This week we present two stories about people who sprung to action to help a dad.

Part 1: To cheer up her ailing father, Victoria Ruiz decides to smuggle a turtle into his hospital room.

Dr. Victoria Ruiz is an Assistant Professor in Biology at St. Francis College and Adjunct Assistant Professor at NYU Langone medical center. She obtained her PhD in Pathobiology from Brown University, and she completed her postdoctoral work at New York University Langone Medical Center. Her primary research focuses on the effects of environmental perturbations of microbial communities on host immunity. In addition to research, she is passionate about increasing equity and inclusion in STEM and developing new and innovative pedagogical strategies to improve learning outcomes for undergraduate students interested in pursuing STEM fields.

Part 2: Stacey Bader Curry finally meets a nice guy -- the only catch is, he needs a liver.

Stacey Bader Curry has a BA in art history and political science from Rutgers University. Naturally, she began her career by selling laboratory equipment at Weill Cornell Medical College. She now sells apartments but can still get you a good deal on a centrifuge. Stacey is also a writer and storyteller and has appeared on PBS’ Stories From the Stage, Yum’s the Word with Mo Rocca, and has won several Moth slams, including a Grand Slam. Stacey lives in Manhattan with her four children, husband, a dog named Pip, and cases of powder-free nitrile gloves.

Episode Transcript

Part 1: Victoria Ruiz

Hi, everyone. It’s 2002 and I am 16 years old. Visiting my dad at the hospital was a frequent occurrence for me, my mom, my sister, even my boyfriend. The hospital became our second home. You see, my father is a diabetic, so having that extra sugar in your blood is really not good for you.

For him, he developed all these different complications, including kidney failure and heart failure and other lists of diseases. This all started when I was 10 years old and my dad injured his toe.

One day, he came home and I saw his toe, I was like, “Dad, your toe looks weird.” And you look at it, it was first bruised and then this weird bruised mass started turning black. Not only was it black but it began to smell. The smells were putrid and rotten eggy. It smelled like rotten flesh.

My mother was disgusted. My sister was disgusted. She said, “Vicky, get away from that, please.”

My 10-year-old self? “Mom, this is so cool! Look at this.”

Victoria Ruiz shares her story with the Story Collider audience at Union Hall in Brooklyn, NY in January 2020 as part of the Brooklyn Podcast Festival. Photo by Zhen Qin.

I was a super inquisitive and weird kid. I just needed to look at it, I needed to touch it. I was like, “Look, it moves.”

And what was really cool, I mean, not cool—interesting was that it was so different from the other nine toes. This one toe was black, and when you keep poking on it you would see that the nail would start moving away from the nailbed. Eventually, my 10-year-old self just took the nail and pulled it out.

I was like, “Mom, look what I did! Sorry, Dad.”

So I think that should have been an indication that I was going to be in some weird field. So, what, 16 years later, I received my PhD from Brown University in the field of Pathobiology, and what that means is studying the mechanisms of disease.

My diploma is in Latin, so I have no idea what it says, but the most important part of that, is important to me at least, is what my expertise is in. It is actually in the art of natural death. So what does that mean? I understand how the body works, and that was really what my focus on was as a scientist, as a graduate student.

But back to my 10-year-old self, not really knowing what was my future going to be, I looked at this toe and me being so intrigued, I pulled it out. I pulled the whole nail out. And that was just the beginning. That was the beginning of many hospital visits. That was the beginning of constant worry for myself, my family, my boyfriend.

We would visit my dad at the hospital. It became a process where I'm the oldest. I needed to think about how can I make this everyday chaos something better for all of us? So what I would do is I would try to make it a joke. I would try to make some… add some light to the day.

So let’s say we’re going to the hospital during Christmas, I would make sure I bring presents. If it’s during Thanksgiving, we would bring the turkey. We would make it our day no matter what. It would be our time no matter what the situation would be, no matter what experience we were having. This is how I would cope. This is how I would help my family cope through all the different daily, weekly, yearly visits to the hospital.

So, I began walking myself to the hospital. I'm 16 years old. And this time around, as we’re passing towards the hospital, you see this elderly lady. She’s actually selling all these little knickknacks, but in addition to the knickknacks she’s selling baby turtles. And I thought, “Oh, my goodness. My dad’s in the hospital again. I think he would love to have a baby turtle.”

He loves animals and my mom was basically allergic to anything furry so I thought he must have a turtle. I know he would love it forever. This is, again, my 16-year-old self. This made complete sense.

So what did I do? I gave the lady $10, she gave me this quarter-sized turtle. It was adorable. I'm pretty sure the transaction was illegal and I should not be buying this tiny turtle. It must have been riddled with salmonella.

But anyway, I took this little turtle and I named it Hercules and I placed it into a Styrofoam cup because, for some reason, she didn’t even give me a cage for it. And I stuffed the cup into my bag because, again, I still have to go see my dad. He’s in the hospital.

So I go with Hercules, he’s in my bag and we’re walking towards the hospital. The reason we’re going this time is because my dad just recently had quadruple bypass surgery. So basically, the arteries that supply blood to the heart, four of them were blocked so they had to bypass those arteries to make sure that that blood was getting to the heart.

Of course at that time, I'm teaching my family how to cope. I'm the entertainment. I am the joy, so I never really thought a quadruple bypass surgery was a big deal, hence me buying Hercules on the street.

So I go with Hercules to the hospital. We pass the revolving door and I make eye contact with the security guard so I don’t look too suspicious. I’m carrying this salmonella-riddled animal in my bag. And I keep walking. I walk towards the elevator. I go up the elevator. I'm super excited. You could almost feel the joy coming through me because I can't wait to show this to my dad. He’s been in the hospital for over a week. He needs some entertainment in his life.

So here I go. I'm getting off the elevator. I'm almost skipping to the room. And as I get towards the room, this sound comes from the room and it basically bypasses all the other insane sounds that you normally hear in the hospital. But this sound was piercing. It was coming directly from his room and it sounded like this, “Beeeep.” And it continued.

Again, it was coming from his room and he was the only one in his room. That sound is the sound of cardiac arrest. The heart has stopped. And I was 16. I didn’t know what cardiac arrest was, but I knew that when doctors are on top of your father trying to resuscitate him, he is dying.

And in my head, everything just goes black. I forget I have the turtle with me. I just, I can't feel. All I hear is this sound, piercing my heart, my soul.

What am I going to tell my mom? What am I going to tell my sister? I am the distractor. I am the entertainer. I’m the jokester. I am not the bearer of bad news. What am I going to tell them? How am I going to do this? I don’t do this. What am I going to do?

That is my dad. He was the provider of the family. He came from nothing and gave us everything. What am I going to do? How am I going to live without my dad?

And I start losing my breath. I wasn’t even in the room. I continued seeing the physicians trying to resuscitate him. It felt like hours just staring at that room. And then minutes later, you start hearing beep-beep. It almost paired up with my own heart rate just coming back. I could actually feel my heart again. It meant that he was back, he was back with me.

Oh, the relief I felt! But at the same time, I knew he was going to be okay. At that moment, I knew that I was not okay in the sense that, “Oh, you know, he’s just in the hospital. It’s just another hospital visit.” That innocence was gone. And I was afraid every hospital visit could be the last hospital visit. How was I going to cope with the idea that this time may be the last time?

So this was when I was 16 and I knew I needed something in my life to help me cope. I need to cope so I could help others cope, and really what helped me was science. I started using science to make me better understand why.

How does diabetes cause heart failure that could eventually lead to situations that happened to my father? And over the years, I learned more about how this process works and mechanisms of disease, and that gave me the bravery to continue. It gave me the ability to cope with those everyday moments of chaos that we, I will have.

So my dad was okay and he did meet Hercules and he loved him. And today, Hercules is now the size of a 6-inch sub and my dad loves him. My mom takes care of him. He still tries to climb out of his cage. I don’t know how he still tries to do that. And they’re coping. And because of that, I will never tell them this story. Thank you.

Part 2: Stacey Bader Curry

On our fifth date, Dave and I walked the Silk Road which was an exhibit at the Museum of Natural History. On our previous dates, we’d been to a wine bar, we’d been to a poetry slam, the zoo. We’d been to a Ukrainian punk rock/klezmer concert. We’d been everywhere except the one place I wanted to go, to bed. And I didn’t know what the deal was with this guy.

We had met online. He had winked at me. He was the one who suggested we meet in person and, when we did, it was magic. It was everything you would want a first date to be. There were sparks flying. We were laughing. We were making meaningful eye contact. And after our date, he walked me home and we stood in front of my doorway, and I looked up at him and I closed my eyes and he came in for a peck on the cheek.

Date number one. Date number two, three, four, same thing, though. Date number five, I am following him around the museum, and he is like really into this exhibit. He wants to stop at every display, read every plaque about Marco Polo and saffron and ladies. I don’t know if you’ve ever had a man be more into a rare spice than you, but it’s not a good sign.

So we left the museum and I was like, “I am done. I am done with this sadistic bullshit.”

But then Dave looks down the block and he says, “Hey, do you want to go to Shake Shack?” and I say, “Okay,” because if I'm not going to have sex, at least I'm going to have a delicious cheeseburger.

So we get to Shake Shack and it’s really crowded. We put our order in and there’s nowhere to sit, so we’re like huddled in together at this little counter space. We’re so close and he smells so good. I love his face and I love his voice and I can't help it, but I feel my face start to rise again.

Then he says to me, “There’s something I have to tell you.”

Stacey Bader Curry shares her story with the Story Collider audience at Union Hall in Brooklyn, NY in February 2020. Photo by Zhen Qin.

And just then, that little like garage door opener they give you when your food is ready, it starts to vibrate, and so he leaves to go get our food. And I contemplate leaving because I am 38 years old, I am divorced, I have three young children and I had been dating online long enough to know that every single man I meet that is willing to accept this baggage I have has something they have to tell me. Shame on me for thinking Dave was any different than the married Mormon, father of four who was also unemployed.

So Dave comes back and I'm like, “Okay, fine. Just tell me.”

And he says, “Well, the thing is I'm really attracted to you, but I have this autoimmune disease. It’s called primary sclerosing cholangitis, PSC. Basically, my bile duct kind of crapped out and spilled bile all over my liver and I’ve had a lot of complications. I've had multiple surgeries. Right now, I have this infection that I’ve had since I’ve met you. I have a drain inserted into my side and my bile is in a baggie strapped to my leg. And it’s not very sexy.

And I’ll get these infections from time to time because there’s no cure for this disease and eventually, I’ll need a liver transplant.”

All I heard from this was that he was attracted to me and so I was like, “You know, I have three kids, you have a funky liver, we’re kind of like even.”

Also, I wasn’t really scared by this because this was science. I mean, I didn’t understand it, but we’re in New York City. There’s great doctors. I'm like this can get fixed.

So I was like, “Okay.” I pick up my cheeseburger and I'm about to take my bite, but then a dark thought occurs to me.

“Wait a minute,” I say, “you're not just dating me for my liver, are you?”

“No,” he says. “My brother has already agreed to give me a lobe of his liver. You can have a living donor. They give you one lobe of their liver and then both segments regenerate to a new liver. And so my brother has said if there’s ever an emergency situation, he’ll give me a lobe of his.”

And this is like the best news ever because his brother is actually a doctor, and his brother went to Yale, so this is like a liver my Jewish mother would be really proud of.

So I take my bite of the cheeseburger and it’s delicious, as are the next few years. We fall in love, Dave moves in with my children and I, and two years later, I give birth to our daughter. It’s cute, right?

He stops getting these infections like he’s fine and I just say to him all the time like, “Honey, you just needed love to cure you.”

Then at the end of 2016, during that dark election cycle period, Dave started feeling really lousy. His doctor sent him in for an MRI. And one morning that December, I'm walking to work and Dave calls me and he says, “We have to go up to the hospital. The doctors want to talk to us. They see something in my liver.”

So we go up to Columbia Presbyterian and it’s a worst-case scenario. It’s cholangiocarcinoma which is bile duct cancer, which is a very aggressive and deadly form of cancer. But the good news is they caught this early enough that it’s still deep in Dave’s liver. They’re hopeful that if he can get a new liver and they can remove this whole liver, he’ll be okay.

Until Dave says, “I’ll call my brother.”

And his brother, the doctor who went to Yale, doesn’t know his blood type. It takes a few days for him to get tested. And when the results come back, he’s a completely different blood type and incompatible with Dave’s.

Stacey Bader Curry shares her story with the Story Collider audience at Union Hall in Brooklyn, NY in February 2020. Photo by Zhen Qin.

But even though I went to a state school, I know that my blood type is A+, the same as Dave’s, and so I call the transplant coordinator and I say, “How does it work? Does it have to be a blood relative? Dave is 6’3, does it have to be someone who’s the same size?”

And she says, “No, it has to be an adult with A+ blood who has a healthy liver and is willing to do this.” That was me.

So I immediately began testing as a liver donor. And you have to meet with 12 different specialists, everyone from a social worker to a cardiologist. And every one of these examinations begins the same way, with a quiz. They want to hear from you that you understand the risk of being an organ donor.

For this surgery, the risks run from infection to hernia to death. So I got very familiar with the risks. Like you could not get your parking validated without saying ‘infection, hernia, death’.

Despite knowing these risks, it was going great, the screening process. Like, even though I love cheeseburgers and dirty martinis, I have a really healthy liver.

So everything was going great until I got to that 11th appointment with Dr. Fox, the heptologist, the liver doctor. I come in. I take the quiz. It’s fine and then she says to me, “How do you know the recipient?”

This is always a hard question for me because even though Dave and I had a child, we never actually got married because we live on the Upper East Side and I had to keep a little bohemian cred. So I never know what word to say, like, we weren’t partners.

So Dr. Fox was like my age and she was really hip, so I just said, “He’s my baby daddy.”

We kind of laughed about that and she was single so she wanted to know what website Dave and I met on. And we just, we kind of like started having this conversation about how hard it is to be a woman of a certain age to meet a man in New York City.

And then she puts her hand on me and she says, “You know, you don’t have to do this. If you want like an easy out, I can just say you have a fatty liver and no one has to know.”

All of a sudden, I stop laughing. This had become more to me. When I first started this process, it was just about, honestly, I didn’t want my life to change. I didn’t want to lose my partner, I didn’t want to be sad, I didn’t want to have to watch someone die.

But the more I got into the process, I stopped thinking of Dave as my partner and as somebody’s son and brother and friend and father and I felt like for the first time in my life, I could be a hero. I could save another human being’s life with just a couple, not even a pound of my flesh.

So Dr. Fox did the sonogram on my liver and I held my breath, so afraid she was going to fat‑shame my liver. Her face was so stern during the whole examination and finally, she just smiled and she said, “You have a beautiful liver.”

And so I moved on to the next step which was just an MRI where they just had to map out how they were going to resect a lobe of my liver, and that went fine.

Then the final step before getting approved as a liver donor was that all 12 specialists had to meet. They had a conference scheduled for every other Tuesday and they all go over the results and they officially approve me.

And this conference was scheduled for Tuesday, January 3, 2017 and late in the day. I am a very impatient woman and I hate sitting around waiting for phone calls, so I said to Dave, “You know what we should do that day? We should go to city hall and get married. I’ve given you a child, I’m giving you my liver, I might as well give you my hand in matrimony at this point.”

So we went, just us and the four kids. My oldest was 18 at that point, so she served as our witness, and we had a really quiet and simple and beautiful wedding ceremony.

Afterwards, we went for an early bird dinner to celebrate. And just as our appetizers were served, my phone rang.

I didn’t want to take this call from the hospital at the table so I looked around the restaurant and there was nowhere private. So I go in the corner behind the busboy station and I'm crouched there, and it’s Dr. Samstein, the Head of the Liver Service at Columbia Presbyterian.

And he says, “Stacey, I just want to let you know, you have a really healthy liver.”

Thank you, thank you. I get that.

And he says, “But it’s the way your lobes are divided. It’s extremely abnormal. Most people have 60%‑40% big lobe, little lobe and, by law, we need to leave a donor with 30% of their liver. And yours is divided 73-27 and so we can’t take a lobe from you. We can’t leave you with only 27% of your liver.”

I'm crouched behind this busboy stand staring at all these bottles of Heinz 57 and I can't believe I have to get up and walk across the room and tell my husband that all hope is lost, that I can't do this.

And as soon as I emerge, he sees my face and he knows. So we signal our server for the check, please and we go home. We start calling our friends and family and no one else is A+ or in a position to do this for us in our immediate circle.

So one of my friend says, “Why don’t you post about it on Facebook?”

I’m like, “I don’t even put my birthday on Facebook.”

So it’s hard but I do it. And I wake up in the next morning and there are 12 messages in my inbox saying, “I’ll get tested,” “I’ll get tested”.

Then later that day, one of my friends who lives here in Brooklyn, her name is Sara Kate Gillingham, she calls me and she doesn’t say I’ll get tested. She says, “I am A+ and I can do this.”

The hospital will only let you choose one person to go through all this extensive testing at a time and I just know in my gut that Sara Kate will do this. And so she does all the same testing I did, but her liver is divided the classic 60%-40% and so she gets approved as a donor.

And on February 14, of all days, 2017, we had this really weird group date at Columbia Presbyterian with Dave and I and Sara Kate and her boyfriend Pete. And she gave 60% of her liver to my husband.

You know, when I started this thing, I thought a liver transplant was like this clinical, scientific procedure and it’s not. It’s love. It’s all we want this world to be. I don’t think I’ll ever get over my disappointment that it couldn’t be me, but I am so grateful I got to bear witness to the best that humanity has to offer.

Dave and Sara Kate are both fine. We’re going out to dinner next week to celebrate. and life continues. Thank you.