Tag Archives: storytellers

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Dallas Buyers Club

A second film identified in StoryDame’s examination of the life story film in Is your story “award” material? is Dallas Buyers Club.

Key to good health. ©istockphoto.com/autorock

Key to good health. ©istockphoto.com/autorock

Dallas Buyers Club is the story of Ron Woodroof, a Dallas electrician and rodeo enthusiast who is diagnosed with HIV in 1985 and given thirty days to live. His story is a great example of what I call the “bad medical news” story. Since Woodroof didn’t tell his own story, I’m going to compare it to one by another Texan who told her story in Healed of Cancer. In 1981 Dodie Osteen, wife of John Osteen pastor of Lakewood Church in Houston, was diagnosed with metastatic cancer of the liver and given only a few weeks to live. “What on earth connects a man with HIV and a pastor’s wife in your mind?” you may be wondering. The link comes through Kay Warren’s work with Saddleback Church’s HIV+AIDS Initiative.

Fight. Neither Osteen nor Woodroof followed the advice Woodroof was given by doctors in the film, “Go home and get your affairs in order.” Neither was going to give in that easily. Woodroof, apparently not eligible for the AZT trial at a local hospital, initially tried illegally obtained AZT. Osteen turned down exploratory surgery, a colonoscopy and chemo. She went home where she “realized that faith for my healing was a personal matter between me and Jesus.”

Expect criticism. Woodroof lost his friends when he announced he was HIV positive and had AIDS. Hurtful comments Osteen faced from within the body of faith led her to challenge us not to “be critical of people unless you walk in their shoes.”

Persist. Is battling for your life easy? No. This is no five-minute fight. According to Dallas Buyers Club, Woodroof made several trips back to the hospital. When AZT was no longer available illegally locally, he turned to Mexico where opinion of AZT wasn’t high. He abandoned it for drugs available in Mexico – vitamins, ddC and the peptide T – not approved for use in the United States.

Osteen’s battle was against fear. As a registered nurse, she fully understood what the doctors told her as well as how her body should function. She sought prayer of others and relied on God through his word and her own prayer. From the minute she received a promise of healing from the Bible, her husband and children treated her as if she were well.

Give. As Woodroof improved he began to sell the drugs obtained in Mexico to others with HIV. Eventually he started the Dallas Buyers Club. The drugs were given free to anyone for a monthly membership of $400. Word spread and he was shut down by the FDA and fined by local law enforcement. In 1987 he filed an unsuccessful lawsuit against the FDA seeking the right to take peptide T. The FDA later allowed him personal use of the drug.

In 1986, Osteen shared her experience, 40 scriptures to which she clung and physicians statements in her book, Healed of Cancer.

Dare to live is the tagline of Dallas Buyers Club and live he did. Woodroff expanded the 30 days doctors gave him into seven years.

Osteen is still alive today.

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Luke and the eyewitness report

We true-life storytellers are likely to hit a snag at some point for any number of reasons. Maybe events of the story we want to tell happened very long ago. Mimi Beardsley Alford wrote Once Upon a Secret, about her 18-month affair as a White House intern with John F. Kennedy fifty years later.

I can see the LIGHT ©iStockphoto.com/NKND200

I can see the LIGHT ©iStockphoto.com/NKND200

Possibly a story we want to tell involves an injury or illness that left us with memory gaps because we were highly medicated or unconscious for a period. Dr. Eben Alexander supports the account of his NDE in Proof of Heaven with the experience of family members while he was comatose.

Perhaps we were absent for some reason at the time the event(s) that impacted our life occurred. Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Lucinda Franks shares her discovery that her father had been a World War II spy after Alzheimer’s struck him in My Father’s Secret War: A Memoir.

Can you tell true stories despite having no, few or time-impaired memories of the events as they actually occurred? Can stories plagued by these be deemed reliable? While there may be a million reasons to affirm such stories, one man stands out this Christmas season as a prime example.

Among the earliest, and certainly among the most credible of true-life tale tellers, is Luke. Luke is thought by many early and church historians to be the author of two New Testament books of the Bible, Luke and Acts. In the second chapter of Luke, he tells what is many people’s favorite version of the birth of Jesus. Was Luke there for the event? No. He found out about it based on careful investigation of eyewitness accounts. Was Luke’s version accepted? It must have been because he mentions it at the beginning of his second book, Acts. (What a great example of first century book marketing!!!) And, maybe even more important, the gospel of Luke remains widely accepted today as one of the sixty-six books of the Bible.

If memory of events is absent or “iffy” because of time, incapacitation or absence, we can take inspiration from Luke. We can look into the events through the eyes of those who were there like family, friends, neighbors.

I inadvertently tested this out recently. In November, we celebrated the 50th anniversary of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. Practically everyone who was alive on that horrific day remembers where they were when they heard the horrifying news that the president had been shot in Dallas.

As I finished watching As It Happened: JFK 50 Years on TV, I posted on Facebook that when I heard the news, I was in Mrs. Whittington’s 6th grade classroom at Oaklawn Elementary and asked others if they were alive then if they remembered where they were. The response was larger than normal and included comments by others that were in my class.

One friend messaged me to remind me that our basement room had no loud speaker, so the information was delivered live. Another messaged me asking if I remembered going to her birthday party at her home that night. While I remember the party and a photo taken at it, I don’t in any way connect the party with Kennedy’s death.

Because of that Facebook post, I now have new details based on the eyewitness experience of others that enrich my memory of that day. Reach out to eyewitness to fill out your stories!

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I’m inspired by Dr. Eben Alexander

In 1970 after fracturing a vertebrae, I experienced a fat embolism that sent me into convulsions and stopped my heart. I only know about the event because medical staff told me the next day as they put my dislocated shoulder back in place, did a brain scan and put me on a no fat diet. To my conscious knowledge, I had no near death experience, or NDE. But if I had had an NDE, would I, a freshman at the University of Arkansas at the time, have had the courage to tell the story to family and friends, much less the whole world?

Amazonian butterflies behind glass. ©iStockphoto.com/simonox

One element of Dr. Alexander’s NDE was butterflies. Amazonian butterflies behind glass. ©iStockphoto.com/simonox

Eben Alexander was living a good life as a husband, father, and respected neurosurgeon for which he was smart enough to be grateful. Then one day he began to experience flu-like symptoms, a headache and back pain. His wife returned home and discovered he was having a grand mal seizure and called 911. At the hospital doctors discover Alexander had E. coli meningitis. Despite the fact he was treated quickly and aggressively, Alexander remained comatose for six days surrounded by medical staff and praying family. With little anticipated hope for recovery, it is miraculous that he opened his eyes on day 7 and eventually had full recovery. Even more remarkable to me is that Alexander returned to consciousness with his own personal tale of a near-death experience, or NDE, which included a blue-eyed woman who came to him on butterfly wing and chose to tell it in Proof of Heaven: a Neurosurgeon’s Journey into the Afterlife.

The NDE is not new in popular culture. Before picking up Dr. Alexander’s book at Target, I had read 90 Minutes in Heaven by Don Piper, Heaven is for Real by Todd Burpo, and To Heaven and Back: A Doctor’s Extraordinary Account of Her Death, Heaven, Angels, and Life Again by Dr. Mary C. Neal. Mark Galli says in his December 2012 article Incredible Journey: What to Make of Visits to Heaven that he tends to believe NDE accounts (one of which he mentions is Alexander’s) due to his experience with historical research and its reliance on personal testimony by reliable witnesses.

Unlike the med students portrayed in the 1990 film, Flatliners, the only proof of heaven needed for the Christian is found in scripture. Didn’t Jesus promise one of the thieves crucified with him that, “Today you will be with me in paradise?” (Luke 23:43 NIV) Where the skeptics often appear, for Alexander and others with NDEs that speak of heaven, is in the scientific realm. Many scientists, including Alexander before his NDE, look upon the NDE as the hallucinations of a dying brain.

Blue skies from the top of the Statehouse Convention Center parking deck. ©D.L. Ewbank

Blue skies from the top of the Statehouse Convention Center parking deck. ©D.L. Ewbank

Arkansans have the privilege of hearing Dr. Alexander live on November 13, 2013, as part of the Clinton School Speaker series. The crowd drawn in this neck of the Bible belt woods by the neurosurgeon turned NDE author is large. At the parking deck of the Statehouse Convention Center I get one of only a few remaining spaces on the upper deck. I join the throngs at the Ballroom of the Statehouse Convention Center and find one of few remaining seats. As the best selling scientist shares a capsule version of the story I have already read, one word comes to mind. Risk.

RISK! is a live show and podcast hosted by storyteller Kevin Allison who regularly brings on folks to tell “stories they never thought they’d dare to share in public.” Possibly the riskiest story I’ve seen told is that of this neurosurgeon turned NDE author unafraid to tell his story even though he knew the full extent of scientific skepticism!

Got a risky story to tell? Get a “prescription for courage” to tell it from Dr. Eben Alexander!

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I’m inspired by Antonio Rocha

Personal story was as prevalent at the National Storytelling Festival as cowboy boots on young Tennessee women at the Johnson City Red Lobster the night I ate there. If your looking for a ratio, I estimate, and roughly, it was two out of three.

What a great sport to pause pre-story for a photo. Rocha rocks!

What a great sport to pause during his pre-story warm-up for a photo. Rocha rocks!

Since Jonesborough is in the South, it was no big surprise that many of these true tales involved faith. That’s no problem, no problem at all, for me, a genuine born-again, Southern evangelical Christian.

There were Jewish tales from Syd Lieberman and Shonaleigh. There were Christian tales by Donald Davis, Geraldine Buckley, Victoria Burnett, Tim Lowry and Elizabeth Ellis who fought David-vs-Goliath against local and national government agencies. There were tales that seemed almost Christian, if taller than true from Bil Lepp, Methodist minister turned comedic storyteller and five-time winner of the West Virginia State Liars’ contest. Lepp was the first teller I heard and I must admit I had to resist shouting “Amen, brother. Preach on!” when his story involved fondue recalling how I almost set my hair on fire coming a tad too close to Sterno hosting the ladies of my small church group.

But perhaps the most inspiring picture of faith didn’t mention faith much if at all. It must have taken great faith for Brazilian born, Portuguese speaking Antonio Rocha to leave his native country and set up camp in the U.S. with grant funding to perfect English, perform and study mime. His inner battle when he traveled farther north to Maine with early winter sunsets and sub zero cold to live with a family he didn’t know and obtain a BA in theatre is “fish-out-of-water” universal and raises empathy.

Rocha won that battle and was still in the U.S. when he turned forty. Because “life begins at 40,” to commemorate this milestone Rocha and a son of his Maine host family traveled to Africa. Rocha, a student of Marcel Marceau, uses mime movements to artistically illustrate his last steps to the summit of Mt. Kilimanjaro.  Was his elephant experience during safari true or tall? You’ll have to find out for yourself!

Rocha has told around the globe. Taste for yourself.