“The Night The Lights Went Out” With Drew Magary
Originally published on “Terrible, Thanks for Asking” on June 16th, 2022
Our brains and our minds fragile, and they’re housed in our fragile little human bodies that just break unexpectedly.
That’s where Drew Magary found himself: the owner of a broken skull and a badly damaged brain. But you’d really never know it — because on the outside, he looked mostly fine!
In this episode, Nora talks with Drew about his memoir, The Night The Lights Went Out, and the insidiousness that is recovering from a traumatic brain injury.
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Transcripts may not appear in their final version and are subject to change.
Hello, my readers. It’s Nora McInerny here, with another episode of the Terrible Reading Club. I like to think of this as great books for terrible times, or about terrible times, maybe? And one of the most terrible things that I can imagine — and I have a particularly TERRIBLE imagination, truly I can just think of anything awful at any time — is something happening to my brain.
My husband Aaron — and stop me if you’ve heard this one before!— he died of brain cancer. And as far as luck goes, he was the unluckiest lucky man I’ve ever met. Or the luckiest unlucky man I’ve ever met. His tumor was in a part of his brain that didn’t affect his personality, or his speech, or his memory. I guess basically just a blank spot, a part of his brain he didn’t need.
But I know a lot of people who weren’t that lucky, whose brain tumors just kept snipping away at who they were until they weren’t themselves at all.
And it’s not just brain cancer that can do this. It’s dementia or a brain injury or — and this is one of those things like quicksand, that I thought, in my childhood, was much more common than it is — amnesia. Who gets amnesia? I thought, truly, not only that I should be on the lookout at all times for quicksand, for sinkholes, for some reason, lava (I lived in Minnesota, very geologically sound place if I do say so myself), I thought at any time I could risk getting amnesia. I still don’t know anyone who’s ever had it.
But our brains are important, obviously. This is where we keep our minds, and our minds are where we keep ourselves. We are, I think, we are our minds? I remember taking Philosophy 101 and having a mindblowing debate over this. Can I remember any other details? Of course not.
But back to our brains and our minds. They are fragile. They’re housed in our fragile little human bodies, bodies that can just break unexpectedly.
That’s where today’s author found himself: the owner of a broken skull and a badly damaged brain.
But you’d really never know it.
Drew Magary is a name you might recognize if you were a reader of Deadspin or if you’re a current reader of Defector. I don’t even like sports … that’s not true. I do like watching some sports, but I’m not a sports head, if that makes sense. But I always loved Drew’s writing. He’s the kind of guy who can make you laugh out loud on the page (or in this case, screen) ... and I have been reading and LOVING his “Hater’s Guide to the Williams Sonoma Catalog” for, I looked it up, a decade now.
Drew is still all of those things. He’s still a writer. But in 2018, he woke up in the hospital after a two-week coma.
There’s no real explanation for WHY he was in coma, for why what happened happened. One minute he was standing in the hallway of a karaoke bar after a work event, and a few seconds later, a colleague saw Drew laying on the concrete floor in a pool of blood. EMTs assumed he was just a drunk guy who had taken a bad fall, but his friends and colleagues insisted that he be brought to a hospital.
That trip to the hospital saved his life. He hadn’t just cracked his skull in three places, he had suffered a catastrophic brain hemorrhage.
The how of it, like I said, it remains a mystery. One doctor insists that the injury to Drew’s skull is consistent with an assault, but surely somebody at a small work gathering would have seen that. His blood alcohol level was 0.0162, so he wasn’t drunk. What happened afterward was months and years of processing what happened and what was lost. Because it turns out that your brain is really important, not just for storing our memories and our personalities, but, you know, as the computer that makes your entire body work.
Drew’s book is called “The Night The Lights Went Out: A Memoir of Life After Brain Damage.” And it’s a marvel not only that Drew lived to tell the tale, but that he retained his ability to tell it in a way that’s not just scary but also very touching and very, at times, funny, too.
So here we go. This is my conversation with Drew Magary. Also, a note that if you’re listening with kids or just don’t like swearing, this episode had a lot of swears in it.
Nora McInerny: I'm going to start at, I think, a place that makes sense, which is like the beginning-ish, or at least the beginning of this book. Tell our readers who you are, personally and professionally, before the lights actually go out.
Drew Magary: My name is Drew Magary. I'm a writer. In 2018, I was a columnist at a site called Deadspin. And I was also a correspondent for GQ magazine at the time. I had written a couple of books. But for this particular story, the fact that I worked at Deadspin was what was important, because we had an award show, a fake award show that we did every year called the Deadspin Awards, where we gave out awards like “biggest asshole in sports media” and stuff like that. And we made a real show out of it. We had Irving Plaza in New York. I hosted the show. I had a monologue. We gave out the awards. We had taped bits and all this stuff that went really, really well. Hundreds and hundreds of people came to the show to say hi and enjoy the show, and everyone got drunk and had a good time. And then we were retired as a staff to an afterparty at a karaoke bar that was a few blocks away. And I got there early. I had a slice of pizza. I had a couple of beers. And then at one point I had to take a piss, so I walk out of the room while everyone else is in it. And I woke up two weeks later in a hospital without realizing it. I had collapsed in that hallway. I fractured my skull in three places. I had suffered a severe brain hemorrhage, which, to this day, doctors do not know whether or not my fall caused the hemorrhage or vice versa. And the only reason that I'm still alive to talk to you is because one of my colleagues heard a thump out in the hallway, looked out, saw me on the ground, and then everyone came immediately to my aid and called 911, because they knew I wasn't quite right. Even though I had woken up. I wasn't unconscious. But I was bleeding, and I was not making any sense, because I had a pool of blood inside my skull, which you're not supposed to have. And it was pushing my brain out of place. And you don't want a dislocated brain. That kills you. And so they called the paramedics. The paramedics came. They thought I was drunk. Megan Greenwell and her husband, David Heller, who is an internist at Mount Sinai, begged and pleaded with the paramedics to take a closer look at me and to take me to the hospital, because the paramedics weren't going to take me to the hospital. They were just like, “Well, he’s shitfaced, like every other, every other person in this bar.”
Nora McInerny: “Yeah, you're in a private karaoke room. I don't think it's an emergency, but I do think you're all idiots.” And I’m sure they get, like, so many idiot calls all the time. Any other night, that might have been the case.
Drew Magary: They took me to the hospital, and Megan Greenwell, while she was there, she was there with my colleagues, Samer Koloff and Victor Jeffries. They begged with the doctors to take a closer look at me, because I was just not normal as far as they had seen. And it wasn't, it wasn't because I had been drinking, because they've seen me drunk many, many times and knew what drunk Drew looked like. And the staff was like, “Well, we, you know, we think it's something that he can probably just sleep off.” And then they did a CAT scan, because Megan and her husband pleaded for it. And when they saw the CAT scan, everything went to a hundred. Like, everyone was like, “Oh shit. This guy is in deep, deep shit.” And it turned out that I was in the wrong hospital for what I had. I had a hemorrhage and a subdural hematoma, in which one of the blood vessels lining the skull popped and the blood leaks into the brain. And they saw this on the CAT scan, and it was growing. The more that it grew, the greater risk I was of dying. Like, this is something that can kill you instantly. It killed Bob Saget instantly, not too long ago.
So they quickly put me in another ambulance, took me to an uptown hospital, where a spinal surgeon named John Keriti, who usually worked on spines but had also done occasional brain surgery on the side, cracked open my skull, sucked out the blood, put the piece of my skull back, and then put me into a coma for two weeks. And then I woke up from that coma thinking it was the day after the award show and that I had gotten into a fight. I was like, “Oh, I can't believe I got so drunk. I got into a fight.” And the nurses are like, “No, you had a very, very serious injury.” But of course, I was so drugged up from the coma – they give you like fentanyl and, you know, a cocktail of god knows what else to keep you under — that I didn't really understand what had, what had happened. And I didn't understand it, while I spent another three weeks in that hospital just learning to walk again and stuff like that. And I still didn't really get it. And it took years for me to figure out, you know, exactly what had happened to me and what it done, because, not only had I almost died, but when I woke up, I was half deaf and didn't realize it. My skull fracture tore through my inner ear on the right side of my head. I didn't have a sense of smell, which I didn't realize until like, three months after I got out of the hospital, which is sort of an insult to the sense of smell. And I lost some of my sense of taste along with that sense of smell.
I had vision problems too, which have since been corrected. But, you know, there was one point where I'd lost control or sensory abilities in over half of my face, and I didn't really understand it. And I was angry. I didn't know why this had happened, and I was angry that it had. And I wanted to just reset it, and I couldn't. And, you know, so the book is about my colleagues saving my life, but then, the time after that, when I had to learn how to essentially become this new person that I was forced into being, and I was able to do that because of my doctors and because of my wife and because of my children and the rest of my family. So it's, it's been … it's been a journey, to use a cliche, but it definitely qualifies for that cliche.
Nora McInerny: It does. And there's also this sort of element of unsolved mystery to it, because you wake up from this coma having no idea what happened, but also there is not a single person in your life who knows what happened.
Drew Magary: That's correct. Even the doctors cannot sort it out and have not been able to sort it out. The doctor who operated on me said, “I don't believe that this just happened spontaneously, your brain just decided to explode one day. I think something happened.” And by saying something happened, I think he was clearly insinuating that I had tripped on something. I had been assaulted or something. Something had acted upon me to cause this injury. But he doesn't know what that was. I don't have a good explanation as to why this happened. And the one thing that … it's not annoying, it's more amusing, is that it seems like everybody but me who hears about it wants to know what happened. And really, if I had been a better writer, I would have been able to journalism my way into an answer and sort of made the book into a procedural. But I never got an answer. The karaoke bar no longer exists. And I wrote it during a pandemic when I couldn't go anywhere. I had to accept that life has mysteries that go unsolved and that that is OK, and in some ways it makes life better. You know, I don't want to use the J.J. Abrams mystery box as a, you know, as a sort of analogy here. But, you have to accept that there are things that you're not going to know, ever. And I think that that goes against a lot of people's instincts, because they want to know, or they want to at least pretend like they know shit. Because I'm a dad, my job is to pretend I know stuff. And so I spend every dinner pulling, you know, factoids out of my ass.
Nora McInerny: And also, it makes us feel safe, you know? My husband had brain cancer and died. Sorry. [Drew: Oh my goodness! I’m very sorry. I’m very sorry to hear that.] And yeah, brains are wild. Even people who study brains are like, “Oooh yeah, I don't know, ugh yeah, that's a tough one.” Like, there's just so much we don't know. There's this part of your book, after you've learned how to walk again and you're trying to beg your wife to let you work again, and I'm going to read you some of your words to yourself.
I highlighted this part. "All my life I'd been taught, with great evidence and great wisdom, that things happen for a reason and that you make good from bad. But I saw no good in almost dying. No one could even tell me why I had collapsed to begin with. All I saw was a miserable fluke. There was nothing to learn."
Drew Magary: Yeah. That's how I felt for, I don't know, a year, longer? Because, it's like anybody else who has tragedy befall them, and the first thing they do is they look up to the heavens and say, you know, “Why me? Why did this happen to me?” That's too random to be fair. Like you want, you know, you want some karmic balance in the universe. And when you're presented with evidence that doesn't exist, well it takes a while to come to grips with that. It certainly took, took me a while. And the other thing was that, you know, the one of the reasons that I wanted to go back to work so quickly was because I wanted to pretend it never happened, and I thought I could if I went back to work and I got back up on my feet, I could proceed as if it never had happened and that I was no different than I was before. But I was different. And it took my wife telling me that to my face many times for me to not only accept it, but then also to go get the therapy I clearly required to process, to, to think about it. It's like anything else. You have to, you know, when your life changes abruptly, life still goes on. And you sort of resent life for doing that. But you do adjust, whether you like it or not. And in my case, the adjustment was not only existential, but it was also physiological. I got a lesson in, you know, sort of the miraculous way that the human brain works around problems, you know? And adjusts itself so that it can work even when it has been damaged and even when parts of you have been badly damaged. I'm not going to say I'm glad it happened, because I'm not. Like, I don't want my family to have to go through that, because they all thought I was going to die. But I definitely would not have gained the appreciation that I have, both for life and for my brain and for the people who loved me, had I not had this happen. And so I guess it did happen for a reason, although for a good long time, it really sucked.
Nora McInerny: Yeah, and I think that's OK. You mentioned wanting to get back to work because then you could pretend that it hadn't happened. And I feel that. There's this thing that happens in the aftermath of any big life-changing event, which is that you kind of go from being this fully formed person, “You might know me from this or this!” To being like, “Oh my god, did you hear about Drew?”
Drew Magary: Yeah, yeah, yeah. That poor bastard.
Nora McInerny: Yeah, “Oh my God. He almost died, I feel so bad for his wife. Yeah, no, they have four kids,” like, you know, “It's really, really sad.” And then all you are is sort of like this sad story that people are telling about you. And the other side of this coin too is that: Work is an identity for us, and also, so is our brain. And as a writer, you know, I think brains are important for every person, no matter what you do-
Drew Magary: Yeah, you are your brain.
Nora McInerny: You are your brain. And yet also, like, for a writer, you're like, “Could I have broken a foot in this fall? I could do this with one arm, if I had to.” But like, we really, really, we need our brains for so much, not just functionally, but creatively. Like, how do you start to write again?
Drew Magary: That part was never a problem. Whatever damage I've incurred in my temporal lobe – and I saw it, like, on a CAT scan, it's there. It did not affect how I write. The only thing that changed was I was not in the right frame of mind, and that showed up in the work. I never had a moment where I couldn't, like, put a sentence together, like particularly after the drugs in the hospital wore off. And I'll tell you one side note that didn't actually did not make the book. Miraculously, my ability to write stayed blessedly intact. And, you know, whether or not, you know, people who don't enjoy my work are happy about that I can't, I can't say. But I will say that when I woke up, I had my phone on me. And I was like, “Oh, I got to tell the world what happened to me,” but I was like, fucking zonked out of my brain on drugs. And I had encounters with nurses and with friends that I fully hallucinated. Like, that did not happen. But I was under the impression that I had somehow, that my brain had leaked blood into my throat and that I gagged on my own blood or something like that. So I did a whole Twitter storm about what had happened. And you know, my wife was on a crosstown bus that morning, and her phone starts blowing up, and everyone's like, “Drew's tweeting. You have to get his phone away from.” She's like, “Oh my fucking God,” because she had just left the hospital. She turns around. She goes up to me in the room. She's like, “What are you doing? You shithead.” [laughs] And she takes the phone away from me. And she doesn't give it back until I leave the hospital.
Nora McInerny: My husband hallucinated that I was harvesting his organs and selling them, and I'm very glad he didn't put that on Twitter. [laughs] But he was like, “Why would you do that?” And I was like, “What, like, huh?”
Drew Magary: Well, the other thing is that I had never, like, I never done acid or anything like that, so I had no real experience with the reality of hallucinations. And even now I have no real clear demarcation in my memory of what was actually happening to me and what I thought was happening. I remember vividly an entire conversation I had with Megan Greenwell about whether I had screws in my head. Like, whether or not they put physical screws in my head. Because I was like, “OK, will I set off a metal detector every time I walked through it?” After that, I told Megan about the conversation. She's like, “Drew, we never had that conversation.” I was like, “Well, you're full of shit because I completely remember.” She's like, “Drew. It never happened, ever.” And that was just one example of it. Like I had remembered also Megan bringing me food with Barry Pacheski, who also worked me at Deadspin at the time, and I thought I ate all of it. And they said, “No, Drew. You ate one bite and you wouldn't eat the rest. And then you asked for tea and you, but you wouldn't, like, you wouldn't sit up to drink the tea. You tried to drink it while lying flat on your back, and then you got mad at everybody because you couldn't drink it.” I don't remember that part of it. [Nora: Yeah.] So it's, it's a little bit terrifying. You know, your brain has that power over you when it malfunctions. But it's a learning experience, that’s for sure.
Nora McInerny: Yeah. Our brains are so amazing, and they're also so fragile. The human body in general is just this series of miracles and also so, so fragile. Like, we are fragile, fragile creatures. It's frightening. If you think about it too much, it's very, very frightening.
Drew Magary: Well, you have to live under the impression that you're strong. That you can withstand things. Because life throws a lot of shit at you, right? And you learn, you know, as you go through childhood and adolescence that you're stronger than you think. Right? When you're two or three and you get a booboo on your knee, you cry, and it's like, “Oh my God, this is the worst thing that ever happened to me.” By the time you're 16, you shrug it off. You don't give a fuck. But that sort of process, you know, that keeps going as you get older. You feel like you have to toughen up to get by. And while doing so, you sort of put on the back burner the notion that you are immensely vulnerable at all times. Like I'm not going to get into a car and think every time about what automobile accidents stats are like in the United States. That’s not going to do me any good. I would just freak the fuck out. I wouldn’t be able to drive my car, right?
Nora McInerny: You don't get on a plane and think like, “Wow, we are 30,000 miles above the ground. That feels unsafe.” You have to just sort of suspend reality to survive in the world. There's this part in the book where you are told that you have brain damage, and you have to sort of square what you think a brain damaged person is with the fact that you are ... brain damaged. Can you tell me about that?
Drew Magary: My thoughts about brain damage prior to the accident really revolved around like what I had seen in TV and movies or, like, sort of any links I had to people who had gotten what I would consider to be more serious brain damage – like, incapacitating brain damage. Like, I thought of it as incapacitating or just compeltely makes you incapable of taking care of yourself and certainly taking care of others. When I was presented with evidence of that on the CAT scan, I hadn’t thought of it in that way. And I also realized there's no undoing that. Like those blotches on my CAT scan. You can't take some Windex and just wipe away. They're there forever. And also they have the, you know, of course, the terrifying prospect of growing. I am more vulnerable to having dementia or Alzheimer's now than I was prior to the accident. And I'm more vulnerable to it than other people with intact brains. And all that came at me in one doctor's visit. And also, that was the doctor's visit where I was told I was half deaf forever.
So, it's one of those things where, you know, you take in all the information. And you don't drop to your knees and, like, scream or anything, or like, pound the floor. Like I was just dead silent. I took it in, and it just takes forever to sort of process it and think about it and come to grips with it, and decide what parts of it are worth ruminating over and which ones are not. So all of that has been part of my recovery. You know, we were focused when I woke up on my physical recovery. Like, that I had to get up and learn to arrange cones on a fuckin shelf and write my name. And do all that shit. But you know, there was the spiritual part of that that, you know, doctors that can only help so much, right? Like, every case is different, and they have other patients they have to treat. And all of that is somewhat left to you. Obviously, it would help to see a therapist, and I saw one far too late. But that is its own part of the process that takes much, much longer and is in some ways more vital than the physical recovery.
We’ll be right back.
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Nora McInerny: There's a lot that you lose even as you're sort of regaining some of your capabilities or some of your skills or some of your sense of self. And you mentioned your hearing. You mentioned your smell. You mentioned taste. What did you learn about sort of all of the things that the brain does for you? And also what kind of effect does that have on you and the way that you interact with the world and your family?
Drew Magary: I think, like, losing my smell was bad, because I had a lot of memories, you know, sort of tied to smell, you know? The smell of the ocean? Like, that's the one I still really miss. Like, I'm pretty much over having lost my smell, but I do miss the smell of the ocean. But you know, there are other things like, the smell of the hair of the girl I had a slow dance with. You know, the smell of my mom's cookies, you know, or the smell of my wife making cookies, or the smell of fall because I love fall so much. Like, when you first smell the smoke coming out of chimney stacks. Like, all of those things like were really not only evocative, but they were important to me. And so it was like, OK, well, how am I going to live without these things? Will my memories be as good? Will they be as vivid?
And, it's sort of, you start off in a position of fear, and once you've lived through it, you know, you have proof that your fears were kind of unwarranted, because, you know, you have more memories, more good things happen. Whether you like it or not, you learn to live as someone who can't smell. Taste was actually a lot more difficult, because I write about food, I love food, And like, if I became a foodie and like, I loved Anthony Bourdain. And so, I like, you know, I liked being someone who liked really good food. Right? And the fact that I couldn't smell, that impacted my taste, but then also I got a cochlear implant surgery in 2019 and was unaware — because I didn't listen to the doctor when he told me this — that you can lose part of your sense of taste during that operation. Because the nerve that goes to your ear from your brain also goes down the side of your face and works with your, with your tongue, to process taste. And I had lost a good amount of taste and that really fucked with me, particularly in the beginning, because right after my surgery, I couldn't taste a fucking thing. And it was like, OK, well, I've been cursed by a sea witch. If I never tasted anything again, that's pretty much it for me, there's not there’s not going to be much more pleasure in my life if I can’t taste anything. But then, some of that taste came back. Not all of it, and I kept waiting for the rest of it to come back. But what happened was at a certain point, I let go of the waiting. And when I did that, my brain accommodated for it. And, the way things tasted to me with a damaged tongue began to taste fuller. And I don't really know how to explain that without, you know, injuring your brain too. It's hard to explain smell loss to someone who can still smell, because things like they can plug their nose, but they know they can unplug their nose. But very, very recently I was able to, like, start eating it again and sort of accepting it on its own terms. Even though I hadn't recovered any, some of the taste buds that have been damaged, right? So, like, cereal tastes the same to me as, like, as it did a year ago, and yet my brain thinks about it a lot differently. And so it tastes better. And that is very complicated and annoying, and it's a long-winded way of saying I can enjoy cereal and ice cream again, even though I thought they had been lost to me, because I changed, I reoriented, my approach to how I think about them.
Nora McInerny: The parenting parts were especially touching, because your kids have known these two really, really different versions of you. So, can you tell me about the kind of dad you were before the accident, before the injury?
Drew Magary: I don't think I was as good of a dad as I imagined myself to be. I got very worked up over things. I didn't have a very long fuse, even before I got hurt. I have become so comfortable in my current skin that I don't think too much about how different I was before it. I used to think about that a lot, but I don't anymore. And also the other thing is that my wife, you know, tried her best to shield the kids from what was happening to me. And that's very hard when you're in a coma in a hospital. But she really did try her best. And there were a couple of times where it broke through to the kids. But even now, I don't think any of them quite understand how close I was to dying, because they were not there for the initial sort of onslaught of both the news and everything that happened. When it first happened, my wife, she sent the kids to school that day and she said, “You know, Dad had an accident. You know, he's at the hospital. He's trying to recover. And we have to go up and see him.” She stayed very general about that stuff because, you know, you try to explain that, he's either not going be able to process it or it's going to be so overwhelming and scary that he'll just freak the fuck out. So she didn't want that to happen. And so now I have to sort of educate them about what happened to me without freaking them out too much, because I know it's still something that, you know, they’re still kids. They still ruminate on things we don't expect them to ruminate about.
Nora McInerny: It doesn't surprise me that she sent her kids to school because you have this sort of tunnel vision into the one normal thing that you can control, and it's: You're going to go to school, and I'm going to try not to make you worry, and I'm going to go check out and see how horrible the reality is, but all you need to know is that Dad's at a hospital, but it'll probably be OK. And it, just like you sort of reach for some sense of control in the uncontrollable. And you know, we talked earlier about losing hearing, losing your sense of smell, losing your sense of taste. And there are parts in the book where, like, you're really angry, and your kids can sense that anger.
Drew Magary: Yes, that's right. It took me a long time as an adult to understand what was going on in my mind. And, you know, I'm a college graduate, I was in my 40s, like I was someone who, in theory, would have been able to grasp this stuff. But I had a hard time doing it. So imagine how hard it would be for someone much, much younger, still going through their education. And you know, their brains aren't fully formed. And what happened to me did not happen to them. So all of that makes it much, much harder, you know, to explain and process, and all of those things. So I think my wife did the right thing by keeping them on their routine, as the way adults do when they're in grief. You know that they will go back to work to distract themselves. You know, and so I think that that allowed us to elucidate what happened to me to them, you know, on a much more sort of staggered timeline, where it's not as scary, and it's easier to digest. And so far that's done well. And, you know, the other thing is that my youngest son himself almost died at 90 days old, and we've had to explain that to him a few times. And of course, he doesn't remember because he was a baby. But, you know, like, you realize that these sort of things are sort of lifelong processes – which, you know, can be daunting at first, like, “Oh my God, it's going to take my whole life.” And then you sort of adjust and you understand that, you know, it's just sort of learning as you go. And that's OK.
Nora McInerny: I can't remember if I quoted this back to you the last time we spoke, so one moment: “Trauma is a vine, a parasitic entity that latches on to a thriving host and over time grows on and around it. It can take a while, even years, to make its presence fully known. It doesn't surround you all at once.” What was the timeline for this trauma making itself fully known, and do you think it's still making itself known?
Drew Magary: I think that it has mostly made itself known, because the fact of the matter is I don't really think about it anymore. I don't ruminate on it. It feels very much like something that's in my past, which was my goal right away when I was in the hospital, like, “Oh, I'm going to, I'm going to leave this in the past, never really happened, et cetera, et cetera.” And of course, the irony was that I only prolonged my recovery time doing that. And by sort of more analyzing what it did to my psyche and things like that, you know, that gave me the illumination I needed to be able to become comfortable with who I was and then move on from there. But you know, like, it's true that the section where I wrote about trauma, it takes time. It grows on you. It can be devastating, and especially in quiet moments when no one else is around. You're so alone with your own thoughts. But the upside of that is that the more it reveals itself to you, the more you sort of learn about it, and the more you kind of learn to live alongside it, to the point where it does not dominate your thoughts where it once did.
Nora McInerny: Had you been to therapy before this?
Drew Magary: No, I had not
Nora McInerny: So what convinces you that therapy is going to be something that could be helpful?
Drew Magary: It was because nothing else had worked. That's what it was. The timeline is a bit fudged in the book, so I did not go to therapy until the pandemic began. And between the time I got hurt and the pandemic, like, I kept thinking that certain things would work, like going on meds would work – and meds alone, even though I had been prescribed meds aren't therapy. I thought all the things I did to get my hearing back, including hearing aids and cochlear implant surgery, I thought those would make me better. I just thought there were a lot of physiological solutions I could get to that would put my brain right back where it was again, so I wouldn't have to worry about it anymore. And that was always, always wrong. And then during the pandemic, my wife bought a table. Like, a new dining room table. It was something that we had to go get from the person who made it. And so we had to rent a U-Haul. So we go to this U-Haul rental place, and it's supposed to be ready for us, but I have to go into the office. Well, I go into the office, I'm freaked out because it's very early in the pandemic. I don't want to go inside anywhere, because I haven't been inside anywhere. Not even like a fucking grocery store. And people aren't wearing their masks and stuff like that. And like, I'm freaking out, and like, I get back to the car and I just lose it. I just lose my shit. I start yelling. I get mad at my wife for like, I don't even know, like one of those things where like, you're mad, but like, you don't even know why you're mad.
Nora McInerny: My favorite kind of marital dispute, frankly. [laughs]
Drew Magary: Right. And my wife was like, “This can't keep going like this. This isn't working. You have to do something about this because I’m not living like this.” And that's when I was like. OK, if I've gotten so far gone that my wife is telling me, you know, that I am intolerable – and I don't mean that in the sort of affectionate or fun way, but I mean, like, truly intolerable – then I have to do something about it. You know, I've been ignoring this therapy. Why the fuck not try it? And before that, I had tried to get therapy, but I was very specific. You know? I wanted one that my insurance would cover. And of course, no fucking place around here takes insurance. And I want one that treated my specific injury, and well, not everybody has a hemorrhage at 42 that leaves them half deaf in an instant. And when I decide really to get therapy in that moment after the incident, I said, “You know what? No, I'm not going to worry about insurance. This is too important to nickel and dime. I'm not going to worry about having the right, you know, doctor. I'm just going to go find someone who can help me in the more general sense.” And so I Googled it and I found someone nearby who was available. And that was it. And it worked. And my only regret is that I didn't do it sooner. My wife, amazingly, has been much more sanguine about it. She said, you know, “It was a process for you to get to that point.” And I still feel as if I burdened her and my friends and my family with so much time of, you know, me being not right in the head. I feel like I could have fixed it so much sooner. But, you know, perhaps she was right. Perhaps this is the only way it could go.
Nora McInerny: When you say not right in the head, what was their experience of you in those years after the accident, when you were just trying to move forward from it, or take a medication or, you know, meditate for five minutes a day or do whatever sort of task you thought would help this really big thing.
Drew Magary: I wasn't predictable. I made everything about what had happened to me. If something bothered me, I would pull my wife aside for like a talk, like, “Can we have a talk talk,” like even though it was something stupid, like, I didn't like how my daughter was loading the dishwasher or something like that. It wasn't necessarily the tone that I took, even though I had problems with anger, but it was just the relentlessness of it. It was just never-ending. Just, “I need, I need, need, I want, I want.” And not being able to let things go when you really need to learn how to let things go, even if they're, even if they're bothering you, because you're not going be able to just keep doing the other things you want to do if you're stuck on these snags over and over and over again. So that's what it was like for them. I'm still a 45-year-old dad. They still have to deal with my bullshit, you know, now, but now it's become much more sort of generalized dad crap.
Nora McInerny: [laughs] I mean, I imagine it's really hard, you know, for your wife or your friends, for you even to understand, like, what's the injury and then what is your sort of reaction to it.
Drew Magary: That was the problem was that I didn't have a good way of communicating what happened to me. It's hard to make anybody feel exactly what you're feeling when they can't. You know? You can't magically make another person half deaf or rob them of their sense of smell permanently so that they have empathy. They have to work hard to find that empathy. And you also have to work hard to understand that it’s not going to be possible for them to have the closest possible empathy for your plight that they can possibly have. It's not going to happen unless, you know, unless you smash them in the head with a baseball bat. And I was not going to do that to my family.
Nora McInerny: [laughs] You're like, “Now, now you all get it, OK?”
Drew Magary: Yeah, that would have been, that would have been problematic.
Nora McInerny: Yeah. There's the initial trauma, which is the physical thing that happened to you. There's the emotional aftermath and then all the additional physical losses you suffer. And then, and this is uniquely American, and we have many listeners from around the world, there's the insurance of it all. There is just … [Drew: Right, the cost!] There's the cost, there's the cost. And I would love to hear you go off, not only about the cost of this stuff, but also how you, a person with a brain injury, had to sort of navigate this labyrinthine, “Oh, you don't have the right code, oh, actually, this part is covered, this isn’t …” It all just feels, having been through this on the caregiver side for my husband, like a freaking shell game. You know, the first thing he said to me when he was admitted into the hospital for a brain tumor was, “How will we pay for this?”
Drew Magary: Yeah! That was where I thought about when my son was in the NICU for a month, you know, when he was first born. You know, it's, it's very hideous. It's, it's a gross burden to put on people to, you know, while they're at their worst moment in life, also have them worry about money and financial ruin. You know, I was very fortunate in that insurance paid for my son’s NICU stay, it paid for my brain surgery, and it paid for my cochlear implant surgery when, like, the FDA approved my specific implant only two weeks before I got the surgery. So the FDA bailed my ass out with the clock running down. But I still think about what would have happened to me had they not approved my implant surgery, because I wouldn't have gotten it, because it was $100,000, right? I don't know what my mental state would be like right now. And I think about many, many, many, many people who were denied by insurance, if not for partial deafness, the way I had, then for other things, including fucking cancer, like a lot of different things. And so, you know, it was weird of me back at the time to be so frustrated that my family couldn't summon enough secondhand empathy or as much as I thought that they should have had. I had some sort of odd standard that I cannot define to you right now, because I was not thinking clearly. But I think about people who are in my state of mind and weren't able to get out of it, because they did not have the coverage that I had or the resources that I had to get out of it, you know? What if I had never gotten therapy? You know? Because I had money to pay for the therapy out of pocket. What if I hadn't done that? Where would I be right now? And what about other people who, you know, I've had really chronic back pain in the past. What if I hadn’t had insurance to get surgery? How many people out there right now are in just astonishing amounts of chronic pain that they can't do anything about that makes them, you know, morose and even suicidal, like, you know, what about them? It's all around you and it makes you think, you know, it's not fun to think about people going through all that, but it does happen.
Nora McInerny: You mentioned empathy. I think it's easy to forget, when we're going through our own lives, which are immensely frustrating with or without a tragedy or a brain injury, to remember that every single person is carrying their own deep hurt or frustration or things that we have no idea about, and that access to the things that help people get better is still really, really, really bad. Like it is still … you were a 40-something-year-old man before you, like, ever sought out any kind of mental health care, which is not unusual, not unusual, you know? Could you have probably benefited from it even before a brain injury? I don't know.
Drew Magary: Yeah! I think, I think I could have. Absolutely! It's fitness, right? There’s physical fitness, and there’s mental fitness. But it's true, it exists. And I think that the stigma is wearing off, you know? Like, this isn't the 1950s. There are still people being terrified of saying what's really bothering them. But you know, that's easing off a bit, and it really has been quite astounding to discover how much better I feel, when I admit that there was, there was a problem with myself, you know? That's a good thing, because it kind of sucks to admit you have a problem. Because I had a problem with alcohol too. And it took me a long time after I quit drinking to say, “Yeah, I think I was an alcoholic. Like, I think that’s a fair term for it.”
Nora McInerny: Did you quit drinking after the brain injury?
Drew Magary: No, no, no. I stopped drinking after the brain injury. And I still don't know whether or not alcohol played a role in my injury, although I suspect it did. And I don't mean drinking that night. I mean a lifetime of drinking. Like, I drank a lot. I remember I told my wife, “You know, back in the day, I used to, like, take swigs strike straight from the vodka bottle or the whiskey bottle when you weren't looking.” She's like, “Really?” I don’t think I was all that smooth about it. Like, I thought she kind of knew, but she didn't. And so it made me realize how frankly easy it was to sort of hide how much I enjoyed heavy drinking, and that I did do as much drinking as I did. But, you know, I didn't … I was worried about labeling myself or that I didn't, I didn't deserve the label. That was the weird one, where it's like, “Was I alcoholic enough to be an alcoholic?” I thought about it that way too.
Nora McInerny: There's more than one way to be an alcoholic and you can, you can still be a successful writer with a drinking problem, as I'm sure history has shown us. [laughs]
Drew Magary: Yeah, yeah. I was a very, I was a very functional alcoholic. Like, I always was like, OK, I never drank in the morning. I was arrested for DUI in 2009. I never drank and drove after that again. So that gave me the idea that, “OK, I have control over this thing. I know when to not drink.” But what I did drink, I drank a shitload. You know, any time I drank, it was cheat day. You know? After the first beer went down, I could, I could have all I liked after that.
Nora McInerny: I know if you have a brain injury, you're advised to not drink, right? You're advised to not ingest a chemical that kills brain cells and …
Drew Magary: You would be surprised. No. I had one doctor that my wife and my mother hated, who said, “Never drink again.” I had a neuropsych eval, and out of that they said, “Don't drink for a year.” And then I had another doctor who said, “You can drink, but just, you know, moderate.” And I knew I couldn’t moderate. And I didn't want to moderate either, so I was like, “No, you know, I won’t, I won't drink at all.” Because I think that drinking is so normalized, and not just like now, not just in 2022 America. We're talking about something that's been around for thousands of years, just has existed alongside the human race pretty much throughout its entire run. I think even doctors who themselves drink are loath to cut you off entirely because they know you're probably going to drink anyway.
Nora McInerny: It is a part of our social fabric, too. And if you work in media, or if you work, it doesn't matter what you work in, what do people do after work, especially when you're young?
Drew Magary: Yeah. And I worked in media, so we definitely drank after work.
Nora McInerny: Then it becomes part of, like, the Drew show, right? Like, “Oh, we're going to go out and Drew's going to be nuts,” or like, “Nora's going to be nuts. Don’t worry.”
Drew Magary: That was my intent the night I got hurt. Because it was an award show, we were gonna have an afterparty, and I was like, “I'm fucking cutting loose. Drew's fucking … Drew’s out on the town baby.” I was very excited to be absolutely shitfaced around everybody. Yeah.
Nora McInerny: Did you do, like, a sobriety program or anything, or did you just stop drinking? And was that a part of your therapy, too?
Drew Magary: No, it was not part of my therapy. I just stopped and I didn't do it again, and I said to myself, “Well, look, if I can't get a handle on this and I start drinking after this, then I should go to AA,” which I did do once after I was arrested by mandate, and I said to someone in the meeting that if I get arrested again, I will come back here for good, cause I know I don't have control of it. I was wrong, because I should have gone back. I didn't. And perhaps, you know, people who are listening now are perhaps screaming at me to go back now. But I am at a point where I really, truly don't have any interest in drinking, and I just don't want to do it. And I don't care. So I don't, like, I don't get the shakes when I walk by a fucking liquor store or anything like that. And we keep booze in the house. I never touch it. I don't care. It's the one time where I have allowed my self-confidence in my track record to say, “OK, I'm never going to do this again.” I thought at one point that I might bust it out for special occasions, like, I might have a shot of whiskey if like a friend dies or something like that, you know? Treat myself, you know, or have a bottle of champagne, you know, when my wife and I have our 20th anniversary this year, which is this year. But all of that has faded, too.
Nora McInerny: So Drew you are, like, I have always loved your writing. I don't even like sports. I hate sports. But I was like, “Oh yeah, I’ll read …”
Drew Magary: Thank you about the writing part, not thank you for hating sports.
Nora McInerny: I would read Deadspin, and it's like, “Oh, this is very funny. You're very, very funny.” You are better, you seem like you're thriving. [Drew: So far, so good, man] So far, so good. This book does not give you the answer to the medical mystery that is what happened to Drew's brain. But what did it give you?
Drew Magary: I think gave me a lot of closure, because when I interviewed my friends and family and coworkers for the book, they told me things about what had happened and what happened to them and how they felt that I did not know and had not known until I asked them. Because for a long time, I either didn't want to ask them, because I didn't want to intrude on them with my bullshit, or I, you know, I was asking them mostly like, mostly stuff directly about me, presently, you know? Because I was selfish. And by sort of sitting back and talking to them on the phone as a journalist, when I, when I interviewed them, I said, “Listen, when you answer my questions, try to pretend like you're not talking to me. Pretend you're talking to a journalist.” And that's like, you know, it's obviously not easy to do because here I am. “But, you know, try to talk to me like you were talking to, you know, an investigator about it.” And from that, they gave me a lot of, you know, they gave me a lot of illumination that I hadn’t had previously. And so it filled out the entire story and, in that sense, ended it for me.
Nora McInerny: When you're at the center of what happened, which you are, it happened to you, it's so easy to get wrapped up in your part of the story. But this is really something that happened to a lot of people.
Drew Magary: Yeah, I was asleep for all of it! [Nora: Yeah!] So, you know, like, they're the ones who had to deal with most of the bullshit. I got to be passed out. It was great.
You can find Drew Magary’s book, The Night The Lights Went Out: A Memoir of Life After Brain Damage, wherever you find books. We’ll link that in the show notes. You can find his writing -- including The Haters Guide to the Williams Sonoma Catalog, which will make you laugh out loud -- at Defector.com. We’ll link that, too.