The Moth Radio Hour: PTSD, Lost Art and The Berlin Wall

The Moth

Arts, Performing Arts

4.6 • 25.4K Ratings

🗓️ 20 April 2021

⏱️ 51 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

The victim of a random stabbing struggles to reestablish his life while suffering from post traumatic stress disorder; author Nathan Englander describes coming of age at 19 while traveling through Europe to witness the fall of The Berlin Wall; and an artist and documentary film maker loses three years of work in an instant and finds it hard to continue. This episode is hosted by Moth Artistic Director, Catherine Burns. The Moth Radio Hour is produced by The Moth and Jay Allison of Atlantic Public Media.

Hosted by: Catherine Burns

Storytellers: Ed Gavagan, Ellie Lee, Nathan Englander

Transcript

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0:00.0	From KRX, this is The Moth Radio Hour. I'm Katherine Burns, artistic director of The Moth,
0:18.0	and I'll be your host this time. We have three stories this hour. A man struggles to
0:24.0	take it back to normal after being randomly attacked by strangers. A young bat-packer accidentally
0:29.5	finds himself on the wrong side of the Iron Curtain, and an animator is haunted by the voices
0:34.7	in her film. Our first story is from Ed Gavigan. Ed has told a number of stories of The Moth,
0:41.2	many of them sintering around the incident at the heart of this story. Ed told it at an event
0:46.4	we did in conjunction with Oregon Public Radio and literary arts Portland Oregon. A warning,
0:53.1	the story involves active violence and maybe upsetting for some listeners. Here's Ed Gavigan,
0:59.2	live at The Moth. You know you wake up in the morning, you get dressed, you put on your shoes,
1:13.0	head out into the world, you feel like you're going to come back home at night, go to sleep,
1:20.0	get up, you do it again. That rhythm creates the framework that you use to create a life,
1:30.1	and you make plans, and you kind of count on continuity. And John Lennon said, life is what
1:40.0	happens to you while you're making other plans. And I woke up one morning, I wasn't wearing any of
1:49.2	my own clothes. I had two chest tubes, I had a hose going up my nose down to drain my stomach,
1:56.8	I had a catheter, a morphine drip, and I woke into this fog of pain that felt like I had broken
2:06.5	through the ice into a lake of frozen hurt. And at the end of my bed, I could see the surgeon
2:15.3	who had spent all night saving my life. And he was holding my foot. And he had given me about
2:25.0	a 2% chance of living. Next to him were two homicide detectives. Now they were homicide detectives
2:32.8	because they had gotten the case because they didn't think I was going to make it and they didn't
2:36.4	want to have to do the paperwork swap. And let me tell you, when you start your day with two
2:41.7	homicide detectives explaining what happened the night before it's downhill from there. They
2:47.6	had, they began to explain to me, they had five young men in custody and they wanted me to
	...

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