounds from atrophied muscle because I was in the coma – 40 pounds of muscle – and boy, I tell you, that’s why I couldn’t move. My muscles were just basically gone. I couldn’t use them. I couldn’t depend on them. I couldn’t move.

Scott J
It sounds like you kind of surprised them a little bit by waking up at that moment. Was that deliberate? Did they bring you out of the medically induced coma and knew you were going to wake up then?

Scott M
That’s an interesting point because – and I do go into this in the book – there is a day when I’m transferred from Intensive Care to Rehab. I’m picked up in a gurney and I’m taken on an elevator to go up or down a couple of floors to go over to Rehab. That’s when I realized I was awake on amputation day. It was called amputation day because I remember going into surgery and then I was listening– they had Eric Clapton playing in surgical center and one of the ladies said– I could still talk at the time and I could still look down at my hands, and she said, “Oh, we’re playing Clapton’s greatest hits.” I was always a smart ass guy, and I asked to make sure that they did not play anything related with heaven, that he might have been reprising. “Knocking on Heaven’s Door”, that was the one I said. “Please make sure you’re not going to play Knocking on Heaven’s Door if that’s on there, because he did reprise it.” I was such a smart ass through and through. So, I was awake at some time, so maybe they were able to control it.

After a while, I do remember going back on the morphine drip and heaven is a pretty wild dream because I was able to ask for it to go on and ask for it to go off. Maybe I should have asked for it to go on longer. I don’t know if that would’ve helped or not just to have some freaky dreams. There were multiple family members all there the entire time up and through the amputations – so it was a couple of weeks, but always someone in the waiting room or in my room. My mom was telling me stories about how she would rub my hands in hopes that the death of my hands would stop. Other family members– we present this in the book as well their viewpoint of coming to visit me and seeing me with all these machines and not knowing what was going to happen.

I was told that my mother and my brother, a year older than me, were given the task of making the decision to let me die, which I was supposed to. I was supposed to be dead when I was told the only reason I was alive was because I was an athlete and I was in great shape or to amputate and see how I would handle life. They tell me that they didn’t hesitate because they knew what I would’ve done and they just followed through on it. I do know also, Scott, that they’ve felt guilt the entire time, but I bet that I have felt even more guilt because it was because of me, and this is how I just put it. Because of me is what they all had to go through during that time, and they still have to go through.

Scott J
Maybe because of you, but it wasn’t anything you had under your control, of course.

Scott M
I realize that.

Scott J
Yeah. What a decision to have to make for someone else. They had already all been in there. They knew what was going on and you were literally the last person to find out what had happened.

Scott M
Good point, yes. I was the last person to find out because it had already been in the news. I had already been in the newspaper where I went to college and the newspaper where I had been teaching before I started coaching, and also in the newspaper where I was coaching. Yeah, good point. I had never come across that. Yeah, that’s true.

Scott J
You’re 15 minutes of fame and you slept right through it.

Scott M
I wasn’t awake for it.

Scott J
But your mom had an interesting outlook on this though. She kind of came up with what I think you called an ultimatum.

Scott M
It doesn’t matter what people think of you, you’re going to move forward and she’s right. I mean, she would’ve known that there was the spur that moved me forward because, right after that, I started gaining those 40 pounds of muscle back. I started training while I was in bed and just said, “Give me more of the protein drinks and things on that.” I actually was able to transfer over to rehab much earlier than what had been anticipated because it was, “All right. If there’s nothing else for me that I can do, I’m going to go back to my training days and just build up muscle and be able to start” because I wanted to start moving forward like my mother had said.

Scott J
Your athletic past seems to have given you a great advantage in this.

Scott M
Oh, yes, for sure.

Scott J
Not just physically being in shape to start with, but mentally being able to. Okay, I got work to do here.

Scott M
Oh yeah, yep. Let’s get going.

Scott J
Can you talk about the day you were introduced initially to your prosthetics?

Scott M
The initial introduction was to a pair of hooks and that– wow. So that was at the same level of shock factor to me that when a doctor told me about the amputations because, all of a sudden, I had been fitted, my arms had been casted, but I didn’t know what was going to go on. I knew of hooks but when the prosthetist showed up, it was all, “Hey, here you go. Wow, we got these.” That’s the second time – I’ll say it – the shit hit the fan with me emotionally. And talking about shutdown, I went through trying them on and him showing me how they worked and me going through the emotions on things. As soon as he left – and he got the message that I didn’t want him around – I took them off and I just, “Wow. What now?” Because I had built up strength, not 40 pounds of muscle yet, but I was able to move, I was able to get up in bed. I wasn’t able to get out of bed because of what had happened with my feet, but I was able to start being in control of things physically. So here this was – shock. Complete, utter shock.

Scott J
And it seems that the way you described the guy that brought you the hooks and showed them to you and, like, he was kind of an asshole, wasn’t he? Like, he didn’t really have compassion or empathy like you would think someone would have,

Scott M
He said, “Do you have a t-shirt available?” I say, “Oh, over there in the closet.” And he went in and grabbed my Nike shirt that I was wearing when I got sick. He didn’t know about that. He just held it out and expected me to grab it and then he realized what had happened. He felt terrible, I could tell. And it reminded me, of course, “Hey dumbass, I can’t grab it here.” Maybe I felt sorry for myself a little bit, but that was true. So then he was nice and he came down and laid it in front of me and I was able to dress myself in some piece of clothing for the first time since before the amputations. So I actually felt like I accomplished something. It took us a visit by a special person in rehab to help bring me out of it. That was a really tough time.

Scott J
What was it about the hooks? You said that was as big a news break as when the doctor first told you what had happened. Is it just the visibility of everyone’s seeing, “Wow. That guy has two hooks instead of hands.”

Scott M
Exactly, and that guy was me. I wasn’t looking at it in the mirror. I’m looking at it from my perspective. This is me now.

Scott J
There’s certainly a stigma attached to it.

Scott M
Oh, for sure.

Scott J
Yeah. And it’s of course magnified when you can see that’s what’s on the end of your arms now.

Scott M
Exactly.

Scott J
I know you were concerned about being able to write and being able to tie your shoes, but your real big concerns were about being able to get back to coaching.

Scott M
Exactly. That was going to be what would save me, I thought, or really, to be totally honest, Scott, my work would allow me to not think about my new life.

Scott J
It was your escape.

Scott M
Exactly. And that’s all I did. I tell you, for the next four years, we had a nationally ranked program. We continued with the national ranked program because that was my focus. That was, “This is what we’re going to do, folks.” And we did it.

Scott J
Just as an aside, you said that your hands and parts of your feet were amputated. How much of your feet were gone?

Scott M
Midfoot. The left was just a simple cut. Boom. The right – an interesting story to it. It was so bad. I mean, a general plastic surgeon would’ve just done a BK – below knee – amputation, then I would’ve been a real pirate, right? Peg? Might as well.

Scott J
I love how you can make jokes about this now.

Scott M
Hey, what the heck? I may as well, right? Yeah, now I could really be a true pirate, but I didn’t think about it. I didn’t learn it for a while, but there was this plastic surgeon from Madison who just happened to be in the Janesville hospital on my amputation day, or I don’t know. Maybe somebody contacted him and said, “We have an interesting case for you,” because maybe they knew he was trying something new, and here’s what he did. He took muscle from my abdomen. So they split open my belly and stripped muscle from my abdomen. It was an eight inch by eight inch section of it. He was attaching that and blood vessels and everything and putting everything together. After stripping everything down to just the bones, I guess, he started remaking it.

Because I was in the coma on my back – they would normally take a thicker skin which is from the back – he used skin from the thigh, and he put it together and, boy, anytime I’ve ever seen a prosthetist since then, they just look at it and say, “Wow, it’s amazing that he was able to pull it together.” I won’t go into it, but there were some surgeries and some other problems that came up from that because of the way that was put together. The skin from the thigh would break down sometimes, but I’m all together now. I mean, I don’t know where I would be if it was both hands, parts of one foot and below knee on the other. My gosh. I mean, the guy really did me a service. I did end up meeting him another time and I thanked him for it.

Scott J
Oh, that must have been so gratifying to meet him.

Scott M
Yeah. It was cool to be able to say thanks for giving it a try.

Scott J
Can you talk about the first time when you were trying to learn to eat with the hooks?

Scott M
Just so happened that my mom came into the room. For most weeknight evenings, she’d come over and we’d watch game shows. 15 minutes before she came through the door, they brought me spaghetti. Oh, okay, I can do this. I’ll be honest. It did feel good to try feeding myself but, in the early stages of using hooks, problems will happen and forks will flop and fly. So needless to say, we got into situations where I tried it and the hook would open and the spaghetti would fall in my lap and my mom would come over. It’s like I got to the point where I yelled at her, “Let me be,” because I was starting to understand– I was starting to be mad at my situation for the first time. Maybe that was good.

As my mom wept, she said, “Why couldn’t it have happened to me?” And right then was another pivot point with, “What are you talking about? No way. This couldn’t happen to anybody else. It had to happen to me. Anyone else in my family, none of them were athletes at their ages at the time. They would’ve died. I was the one that was able to survive. So it had to happen to me. If it had to happen to anyone in the family, it was me. So it was the right thing.” So there’s the guilt thing I was mentioning.

Scott J
Yeah. But of course, any parent is going to want to trade that pain with their child. Oh yes, of course.

Scott M
Of course. But that was a really raw point because neither one of us was faking it – looking past into tomorrow – and we were both being raw about it. We couldn’t help but be raw in the moment because here we were, and here it was.

Scott J
Later on, there was a switch to – I’d never heard this term before – myoelectric hands. That must have been so exciting.

Scott M
Whew. I first heard about the myo’s when the doctor in rehab was observing and removing the bandages. He talked to me about, “Boy, they left enough here for you to wear Myo.” “What are you talking about?” So he told me about Myoelectric hands and he told me, “It’s really a simple thing, Scott. We all have electricity that runs through us. That’s how our muscles contract and open.” And when I had that concept in mind – that these have electrodes that will read those muscles firing – then I have an understanding. So when we went through the fitting– and the testing, I thought, was really funny. I was first hooked up to meters. “Alright, fire this muscle.” And I couldn’t fire that muscle. Something else in that the meter would shoot to the right, or shoot to the left to come down. It was interesting trying that.

Getting the myo’s totally changed things. I don’t know if it was because they have fingers and a thumb. They’re simple. They just open and close. But for me, it must have been something mental in that I didn’t have the hooks, but I had something that, to me, seemed like a hand or two hands.

Scott J
Yeah. That’s what they look like. They’re flesh colored. I mean, if anybody looks closely, they can see, “Okay. Those aren’t actual human hands, but they certainly replicate a lot of the function.”

Scott M
Yeah, they did. I think it helped carry me through a time of preparation in order to finally come to an understanding about my situation.

Scott J
Are there such things as myoelectric feet as well? Did you get that? Or what do they do for that?

Scott M
No. Gosh, we went through so many different types of braces with that. The foot would pivot and that’s when the hole would open up, and then they’d have to have surgery and I’d walk around on my knees and then we tried something else, and then the foot would pivot or get hot and open up. I guess I had to have two surgeries to close this and, both times, I had to get around my apartment on my knees for a month at a time. We finally did come up with something I’m in now that are AFOs. Foot’s been closed for 7-8 years – doesn’t open anymore. They work great. I’m able to get around on my own. I’m basically really close to being a hundred percent independent.

Scott J
That’s amazing. When you were discharged, you said you felt like you were living in a fog. What was that about?

Scott M
Yeah, I’d call it the fog and it would roll in when I woke up and started putting on the myo’s in the morning, then I was, “Oh crap, now I have to do this again.” In the beginning, it would take me three hours to get dressed. I mean, it was a lot of work and a lot of focus on how to do things and I think that was how the mind– I don’t know if it was protecting me or it was just happening chemically or what, but I was in a fog constantly when I was awake constantly, and it would affect my hearing a bit and definitely would affect how I would absorb information. I know it affected how I coached as well. I tag the fog as part of what led me to that brick wall of depression. I think it was part of the depression coming on and I think that was part of my depression.

Scott J
Eventually you decided to pursue legal action for medical malpractice. What prompted that?

Scott M
A few months after I was discharged, I was in a hospital for a total of five months. A few months afterwards, I called the doctor, I would say, that saved my life. The doctor was head of the intensive care unit and I asked him, “What happened? How did I get sick?” And he told me, “We don’t know. We couldn’t trace it. We couldn’t figure it out for sure. But Scott, you’re asking the wrong question.” And being the physician at the time, he had to be careful on how we responded to that. So he just said, “Asking the wrong question. What you really should look at is the day before you arrived at the emergency room.” So it was, “Okay, what is he telling me sideways?”

We ended the conversation and I did some digging and I came up with Group A Strep. Once it’s close to 103 degrees in temperature, this is supposed to happen. They never checked my blood – I knew that. So, I contacted an attorney in Eau Claire and oh, they were happy to pick it up at no cost. There was a partnership. There would’ve been a percentage involved with it. So it felt really good about– I’m going to do something about this – what happened to me and what happened to my family – because there was an injustice that was done because of what the attorney dug up. It took three years to finally get to trial but, during that time, they dug up a lot of information I wasn’t privy to at the time but, when I learned about it, it was dug on right, let’s do a trial.

Scott J
But it didn’t turn out the way you expected.

Scott M
No. Two weeks. We sought damages at $10 million which, in 1997, was more money than it was today. I learned a lot about perception, Scott, about how 12 jurors can sit and it wasn’t comfortable for them – I think that was a mistake on our side – to do a two week trial. But it really boiled down to our specialist and their specialist on what the calendar was, whether when I first presented it would’ve made a difference or not, even if they had drawn blood. So it all came down to perception. Who sat in the box for them? Who sat in the box for us? Ours was older and frumpy and kind of real casual and grandpa type and theirs was a smooth university professor who relied on and quoted on oftentimes regarding this illness. Lost the case.

My attorney brought up a small piece of a Women’s Day article for which their professional had said that it would make a difference in certain periods of time where antibiotics would have a positive effect. Well, we’re talking about a major courtroom drama when that was projected. Their attorneys – three of them – all jumped up. “Your Honor.” And all these going on. “That’s hearsay.” Pounding on the table, the judge asked the jurors to please leave the room while their lead attorney and our lead attorney both fought the case about this Women’s Day article in court. They asked point blank to their expert, “Did you say this?” He said no. “What? How so? Really? So the lady on Women’s Day is lying?” They just said, “It’s double hearsay, therefore it’s not usable.” So it was thrown out.

Scott J
So in losing the case, at that point, did you still have a coaching career? Was there any kind of safety net, any kind of financial security at all?

Scott M
I had resigned my last season there. We had won only 10 games and we started out the year kind of ranked nationally. We won more than we lost, but I’m not doing my job. There was something said by a couple of my players in the school newspaper that they just want to have fun and it’s too much about winning, and that kind of did it for me, but I knew that wasn’t the true reason why I was resigning. The true reason was I was burnt out. I had really just run so hard into depression. I talked to the athletic director. I said this, “One of my assistants – he can take this. I need to step away. I’m done.” And she understood.

I had resigned a couple months before the trial, so here I was with nothing. I had been out east for a couple of job interviews. I did come across one really bad incident of discrimination where an athletic director– after the interview, I was walking down the hall, I stopped at the water fountain, I heard him say out of his office to his secretary across the hall from him, “Why did you have me visit someone or interview someone with no hands?” And that struck me. It angered me. I knew that I was going to keep running into this. It also shot a cold shiver down my spine of, “Damn, I mean, I’m truly disabled.” So a lot of things happened from that moment. That was not the last time I would feel discriminated against, Scott.

Scott J
You said your friends were concerned that you might be suicidal.

Scott M
Yeah. During the trial, my attorney – it was one of the last days of the trial – told me what’s going to happen and he asked me not to come in. He didn’t think it was wise for me to be in the trial because of – and I knew darn well – suicide was going to come up and what’s this guy’s mental capability. I knew that, but I also knew, “No. At no time I had thought about committing suicide.” I almost bled out in the hospital once and I thought, “Man, if I’m going to go, okay, that was as close as I came to it. I’m done with this. If I’m going to bleed out, so be it. I was as close as I came.”

Scott J
Eventually, you got back into coaching but, this time, with youth soccer. Why the change?

Scott M
Well, there was a little situation in there where I left– I did have an opportunity. I was at Gonzaga for a little bit and I ended up just leaving soccer altogether to become the father of what became five adopted kids. So, 20 years, I was away from soccer unless one of them needed a rec coach, just to help out. Finally, I got the spark again when the youngest one was securely in high school. I went back and we were in Bellingham, Washington at the time. And here’s another point of discrimination. I showed up to this club. I’ll say I have a pretty damn good resume and I find out that I wasn’t given– I mean this was a large club with people paying thousands of dollars for their child to be able to end up playing in college or professionally, whatever. I mean, this was a big club. I wasn’t given an A team, I wasn’t given a B team. I was given a C team – kids that nobody thought was going to do anything – of 12 year olds and told, “Keep everybody happy.” This is one of those teams we need to have to bring money into the club.

Scott J
I can imagine that’s going to set a fire going in you, right>

Scott M
Oh, if you were trying to do that, I applaud you, but he wasn’t. It was, “You’ve got all these kids that nobody gives a rip about. They don’t mean anything because the other two coaches passed them up.” These are kids that passed, but I attended those tryouts and I saw these kids. They were smaller than the other ones – I’ll grant that. And in tryout situations, when there’s pressure on, these kids all cowards a little bit, they were lacking confidence. So when I got off my pissed-off-ness and we finally met, I realized, “You know what? They gave me something and they didn’t know it, so they messed up. I’ll take it.”

Scott J
All they wanted was a babysitter, it sounds like.

Scott M
You know what? That’s exactly what they wanted, yep. They’ll take the checks. But I’m not babysitting,

Scott J
This is kind of a Bad News Bears situation, right? The ragtag team comes from behind and–

Scott M
Yep. I did not bring a beer to my first training session.

Scott J
And I know – you said this in your book – you openly tell players about your prosthetics rather than kind of pretending they aren’t there. It seems like that’s the right way to go.

Scott M
Yeah. I’d finally gotten to that. That’s gotten me to the point now when we’re doing the marketing for this book too, Scott, is I know I have a responsibility now. I think, being with those kids– raising my five children was one thing I could get away from the reminders of things but, with those kids, it was finally, “Hell with this. I’m going to be totally open.” And I think that’s actually prepared me for what’s coming now as we do the book marketing, and it felt great. Not just good, it felt great to kind of see myself as a bit of an advocate, but also I’m here to help these kids see much more than just soccer.

Scott J
Yeah. In the book, you talk about leading the team of, I think, the so-called soccer rats to a championship and, of course, people can get the book and read the details about that. I think what’s really cool about that is that it mirrors your own journey, right?

Scott M
Good catch. Very good catch, Scott.

Scott J
You read the space, trust your intuition, and think independently.

Scott M
Exactly. And you win.

Scott J
Tell us about the book.

Scott M
Well, the title actually was originally too long, when I thought about it. When I started coaching as a college freshman, I would always tell my players, “Turn off your brain and play from your heart.” Too long. So just “Play from your heart,” which is catchy, and it does. And you brought up a great point. It covers the entire book from start to finish and everything. I had to learn how to play from my heart as well. I think about what we’re trying to do with it, and I’m learning as I go through this process – I think you’re podcast number 10 of 45 or something – and I do have a responsibility and what we’re trying to get across. So, I do now see it as a potential learning tool for people.

Here’s the tagline I came up with that I think is very important for today. This is a positive story during negative times. We all come across so much negativity. I think it’s going to make people laugh, make people cry. We’ve got music in it. I want people, when a song comes up in the book, to open another tab because they’re probably doing it on their electronic device. Go listen to that. Go to Spotify and listen to the song. I always played music at training, by the way, so I bring that up during the training sessions with those soccer rec kids. So, yeah, again, as we go more and more, I get into the media aspect of this, the outreach, the more I’m learning about there’s something here that people want to know about and they want the honesty. They appreciate the honesty. It’s exactly what we’re giving them.

Scott J
Right, exactly. Because you see someone in public that has some kind of an obvious disability, they see your fake hands, there’s always that curiosity, but it would be really rude for me to go up and ask someone, “Hey, what happened?”

Scott M
It would. I’ll look at it as, I think it’s a responsibility of being openly disabled. We need to just educate, not feel bad about ourselves or how people look at us, which is how I went through my depression, but help educate the non-visually-disabled. People don’t know. A lot of times people approach me, “I had no idea that your hands were fake.” Okay. I get it, but we need to educate.

Scott J
In the beginning, you were someone who was sort of obsessed with being able to control things. What does the word control mean to you now?

Scott M
Well, what really opened up with me with those soccer rats was giving them control, and I continued– I moved back to Wisconsin because there were some things that I wasn’t invited to come back to the next year. Imagine that. I came back to Wisconsin and started working on a group of 14 year olds. Our third season together, we won another state championship. Following the same thing, I present it to them. I give concepts about players in situations where they’re able to learn from concepts and through play. They come together as a team. They gain confidence. I found my method of doing this really works. I think it’s an improvement over the way I coached before the illness. I learned something and now I’ve learned how to apply it. I would kind of like to– boy, if I had an opportunity to go back and coach at the college level, I’d be interested to see how that would work there. I think it would work though.

Scott J
You think that might be a possibility at some point?

Scott M
Well, we’ll see. I’m not coaching right now because I’m so doggone busy with the book, which is fine, but we’ll see where this carries me and, if a challenge comes up, definitely go after it.

Scott J
Well, any college listening to this right now

Scott M
Give me a call. Give me a buzz.

Scott J
We’ll have your contact information and, of course, we’ll have a link to the book. And everything in the episode notes. Thanks for sharing your story.

Scott M
I appreciate it, Scott. I really enjoyed the way you interview – casual, laid back – and I hope that people appreciate the show.

Scott J
There’s a lot more to this story than what we talked about. One big thing you may have heard him mention is that Scott adopted a bunch of children. You can get all of those details in his book. A purchase link, as well as pictures of Scott, are in the episode notes at WhatWasThatLike.com/243.

You know I frequently mention how much fun we have in the What Was That Like Facebook group. And we really do! So many great discussions there. The question this past Tuesday was – “What makes zero sense to you?” So if you have something that comes to mind, come on over and join the conversation! Something I thought of that doesn’t seem to make sense – we all know how important seat belts are, and how they often save someone’s life in a car crash. So why aren’t there seat belts on school buses?

You can join us and post your comments or questions at WhatWasThatLike.com/facebook.

Graphics for this episode were created by Bob Bretz. Full episode transcription was created by James Lai.

And now it’s Listener Story time! I love this segment because it means we get to hear another story. Listener stories can be sent in by anyone – including you. Just record something interesting that happened to you, usually they’re around 5-10 minutes, and email it to me – Scott@WhatWasThatLike.com

This listener talks about a confusing incident at home.

Stay safe, and I’ll see you next time.

(Listener story)

My oldest sister had a boyfriend named Dave. Dave was awesome and cool. He taught me how to play my first song on the guitar when I was 9 years old. He was good friends with my brothers and my mom loved him. Dave was a fixture in our life long after him and my sister broke up, but he was in and out of jail over the years. I never knew what he went in for, but probably drug related. Every time he got out, my mom would let him stay with us for a couple of days till he could find a place to live. I was 18 when Dave came back from one of his visits. I probably would’ve said hello to him, but I was in my own teenage angst, so he was a blip on my radar. I had a room set up in the basement. My walls were ceiling to floor drapes that my mom had in storage, but I didn’t care. It was my own room in a house with 8 humans and 4 bedrooms and 3 dogs and I think a couple of cats.

One night, somewhere around 1-2 o’clock in the morning, we were woken up by all this yelling and heavy footsteps thudding all over the main floor. My first thought was that my brothers were drunk and fighting again, but they didn’t. The voices didn’t sound familiar, so I thought I better go find out what’s going on. I threw my robe on, turned the light on, and headed up the stairs. I hadn’t even gotten my foot on the first step, and the door flies open and there’s this police officer aiming a gun at me. I was, like, stunned and shocked. He started yelling at me like, “Where is he?” And I was like, “Where’s who?”

And he goes, “Who’s down there with you?”

And I said, “My dog.”

“You get up here.” He gets me up there and he pushes me out of the door there. And there’s another cop standing right there, aiming his gun at me.

When they realized there wasn’t a threat, they told me to go wait in the living room. My mom and my younger brothers and sisters were already there and they were looking just about as shocked as I was. There were cops coming down from the second floor, others were going back up. A couple of cops had one of my brothers in the kitchen, and I could hear them yelling at him. My mom told me that my oldest brother and Dave had been taken out and were in the police cars. My brother had warrants out on him for running away from the pleads at an earlier incident a few weeks before, and they were all proud that they caught him.

I asked my mom what the hell was happening, and she didn’t have a clue. She said everybody was in bed sleeping and there was a pounding on the door and she barely made it down to open it, and they burst in. I looked out the window and I saw at least 5 or 6 police cars with their flashing lights going. There had to be at least 10 to 15 officers in the house somewhere downstairs in my bedroom and a couple were in the kitchen interviewing my brother. Nobody would stop long enough to explain why they were there. Then, we hear this shout from upstairs, “Got it! Got the gun!” And then 3 or 4 officers come down with this small starter pistol. My daddy gave my mom one for safety. She kept it under her mattress. I didn’t even have a clue that she had it.

A few minutes later, they all start filing out and my mom catches the attention of one of the officers and says, “Sir, we’ve been sitting here and not knowing what’s happened. Can you please tell us what’s going on?” The cop said, “Ma’am, we got a call from this address from somebody who said that he had a gun and was holding the family hostage and he was trying to kill everyone.” She was stunned, and she said, “Oh my God, we would’ve called you. We were all asleep.” The officer explained that when they burst in, they found some guy passed out in the armchair with a receiver still in his hand.

Dave, he’d come back from partying somewhere and he was all drunk and coked out and he sat in the armchair, made the phone call, and then promptly passed out. He later told us he was just as surprised as we were, that he had woken up in a room full of cops. I honestly think that was probably the last time I ever saw him. I heard that he passed away in the 90s from hepatitis. He was, like, 36 years old at the time. When I went back down to my room to go back to bed, one of the curtains had been ripped off the ceiling, my dresser drawers were hanging open, my underwear drawer had been rifled through, one of my bras was hanging by a strap on the dresser handle. My dog was traumatized, but he wasn’t hurt.

Looking back now, I wonder what the police thought they were doing. They burst into the house where an alleged gunman was supposedly holding the family hostage. I mean, I know Dave would never would’ve done anything to hurt us. I honestly don’t know why he made that call, but what if he had been that serious? Their approach and the way they stumbled into the house like that, that could have resulted in some serious issues.

One of the thoughts that’s haunted me to this day is that, in that room with curtains as walls, I had to turn on the light by pulling a switch like a chain. So, if I had been 30 seconds slower and that officer with the gun had gotten down to the bottom of the stairs, he would’ve seen a silhouette of somebody with their arm raised letting go of the light chain while how fast things could happen. Dave was charged with mischief and, understandably, my mom didn’t let him stay with us anymore.

A night in the life of a kid from the projects.