Armchair Anonymous: Wild Card VII

0:01Welcome, welcome, welcome to Armchair Anonymous. I'm Dan Rothers. I'm joined by Buck Rogers. hi today is wild card dealer's choice chef's kiss pick your poison uh-huh roll of royal casino royale roll of the dice that's what jess says all the time well it was a thing we did at mess hall you could roll the dice and they would bring you a drink and you wouldn't know what it was i love that it was cool they should do it more like a russian roulette where you you hold a toy pistol to your... No, I'm scared of guns. I'm gonna be honest with everyone. This one leaned very medical. Very. Very, very medical.

0:49And there's some intense ones. Yeah. Don't listen. I think it's a skip. Yeah, don't listen. I think it's a skip. This one's a skip, everybody. So skip it and we'll see you next week. So have a great day. We'll see you next week. We'll see you next week for a different one. I loved it, though. Yeah, me too. This was wild. Remember the... Okay. It put the wild in wild card. All right, please enjoy wild card. Number seven? Yep, we've done seven. Holy. This is the seventh wild card? I believe so, yes. Can't be right, but I must be wrong. Lucky number seven.

1:34But one thing you gotta know, I'm gonna keep on shining.

1:42Hello, can you hear us? I can hear you. Can you hear me okay? Yes. And we can see you too. We can see you. You're in a tent. I'm in a tent slash closet. I like to follow rules like Monica. I love that. I don't know how you guys do it. I just don't know how rules are followed. Okay, so we're calling you Taylor. That's very promising. scene. And why did you pick Taylor as a code name? There's two reasons. One, my eight-year-old daughter loves Taylor Swift. You could have just said eight-year-old daughter and we would have known the rest. Or 37-year-old daughter. Yeah, also true. And then my best friend growing up and I, that would be our code name.

2:20If we went to a restaurant and we didn't want to say our name, or if we met somebody who we didn't want to tell the truth to, we would use Taylor. It goes way back. So you do break the rules. No, you have honor. Okay. So Taylor, you have a wild card story. Okay. I'm going to try and do this as best as possible and stick with the timeline. Can I tell you, you will not be in trouble if you don't stick to the timeline. Okay. Just so you know, there's no threat of trouble. Speak for yourself. Okay. Yes, that's true. One Saturday in 2012, I was cleaning my stove. I cut my thumb on the metal piece of the burner.

2:58I'm trying to push through like it's fine, but it just kept really hurting me. By Monday morning, my thumb was barely swollen. I had to go to the doctor. I was administered two shots. One is a Tdap shot and the other one was a flu vaccine. After I saw the doctor, I went to another room. I was in there with a nurse and she got the Tdap shot all fixed up, but she didn't know that I needed this other vaccine. So I saw her look at the paper, then realize, oh, she's getting another one. She came back in with the other syringe. She administered both shots into my arm and I went about my day. By that night, I was feeling really off.

3:39So the next morning I wake up and I have no energy whatsoever. I push through my day at work and I'm just not feeling good at all. So I call my mom because she's my best friend. And I say, I think I need to go to the emergency room. So she meets me at my house. She's helping me change out of my work clothes. And we noticed that my arm where I received the shots was just so swollen and getting like little red spots. So my mom's like, I wonder if it has to do with shots that you bought. So we go to the emergency room. They take me in fairly fast because I had such a bad fever. They give me all the good drugs and I'm still uncomfortable.

4:19And they try to say, you know, I think you'll be okay. I think it might just be allergic reaction. You should probably just go home. And I was like, no, I'm not going to go home. I stay the night. And so that was Tuesday night. The next morning, the nurse comes in to check my temperature and do my vitals. And she puts the thermometer in my ear and she looks at it and she has this face. She took the cap off and put a new one in, put it in her ear to look to make sure she was reading it properly. So then she drops the thermometer and just walks out the door in a really big hurry. My mom's a nurse.

4:53She went over and grabbed the thermometer and she looked at it and showed me it was 105.8. This is why I'm not feeling good. I'm glad my symptoms are showing the pain I'm in. They get three or four doctors in the room. So they're like, there has to be a pus pocket in your arm because my arm had grown so much bigger since just the day before. A pee-pee, a pus pocket. I know. I'm not sure how far I should go with it. There you go. All the way. Go all the way. So they pull out this needle and it is huge. They put that in my arm three to five times and it was excruciating. And were they pulling out pus?

5:33No, there was no pus. They were looking for it. They didn't find anything. So they're all kind of like scratching their heads. And we knew one of the doctors. He was like, we're going to do all the tests for you. So I went into the MRI. As soon as I get out of the MRI, there is already somebody waiting to bring me up to my room. My mom, my dad, and my best friend were waiting right by the door. I couldn't even hardly say hi because the pre-op guy came to get me. Fuck. So it's my mom, my dad, and I in pre-op. The doctor that we know came in and he was like, we read your MRI and it is glowing. You have necrotizing fasciitis.

6:20Well, hold on. Necrotizing fasciitis? That means necrotic flesh. Is it dying necrotic flesh? It's flesh-eating bacteria. Oh, my God! I've heard of this on the news. I didn't think I'd ever meet anyone in real life. It's a streptus bacteria, isn't it? I think it is because they thought it was like an airborne disease. Luckily, it's not. So I got like a really good room. All the nurses that were coming in, you know, it looked like E.T. Mercer. They were completely covered. I thought you got that from going in the pond. Every time people see my arm and ask me the story, because I'll tell anybody, and they're like, oh my gosh, it's from the lake, isn't it?

6:57And I'm like, no, it's not. But now you're scaring me. I don't want to go in the lake now. In Georgia, you can't go in the pond or the lake. My mom, being the nurse, knew exactly what it was. And I'm looking at him and he's like, well, it's flesh eating bacteria. It was the scariest thing because just a few months before that, there was a report in the news where a lady in Florida had lost all of her limbs with it. And I read so many stories of this poor woman and I just could not believe it. And then here I am in pre-op ready to go in because I have the same thing that this woman. Okay, and can I ask, is the source of it your finger you cut or the shot?

7:36It was the shot. I sent Emma pictures. I'm not sure if you want to jump ahead. Oh, I do. It's that time. It's that whole pile. The whole pile. Oh, my Lord. Oh, my God. Holy fuck, America. This is horrifying. Guys, you have to imagine. This is one of the worst things I've ever seen in my life. Oh, my. Oh, but you have a smile. on your face. Guys, you need to know it is virtually a football taken out of her upper arm. So they went in there and they cut that area out to get to all the bacteria? Yeah. When the doctor came in to talk to us about it, he was like we are so lucky we caught it because it was only in your flesh.

8:20It did not get to your muscle yet. Thank God. The next day the pain was still so bad. As you saw there's black foam in there. It's called a wound back and it helps heal I won't go into detail. It's a very cool machine, but it's really gross if you see the whole contraption working. I couldn't handle the wound back because my arm was still really painful. You feel under-medicated throughout this whole story. I want to be there advocating. You need a massive Dilaudid. You need some fentanyl. I was on Dilaudid, but my fever wasn't going down, and the pain medicine was probably helping. But it felt like I was burning from the inside out.

8:57Jesus! This is horrifying. I bet you felt like I did in Mexico City, but for days. I think necrotic flesh is worse than what I felt. Is worse than norovirus. I know. I'm sorry to tell you that. I don't think you can feel worse than I felt for those eight hours. Well, let's hope you don't get this. Go, don't go in any ponds. I'm going to live on a pond. Oh my God. Those southern ponds and lakes. So how long was the recovery? I was in the hospital for 10 days because of my symptoms and my fever. They were afraid that I was still going to either one, lose my arm or two, it was going to go to my heart because it was on my left side.

9:33I laugh now, but my boyfriend at the time looks at me and he's like, I can't come to the hospital room every day and see you. I have jobs lined up and then I have a workout routine. Oh, sure. He's got to stay fit. At the time is so important. Oh, wow. That guy sucks. Well, hold on. No, don't. No, no. Oh, don't. I'm only going to ask, were you 20 at the time? Was he like a 20-year-old dum-dum? No, we were 30. Oh, geez. Okay. Really bad. That's rough. I was in the hospital for 10 days, and then I had that wound back in for another three months. Wow. And it just slowly closes up, and it has to heal from the inside out.

10:15Because if you have an infection, you can't just do stitches to cover it back up. So the needle. Yeah, the poor nurse, because I'm sure she didn't mean to do this. But in my heart, I feel like she got the Tdap ready, looked at the paperwork and thought, oh, I got to go get that other vaccine and then put the Tdap syringe on the tray and then went to go get the other syringe with the vaccine in it and then came back and administered it in my arm. When my arm got swollen, you could actually see where the needle had gone in. So it was like opening up, I guess you could say. It was starting to eat right there.

10:49Exactly. So we think it just wasn't clean. That may be on the tray. That's my guess because they did go through and do all the tests to make sure it wasn't the actual lot of those Tdaps. Nobody else in my area had contracted this. I was the lucky one in a million. Wowie, wow. Oh, Taylor. Sometimes life is just insanely unfair. You didn't even like do anything wrong while you cut your finger. Well, you picked a bad boyfriend. That's the good thing about this. It just showed me who was there for me and who I really should be spending my time with. It really makes you change your perspective on life.

11:25You're very positive. I like that. A lot of silver linings here. Boy, that fucking sucks. I'm going to put that in the top five worst injuries I've ever seen. And I've seen like a guy's leg come completely off in a snowmobile accident. Yeah, I think this is like the shark, the wolf bear, whatever. The bear attack. And this. Yeah. These are the worst and the best. Should we have a banquet for like the most injured arm cherries? Oh, how fun. I won't be there. Well, thank you so much for sharing that. Yeah, thanks, Taylor. That's incredible. Thank you. You guys have a good day. All right, you too.

11:59Bye. Bye, Taylor. Oh, man, I'm sad that happened to her. You can't even post that picture. No. You'd get kicked off Instagram. They could have done an episode of Magic School Bus where they go into the wound in the bus. Oh, explore it with like spelunking tools. You could definitely rappel down into this gash. Wow. Oh. That sucks. I am never going to a lake. I think when people get sick at the hospital, it's so fucking common. They say it's like the most dangerous, but there's so many. Bacterias, viruses. I mean, yeah. Super bugs. Hey, guys. How are you? Is this Brennan? It is. That's a great name.

12:33I don't think I've ever met a Brennan. I'm the first, I guess. Yeah. Sometimes it's spelled with an A-N and not an E. Okay, so you've met other Brennans. Yes, but not in the same spelling. Are you at a school? I am, actually. school. Are you a teacher? I'm a student advocate at a high school. Oh, cool. I work at an alternate high school. I help kids who are in rehab, teen parents. The Aaron Winkley's of the world. He went to an alternative high school. You could smoke cigarettes in class and stuff. It was real loosey sometimes with the teachers. Okay. So Brennan, you have a wild card story. I do.

13:06So it was June of 2014. We had just gotten married and our honeymoon was to Paradise Valley, Montana. We're going to go whitewater rafting on the Yellowstone. It was the second day we got there. It was kind of overcast, raining on and off. It's June in Montana, so it's not super warm yet. There was a lot of runoff still, so the water levels were pretty high and it was cold. We showed up the outfitter thinking that we were going to have this big group of people to go river rafting with, and there was two other people and the guide. So it was my wife, Nicole, myself, a guy named Billy, I'm going to say, and a guy named Jeff.

13:39Billy was probably in his late teens. I don't know if he was quite an adult yet. And then Jeff was in his mid fifties. He was Billy's dad. He was Billy's uncle, which I kind of thought was weird at the time, but I mean, whatever. Yeah. You never know. So we showed up with this outfitter. The guy is like, Hey, all you need is a life jacket and a wetsuit. Leave your keys, leave your phone. He's like, Oh, if you want the real experience, you need to leave your shoes. I'm just barefoot. I think everybody else was like, no, I'm wearing mission. I want the real experience. I'm a river man. He was challenging your masculinity.

14:14He definitely was on the way to the river drop. He starts explaining to us. There's only really two spots that you have to be concerned about. The first spot is a class four rapid at the very beginning. The second one is about a mile down that same river. It's called a hydraulic hole or what people call a washing machine rapid. And what can happen with that is if you get sucked in, it's hard to get out. It just kind of recycles you. So we get to the drop-off area, get in a boat, and on both sides of this river are basically just cliffs. So one side of the river is the road we drove in on. The other side is like a service road.

14:46We're 20 miles from really anything. So there's Nicole and I are up front, and behind Nicole is Jeff, and then behind me is Billy. The guide says, hey, when we get up to this rapid, this class four, you have to paddle super hard, or there's a chance that the boat could flip. At this point is when he's like, oh, by the way, if you fall in, make sure you hold on to the raft. So we can kind of see this rapid coming up. He's like, all right, everybody needs to paddle as hard as they can. So we just dig in, dig in, dig in. I remember looking back and seeing Billy and he's frozen. He wasn't paddling.

15:16He wasn't doing anything. Sure, sure. Jesus. And it was scary. I remember the last thing I saw was my feet in the sky. Oh, your bare feet. My bare, hairy, hot ass feet. Then I just remember darkness and cold. The water was so cold. So the boat did a wheelie. It went straight up. Basically just flipped on its back. Oh, boy.

15:58so all five of us were in the water at this point the raft's upside down and luckily we had fallen in close enough to the raft where we could grab hold of it. So everybody's still holding it. So there's me on one side with Billy, Jeff and Nicole on the other side, and the guys on the back. He says, hey, I got to hop on top of this. Because on the top of the raft, there's a rope that they can pull in case of a flip. So he's like, hey, I got to pull this raft back over. You guys need to let go for a second. So he counts one, two, three. And on three, Billy lost his shit. He lets go, and he jumps on top of me, like on my head, pushes me under the water.

16:33Why? What? He's panicked like he's gonna drown so he's like trying to grab onto something this is why you don't rescue a drowning swimmer by the way have you guys seen that scene in the guardian where he elbows him yeah that's the move is you gotta knock the person out i should have elbowed it but yeah he jumps on top of my ass and sends me and him down river it was enough for us to push us away from the raft we are moving at a much faster pace than the raft did he get it over because that's its own challenge yeah he actually was able to pull jeff and nicole back in oh wow it's a crazy river and i'm in and out in and out trying to catch my breath and all the while i like go under i come back up and i can hear like and i finally hear the guy get to the left side get to the left side washing machine yeah and in my head i'm like oh god nicole's there they're paddling the guy's paddling all jeff is doing at this point is just scream crying for billy oh yeah he's like how am i gonna tell my brother i lost his son out on this river this is a mess so i start swimming as hard as i can I could just hear Billy screaming behind me.

17:35And I'm like, he's not even moving. He's sitting there with his hands on his life jacket, just screaming bloody murder. Oh, fuck Billy. Oh, Billy. Part of me was like, do I do the selfish thing and just keep swimming and just let him go? Let's relieve you of some guilt. You're doing a quick analysis whether one of you can live or none of you can live. I think that's the right math to be doing. I didn't even think about Billy. Oh, okay. Yeah. Billy's on his own. Billy is the reason you're in this situation. You kind of want Billy to be punished a little bit. That's diabolical. I know, I know, I know.

18:11So I'm sitting in the river and I'm like, okay, I got to go back and get Billy. Wow, you're nice. On the river, the right side as you go around is where the washing machine rapid is. The reason he was telling us to get to the left is because if you got far enough to the left of the river, you would miss it. I go back and I grab him with my right arm by the life jacket. And he's just like flailing. He's not doing anything. I'm trying to one arm myself and him to the left side of the river. I was exhausted at this point, but my adrenaline was going. So I had enough strength to get to where I knew he was going to be okay.

18:42And I knew that if I didn't let him go, we were both going over. At that point, I was like, okay, I'm going to get to the shore. I think I pulled him enough. I got to the side of the shore, got out and just like laid on a rock and then barely went over. Boom! And I didn't see him go into the rapids. Like I couldn't see him at all the way the river was. And so I had no idea if I had helped him. But I do remember one specific moment of terror when I'm laying on this rock just exhausted. I remember looking back and seeing my newly wedded wife and the guide and the screaming middle-aged man fly past me.

19:16Yeah. How are they going to come get me? I'm in the wild by myself. What the hell am I going to do? So I am now laying on this rock in the middle of the Yellowstone Wilds, basically, with no shoes, no cell phone. All I have is my life jacket and my wetsuit. And you're in bear country. Oh, no. So we were driving through Yellowstone the day before and had seen some black bears. That's all that's in my mind, like, oh, no. Yeah, what's next is the bears. You feel so validated, right, to just avoid the nature. Don't go there. Don't go to nature. Well, I don't anymore. So there's the two cliffs on each side.

19:54I have to make a decision. I'm like, all right, I'm going to climb up this cliff and go to the service road. And maybe that's where the company van can come get me. And I'll just kind of wait there. Because you're like, there's no way I'm getting back in the water. No, hell no. And float down to meet them. Okay. That did cross my mind. Maybe I could walk along the river and they maybe had stopped. But I didn't know if they just kept going. I don't know. Billy had just kept going. So I'm like, they could be miles down the river. Who knows how long it would take. So I start climbing this cliff, basically barefoot.

20:20My feet are bleeding. I get to the top and I kid you not. Do you know what goat heads are? No. They're like a thorn. They get like hard when they fall off and they're like really pokey and they get in bike tires and bike tires go flat all the time. There's a whole freaking field of them. So I take off my life jacket and I try to strap it to my feet thinking like maybe I could like scooch across this field of goat heads. No, it didn't work. So I basically just had to like walk across this nasty field. All the while they'd caught up to Billy. He had gotten out of the river, pulled the boat off. The guide was like, hey, I'm going to go up and take Billy back to the van.

20:56He's not going to want to keep going. All of them were like, we don't want to go. Nicole's like, I don't want to keep going. Like, where's my husband? Yeah. What the hell is going on? And he goes, well, I'm going to go up and drop Billy off and look for Brennan. He's gone for 30 minutes, comes back without Billy and tells Nicole, oh, I found Brennan. He's going to go back in the van. He doesn't want to keep going. So he lied? He lied. Told Nicole that I was okay and safe. Oh, my God. Okay, hold on. Everyone's going to hate this. Make an argument for him. No, Dax, no. Look, everyone's fucked at this point.

21:29Let's just say no one's day is going as planned. So he's like, okay, I have this woman on board. Is it going to be easier for her to continue thinking her husband's safe? Why do they need to continue? Why can't they do what he did with Billy? I don't know that part. They can only pull the raft out at a certain point in the river because it's so heavy. And they remember the cliffs. So there was like a side path that they walked up, but it wasn't wide enough for the raft. So they had to finish. The boat got it. But leave the fucking boat. Oh my God. It's a pretty expensive boat. The boat? Who gives a fuck?

21:57You get the people out. I mean, I agree. He comes back, tells Nicole that I'm safe, that I didn't want to finish. I'm like, come on, man. I literally just got married to this woman. Please don't make it sound like some sort of weenie. He's like, hey, you got to finish the tour with us at that point. And it was probably like only another two hours or so. So they get back in and the rest of the river is pretty calm for them. But all the while, I finally get to the road. But for some reason, I don't know if I got disoriented. I started walking in the wrong direction. And now when I think back, I'm like, I was so stupid because I could have just looked at the river.

22:29So I take off the top of my wetsuit because now I'm just cold. So I'm half naked, basically, with just my life jacket in my hand. And I'm walking down the road for probably like 40 minutes or so. And this Prius starts coming down the road. And I'm like, I'm saved. Sweet. They can like call somebody. It's all good, right? There's a lot of tourists in Yellowstone and I could not communicate with them. They spoke an entirely different language. Sure, sure, sure. They were on vacation. And all they said was Yellowstone with a question mark. They're like, Yellowstone? Where's Yellowstone? They were looking for you to help them.

22:59Fine. Old faithful. Also, I'm bleeding. So they turn around and leave. And I'm like, okay, at least there's traffic on this road. Right. So I keep walking and I finally get to this like ranger shack. I put my life jacket on the ground and just kind of lay down and it starts to rain. All of a sudden, I just see the headlights and the van. So they had finally found me and it was four hours or so later. Oh my God. Billy had run up to Nicole after all this and was like, oh my gosh, your husband saved my life. Thank you so much. She's like, get away from me. Yeah. After all of this, we're back in the van and the guide was like, hey, how would you like to come work with us next summer?

23:35You can get certified and come work on the river with us. And I'm like, yeah, that sounds awesome. Let's do it. My wife was like, absolutely not. You are not getting back on that boat. That guy is up and down. He's like saying you're not qualified. You get your quitter. And then he's offering you a job. I mean, he's really got to get his narrative straight. I wouldn't be surprised if their river rafting business is no longer around. Yeah. Whoa. Whoa. Whoa. Oh, Brennan. Have you ever gone rafting again? No, I would. But the very next day, we actually went hiking. I ran into some brown bears. And my wife took off running, left me for dead again.