393: What if your doctors weren’t allowed to help you?
This Is Actually Happening
Audible
4.6 • 10.4K Ratings
🗓️ 10 February 2026
⏱️ 67 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
After a lifetime of striving for control, a woman is thrust into unimaginable loss when a potentially catastrophic twin pregnancy collides with restrictive laws, forcing her to rebuild her life from the ground up.
Today’s episode featured Helen. Helen and her husband, Zach, began The Marigold Foundation, whose mission is to lead the way in providing financial aid to families that are facing a complex medical diagnosis or the loss of an infant or neonate. To learn more or to donate, please visit themarigoldfoundation.org.
The Marigold Foundation’s Instagram @marigoldfoundation
Producers: Whit Missildine, Andrew Waits, Sara Marinelli
Content/Trigger Warnings: Pregnancy loss, Infant loss / neonatal death, Stillbirth / miscarriage, Complicated / high-risk pregnancy, Prolonged labor and medical distress, Medical trauma, Restrictive abortion laws / lack of medical intervention, Hemorrhage, Eating disorder, Grief and bereavement, Religious / spiritual distress, Mental health treatment and therapy, Traumatic medical procedures, Discussions of death and mortality, explicit language
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Intro Music: “Sleep Paralysis” - Scott Velasquez
Music Bed: Uncertain Outcomes
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | And I think that was the worst of it, this feeling of not understanding what was happening |
| 0:15.1 | and not understanding why it was happening. |
| 0:19.9 | Just this kind of awful quiet quiet of no one's coming to help me. |
| 0:29.6 | From Wondery, I'm Witt Misseldine. You're listening to This Is Actually Happening. |
| 0:43.6 | Episode 393. |
| 0:47.0 | What if your doctors weren't allowed to help you? I was born in June of 1980. |
| 0:55.0 | I was born in June of 1988. |
| 1:15.1 | My sister was six and a half, and my parents had been living in Northern Illinois for a couple years. |
| 1:22.3 | My parents met at college. |
| 1:25.2 | My dad had recently gotten out of the army and was going to college, and my mom was |
| 1:29.8 | there to study art, and then got married in 1980. My dad was in Korea for a few years. He was on the |
| 1:38.2 | DMZ and was a military policeman in the army. He had a lot of trauma from that experience that he's dealt with over the years. |
| 1:49.8 | But despite having PTSD, my dad has always been calm and kind, |
| 1:55.2 | and there was never any violence in the household. |
| 1:58.5 | It was a pretty middle-class upbringing. My dad worked full-time. My mom stayed home |
| 2:05.6 | with us. I have great memories of doing different projects with my mom. She's an artist. And so |
| 2:12.7 | there was always some sort of craft or project. It was a happy childhood. When I was nine, my parents got |
| 2:21.0 | divorced. I found out later that there had been problems in their marriage for a while. My dad's |
| 2:29.3 | PTSD, I think from being in the army, made it difficult for him to share the challenges that he was |
| 2:36.4 | struggling with, the terrible things he had seen when he was in the army. I obviously wasn't happy |
| 2:42.4 | about the divorce. I missed my dad, but it actually started a lovely ritual. I missed him a lot at |
| 2:49.4 | first, and so he would call me every night before |
... |
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