889: There’s Something About Hail Mary
6/21/20261 hr 6 min
We spend an hour in the last two minutes of the fourth quarter, behind and desperate, with people trying any damn thing they can think of.
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- Prologue: Five years after Ora first started experiencing mysterious and debilitating health problems, she decides to try a treatment that she knows very well might kill her. Host Ira Glass talks to her about the experience. (9 minutes)
- Act One: Two lawyers have just three months to stop their client's execution. In Texas, where this story takes place, these kinds of appeals to get people off death row fail 94% of the time. (38 minutes)
- Act Two: At the Otay Mesa Detention Center in San Diego, migrants figured out an ingenious way to communicate with the activists gathered outside of the detention center’s walls. (13 minutes)
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Clips
Transcript preview
First 90 secondsAviva DeKornfeld0:01
A quick warning: there are curse words that are unbeeped in today's episode of the show. If you prefer a beeped version, you can find that at our website, thisamericanlife.org.
Ira Glass· Host0:10
Desperate times, my friends, call for desperate measures. Aura was in college when something mysterious happened. She was at her computer editing.
Aura· Guest0:19
And I was editing, editing, looking at this computer, and my eyesight started to go blurry, and I just, like, couldn't really see the computer that well, and I was like, "I need to stop. I can't really see anymore." And I was walking home, and, like, everything's just blurry.
Ira Glass· Host0:34
An eye doctor examined her, said there was nothing wrong with her eyes to cause the blurriness.
Aura· Guest0:38
And then, oh, I remember I had weird heart palpitations, so I went to the doctor to get an EKG, and they were like, "You seem fine. Maybe you're just in love."
Ira Glass· Host0:49
Pause on that. [laughs] That was really a thing that happened to you? You showed up with medical symptoms, and they said, "Maybe you're in love"?
Aura· Guest0:55
Yeah.
Ira Glass· Host0:56
She was actually falling in love, but she did not think that explained the heart palpitations. She was starting to get the feeling that people were not taking her seriously, and things were getting worse.
Aura· Guest1:07
It just feels like everything in my body is breaking in a weird way. Terrible fatigue, horrible brain fog, and this feeling in the left side of my brain just, like, the best way I can describe it is I feel like an ice cream scoop has been taken out of my head.
Ira Glass· Host1:24
Symptoms like that come and go for two years. Blurry vision. Her legs