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- [00:00]
Wit Misseldine
Audible subscribers can listen to all episodes of this Is Actually Happening ad free right now. Join Audible today by downloading the Audible app. This Is Actually Happening features real experiences that often include traumatic events. Please consult the Show Notes for specific content warnings on each episode and for more information about support services.
- [00:22]
Nathan Weiser
It felt like an elephant was stepping on your chest every day and you're just trying to get up and breathe and feeling like you just never really can get a moment of peace from your own head. You know, you really start feeling certainly not yourself. I knew I just emotionally couldn't do another loss. I just was hanging by a thread.
- [00:57]
Wit Misseldine
From Audible Originals. I'm Wit Misseldine. You're listening to this Is actually happening episode 413. What if your hope was hanging by a thread?
- [01:21]
Audible Narrator
I'm Leon Naifak. What happens when OnlyFans becomes more than just a side hustle? OnlyFantasy is an in depth look at the world's newest profession and how the rules of human intimacy are being rewritten online. Listen wherever you get your podcasts or binge all episodes of Only Fantasy ad free only on Audible.
- [01:41]
Raza Jaffrey
I'm Raza Jafre and In the new season of the Spy who We go back in time to meet Benedict Arnold, the spy who betrayed the American Revolution. As America fights for freedom from Britain, Arnold emerges as one of the rebel's greatest generals. But when his loyalty is pushed to the limit, he turns spy and devises a plot to shatter the rebellion and make George Washington a prisoner. Follow the Spy who Now wherever you listen to podcasts, you can also listen to the full season of the Spy who Betrayed the American Revolution early and
- [02:10]
Nathan Weiser
ad free on audience. My parents met in Bible school in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. Here they moved to what would be my hometown of Kelowna, British Columbia. My father was a therapist, so he began working here doing family counseling and marital counseling. And my mother was a housewife. They weren't able to have children of their own, so then they put their name in for an adoption. At the time, I think boys were harder to get. You know, a longer wait for a boy. They also wanted a baby, which, you know, takes is a little harder to get than say, an adolescent. So after seven years, it took from starting the process, they finally got a call one night in the evening saying, your son's ready. They jumped in the car immediately and drove to get me. My birth mother, I don't know much about. She was a teenager. She wasn't in any way ready to handle a baby. My birth father was out of the picture. So the best thing she could do was put me up for adoption. And I definitely led a better life because of that. My parents did a very good job of dealing with my adoption. I didn't find out when I was 15. They told me from as far as I can remember, there was a birth mother. I was adopted, but they chose me, essentially. And they had waited for so long. That made me feel more special because you realize that they did fight and wait and you were that thing they were waiting for. That always made me feel more special. They were both brought up Christian Baptist. They're very different people. And maybe that was an opposites attract kind of thing. My father's very kind of standoffish, methodical. My mother was outgoing in the church and the choir, Always really great with children. Her meaning in life here was to have. Have a kid, be a mother. Pre adolescent. I was pretty carefree. We were very active family. You know, we skied in the winter, water stuff in the summer. We were privileged enough to have a cabin that my grandfather had built out on the coast here. So we spent a lot of time in the summers out there. My first actual real memory is of him out at that cabin. We had all gone fishing. I had been given the little kid small fishing rod and caught myself what would be considered a minnow with my little hook and so on. And we all got back to the cabin. My grandfather was a German man. His name was Otto. He was a little rough around the edges. He had immigrated from Germany in between the wars and then gone through the Depression. So after they had finished filleting all the salmon, they always did a traditional kneel by their catch picture. I was probably a couple months from turning three, and I wanted to be in the picture with the fish because I was on the boat. And he sternly told me that I didn't catch any of those fish, so I couldn't be in the picture. Which for a toddler is pretty upsetting. It's understandable, and I accept it. But my grandmother tried to make it better and say, why don't we take a picture with your fish? Which was all of 6 inches long. And so there's a. One of my first pictures as a toddler is me in front of the cabin holding up my minnow and trying to smile while crying, which I always get a kick out of now. But it was, by all accounts, a pretty fun childhood. I don't have any traumatic memories of being young before high school. And then it got a little different when I was 14. I went on a church trip and I came back and my father had moved out to our cabin on the lake here. They fought behind closed doors. As far as I knew, their marriage was great. I learned over the years it wasn't. I definitely felt very blindsided by it. And so that began my more rebellious years, being at a Christian school and heavily involved in the church. There wasn't a lot of divorce. It was definitely in the 90s, still kind of looked down upon. You know, you had this black mark on your family, like you're the divorced kid. You know, I just didn't deal with that very well. I bounced between my mom's house to my dad's house and back to my mom's house. You know, every six months or something, whoever could put up with me the longest. You know, I get in the scuffles, come home with cuts and bruises and black eyes, partying and getting in fights and all the kind of rebellious teenager stuff, but turned up a notch, I guess. I definitely put some gray hairs on their head. My father quickly went into trying to start his new life. So there was a few girlfriends and they had kids and they were younger than me, and my mom was very emotional and pretty much had a nervous breakdown. So you were kind of left holding the bag that your father had created. But in my mind, it was kind of like, well, you're the one supposed to be here dealing with this, not a 15 year old. It was a very contentious few years. A lot of arguments and yelling, and this is your fault. This is your fault. You feel like some of it's my fault, you know, as well, you know, divorce rates went so high at one point, and my dad did use that, you know, he was like, ah, 70% of kids come from broken homes. You'll be fine. And it doesn't mean that those 70% of kids are fine. And especially from a father that was a marital counselor, you're grasping for answers because your world just kind of imploded what you thought was a normal life. That's a huge adjustment. When we were 14, right before my parents split up, we had taken our dive certificates and gone on a dive vacation to Bonaire on the ABC islands, the Dutch Antilles. That was our last family vacation. I'd always loved the water, always loved being on the water, in the water, since I was very young. And then going on that vacation, I saw the guys that worked on the boats, these dive instructors, you know, with their tans and their long hair and hitting the bar after being a Dutch island. There's these beautiful, you know, blonde Dutch women. And something clicked in my head, thinking, you know, this is a job so you can dive all day, have fun all night, and just rinse and repeat every day. As misguided as I was through my teenage years, I had my sight set on becoming a dive instructor and being involved in that industry as a captain. It was a way to get out of here. So finished school and in Kelowna, British Columbia. Here there was a dive school called Diving Dynamics. Ended up getting a job on an island of the Bahamas called San Salvador. Its claim to fame is that Columbus landed on it. That was the first island he landed on. So the resort was called Columbus Isle under the Club Med flag. That was the first time, you know, really leaving home by myself. Nervous, scared, but excited, Very excited. Club Med also has, you know, a certain reputation to it for the lifestyle and the partying. And so it was very much a work hard, play hard type of deal. It was also the birth of Red Bull. So you had a few of those and a few cocktails. So it was definitely a job. At 20 years old at that time, that was very exciting in many different ways. We caught goats out in the field and cooked them into stew and stuff that, you know, I certainly didn't do growing up. That coupled with it was an amazing place to dive. I spent a year in the Bahamas for Club Med and then I moved over to Grand Cayman. My second year in Grand Cayman, I got out of diving, started getting a little bit out of the water and more into operational management of that company. I got to Grand Turk, which also is the second island that claims Columbus landed on it. So I've lived on both. And I met my wife to be Lucy February 7th of 2007. I was 24 years old at that time, and my wife had just graduated high school. She's British. So they have. They call it a gap year. And a lot of them just take the year off travel. So she had come down for whale season. We met after a pile of drinks in a dive bar on the water. We woke up the next morning. I don't even think we knew each other's names, but she ended up staying. We spent the whole time together. Well, I was still very much in. Live every day to fullest and party at night. Lucy was a lot calmer, so she was a ying to my yang a little bit. We had gone through a major hurricane called Hurricane Ike. It was definitely a scary situation. Challenging few months of just bugs and heat and no break from it. And trying to get everything rebuilt so that, you know, you can go back to work essentially. So during that time we started feeding a stray dog that had been clearly eating from the tourists, right? The tourists would buy a burger or something and feed the dog with it. She had given birth to four female puppies and I don't know if it was just the time of life we were in or whatever we felt we were fit to go from zero dogs to five. We moved houses, stretched our budget, but we made it work slowly. Once you have five dogs, well, you have five. So what, six? So on and so forth till we got to nine. So even though we didn't realize it, maybe had some parenting instincts ingrained in us, but was just the dog years and the fun and the beach and we just enjoyed life to its fullest.
- [14:03]
Audible Narrator
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- [15:03]
Dr. Death Narrator
There are people you're told to trust. Lawyers, teachers, especially doctors. But what happens when you put your life in someone's hands and they betray you? The hit podcast Dr. Death is back and this season is unlike any other. Dr. Death the Cowboy is the story of a charming neurosurgeon who rode into western towns selling a Persona of confidence and care. He wore cowboy boots in the operating room and became sought after by patients. He promised to heal them. Instead, he left a trail of broken bodies. This season is about a doctor who was never truly held accountable for the patients whose lives he ruined, a story of greed, betrayal and a fight for justice that will leave you questioning who to trust. Listen to Dr. Death the Cowboy wherever you get your podcasts or binge the entire series right now only with Audible.
- [16:10]
Nathan Weiser
We got married April 16, 2013. I was 30 years old and we were able to purchase a small Modest home on the water. It was incredible. It was, you know, you found the woman you love, you talk about the future and we definitely knew we wanted kids. I don't think we had settled on a number, but it was definitely something we both really wanted. So the morning after our wedding, we flushed all contraceptives and figured we'd just let nature take its course. We didn't take long to get pregnant. That was in the summer of 2013. We got to the sex scans. They told us we were having a son, but they were having trouble seeing it and they said it was because there wasn't a lot of fluid. Now the hospital is pretty notorious in the country from being subpar, so we didn't really like what they were saying. They kind of said, ah, there's not a lot of fluid, but you know what, just take the baby to term and we'll figure out what's going on after, you know, which first time parents doesn't make you feel good anyway. If, like, there's something happening, we're not sure, just keep going. That was a tough thing to wrap our mind around. So we eventually sent Lucy back to the UK to have their doctors look at it. The first appointment, within minutes, they said, there's no fluid. And the reason there's no fluid was because most of the baby's fluid is made up of pee from them peeing and our son wasn't peeing. So there was no surgical intervention. We were left with two options was to either terminate the pregnancy or take the pregnancy to term and watch our son come out, struggle to breathe and die in front of us. We thought the more humane, I guess, thing to do was to terminate the pregnancy. It had taken so long to figure out what had happened. We were past the point that she could just kind of have like a normal abortion. So they needed to stop our son's heart. And then after that they would induce labor and she would give birth to a stillborn son. That was a very hard thing to do, but I think we were still optimistic. You know, it took us a while to recover emotionally, wrap our minds around maybe being naive to it. I figured, we figured that, you know, you get married, you have kids and that's it. You know, you don't hear a ton of child loss, pregnancy loss stuff until you're kind of in that realm. So we were definitely naive to it. We never named our son. We hadn't gotten to that point. Parts of you regret it and the other part you acknowledge that you weren't in the headspace. For that. But we had our son cremated, and I actually took him to our cabin, our family legacy property, our cabin on the coast, and buried him there. I wanted somewhere that was we could remember them. When we're in somewhat of a happy place. We were sad but still optimistic. When that kind of thing happens, then you hear from more people that have had a miscarriage or this or that. So you feel like you're not totally alone. You're like, okay, this having kids thing isn't easy for some people. We definitely didn't talk for a bit about having kids again. We enjoyed life, enjoyed our dogs. So it was probably six months after that we started talking about it again, and we got pregnant pretty quick again. Went in for the first scan together, and they weren't able to find a heartbeat. They called it a missed miscarriage. You know, it's definitely a devastating thing. It's a hard thing as a husband because you know how you feel, but you don't know. You know, your wife's going through the physical trauma as well as the emotional trauma of it. And it's a hard thing for, I think, men to truly comprehend. You're kind of a coach and a bystander and trying to do everything you can to make her life better, but you're kind of suffering in silence, too. I was at that point still dealing with it okay. You know, it wasn't. I didn't really tailspin, but it took us a while to, same thing, recover and start talking about it. But it was something we definitely were both devoted to doing and felt that our lives would be more complete with a child in it. Eventually, we got back around to it, got pregnant again. It was the beginning of the summer of 2015. We didn't trust the hospital still. We didn't like the idea of giving birth in the Turks and Caicos. So we booked a first class ticket for Lucy, my wife, to go back to England in the fall of 2015 and give birth to what we found out was a daughter, and then come back with the kid, and we would live happily ever after. My grandmother that I was so close to, her name was Mary. I wanted to honor my grandmother by naming her Mary after her. She had, you know, passed a few years early, but that was my way of kind of honoring a woman that was really a pillar in my life. It was eight days before that flight and Lucy went in. She had signs of premature labor, but just to be sure, they flew Lucy by air ambulance to the Bahamas to Nassau, because Nassau had a nicu. Lucy spent A couple of months in the Bahamas, beginning in December. They started talking about transferring Lucy back to the Turks and Caicos because she was then eight months pregnant. It's a viable pregnancy. You don't need an icu. A baby can be born at eight months and relatively trouble free. Middle of December, she came back. Mary was growing. Mary was healthy. Everything was fine. All the vitals, all the scans were fine. We went into the hospital in Grand Turk, met with the obgyn. She assured us that everything would be fine. It'll be a routine pregnancy. She would be there. She said she promised to be there, given our history. And then on January 1st, New Year's Day, 2016, we got up in the morning. Lucy said she thinks she was going into labor. I'm extremely excited at that point. Nervous. Picked Lucy up, took her to the hospital. Then Lucy, in between contractions, started to say that she had a pain in her side that was separate from the contractions. I would relay to the nurse whatever Lucy was telling me. And I kept relaying to the nurse that she had this pain. I could hear her call the doctor and, you know, you can hear the doctor speak. It was New Year's Day. I don't know what she did the night before, but she was on call and she had no plans of coming in anytime soon. The pains were getting worse. Lucy's really good at handling pain. So when I saw her really try to start to squirm outside of the contractions, I started to get really nervous. Finally, Lucy shot up out of the bed, like sat up, it was almost like a scene from the Exorcist. And then screamed, like a blood curdling scream. And then collapsed onto the bed and started to go really pale. I then got into the nurse's face and sternly told her to get the fucking doctor. Something wasn't right. I called our neighbor who was the anesthetist who was also on call. I said, can you just come down here? Because that was kind of my lifeline, I guess, in my head to call. And he agreed to come down. Lucy was just at that point, not animated at all. She was conscious, she was awake. But we would find out later. She basically in shock. The doctor arrived at the same time as our neighbor. The OB GYN walked to the Doppler and looked at Mary's stats that had just started plummeting. She didn't say a word to us. It looked like she kind of realized, oh, shit, you know, maybe I should have come. They were going to do a C section, an emergency C section. But everyone was on call. They wheeled Lucy over into a room, sat me in a dark hallway. I could see Lucy through a doorway. And there we sat for another hour. And she just kept looking worse and worse. Finally, they wheeled Lucy into the operating room. The whole time in my head, I was just trying to hear a baby cry. I knew if I heard that my daughter was fine, and in turn, then Lucy would be fine. I waited for quite a long time and never heard any cries. Finally, our neighbor, the anesthetist, came out from the operating room door, came down the long hallway towards me, and as he was coming towards me, he made the hand signal of the hand across the throat, like someone was dead. I said, who? How? You know, completely kind of blindsided from it still. And he explained that Lucy had had a uterine rupture. Mary's head had come out of the womb into Lucy's body cavity, and she had kind of essentially drowned on Lucy's blood. They got her out. She had had a faint pulse. They tried to bring her back, but they weren't successful. But then he also explained that Lucy had lost 60% of her blood and now she's fighting for her life. Her blood type's O negative. They didn't have any of that blood on hand. They were making arrangements to fly some in. So in the meantime, they just pumped her full of saline and let her fight for her life. He went back in, and it was another half an hour or so. Then the whole team came out. The OB GYN sat right next to me. I didn't even want to look at her. She had the audacity to tell me that although all that had happened, I should feel grateful because Lucy had lost an ovary in the trauma that she had just had. But the OB GYN had saved the other ovary. So I. I should appreciate that if my wife wasn't dying in the other room, she probably would have needed the hospital and I probably would have been in prison. But I held my composure. Then they explained to me that Mary was inside. They wanted us to spend time, and I still don't know to this day why, but they were in a rush to get her body out into the morgue. We were the only people in there. You know, like, you don't need to rush us spending time with what is now our infant daughter's corpse. They hadn't told Lucy, and they wanted me to tell Lucy, as she's regaining consciousness, that our daughter is dead. That was easily the hardest thing I had to do. So I Tried to find the words. Lucy was kind of dazed, in and out. And I just said, my love, I'm. I'm sorry. I'm not really sure what happened, but our daughter didn't make it. And you need to fight, so you make it. We did spend some time with Mary. We're able to hold her. She was in an incubator. She was perfect. She was nine pounds, and she change. She was perfect. She was a little angel. It was supposed to be the happiest day of your life, is now the worst day of your life, and could get worse if your wife doesn't make it like that's your soulmate. It didn't give me time to process that Mary was dead, because my mind went straight to focusing on my wife. They wanted to fly her and me by air ambulance to. To Nassau again. When we got there, the doctor that we had pleaded with, she didn't understand. She had sent a healthy woman in her 20s back to a hospital to give birth to a baby that's of age to give birth. And here we are back with no baby and Lucy fighting for her life. So she pulled me aside in a waiting room, I guess, looking for answers, tried to blame me for it. She kept saying what happened? And I still didn't even know what a uterine rupture was or really what had happened. I was kind of a deer in headlights still. I hadn't processed anything. And I kept saying, I don't know, you know, just relaying what the doctors had kind of said. And she was like, you know, uterine ruptures don't just happen. There has to be some kind of trauma to the body or, you know, getting hit or kicked or push down the stairs. Not falling down the stairs. Push down the stairs. So I got the hint at that point what she was trying to get at, and I was like, no, this all happened in the hospitals. Zero chance of domestic violence. I know what you're trying to say. And then I kind of turned it back on her and was like, well, you're the one that sent her back there. We told you not to. That at least ended that uncomfortable conversation with that doctor. We were in the. In Nassau for a week before they figured Lucy was healthy enough to fly home. Before we came back, my dad had actually flown down. We had renovated our house, and one of the things we had done was do the nursery, which was completely done with her name on the wall. And it was beautiful. And so I asked him to close those doors and that we would open them when we were ready. We each met separately with private doctors. And the doctor that I met with said that I had post traumatic stress disorder. I was having recurring nightmares anytime I would go to sleep of just my wife and daughter being in some distress, I couldn't get to them. So he put me on an antipsychotic. It didn't make any of the nightmares go away. It didn't make any of my horrible thoughts go away. It just made me do all that while not moving on the couch. We took three months off work. Like stress leave, the doctor was fired right away. It took me months to cry from my daughter, which made me really hate myself. When one of our dogs would die, I'd sob for days. But now my daughter died in a very tragic way and I couldn't feel the emotion I should or thought I should. And I was just pissed off at the world. And after I flushed the medication they gave me, I kind of figured I knew better. And I would cope by self medicating, which was mostly booze, some drugs, so cocaine helped me drink more. I would just really look forward to getting off of work and just going on a mini bender for four hours and then passing out and rinse and repeat the next day. Guilt was certainly a huge part of it. I think you're wired as a husband and a father and a man command to be that protector. And I wasn't able to do that. I failed at that. You know, could I have done something different? That's the only thing on your mind, really. And maybe that was all destined to happen regardless, I don't know. But certainly there was a lot of guilt. There was a lot of just self loathing where Lucy was far better at compartments, analyzing everything and just dealing with it in a much healthier way than than I was running a tour company for a cruise ship. You know, you have the overfed, the almost deads and the newlyweds. So if you run several hundred people through tours, you do have to go to the hospital with a guest or two, whether it's a scrape, a cut, something worse. And walking back into that place, I would instantly, you can feel your heart rate go up. You could feel your blood pressure go up. I would start, you know, almost shaking, but it was just the most uncomfortable place I could possibly imagine being. So we started talking about a change of scenery, not only for emotional stress, but if we were going to have try to have kids now, it was going to be a lot more complicated. We would go back to Canada, settled in Kelowna, where I was raised 2017. So it was about a year and a bit after Mary had passed. We would take our time, make an informed decision. But we were both still driven in trying to find the answer to this riddle now of how we would have a child. We sent Lucy to every specialist, the majority, at least this is how they explained it to us. The majority of the women that had had a uterine rupture in a hospital had a healthy child because they acted right away, got the kid out. So usually those women decided not to try again. So in Vancouver, they had a specialist, he felt that under close monitoring that we could successfully have a pregnancy. He said, you know, they would take the baby out a little bit early just to make sure another uterine rupture couldn't happen. We would have to be in for a scan every week or two. They were going to really be on top of it. I was more pro surrogacy. It took a while, like a few years, but then we decided to try again. Lucy slowly and gently coaxed me into that camp, so we tried again. We had still kept our house in Grand Turk and we had had a storm and a hurricane. So once I got to Grand Turk with two and a half months worth of repairs in front of me, she called and said that she was pregnant. I thought I would feel kind of dead inside, just assuming the worst, but I let my mind get carried away again with hope and optimism. Still having almost nightly nightmares. And, you know, I definitely wasn't mentally well at that point, but was excited by the prospect of again being pregnant. She went in for the initial scan, then called me and she said that it was twins, but they couldn't find a heartbeat on either twin, on either child. They were going to send her to the hospital for a scan that's a little stronger, I guess that if it's very faint, they could pick it up. So she was still positive. In my head, I was like, there you go. She said to wait a couple hours. She's going in the hospital and she'll call me once she gets out of that. So I grabbed a few drinks. I went down to a beach I knew no one would be at. I just sat there having drinks until my phone rang. And it was the worst case scenario. They couldn't find the heartbeat, so we lost those two. I felt bad because, you know, my wife was in Canada going through that alone. My friends wives definitely rallied around her and my folks, but, you know, I wasn't there. Came home at Christmas. It was a pretty solemn event. I told her at that point, I'm like, I'm done. That's five, four pregnancies, five babies. It was too much of a burden, I thought, for me to carry. But as my wife will, she slowly convinced me to come around to her side of things. You know, right or wrong, she was determined to do this. She felt like it was robbed from her and, you know, she had a way of getting me on board. So almost exactly the timeline, the next year, end of September 2022, I just turned 40, we had another storm. I headed back down to the Turks and Caicos to do more repairs, and the timeline was almost bang on to the year before. She called me shortly after I got there. She was pregnant again. So I still had some more time to spend down there again, try to not get as excited. Then it came time for the scan. She went into the obgyns, and just like the twins the year before, they couldn't find a heartbeat. You know, my mind went to the worst case scenario, which was, here we are again. So I did the exact same thing. Grabbed some drinks, grabbed my phone, went down to the same beach, and I told myself I knew the outcome, she was going to go do the stronger scan. You know, I know the outcome. Going into trying again, I knew I couldn't do it more than one more time. I just. It had taken its emotional toll on me by that point. You know, with the post traumatic stress, with the nightmares, with the drinking, it felt like an elephant was stepping on your chest every day and you're just trying to get up and breathe and feeling like you just never really can get a moment of peace from your own head. You know, you really start feeling, certainly not yourself, a different version of yourself, an angrier version, you know, a depressed version. And that torment can really start driving you nuts. I knew I just emotionally couldn't do, do another loss. I just was hanging by a thread and I knew another loss would be the end to my soul. So I grabbed as many drinks as I could carry and I was just going to sit on the beach, consuming as much alcohol as I could. And I assumed that she would call me shortly and explained that they couldn't find the second heartbeat. And in my head, I felt like I would probably just start swimming out into the open ocean. I figured I would just swim away, I guess, from all my problems and just let nature take its course, go down with the ship. I waited and waited, and as the sun was setting, she called. I was just kind of sitting neck deep in the water with my phone in one hand. Drinking the other. She called and said that with the stronger scan they found the heartbeat instantly. I shed tears of joy at that moment and just screamed out to the horizon, thank you, God, for sparing my child's life so far and sparing mine. We also felt more optimism than we had felt in a while. You know when you have so many different losses, you're like, okay, we made it past the twins, or we made it now past where we went in for the scan and for our second child and had to miscarriage. So you take that as like a small win. We both felt very happy, very positive. Tried not to get carried away with our emotions about thinking of the future. We're probably very reserved in our excitement, but you know, your mind does what it wants to do. It was a very nervous excitement. We went for the sex scam in January and it was a boy. Both Lucy and I agreed to name our son Otto after my grandfather on my father's side, the old German guy. We had been pretty reserved on telling people because when you lose a child and then have to explain it to everyone, you have to relive and explain everything. So we started to tell everyone. Everyone was by that point very excited and nervous. I think for us it had been 10 years that we had been trying at that point the pregnancy was normal, all the scans were good. The nightmares had started subsiding. It felt like we were getting close to the finish line. Also our son's 24 week mark, which in Canada and I believe in the States too, that's considered a viable pregnancy where they can usually handle whatever issues outside of the womb. So we had two weeks prior quietly celebrated, we're viable. You know, this, this could happen. We had also had Otto's C section scheduled. His due date was July 1st and we had the C section scheduled for June 13th. So they were going to take him early. So April 4th, I was up working on the fence. Usually Lucy and I, like most husband and wife, he'll text throughout the day. But she called me and I thought it was odd. So I answered and she said, I'm bleeding. Get to the hospital. Which was the worst thing I thought I could possibly hear at that point. And now I'm driving as fast as I can, like about out of hell, running lights to get to the place that my nightmares were made out of. I got to the hospital, ran inside. They had a Doppler on Lucy to watch Otto's stats, and all of a sudden they started to drop just like Mary's. Only instead of taking an Hour plus to do anything. Within a minute, they said they need the OR pack. Out went Lucy with the staff. And there I was sitting alone. It was definitely deja vu, sitting in that hallway, trying to hear my daughter cry. After about 10 minutes, the first person that came through the door was a social worker. I still feel bad about this to this day, but I. I bit her head off because I didn't want to hear anything she had to say. Assuming it would be the worst news, she let me vent. And then she slowly explained that she was there in case we were transferred as a family to BC Children's Hospital that was more equipped, so really just there to be helpful, but took the brunt of my 10 years of stress. Ten minutes after that, a doctor with a South African accent poked his head in and asked if I wanted to meet my son. I got a very bewildered look on his face when I said, is my son alive? He asked me what his name was before I got to him. I said, his name is Otto, after my grandfather. I got there and there was this child, my son, the size as big that it would fit in the palm of my hand, at least his torso. He was just under £2. Wires, hoses, everything coming out of him. They had intubated him. I was able to just see past it at that point and see that I had a living, breathing son. 10 fingers, 10 toes. The rest was just noise. I was able to wash my hands very well and put them inside and. And give him what I would find out later was called a hand hug in the NICU and hold him in my hand. He was so tiny. His little hand went over top of my hand. His hand was the size of like my fingernail. Then I asked about my wife. I wanted to tell Lucy that our son's out breathing, he was alive. Finally they said, you can go and see your wife. Got out in this hallway absolutely ecstatic. And as I rounded the hallway, she saw me. And as I got closer, she raised her hand and said the three best words I've ever heard in my life. We did it. There was just a burden that we had both carried. It felt like it lifted. As good as the feeling was to see my son for the first time, hold his hand for the first time, it was an even better seeing her do it. You know, all the pain and stress and whatever else that I went through, she went through that too. As well as the physical trauma and having a baby inside you that we as men don't have that bond. I remember just sitting there thinking, you know I don't want this moment to end. I. I could watch her watch him for the rest of my life. Little did we know what we had in store for us going to Vancouver to BC Children's. But we had a healthy, albeit small, breathing baby boy. And the weight of the world felt like it lifted off us for a time.
- [47:51]
Raza Jaffrey
I'm Raza Jaffrey, and in the new season of the Spy who, we open the file on Benedict Arnold, the Spy who Betrayed the American Revolution. America is fighting to free itself from the British Empire, and one of its foremost generals is Benedict Arnold. He's a smuggler turned battlefield hero and admired for his aggressive tactics. But when a war wound, a new wife, debts and politics test his loyalty to the mags, he turns spy and devises a plot to shatter the revolution and help Britain capture rebel commander in chief, General George Washington. And that plot would make him the most infamous traitor in U.S. history. Follow the Spy who now Wherever you listen to podcasts, you can also listen to the full season of the Spy who Betrayed the American Revolution, early and ad free on audible.
- [49:01]
Nathan Weiser
So Otto and I were flown first to Vancouver. I was like a deer in headlights. All the emotions of 10 years just going through me. And it's a different experience to anyone that's been in the NICU. It's a very unique hospital experience. 26 weeks is very young. You know, that's very premature. And they kept telling me that there would be a lot of ups and downs. Just prepare yourself, but we'll get you through this. He did have what was called a pda, which is a leaky valve in the heart, but they put that on the back burner. It's something that's very common in a premature child. But after a couple of weeks, he started kind of vomiting up his food. His stomach got distended, so we did some antibiotics, hoping that would rectify it. It didn't. He got worse. Our happy time was slowly becoming a stressful time. Again and again, your mind goes to those dark places. They finally decided that they needed to operate. He was still only, you know, 2.2 pounds or something. And they were going to then open him up, pull all those intestines out, see where the bad part is, maybe have to cut it out. Very scary. For Lucy and I, they did the surgery. It took about four hours, but then he also got septic. The infection spread. So now they were treating him with painkillers, several different antibiotics. Four days after his surgery, he started what they call de satting. So we'd Watch his heart rate drop and his breathing drop. And then he bounced back out of it. And that was just what we were doing. Every five minutes was, okay, buddy, you got this. You go over and give him a hug, you know, a hand hug. And that would kind of stimulate him, encourage him to breathe again. And one day, it didn't work. The nurse hit the resuscitation alarm. So all of a sudden, the room was filled with about 20 different staff. The staff there, they were so amazing. While they were begging my son to bring him back, hopefully from flatlining, the nurse working on him looked me in the eyes and reassured me twice that it would be okay. She said, we got this. He'll be fine. Don't worry. Those words definitely at the time, fell on deaf ears. But they did bring him back. He did bounce back. Otto didn't give us a lot of time to process anything. Two days later, he pulled the same stunt and stopped his heart again. Again, they were able to bring it back. The staff was incredible. Then they started focusing on the pda, the leaky valve in his heart. So then we started talking about heart surgery. We got to the surgery day and they took him down to the or. We just went for a walk, just to not sit in a chair and stare at a wall. Very early on, we got a call from the hospital and the surgeon. He had scanned Otto's heart one more time after knocking Otto out right before cutting. And the PDA had closed itself. Somehow, by the grace of God, it had healed itself. After he closed his own leaky heart, he started just getting, getting on the mend and he started gaining weight. The days were more fun. There was all of a sudden the incubator top was off and we could handle our son without permission. There was less wires, less tubes, and he got bigger. And it was such an enjoyable time. We had the other surgery to put his intestines back together. The surgery went off without a hitch. Finally, after 121 days in the hospital, they released us to go home. We got otto home on August 3rd. After 121 days, we were finally together as a family with our remaining three dogs. And then we had to figure out how to live with a baby and everything that that brings along with it. We had a, you know, a revolving door of support. The amount of love that we got and support. It was an amazing two weeks. We just kind of played host and let everyone come and hold Otto, spend some time with otto. Then on August 17, we took him for a vaccination. A doctor's appointment. And up on the hill there was a plume of smoke. British Columbia is similar where we are. At least it's a similar climate to like Northern California. It's a semi desert climate, so we're no stranger to forest fires. So this was the beginning of one. Chatted with the nurse about it. Still 40 miles from our house. Didn't think it was a threat. By that afternoon, the wind had picked up in just the right direction. It jumped a major road and started coming towards us. We found ourselves throwing everything we could into two vehicles with our dogs and our son, which left very little room for anything of ours. And fleeing from the flames that had now come down the mountain, jumped the road and are coming right for our house. We made our way around the lake to the other side of the valley and set up camp there. The smoke was really thick. We couldn't find out if we had lost anything or what the status of our home was. We were finally able to take a boat out to the property. And once we got there, you know, you saw it was complete devastation, a complete loss. You know, there wasn't anything left. It was just kind of hard to process after everything, you know, again, still just two weeks, exactly two weeks from getting home. Kind of gotten home from the hospital and figured like, okay, we could be stress free for a little bit, but there was other plans for our future. So we had, you know, just set up his crib and, you know, everything else. But as hard as it was, and it was hard, it's hard to see your stuff just in ashes. But it didn't linger. By that time, albeit sad or angry that it had happened, it almost seemed trivial because it was all material stuff. And we had our son, we had our family. You can always replace things. And as we found out, it's something that definitely put things into perspective for us on how much that devastation or that loss meant versus the 10 years of real loss that we had experienced. You know, anytime I would get upset at that point, I could look at my son and it all seemed trivial. We had what was important for us. We had our family. Our family was intact. Our family was healthy. Our son was healthy. You definitely realize how precious life is. You realize how fast it can be taken away. You realize what true loss is. I could not love anyone more than I love my son. And today he's a thriving toddler. All the stuff that people complain about their toddlers, all the annoying things or whatever, I find myself just shrugging off every part of being a father now. I love the Good, the bad, all of it. And even more, watching Lucy be a mother. She's such an amazing patient, perfect mother. Otto's so lucky to have her, and we're so lucky to have him. I think one of the neat parts, as early on as he could talk, his favorite number was five. He asked how many pancakes he wants. Five. You know, this is five, five, five, five. And it took me a second going through all of it, realize, well, that's, that's the amount of siblings he has. So I, I tell him when he asks that he's got five guardian angels watching over from. And maybe that's who healed his heart without putting him through that stress of the heart surgery. You know, they say everything happens for a reason. And I don't think I'll know why we went through that turn of events, why it took us 10 years to get where we're at until, you know, maybe it's my time and I can ask someone at those pearly gates why we had to go through that. But you still process it. You still think about it. The nightmares are gone. It seemed like the crash course to get me away from ptsd, away from spiraling because of the grief, was to walk into a hospital and be forced to sit in there for four months. It was like crash therapy. And it was just the last place I wanted to be, the last place I wanted to even go near, a place I had avoided for so long. And I had to walk into that place. And it was still an extremely stressful experience. But coming out of that, going through hell to get to heaven seems like it really healed a lot over those 10 years. And the losses. Your mind really just trains to go to the worst case scenario, because we experience the worst case scenario over and over. And I find that any little thing, I have to tell myself that it's not that the worst is going to happen, you know, and maybe I worry, maybe there's more anxiety. That's probably been the hardest thing. And just to not fall into that rut again of kind of the darkness and the, the hidden parts of your brain you don't want to go into. And I think that's the self struggle that, that I have sometimes now. But the stuff that we. The noise that stresses us out in life, big events, small events, whatever, it really just shows you what matters in life. It really just taught us what matters in life, that if you can overcome what we overcame and what our son overcame, watching a small child die twice to come out the other side, that doesn't motivate you to live your life in a different way, in a better way, and not just it really seize the day, really experience life. Otto just turned three April 4th. He has such an incredible imagination. Loves animals, loves the water. Brave, you know, nothing scary. Walk up to strangers and say hi, just as such a you see zest for life, I guess. But he's just so inquisitive and he's so interested in the world that it makes you see it through a different lens as well. For me, you know, he's falling in love with the water and that's making me fall in love with the stuff I fell in love with before that probably you forgot about or it just got pushed to the back when your mind and your heart are, you know, dealing with grief and pain. And now I get to fall in love with some of the stuff I fell in love with before because my son's showing me how amazing it is through his eyes.
- [61:24]
Wit Misseldine
Today's episode featured Nathan Weiser. Nathan's memoir is titled We Did A Rare Perspective from a Husband and Father Enduring a Decade of Miscarriages, Infant Loss, and the Rollercoaster of Emotion in the nicu and is available wherever books are sold. A link to Nathan's book, his email and socials can all be found in the Show Notes. And if you'd like to hear some deeper reflections on Nathan's story, as well as reflections on the last few episodes and updates about the show, please subscribe to my substack click called beyond the story@whitmisteldine.substack.com from Audible Originals. You are listening to this Is Actually Happening. If you love what we do. Please rate and review the show. You can subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music to listen ad free and get access to the entire back catalog. In the Episode notes, you'll find some links and offers from our sponsors. By supporting them, you help us bring you our show for free. I'm your host Wit Misseldine. Today's episode was co produced by me with special thanks to the this Is Actually Happening team including Ellen Westberg. We'd also like to thank Head of Creative Development at Audible, Kate Navin, Head of Audible Originals North America Marshall Louie and Chief Content Officer Rachel Gyazza. Copyright 2026 by Audible Originals LLC. Sound Record Recording Copyright 2026 by Audible Originates LLC the opening music features the song Sleep Paralysis by Scott Velasquez. You can join the community on the this Is Actually Happening discussion group on Facebook or follow us on Instagram. Actually Happening on the show's website, thisisactually happening.com you can find out more about the podcast. Contact us with any questions, submit your own story, or visit the store where you can find this Is Actually Happening designs on stickers, T shirts, wall art, hoodies, and more. That's thisisactually happening.com and finally, if you'd like to become an ongoing supporter of what we do, go to patreon.com happening even 2 to $5 a month goes a long way to support our vision. Thank you for listening. Follow this Is Actually Happening on the Audible app or wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen to all episodes of this Is Actually Happening ad free by joining Audible.