When life throws challenges our way, sometimes the most surprising people—or even baked goods—step up to save the day. In this week’s episode, both of our storytellers remind us that heroes can come in all shapes, sizes, and forms.

Part 1: While on a bike ride with her daughter, Rebecca Stronger comes across an unconscious stranger on the ground.

Rebecca Stronger was born and raised in Brooklyn, and she wants you to know that she HAS left the neighborhood a few times. She is a retired acrobat, a veterinarian, a single mother and is just about ready to start calling herself a writer.

Part 2: The only thing standing between Ruby Mustill and being trampled by elephants is a tent.

Ruby Mustill is an evolutionary biology PhD student at Texas A&M University. Before moving to Texas, she graduated from Columbia University with a BA in anthropology, studied monkeys in Puerto Rico, and managed a remote field site in Kasanka National Park, Zambia. Outside of research, Ruby spends her time knitting and talking at length about her elderly cat, Muffin. She hopes to work at a natural history museum in the future.

Episode Transcript

Part 1

My daughter and I are riding our bikes to school one morning. It's quiet, clear, it's late summer. We come around the corner of 15th Street and Prospect Park West and I look over my right shoulder to make sure she's keeping up, and I can see that she's right there behind me. I can also see that just inside the entrance to the park, there's a man on the ground and another man standing over him, looking down, talking on the phone. I assume it's 911.

Without thinking, I stop my bike, I stop my kid, and I say, “I think I need to go over there and see if I can help. Stay right here. Don't move. Don't follow me,” and I run.

The man is unconscious and he's not breathing. His skin is ashy, his lips are blue. I put my fingers on his neck. It's warm, but I can't find a pulse. So I stimulate his chest and I don't get a response.

So I drop down on my knees and I start doing CPR. I know this man is dead and I know that CPR rarely works, but I try.

I start to notice people are coming by and I yell out, “Can somebody please go stand with my daughter? She's 10. She's in the bike lane. She has two bikes with her.”

Then I look back down at my hands and I can't figure out, are they on the left side of his chest or are they on the right side? My brain is looking but I can't figure it out. So I close my eyes and I imagine myself laying on my back in the same position that he's in and, yes, I'm on his left side. Okay, good, good.

Then I look over at his face and his slack jaw and I think, “I really don't want to do mouth‑to-mouth on this guy.” I mean, that's a lot for a dead guy. I think that's going a little too far.

But just then, a woman runs up and she yells, "I'm a nurse. Go faster!" And so I go faster.

We work together for a while. Eventually, the nurse and I switch places. She takes over compressions and I keep my hand on the man's wrist. And with each push on his chest, I can feel that she's generating a strong pulse. And when she stops for a life check, she looks at me. I don't feel anything and so we keep going.

Eventually, the FDNY arrives. I stand up, I brush the gravel off of my knees, and I go find my kid. She's safely on the sidewalk, guarding our two bicycles, petting someone's dog.

When she sees me, she stands up to meet me and she says, “Is the man dead?”

And I say, “Yeah. That man is dead.”

Then she says, “Do I have trauma from this?”

I laugh and I say, “No, baby, I don't think so. Nobody did anything to hurt this man and he probably had a problem with his heart and, look, so many people just came to help him, so I think you're okay.”

This seems to satisfy her, so we hop on our bikes and I take her to school and I head to work.

About a half a block from work, I stopped my bike again. I lean it on the wall of the storage place across the street and I sit down on the hot sidewalk and I cry, not because I just did CPR on the dead man. I cry because, the night before, I found out that my best friend John has been lying to me and I'm bereft about it.

John and I have a very close and a very complex relationship. I'm always the first person that he calls when something big or small is happening and he's always the first person that I call. And when things are good with us, I'm good. But we also fight. And when things are not good with us, I'm not good.

Lately, our fights are lasting longer and we don't recover as quickly as we used to. When I try to talk to him to work things through, he's distant in a way that he's never been with me before and he gets aggressive. Then later, he'll act as if nothing ever happened, and that's really hard on me.

But I love him a lot so I keep trying.

The night before I met the dead man in the park, I found out that John has had a girlfriend for almost a year and he's been lying to me about it. I don't care about the girl, I care about the lie. I feel so betrayed. I had a feeling he was seeing someone, and every time I asked him about it, he would deny it and would get super annoyed with me. I don't know why he would lie about something like that, so I believed him.

So when I found out, I texted him to tell him that I knew. I know he hates when I text about big things, but I knew there was going to be a fight and I hate talking to him on the phone when he's angry.

Shortly after I texted him, he called. When I saw it was him, I froze a little bit and I didn't pick up the phone. This was probably the first time in 35 years that I didn't pick up the phone when John called.

So in this quiet, clear, late summer morning, I'm sitting on the sidewalk crying because I feel like if I don't matter enough to John for him to be honest with me, then how do I matter at all?

I can't bring myself to get up and cross the street and go in to work, and so I call a friend and we talk and I start to calm down. I tell him about the CPR, and the detail that sticks most in my mind is that I can feel the man's ribs break when I was doing compressions. I feel bad for breaking his ribs. I feel bad for doing CPR when I knew he was dead anyway.

I'm a veterinarian. I know CPR on animals, not on humans, and I feel like I had no business being there at all. And that's contributing to this feeling that I just don't matter.

A few days later, I'm emailing with one of my veterinary clients and I sign off with my typical, "Please let me know if there's anything else that you need."

She replies with, "There is something that I need. I need to thank you for your heroic actions on Friday morning in the park. The man whose life you saved is the father of my daughter's best friend."

I have to read that sentence again, "The man whose life you saved." The man in the park is alive, and, apparently, he thinks it's really funny that it was her veterinarian that saved his life.

His wife contacts me later that week. She cries on the phone and she goes on and on about his recovery.

I tell my close friends the story and they're so proud of me, and they tell me that I should be proud of myself, but I'm not. I'm not even sure that it really happened. It's such a surreal blur. All I want to know is if I actually broke the man's ribs. I feel like if he can tell me that his ribs were broken, then I know that it really did happen, that I was there and that I really did make a difference.

Meanwhile, I still haven't talked to John. We usually talk at least a few times a week, but not now. I am the one who always calls, but I haven't done it lately. The night that I text him and he called and I didn't pick up, he didn't leave a message and I haven't heard from him since. And over 35 years, our relationship has had its ups and downs, but this feels really different. I'm reminded of the nurse doing compressions, generating a strong pulse. And that pulse disappears when she stops.

The following week, Mary, the client who knows the man, is in my exam room with her dog Rosie. Rosie just had a minor surgery and she's doing well. I asked Mary about the man and how she knew about my involvement. She tells me her daughter saw a Facebook post about what had happened.

I saw that post. I saw it the same day. There were so many comments from people who knew me, clients, friends, literally singing my praises, and I hated it. I felt embarrassed. I felt like I was invading somebody's privacy. But now, here with Mary, now that I knew that it connected me to the situation in a more real way, I was grateful for it.

And later that same day, one of my favorite patients had an appointment. Celeste is a big, fat, happy black lab and she's recovering from a pretty serious illness. Over the last few weeks, she was really worrying me. She would mope into the exam room and show no interest in treats. But on this afternoon, she pranced into the waiting room and her owners were behind her smiling. When she saw me, she jogged right over, she took a treat, she sat on my foot and practically knocked me over, just like old times. It was really nice.

I really like her people too. We have one of those warm doctor‑client relationships that cross over a little bit into personal, and I know that one of them is a paramedic. So after I take care of Celeste, I tell them the story about the dead man in the park who isn't dead anymore. Then I tell them that in veterinary medicine, CPR almost never works.

The one who's a paramedic starts nodding and smiling practically with his whole body before I even finish my sentence and he says, “Yeah, it's the same in human medicine. CPR almost never works.” And then he tells me, “Recommendations for CPR change all the time, but there are two things that we know that are the most effective: to start compressions right away and not to stop.”

And then he tells me that I should be very proud of myself. This time, it lands, and I feel like I'm going to cry again, only in a good way. Because he just gave me this gift of understanding that I do matter.

Look, I know it wasn't this man's time to die. The universe put me and everyone who was there that day in place to keep him alive. And while I still think of John and his new absence from my life, it's actually not that often. The closeness that we had is gone, and I miss that a lot, but I don't miss the struggle and the unease. And I'm starting to make connections between the ups and downs of our relationship and how I see myself in this world. And I'm starting to see myself a little bit differently.

I know that the universe put this dying man in my path, not only to show me how truly connected I am in this world, but also to show me that I may have been doing CPR alone in this long relationship with John, and it just might be time to stop and to let it go.

Part 2

The baboons have been missing for a month, and I am sick of looking for them. It's June and I'm four months into a year managing a remote field site in Zambia. I'm supposed to be studying baboons, but it's hard to do that when you can't find them anywhere.

The good thing is that I'm pretty sure I have the perfect solution for low morale. So I zip up my canvas tent, and I walk with determination towards the kitchen, past the collection of bamboo huts that make up our research camp. I'm already excited by the time I brush mouse poop off a box of shelf‑stable milk and pour sugar into a mixing bowl. I'm about to make apple cinnamon muffins and I cannot wait to taste them.

I'm in Zambia because I want to pursue a PhD in primatology. But in order to let myself follow that path, I feel like I need more field experience. I've done fieldwork before, but I had electricity and running water. So in my mind, I've yet to prove whether I have the resolve to handle the real deal.

My feelings about my job are mixed. On one hand, it's pretty cool. I live in a beautiful forest, I have delinquent vervet monkeys as my neighbors, and I've already seen some of the weirdest bugs I've ever encountered in my life. I'm learning that nothing is more exciting than recognizing a new baboon based on their face, just the way you'd recognize a person, when a couple months earlier, they'd all just look like baboons.

I feel really lucky to be there, to have been given the chance to study wild animals and take the next step towards a PhD.

On the other hand, I'm in over my head at the field site, I have eight months left to fulfill my contract, and I'm starting to wonder if I actually do have what it takes to do field work.

After a month, looking for the missing baboons is getting demoralizing. I walked 50 miles in the last four days alone and I'm starting to feel sorry for myself. It's cold, my tent is thin, so I sleep with my legs curled up on top of me to stay warm at night. My lower back aches from my mattress, which I'm pretty sure used to be a rat's nest, and which still has a mushy pit in the middle. And I just had malaria, which kicked my ass.

I know I'm fortunate to be doing science, or trying to do science, in a national park in Zambia, but I'm rethinking whether studying animals as a career is actually worth all this trouble. Do I really want to do this again as a PhD student in a few years?

I'm also sad because I miss my friends and family. My dad cried when he dropped me off the airport. He's not much of a crier so it broke my heart. Four months later, my chest still hurts whenever I think about him watching me from the other side of security with tears in his eyes.

I miss my family more now that the only other Westerner I work with has been gone on vacation for three weeks. Our camp feels like a ghost town with just me in it.

I have Zambian co‑workers too, but they live together in a camp down the road in brick houses. So I eat all my meals by myself, and my cell service is too unstable to call anyone from home.

I feel most alone at night, in my tent, listening to animals walk by in the darkness. The animals are almost always antelope, but I worry that one day they might be elephants.

I didn't know that elephants could be scary until I worked in Zambia, but that was one of the first things I learned. Whenever I leave camp to follow the baboons, I have to go with a park ranger who carries a machine gun, not because of poachers or lions, but in case you run into elephants.

What I'm told is that, in Zambia, decades of human hostility have made elephants scared of people and they can be unpredictable and aggressive as a result. I've also been told horror stories.

Just two months earlier, a primatologist in Uganda was trampled to death. And when one of my bosses was a grad student, she ran into an elephant outside the same camp that I'm now living in. The armed guard that she was working with ran away, leaving her to die. And she told me that she was curled up in a bush for hours while the elephant circled her, until it finally lost interest.

So all these thoughts and frustrations and fears are on my mind when I decide to make my muffins. I'm particularly desperate for something sweet, because I’ve eaten boiled potatoes and instant ramen and soggy rice for long enough that just looking at those things has started to make me feel sick. My friends from home have asked me to stop texting them about how much I miss eggrolls. But I'm feeling confident that the muffins are going to make everything better.

I almost finished with my batter and I'm preheating the oven when I realize my mistake. I have no flour. I also have no car. The closest town is a two‑hour drive away, and no one around is eager to deliver groceries. But there's no fridge and camp either, so saving the batter for later is also not an option.

I'm desperate. I've used up my last apple and two eggs, which are precious resources. I can't waste them, so my muffins have to turn into something edible.

I look around the kitchen desperately for something that I can use to replace flour in my recipe. I think about grinding up some almonds, but there are only six left in the bag. My next idea is to create Oreo‑meal out of a couple ancient packages of cookies, but I'm not willing to sacrifice them to the experiment.

So I resign myself to picking pellets of rat poop out of a bowl of stale ground maize. Two cups of theoretically‑shitless cornmeal go into the batter and my creation is ready for the oven.

I put the muffin tin in and I leave the kitchen, then I run back 10 minutes later when I smell fire.

The muffins are burnt. They're completely flat on top and they've crusted over the side of the baking tin. They're mealy and they're hard to the touch on the outside, but completely wet underneath the crust. I'm still thinking about it and I figure they might be edible if I let them finish baking, but at this point I'm not optimistic about what will happen if I put them back in the oven.

I decide I'm over it. I'm cursing myself for not dumping the batter earlier and I'm cursing myself for being in the middle of nowhere with no good food in the first place. Why am I doing this if there are no baboons to study? And why did I think I'd want to do this again?

So I walk back across camp, with the baking tin hanging limply out of my hand. I end up a few feet away from my tent, standing in the grass just outside the entrance. I flip the muffin tin upside down and watch as the wet parts of my batter plop down next to my feet. I scrape the burnt parts off with a butter knife and I tell myself that leaving the batter right here, right next to my tent, is a good idea. It might even make the whole experiment worthwhile if it attracts mongooses to hunt the snakes that live in my bathroom.

And then I forget about the muffins completely.

That night, I hear this sharp, sudden sound of a tree hitting the forest floor 200 feet away and I know immediately that it's a herd of elephants. I'm still alone in camp and I'm sitting in our main insaka, which is a thatched‑roof hut with an open doorway that serves as a living room. The last thing I want to do is make eye contact with the elephants from under a structure made of bamboo and straw.

So I run to my tent through the darkness, because at least it zips up. I sit in the middle with my arms around my knees and I'm terrified of what will happen if the elephants sense me there.

Several agonizing seconds of silence are broken by a trumpet call, which I interpret as an expression of surprise. That means I've been seen or smelled. The sounds of breaking branches get closer as the herd approaches. A distance of 60 feet becomes 40, which then becomes 20. Suddenly, I'm crying, and the elephants are only getting closer.

When they stop outside my tent, all I can hear is their munching and my own heartbeat. “Of all the ways to go,” I'm thinking, “I cannot believe this is it. Being trampled by elephants thousands of miles away from anyone I love. What a raw deal. Why did I think I could do this job?”

I think about my dad and how he cried at the airport. How could I let myself be killed? How could I let that happen to him? I couldn't let that happen to him.

What if I run? Maybe I could make it to the brick shed in time.

What if I throw something at them? I have a metal water bottle. Can I save myself by throwing a metal water bottle towards a herd of elephants? Do I have a knife in here?

It was hopeless

So, without knowing why, I opened my phone's voicemail app and I hit the red button, ensuring that an audio recording of my flattening would exist for future generations.

I opened my camera next, and the face that appeared on screen didn't quite seem like mine. It was twisted into an expression that I had never seen before. But I took a picture, and I sent it to three friends, along with an eloquent final message, “I think an elephant is going to kill me.” Even though I knew that with my spotty cell service, if I died, it would never be delivered.

Then I waited.

One by one, the elephants passed around my tent, completely disinterested in me and engrossed in whatever they were eating. They lingered nearby for a few hours but, by dawn, they were on to the next woodland.

I finally fell asleep. When I woke up later that morning, the sun was low in the sky and it cast a light like late afternoon on the trees above camp.

I left the safety of my tent and stood in the clearing behind it, where I had dumped out my muffins a day earlier. Above me, a family of vervet monkeys huddled together for warmth on a sunlit branch, and I shivered in the brisk and humid air.

Overnight, a path of trampled grass had appeared. It began across camp, wrapped around my tent and disappeared into the forest.

I looked down and the muffins were gone. I stared for a few moments where I had piled my sludge the day earlier. I decided that I was grateful that at least the elephants thought my muffins were worth eating. Then I got dressed, ate half a potato, and walked for another 12 miles. I kept walking after that.

We found the baboons three months after they went missing, which was the longest they'd been gone in the history of the research project. And when we finally ran into them again, a bunch of females had brand new babies. There was suddenly a lot of work to do with taking pictures of the infants and figuring out their sex and who they belong to. And I finally had my job back.

Watching the babies learn to play and seeing all the new moms hang out with each other despite their differences in rank and laughing at how all the baboons, even the macho adult males, were trying to sneak looks at the babies, reminded me of why I was there in the first place and why I wanted to be a field researcher. And after those three months and my visitation from the elephants, I knew I had the grit to be one.

Thank you.