September 2, 2025 • 38 mins
At 20 years old, Amanda Kloehr was a quirky, irreverent Air Force airman trying to find her way in the world. But everything changed in an instant when her car collided with the back of an 18-wheeler. She was nearly decapitated, lost her right eye, suffered major facial trauma, and spent months in the hospital enduring over 20 surgeries. Against all odds, Amanda lived—and began a long and often painful journey of physical healing, emotional reckoning, and radical self-reinvention.
In this unforgettable episode of Alive Again, Amanda recounts the horror and absurdity of her accident, the quiet trauma of public stares and whispered judgments, and the complex dance of identity that comes with living in a body permanently marked by survival. With humor, vulnerability, and unflinching honesty, she shares how she went from post-crash denial to public speaker, from hiding behind long red bangs to owning her story on national television.
Now a mother, wife, writer, and advocate, Amanda reflects on what it means to live in a society that defines people by their scars—and what it means to rewrite that narrative. Her journey isn’t a tragedy. It’s a declaration: "I am the hero of my own story. I’m proud of the woman I fought to become."
Story Producer: Kate Sweeney
“In the shadow of a wreckage, where silence lay thick,
I danced with the darkness, my heart beating quick.
One eye now a memory, a glimpse of the past,
Through the veil of my trials, I learned hope could last.
With each faltering step, on the path I would tread,
Change bubbled in me like laughter,
While the outside reflected all the places I bled.
Life carved its lessons, etched deep in my soul,
Through pain and resilience, I learned to feel whole.
From the ashes of anguish, a phoenix would rise,
With wings made of moxie, I took to the skies.
I cradled new life, a new generation born,
An ode to strength and a blood oath sworn.
In love, I found solace, our connection, a dream,
Yet storms brewed within me, found safety as a team.
Through heartache and healing, I learned to embrace,
The beauty of journey, the joy in each space.
Two degrees on my wall, symbols of fight,
In the tapestry woven, I found my own light.
To love myself fiercely, to cherish each scar,
Is to know every struggle has brought me this far.
With grit and determination, my sparkle continues to amplify,
A testament to living, to truly defy.
So here's to the battles, the laughter, the tears,
To the moments of triumph that silence our fears.
In the journey of being, of learning to fly,
living out loud is my battle cry.”
- Amanda Kloehr
* If you have a transformative near-death experience to share, we’d love to hear your story. Please email us at aliveagainproject@gmail.com
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:09):
You're listening to Alive Again, a production of Psychopia Pictures
and iHeart Podcasts.
Speaker 2 (00:15):
My name is Amanda Claire. When I was twenty years old,
I had a really bad car crash that almost killed me.
It started to feel like a sob story. I no
longer wanted to tell a story of tragedy that I
(00:37):
was the victim, not the hero, and I am the
hero of my own story.
Speaker 1 (00:46):
Welcome to Alive Again, a podcast that showcases miraculous accounts
of human fragility and resilience from people whose lives were
forever altered after having almost died. These are first hand
accounts near death experiences and more broadly, brushes with death.
Our mission is simple, find, explore, and share these stories
(01:07):
to remind us all of our shared human condition. Please
keep in mind these stories are true and maybe triggering
for some listener, and discretion is advised.
Speaker 2 (01:23):
I was a twenty year old girl, very much not
sure where I was going with life on active duty
at the time in the Air Force Station at McGuire
Air Force Base. The military was not my favorite place
to be. I have a long family history of people
(01:44):
who were in the military, my dad, my mom, my stepmom, grandfather,
so many people, such a strong family lineage of military history,
and so I tried to join that lineage. First of all,
I am not the kind of person who has an
(02:06):
intense workout routine now or then, so I was not ready.
And then once I got in drill, sergeants actually screaming
at me, Amanda, what are you marching to my own drum,
of course. And then I finally got to my first
(02:31):
duty station, which is Maguire. I was a physical therapy assistant,
which is probably not something most people think of when
they think of the military. And I remember our secretary
being out and being asked to supervise the front desk
while she was away, and I thought it would be
(02:56):
funny to completely cover her desk and post it notes.
That was not received as funny. I think a lot
of it was immaturity. A lot of it was I'm
a little bit quirky. I would think some of it
is that inability to just immediately yes sir, no sir, yes, ma'am, no, ma'am.
(03:19):
All of those things were constant reminders that it just
was not the right fit for me. So I was
twenty years old and I went to go visit friends
(03:40):
that were stationed in the Navy, and I was going
from MacGuire R Force Base in New Jersey to Newport News, Virginia,
and you know, I was gonna go party with my friends.
I was gonna go see you know, old crushes and
be flirty and fun and have a good weekend. I
(04:05):
was in a little accurate in Tigra. It's a hot
day and the air conditioning doesn't work in the car,
so I'm playing that awful game of how do I
roll down the windows enough that I do not melt
and enough that my hair doesn't turn into a complete
rat's nest by the time I arrive, Because of course
(04:28):
you gotta be cute. But it's a summer day. It's
June twentieth, which happens to be my mother's birthday. She
wanted me to come home for her birthday, and I
lied to her and told her that I couldn't because
(04:51):
our squadron got in trouble for something and that our
commander said we had to do bass beautification. That wasn't true.
So she had no idea where I was or what
I was doing. So I'm in the car relatively close
to my destination. I was about within an hour. I'm
(05:15):
literally hot and trying to be at the sexy hot,
not sure that I'm succeeding at all. There's a lot
of traffic, two lanes that way, two lanes the other way,
grassy median in the middle, and I was in the
accurate tiger behind a van. The van had a mother
father backseat of kids. I'm intermittently checking in with the
(05:38):
people and going to visit. I'm trying to not have
to stop for a bathroom break. I am very focused
in that moment, and I just want to get there.
I was doing the things that you're supposed to be doing, right,
seatbelt on, keeping with the speed of traffic, you know,
(05:59):
driving on the right, pass on the left, and I
went to pass the van and there was an eighteen
wheeler with a forklift on the back of it, and
the left hand lane there was a rest stop on
the other side. He was trying to get over to
the other side where that grassy median was to get
to that rest stop. If he had gone up another
(06:20):
two hundred feet or so, there was a turning lane,
but it wasn't labeled or marked. That was not the
first time an accident had happened there when I came
out from behind that van, and I was probably dueing
seventy seventy five miles an hour, as you do on
the highway, and he didn't realize that I was coming.
(06:41):
I didn't realize he was stopped. It was at dusk,
and that forklift impeded the brake light. He saw me
coming at the last second and let off the brake,
and I hit the back of the tractor trailer, and
I pushed the eighteen wheeler or with the forklift, about
(07:02):
six feet with my car. It's sort of like flashes
of pictures, like the old school slide shows where you
get picture blank, picture blank, picture blank. I remember being cute,
(07:30):
I remember coming out from behind the van. I remember
all of those things, but I don't remember the moment
I hit the truck. The first patrol officer on the
scene of the accident got out of his car. They
(07:51):
said he'd never seen an accident like mine where the
person in the car survived. Things were really bad. It
was more than halfway to his trunk to pull the
body bag when he heard me screaming at the top
of my lungs, get me the fuck out of this car.
Is what I was saying at the top of my lungs.
I was in shock, and he came to my window
(08:18):
and he said, we're gonna get your help. He told
me that the only three things that he could do
was to try to calm me down, call for an airback,
and pray, and that's what he did. All the additional
(08:41):
crew members. I don't even know how many fire trucks
and ambulances showed up, but it was a lot. And
they pulled my car out from the back end of
the tractor trailer, used the jaws of life to cut
my roof off because I was trapped, and after they
got the roof off, they went to extricate me from
the vehicle and the engine bolt had come through the
(09:04):
floorboard and snapped my foot almost completely off. It's sort
of a catch twenty two because with the forklift on
the bed of the truck, it saved my life. Without it,
I would have most certainly been to capitated. But because
of it, that's what crushed my face and took my eye.
(09:27):
They got me in the back of the ambulance and
tried to stabilize me until the helicopter arrived and I
ripped out a fully inflated catheter twice, an IV three times,
and I kicked one of the EMTs in the face.
One of the other amts was trying to hold my
arms down because I kept sticking in my hand inside
(09:48):
of my cheek because it had just been completely ripped open,
and I kept saying, somebody take the gum out of
my mouth because my jaw had been fractured in four places,
and I thought I lost my contact, and I had
my sunglasses on because a piece of glass had cut
my eye in half and I couldn't see, So I
(10:12):
was pretty frantic. It's your body's way of protecting itself, right,
So I, you know, protect myself now by my brain
not allowing itself to remember all of the horrific details.
And I protected myself then by screaming and ripping things
out of my body and flailing and kicking at that
(10:34):
fight in the fight or flight, right, So I was
just in that moment, fighting for my life. Really. They
sedated me before they put me in the helicopter and
then they flew me to Norfolk General Hospital where they
(10:55):
took me to the burn and Trauma unit and they
put me in a medically induced to come up. My
injuries were the loss of my right eye, my job
being broken in four places, scarring and cuts all up
and down. My right arm. I still have a piece
of car in my arm actually yeah. And my foot.
(11:19):
I almost lost my foot with that engine bolt that
came through the floorboard. So it was primarily my face,
my eye, my arm, and my foot. I was in
the hospital for two months. Two months in the hospital,
I will tell you, feels like, especially at twenty, feels
like an eternity. And my family came to visit me,
(11:43):
and I remember them all standing around my bed looking
at me like they had come to say their final goodbyes,
Like they just looked so scared and so like devastated.
Right as I was getting ready to be discharged from
(12:03):
the hospital, might my mom and my stepdad and my
siblings came and they took me. They wanted to take
me out because the hospital had given permission finally for
me to be able to go somewhere, and they decided
to take me to an aquarium. It was the first
time I realized some of what I was going to
(12:23):
have to deal with had very little to do with
the physical. I was in a wheelchair at the time.
I had one lady almost trip over around feet trying
to turn around to stare at me, and my mom
shouted at her. I was ready to get in her
face because she was staring at me so rudely, which
(12:46):
of course just drew more attention to us and totally
embarrassed me. I also had another couple stand probably within
ten feet of me, and they were whispering, but of
course people think they whispered quieter than they do. And
she said, what happened to her? Do you think she
(13:07):
was born like that? And he said, no, people aren't
born that fucked up. And I knew at that point
that it was going to be It's going to be
a journey, I guess. I remember talking to the plastic
(13:35):
surgeon and him saying, what are your goals? What do
you want to see happen here? And me saying, I
just want to be back to normal by my twenty
first birthday. I really thought that was possible at the time.
Nobody corrected me. For a long time. It was bc
(13:58):
AD before the crash, after a disaster. My life just
felt so segmented by this. Who I was and who
I was becoming were two completely different things. How I
looked at life, how I felt, how I lived, who
(14:20):
I was. I don't remember them asking me, do you
want to see a therapist? Do you want to join
a support group? And me being like no, why why
would I want to do that? I'm fine, I'm fine.
You know when you say something enough times and it
(14:43):
starts to like sound weird. I'm fine, I'm fine, I'm fine,
I'm fine. But I didn't know any better. I was
a twenty year old kid. When I think about it now,
I'm like, how did nobody say, no, you're going to therapy.
You're going to therapy? But nobody did, and I didn't
(15:05):
know that I needed it. I thought I was fine,
that I was going to be back to normal by
my twenty first birthday, and it would just be a
blip on the map. What would happen was after I
(15:26):
got out of the hospital, I would go in see
the doctor, we'd do pre opt testing, then we'd go
have the operation, and then i'd come out, we'd do
post op testing. Then I'd have about two weeks or
so to recover, and then we'd go for pre opt testing.
(15:47):
I've had over twenty surgeries. I had surgeries until I
couldn't anymore when the military basically said these are no
longer medically necessary. It is cosmetic at this point, and
we're not going to continue to pay. So the accident
happened in two thousand and eight. I got the news
that I was separated from the military the end of
(16:10):
September two thousand and nine, and that was it. My
time in service was finished. And then I went, now
what do I do? I didn't know, like, where do
I go now? And I found out that the townhouse
(16:33):
I bought was less than five miles from a college
that had a pretty comprehensive physical therapy program, and I thought, okay,
I will go to school there. When I was active
(16:55):
duty Air Force, I was a physical therapy assistant, so
it seemed like I'm easy and natural transition for me.
I was like, okay, well, I'll just do that. And
the admissions counselor said, if you want to be a
physical therapy assistant, then you are going to have to
do you like anatomy and physiology and stuff. Again, I
(17:16):
was like, I didn't like anatomy and physicality the first storm,
I'm not doing it again. What should have been a
good clue that I probably shouldn't be a physical therapy assistant.
And I was ready to leave, and the admissions counselor said,
but what do you like? And I said, I like
to write and I like to talk, but there's not
(17:39):
a job for that. And she said, have you heard
of the communications program? So I did the communications program
and I ended up actually really liking it. I found
out that it was a great fit for me in
a way that I just hadn't anticipated. I felt confident,
I just felt good about it. So I have a
(18:01):
huge blended family, six hunga brothers and sisters, and one
of them pulled their driver's education teacher about what happened
with my accident, and he said, would she come and
tell our class her story to impact upon our students
how important it is to be a safe driver. I've
(18:23):
always loved an audience. If I can help other people
be safe, like sure, And so I did an okay job.
And so the next year he said, can you come back?
And I just started going back. Every year. I would
start off by introducing myself, going through the process of
(18:45):
having the accident, with a little bit of levity sprinkled
throughout so that it was easier for everyone to listen to.
My overall message was about distracted driving, so that was
really the crux. And at my college they heard about
it and they said, would you talk about it here?
(19:06):
And it started to occur to me maybe I could
be a professional public speaker. I like this, I'm kind
of okay at it. So I worked with the director
of communications at the school because I was like the
president of the communications club, and she helps me come
up with press releases and like, hey, let's give it
(19:27):
a go. And so I went to speak for the school.
But when I did, our local news station came and
did coverage at my story and aired on two different
time slots. And probably a month after that, I got
contacted by someone in DC asking if I would come
(19:48):
and speak there an organization called NOISE, the National Organizations
for Youth Safety, And I said what do you charge?
And I said, I, uh, what, what do I want?
And it just blew up. I remember when I got
covered by the local news station, feeling like whoa, I'm
(20:12):
on WHTM, like we'll look at me now. It just
took off and I started talking, you know, all of
the country. By the end of it, I'd been on
CNN a few times. I was on I was in
teen Vogue, I was on The Today Show with Kathy
(20:36):
Lee and Hoda. I was on Consumer Reports Al Jazer News.
Not in my wildest imagination when I've ever guessed that
I would ever get that kind of traction. So I
did that for a long time. I would say about
ten years. I think I started to finally have some
(20:58):
sense of Amanda. Now it's that, you know, bc a
d who is a d Amanda and can she have
a life after everything that she thought she was going
to do and be was ripped away. I think I
still thought, I'm going to get the rest of my
(21:22):
face fixed and it's going to be perfect, and it's
just a matter of time until I'm back to normal.
One of the things that I found during the pandemic
was that I had been brick by brick building a
(21:45):
trauma wall, and this wall sort of protected me, you know,
I just with each thing that happened, I just added
another layer of bricks. And then the pandemic came and
it kind of it's like the kool Aid man came
crashing through my trouble wall and it just oh no,
(22:10):
not oh yeah, I was oh no, It's just all
sort of came grumbling down right like I was to fuck,
And I think that was when I realized, like, I
need therapy. My husband and I met when we were
(22:31):
working together in that health insurance environment, and my husband
has muscular dystrophe. And when we first met, he introduced
himself and he said, I'm really excited to be working
with somebody who is like me. And I thought, I
don't know what you mean by that, naturally brunette, and
(22:56):
he kind of said, you know somebody else with a disability,
and I'm like, I don't have a disability. I'm not disabled.
I didn't know. I genuinely just thought like I had
this accident and now some things are hard. And he
really taught me what disability was and that it wasn't
(23:16):
something that I should be ashamed of, and what an
acquired disability is versus something that you were born with,
and that I shouldn't be embarrassed or ashamed of that,
and then it's not a bad thing. I think it's
something that we don't really talk about as a society.
(23:39):
But there's a stigma behind having a disability. You kind
of like, ooh, unless we have some experience with it
in our childhood. We're kind of taught and conditioned to
feel better than those who have disabilities. I would say
most people who have acquired probably don't define themselves that way.
(24:03):
It's not something that people normally take on as a
badge of honor. It changed for me because he is
the most patient, understanding person. I remember Daniel and I
went to the Cherry Blossom Festival in DC and we
(24:24):
were walking around. I didn't have my motorized scooter yet,
but I was starting to hurt. And we went into
the Museum of Modern Art and there's couches on the
second floor and I sat down because I was struggling
to walk at that point, and I just sobbed, like
(24:45):
in the middle of the Museum of modernut because I
was embarrassed, because I felt shame, because I felt frustrated,
because I felt broken, because I felt like somebody had
stripped me in my power, and I think those feelings
(25:09):
never go away. Still frustrating. For a long time, I
wore my hair like completely down the right side of
my face, like I almost look like half a cousin it,
just like it's just the whole right side of my
face was covered with my hair. And then as as
(25:33):
the years went and the exception that it wasn't ever
gonna be what it was, the bangs got shorter and
shorter and shorter, and I still wear them over my
right eye, both for myself and for others, because I
find that when I have my face uncovered, there's a
(25:59):
lot of questions, there's a lot of stairs, they're a
little uncomfortable. I'm a little uncomfortable, and so it's just
easier for me, for the most part to keep my
one right eye covered by what my friends refer to
as my Jessica Rabbit hair, because my hair is red.
(26:23):
But the process of going through that is something that
I would say I've grown from and I've healed from,
but that you never really get over. There are surgeries
that I could have to make me look better, but
(26:48):
I'm an average middle class American and I don't have
the money for that, like most of us, and so
there has to be some level of acceptance of just
where you're at. I do feel like a different person.
(27:10):
It's like a completely different version of Amanda. When I
was a public speaker, I can't tell you how many
times I had teenagers tell me I was their hero.
Or I would go and talk to an AARP group
and I'd have grandfathers come up and tell me how
(27:33):
much I reminded them of their children and their grandchildren,
and how much they appreciated what I had to say.
I mean, it was really It meant so much that
I was making a difference in people's lives. But I
started saying things in my speech pretty early on, like
(27:56):
this is what lucky looks like, and you don't want
to be like me? Why not? Like why wouldn't you
want to be like me?
Speaker 3 (28:07):
Why?
Speaker 2 (28:07):
Because I have some scars in my face and like
it hurts when it rains, Like, yeah, I don't want
you to have to suffer through those things. But being
like me is not terrible. I have a beautiful little
girl and an amazing husband and a home I can afford,
and now I'm getting my master's degree. Why wouldn't people
(28:32):
want to be like me? It started to feel like
a sob story. I no longer wanted to tell a
story of tragedy that I was the victim, not the hero,
And I am the hero of my own story. I
love my life. I love the woman that I've thought
(28:56):
to become. I never in a million years thought that
this is who I would be. But I'm fucking proud
of her, he said. I could swear saying, oh but
I am. I am proud of me. I'm proud of
(29:19):
who I've thought to become. Who would I have been
had this not happened to me? I don't know. It
doesn't really matter because it's not something that I'm ever
gonna find out. And I can't imagine that the other
(29:43):
version would have ever been as cool as this one,
which sounds cocky, but like it's really how I feel.
Speaker 1 (30:19):
Welcome back, This is Alive again, joining me for a
conversation about today's story or my other Alive against story
Producers Kate Sweeney, Nicholas Takowski, and Brent Day, and I'm
your host, Dan Bush.
Speaker 4 (30:31):
This is the story of a total badass. That's one
thing that drew me to Amanda really from sort of
the first moment. She was such fun to talk with.
Her story is not all fun at all, but she
(30:52):
kind of zagged on me. You know, you think it's
gonna go one way and then it goes another direction completely.
She lost her eye and then she ended up being
aer for like driver safety kids, and then realized she
was using herself as a cautionary tale, like don't be
like me.
Speaker 1 (31:07):
And she's like, this victim narrative had become such so
ingrained and right that that's who she had become with
this victim. Yeah, her whole life was just defined by
this accident and visit there's in this story. As with
one of our previous episodes where we talked to Rodney
White or listen to Rodney White's story, this episode also
has this theme or this you know, this conclusive moment
(31:29):
where the person who went through this trauma and this
horrible experience and almost died is I wouldn't say grateful
for having gone through that, because that's a stretch because
it's so horrific, but they feel empowered in a way
that maybe they would not have had they not gone
(31:50):
through it.
Speaker 4 (31:51):
I know, it's so amazing to hear her say that,
isn't it? And that's one of my favorite things Dan
about hearing her tell her story because she allowed for
the ambiguities and the complexities that go along with life,
because she she's happy to be the woman she is today.
She's proud of who she is and what she's done.
(32:12):
At the same time, she admits that life sucks a lot.
You know, it sucks when she's more tired than she
wants to be. It sucks when she's walking around a
museum in DC and just gets too tired and is
absolutely exhausted, and more frequently when people you know don't
(32:32):
make way for her. Mates they say, she's wheeling through
a museum in her wheelchair and you know, people walk
right in front of her, so she can't see an exhibit,
so kind of feeling othered and feeling like made to
be invisible. And she talks about the fact that she's
proud of who she is. Sometimes she still has has
fantasies about getting facial reconstruction surgery, but at the same
(32:54):
time she loves her life. So I loved hearing that
she doesn't try to make her story and tidy one,
and that makes it, you know, that much more real
and that much more compelling.
Speaker 1 (33:05):
What I love about the story is that at the
end of everything she's gone through, she's just like, I
love who I am. I wouldn't change who I am,
I wouldn't go back. I'm a badass. It's sort of
think and that's the sort of the nature of what
she's saying.
Speaker 4 (33:17):
Yeah, so you know, as I said, yeah, like she was.
I love that she refused to settle for the simplest
version of the truth. And when you hear her thinking
through what's happening as she's telling her story, she this
wasn't canned at all. She was thinking these things through
in real time and making realizations as she was talking
and sharing those with us, allowing herself to be that vulnerable.
(33:41):
And that's what you're getting to hear.
Speaker 5 (33:43):
How old was she when this happened twenty and how
long has she been living with this? Then? How old
is she now or when she met her husband?
Speaker 4 (33:52):
I want to say that she's maybe like thirty eight
or thirty nine years old now, I want to say
two thousand and eight.
Speaker 6 (34:00):
So it's like it's like half her life.
Speaker 4 (34:02):
Yes, which is I mean, you know she used to
go you know, she as you just heard, you know,
she was on the public speaking circuit, on a public
speaking circuit, telling this, telling this story as if there
was a before and an after, and that's it. But
part of it was, as you say, Nick, so many
years that have passed since even then, that her life
(34:23):
has changed again and changed again, So That's another reason
this didn't fit her because she's not She's not that victim,
and she doesn't feel like she's that victim.
Speaker 6 (34:31):
Now she's bigger. That she's bigger than one moment in
her life. Absolutely, you know that it changed a thing,
But you continue to have epiphanies and you continue to
have things that happen that that shift you. Yeah, chapters
in your life. There's not just two chapters exactly.
Speaker 5 (34:52):
Even if it's not a car accident. You know, I'm
not the same person I was before we had our
second child, before we had our first child, before I
got married, before I left college. You know, every life
event changes you.
Speaker 1 (35:03):
Something else that was striking about her story was that
how amazed when the paramedics and the fireman and the
rescue people showed up, How amazed that she was even alive.
They were like, he went to get the body bag.
Basically wow, because nobody's ever survived this type of accident, right,
a sudden head on. I think in a situation.
Speaker 5 (35:25):
She was in the military at the time that she
had the accident. Yeah what you said, Yeah, yeah, and
hated it. Huh. I can empathize with that.
Speaker 2 (35:36):
Square peg.
Speaker 4 (35:38):
But yeah, I mean, I just I this narrative is
so compelling to me. How this event Reallyina like sends
Amanda off first in one direction, the sense of finally
having found her calling. She was miserable in the military,
and like, oh, it's communications and I'm a public speaker
and I've finally found I'm discovering who I am. I'm
(35:59):
discovering who who you know? As she puts it, ad
Amanda is after almost dying or after disaster, as she
puts it, and then realizing, oh, wait a minute, you know,
like she's using herself and her disabled body as a
cautionary tale and like who wants to do that? And
discovering this world of disability advocacy, which I freaking love.
(36:21):
If you can't tell from my voice, I mean I
loved talking with Amanda. I could have talked with her
all day, just listened to Amanda tell Amanda stories.
Speaker 5 (36:29):
What a badass after disaster? That is great.
Speaker 4 (36:32):
Yeah, that's how she saw it before crash and after disaster,
and that's how she framed it for a long time
and then was like wait a minute.
Speaker 1 (36:43):
Next week on a live again. Scott McCoy, the beloved
singer songwriter behind bands like the Minus five and Young
Fresh Fellows, had spent his life living and breathing music
until a massive stroke in twenty seventeen shattered his ability
to speak, play, and understand the world around him.
Speaker 3 (37:00):
I've been there for twenty four hours. They finally got
the doctor to give me a MRI because he wouldn't
give me one because he said it's not a stroke,
said he's a drum.
Speaker 1 (37:10):
In this deeply human episode of Live Again, Scott opens
up about the long road of recovery, his first terrifying
moments in the er, and the odd beauty of watching
The Wizard of Oz while relearning language. With honesty, humor
and an artist insight, Scott explores what it means to
lose the thing that wants to find you.
Speaker 3 (37:28):
I think what it has done for me is it's
made me just more desperate to keep creating art.
Speaker 1 (37:39):
Our story producers are Dan Bush, Kate Sweeney, Brent die
Nicholas Dakowski, and Lauren Vogelbaum. Music by Ben Lovett, additional
music by Alexander Rodriguez. Our executive producers are Matthew Frederick
and Trevor Young. Special thanks to Alexander Williams for additional
production support. Our studio engineers are Rima El Kali and
(38:00):
EJames Griffin. Today's episode was edited by Mike w Anderson,
mixing by Ben Lovett and Alexander Rodriguez. I'm your host
Dan Bush. Special thanks to Amanda Clair for sharing her
incredible story. Amanda graduated with her master's degree in social
work in May of twenty twenty four. She's currently exploring
career opportunities and has worked as a professional public speaker
(38:20):
and advocate since two thousand and nine. If you'd like
to connect with Amanda, click the link in our show notes.
Alive Again is a production of I Art Radio and
Psychopia Pictures. If you have a transformative near death experience
to share, we'd love to hear your story. Please email
us at a Live Again project at gmail dot com.
That's a l I V e A g A I
(38:43):
N P R O j E c T at gmail
dot com.
You're listening to Alive Again, a production of Psychopia Pictures
and iHeart Podcasts.
Speaker 2 (00:15):
My name is Amanda Claire. When I was twenty years old,
I had a really bad car crash that almost killed me.
It started to feel like a sob story. I no
longer wanted to tell a story of tragedy that I
(00:37):
was the victim, not the hero, and I am the
hero of my own story.
Speaker 1 (00:46):
Welcome to Alive Again, a podcast that showcases miraculous accounts
of human fragility and resilience from people whose lives were
forever altered after having almost died. These are first hand
accounts near death experiences and more broadly, brushes with death.
Our mission is simple, find, explore, and share these stories
(01:07):
to remind us all of our shared human condition. Please
keep in mind these stories are true and maybe triggering
for some listener, and discretion is advised.
Speaker 2 (01:23):
I was a twenty year old girl, very much not
sure where I was going with life on active duty
at the time in the Air Force Station at McGuire
Air Force Base. The military was not my favorite place
to be. I have a long family history of people
(01:44):
who were in the military, my dad, my mom, my stepmom, grandfather,
so many people, such a strong family lineage of military history,
and so I tried to join that lineage. First of all,
I am not the kind of person who has an
(02:06):
intense workout routine now or then, so I was not ready.
And then once I got in drill, sergeants actually screaming
at me, Amanda, what are you marching to my own drum,
of course. And then I finally got to my first
(02:31):
duty station, which is Maguire. I was a physical therapy assistant,
which is probably not something most people think of when
they think of the military. And I remember our secretary
being out and being asked to supervise the front desk
while she was away, and I thought it would be
(02:56):
funny to completely cover her desk and post it notes.
That was not received as funny. I think a lot
of it was immaturity. A lot of it was I'm
a little bit quirky. I would think some of it
is that inability to just immediately yes sir, no sir, yes, ma'am, no, ma'am.
(03:19):
All of those things were constant reminders that it just
was not the right fit for me. So I was
twenty years old and I went to go visit friends
(03:40):
that were stationed in the Navy, and I was going
from MacGuire R Force Base in New Jersey to Newport News, Virginia,
and you know, I was gonna go party with my friends.
I was gonna go see you know, old crushes and
be flirty and fun and have a good weekend. I
(04:05):
was in a little accurate in Tigra. It's a hot
day and the air conditioning doesn't work in the car,
so I'm playing that awful game of how do I
roll down the windows enough that I do not melt
and enough that my hair doesn't turn into a complete
rat's nest by the time I arrive, Because of course
(04:28):
you gotta be cute. But it's a summer day. It's
June twentieth, which happens to be my mother's birthday. She
wanted me to come home for her birthday, and I
lied to her and told her that I couldn't because
(04:51):
our squadron got in trouble for something and that our
commander said we had to do bass beautification. That wasn't true.
So she had no idea where I was or what
I was doing. So I'm in the car relatively close
to my destination. I was about within an hour. I'm
(05:15):
literally hot and trying to be at the sexy hot,
not sure that I'm succeeding at all. There's a lot
of traffic, two lanes that way, two lanes the other way,
grassy median in the middle, and I was in the
accurate tiger behind a van. The van had a mother
father backseat of kids. I'm intermittently checking in with the
(05:38):
people and going to visit. I'm trying to not have
to stop for a bathroom break. I am very focused
in that moment, and I just want to get there.
I was doing the things that you're supposed to be doing, right,
seatbelt on, keeping with the speed of traffic, you know,
(05:59):
driving on the right, pass on the left, and I
went to pass the van and there was an eighteen
wheeler with a forklift on the back of it, and
the left hand lane there was a rest stop on
the other side. He was trying to get over to
the other side where that grassy median was to get
to that rest stop. If he had gone up another
(06:20):
two hundred feet or so, there was a turning lane,
but it wasn't labeled or marked. That was not the
first time an accident had happened there when I came
out from behind that van, and I was probably dueing
seventy seventy five miles an hour, as you do on
the highway, and he didn't realize that I was coming.
(06:41):
I didn't realize he was stopped. It was at dusk,
and that forklift impeded the brake light. He saw me
coming at the last second and let off the brake,
and I hit the back of the tractor trailer, and
I pushed the eighteen wheeler or with the forklift, about
(07:02):
six feet with my car. It's sort of like flashes
of pictures, like the old school slide shows where you
get picture blank, picture blank, picture blank. I remember being cute,
(07:30):
I remember coming out from behind the van. I remember
all of those things, but I don't remember the moment
I hit the truck. The first patrol officer on the
scene of the accident got out of his car. They
(07:51):
said he'd never seen an accident like mine where the
person in the car survived. Things were really bad. It
was more than halfway to his trunk to pull the
body bag when he heard me screaming at the top
of my lungs, get me the fuck out of this car.
Is what I was saying at the top of my lungs.
I was in shock, and he came to my window
(08:18):
and he said, we're gonna get your help. He told
me that the only three things that he could do
was to try to calm me down, call for an airback,
and pray, and that's what he did. All the additional
(08:41):
crew members. I don't even know how many fire trucks
and ambulances showed up, but it was a lot. And
they pulled my car out from the back end of
the tractor trailer, used the jaws of life to cut
my roof off because I was trapped, and after they
got the roof off, they went to extricate me from
the vehicle and the engine bolt had come through the
(09:04):
floorboard and snapped my foot almost completely off. It's sort
of a catch twenty two because with the forklift on
the bed of the truck, it saved my life. Without it,
I would have most certainly been to capitated. But because
of it, that's what crushed my face and took my eye.
(09:27):
They got me in the back of the ambulance and
tried to stabilize me until the helicopter arrived and I
ripped out a fully inflated catheter twice, an IV three times,
and I kicked one of the EMTs in the face.
One of the other amts was trying to hold my
arms down because I kept sticking in my hand inside
(09:48):
of my cheek because it had just been completely ripped open,
and I kept saying, somebody take the gum out of
my mouth because my jaw had been fractured in four places,
and I thought I lost my contact, and I had
my sunglasses on because a piece of glass had cut
my eye in half and I couldn't see, So I
(10:12):
was pretty frantic. It's your body's way of protecting itself, right,
So I, you know, protect myself now by my brain
not allowing itself to remember all of the horrific details.
And I protected myself then by screaming and ripping things
out of my body and flailing and kicking at that
(10:34):
fight in the fight or flight, right, So I was
just in that moment, fighting for my life. Really. They
sedated me before they put me in the helicopter and
then they flew me to Norfolk General Hospital where they
(10:55):
took me to the burn and Trauma unit and they
put me in a medically induced to come up. My
injuries were the loss of my right eye, my job
being broken in four places, scarring and cuts all up
and down. My right arm. I still have a piece
of car in my arm actually yeah. And my foot.
(11:19):
I almost lost my foot with that engine bolt that
came through the floorboard. So it was primarily my face,
my eye, my arm, and my foot. I was in
the hospital for two months. Two months in the hospital,
I will tell you, feels like, especially at twenty, feels
like an eternity. And my family came to visit me,
(11:43):
and I remember them all standing around my bed looking
at me like they had come to say their final goodbyes,
Like they just looked so scared and so like devastated.
Right as I was getting ready to be discharged from
(12:03):
the hospital, might my mom and my stepdad and my
siblings came and they took me. They wanted to take
me out because the hospital had given permission finally for
me to be able to go somewhere, and they decided
to take me to an aquarium. It was the first
time I realized some of what I was going to
(12:23):
have to deal with had very little to do with
the physical. I was in a wheelchair at the time.
I had one lady almost trip over around feet trying
to turn around to stare at me, and my mom
shouted at her. I was ready to get in her
face because she was staring at me so rudely, which
(12:46):
of course just drew more attention to us and totally
embarrassed me. I also had another couple stand probably within
ten feet of me, and they were whispering, but of
course people think they whispered quieter than they do. And
she said, what happened to her? Do you think she
(13:07):
was born like that? And he said, no, people aren't
born that fucked up. And I knew at that point
that it was going to be It's going to be
a journey, I guess. I remember talking to the plastic
(13:35):
surgeon and him saying, what are your goals? What do
you want to see happen here? And me saying, I
just want to be back to normal by my twenty
first birthday. I really thought that was possible at the time.
Nobody corrected me. For a long time. It was bc
(13:58):
AD before the crash, after a disaster. My life just
felt so segmented by this. Who I was and who
I was becoming were two completely different things. How I
looked at life, how I felt, how I lived, who
(14:20):
I was. I don't remember them asking me, do you
want to see a therapist? Do you want to join
a support group? And me being like no, why why
would I want to do that? I'm fine, I'm fine.
You know when you say something enough times and it
(14:43):
starts to like sound weird. I'm fine, I'm fine, I'm fine,
I'm fine. But I didn't know any better. I was
a twenty year old kid. When I think about it now,
I'm like, how did nobody say, no, you're going to therapy.
You're going to therapy? But nobody did, and I didn't
(15:05):
know that I needed it. I thought I was fine,
that I was going to be back to normal by
my twenty first birthday, and it would just be a
blip on the map. What would happen was after I
(15:26):
got out of the hospital, I would go in see
the doctor, we'd do pre opt testing, then we'd go
have the operation, and then i'd come out, we'd do
post op testing. Then I'd have about two weeks or
so to recover, and then we'd go for pre opt testing.
(15:47):
I've had over twenty surgeries. I had surgeries until I
couldn't anymore when the military basically said these are no
longer medically necessary. It is cosmetic at this point, and
we're not going to continue to pay. So the accident
happened in two thousand and eight. I got the news
that I was separated from the military the end of
(16:10):
September two thousand and nine, and that was it. My
time in service was finished. And then I went, now
what do I do? I didn't know, like, where do
I go now? And I found out that the townhouse
(16:33):
I bought was less than five miles from a college
that had a pretty comprehensive physical therapy program, and I thought, okay,
I will go to school there. When I was active
(16:55):
duty Air Force, I was a physical therapy assistant, so
it seemed like I'm easy and natural transition for me.
I was like, okay, well, I'll just do that. And
the admissions counselor said, if you want to be a
physical therapy assistant, then you are going to have to
do you like anatomy and physiology and stuff. Again, I
(17:16):
was like, I didn't like anatomy and physicality the first storm,
I'm not doing it again. What should have been a
good clue that I probably shouldn't be a physical therapy assistant.
And I was ready to leave, and the admissions counselor said,
but what do you like? And I said, I like
to write and I like to talk, but there's not
(17:39):
a job for that. And she said, have you heard
of the communications program? So I did the communications program
and I ended up actually really liking it. I found
out that it was a great fit for me in
a way that I just hadn't anticipated. I felt confident,
I just felt good about it. So I have a
(18:01):
huge blended family, six hunga brothers and sisters, and one
of them pulled their driver's education teacher about what happened
with my accident, and he said, would she come and
tell our class her story to impact upon our students
how important it is to be a safe driver. I've
(18:23):
always loved an audience. If I can help other people
be safe, like sure, And so I did an okay job.
And so the next year he said, can you come back?
And I just started going back. Every year. I would
start off by introducing myself, going through the process of
(18:45):
having the accident, with a little bit of levity sprinkled
throughout so that it was easier for everyone to listen to.
My overall message was about distracted driving, so that was
really the crux. And at my college they heard about
it and they said, would you talk about it here?
(19:06):
And it started to occur to me maybe I could
be a professional public speaker. I like this, I'm kind
of okay at it. So I worked with the director
of communications at the school because I was like the
president of the communications club, and she helps me come
up with press releases and like, hey, let's give it
(19:27):
a go. And so I went to speak for the school.
But when I did, our local news station came and
did coverage at my story and aired on two different
time slots. And probably a month after that, I got
contacted by someone in DC asking if I would come
(19:48):
and speak there an organization called NOISE, the National Organizations
for Youth Safety, And I said what do you charge?
And I said, I, uh, what, what do I want?
And it just blew up. I remember when I got
covered by the local news station, feeling like whoa, I'm
(20:12):
on WHTM, like we'll look at me now. It just
took off and I started talking, you know, all of
the country. By the end of it, I'd been on
CNN a few times. I was on I was in
teen Vogue, I was on The Today Show with Kathy
(20:36):
Lee and Hoda. I was on Consumer Reports Al Jazer News.
Not in my wildest imagination when I've ever guessed that
I would ever get that kind of traction. So I
did that for a long time. I would say about
ten years. I think I started to finally have some
(20:58):
sense of Amanda. Now it's that, you know, bc a
d who is a d Amanda and can she have
a life after everything that she thought she was going
to do and be was ripped away. I think I
still thought, I'm going to get the rest of my
(21:22):
face fixed and it's going to be perfect, and it's
just a matter of time until I'm back to normal.
One of the things that I found during the pandemic
was that I had been brick by brick building a
(21:45):
trauma wall, and this wall sort of protected me, you know,
I just with each thing that happened, I just added
another layer of bricks. And then the pandemic came and
it kind of it's like the kool Aid man came
crashing through my trouble wall and it just oh no,
(22:10):
not oh yeah, I was oh no, It's just all
sort of came grumbling down right like I was to fuck,
And I think that was when I realized, like, I
need therapy. My husband and I met when we were
(22:31):
working together in that health insurance environment, and my husband
has muscular dystrophe. And when we first met, he introduced
himself and he said, I'm really excited to be working
with somebody who is like me. And I thought, I
don't know what you mean by that, naturally brunette, and
(22:56):
he kind of said, you know somebody else with a disability,
and I'm like, I don't have a disability. I'm not disabled.
I didn't know. I genuinely just thought like I had
this accident and now some things are hard. And he
really taught me what disability was and that it wasn't
(23:16):
something that I should be ashamed of, and what an
acquired disability is versus something that you were born with,
and that I shouldn't be embarrassed or ashamed of that,
and then it's not a bad thing. I think it's
something that we don't really talk about as a society.
(23:39):
But there's a stigma behind having a disability. You kind
of like, ooh, unless we have some experience with it
in our childhood. We're kind of taught and conditioned to
feel better than those who have disabilities. I would say
most people who have acquired probably don't define themselves that way.
(24:03):
It's not something that people normally take on as a
badge of honor. It changed for me because he is
the most patient, understanding person. I remember Daniel and I
went to the Cherry Blossom Festival in DC and we
(24:24):
were walking around. I didn't have my motorized scooter yet,
but I was starting to hurt. And we went into
the Museum of Modern Art and there's couches on the
second floor and I sat down because I was struggling
to walk at that point, and I just sobbed, like
(24:45):
in the middle of the Museum of modernut because I
was embarrassed, because I felt shame, because I felt frustrated,
because I felt broken, because I felt like somebody had
stripped me in my power, and I think those feelings
(25:09):
never go away. Still frustrating. For a long time, I
wore my hair like completely down the right side of
my face, like I almost look like half a cousin it,
just like it's just the whole right side of my
face was covered with my hair. And then as as
(25:33):
the years went and the exception that it wasn't ever
gonna be what it was, the bangs got shorter and
shorter and shorter, and I still wear them over my
right eye, both for myself and for others, because I
find that when I have my face uncovered, there's a
(25:59):
lot of questions, there's a lot of stairs, they're a
little uncomfortable. I'm a little uncomfortable, and so it's just
easier for me, for the most part to keep my
one right eye covered by what my friends refer to
as my Jessica Rabbit hair, because my hair is red.
(26:23):
But the process of going through that is something that
I would say I've grown from and I've healed from,
but that you never really get over. There are surgeries
that I could have to make me look better, but
(26:48):
I'm an average middle class American and I don't have
the money for that, like most of us, and so
there has to be some level of acceptance of just
where you're at. I do feel like a different person.
(27:10):
It's like a completely different version of Amanda. When I
was a public speaker, I can't tell you how many
times I had teenagers tell me I was their hero.
Or I would go and talk to an AARP group
and I'd have grandfathers come up and tell me how
(27:33):
much I reminded them of their children and their grandchildren,
and how much they appreciated what I had to say.
I mean, it was really It meant so much that
I was making a difference in people's lives. But I
started saying things in my speech pretty early on, like
(27:56):
this is what lucky looks like, and you don't want
to be like me? Why not? Like why wouldn't you
want to be like me?
Speaker 3 (28:07):
Why?
Speaker 2 (28:07):
Because I have some scars in my face and like
it hurts when it rains, Like, yeah, I don't want
you to have to suffer through those things. But being
like me is not terrible. I have a beautiful little
girl and an amazing husband and a home I can afford,
and now I'm getting my master's degree. Why wouldn't people
(28:32):
want to be like me? It started to feel like
a sob story. I no longer wanted to tell a
story of tragedy that I was the victim, not the hero,
And I am the hero of my own story. I
love my life. I love the woman that I've thought
(28:56):
to become. I never in a million years thought that
this is who I would be. But I'm fucking proud
of her, he said. I could swear saying, oh but
I am. I am proud of me. I'm proud of
(29:19):
who I've thought to become. Who would I have been
had this not happened to me? I don't know. It
doesn't really matter because it's not something that I'm ever
gonna find out. And I can't imagine that the other
(29:43):
version would have ever been as cool as this one,
which sounds cocky, but like it's really how I feel.
Speaker 1 (30:19):
Welcome back, This is Alive again, joining me for a
conversation about today's story or my other Alive against story
Producers Kate Sweeney, Nicholas Takowski, and Brent Day, and I'm
your host, Dan Bush.
Speaker 4 (30:31):
This is the story of a total badass. That's one
thing that drew me to Amanda really from sort of
the first moment. She was such fun to talk with.
Her story is not all fun at all, but she
(30:52):
kind of zagged on me. You know, you think it's
gonna go one way and then it goes another direction completely.
She lost her eye and then she ended up being
aer for like driver safety kids, and then realized she
was using herself as a cautionary tale, like don't be
like me.
Speaker 1 (31:07):
And she's like, this victim narrative had become such so
ingrained and right that that's who she had become with
this victim. Yeah, her whole life was just defined by
this accident and visit there's in this story. As with
one of our previous episodes where we talked to Rodney
White or listen to Rodney White's story, this episode also
has this theme or this you know, this conclusive moment
(31:29):
where the person who went through this trauma and this
horrible experience and almost died is I wouldn't say grateful
for having gone through that, because that's a stretch because
it's so horrific, but they feel empowered in a way
that maybe they would not have had they not gone
(31:50):
through it.
Speaker 4 (31:51):
I know, it's so amazing to hear her say that,
isn't it? And that's one of my favorite things Dan
about hearing her tell her story because she allowed for
the ambiguities and the complexities that go along with life,
because she she's happy to be the woman she is today.
She's proud of who she is and what she's done.
(32:12):
At the same time, she admits that life sucks a lot.
You know, it sucks when she's more tired than she
wants to be. It sucks when she's walking around a
museum in DC and just gets too tired and is
absolutely exhausted, and more frequently when people you know don't
(32:32):
make way for her. Mates they say, she's wheeling through
a museum in her wheelchair and you know, people walk
right in front of her, so she can't see an exhibit,
so kind of feeling othered and feeling like made to
be invisible. And she talks about the fact that she's
proud of who she is. Sometimes she still has has
fantasies about getting facial reconstruction surgery, but at the same
(32:54):
time she loves her life. So I loved hearing that
she doesn't try to make her story and tidy one,
and that makes it, you know, that much more real
and that much more compelling.
Speaker 1 (33:05):
What I love about the story is that at the
end of everything she's gone through, she's just like, I
love who I am. I wouldn't change who I am,
I wouldn't go back. I'm a badass. It's sort of
think and that's the sort of the nature of what
she's saying.
Speaker 4 (33:17):
Yeah, so you know, as I said, yeah, like she was.
I love that she refused to settle for the simplest
version of the truth. And when you hear her thinking
through what's happening as she's telling her story, she this
wasn't canned at all. She was thinking these things through
in real time and making realizations as she was talking
and sharing those with us, allowing herself to be that vulnerable.
(33:41):
And that's what you're getting to hear.
Speaker 5 (33:43):
How old was she when this happened twenty and how
long has she been living with this? Then? How old
is she now or when she met her husband?
Speaker 4 (33:52):
I want to say that she's maybe like thirty eight
or thirty nine years old now, I want to say
two thousand and eight.
Speaker 6 (34:00):
So it's like it's like half her life.
Speaker 4 (34:02):
Yes, which is I mean, you know she used to
go you know, she as you just heard, you know,
she was on the public speaking circuit, on a public
speaking circuit, telling this, telling this story as if there
was a before and an after, and that's it. But
part of it was, as you say, Nick, so many
years that have passed since even then, that her life
(34:23):
has changed again and changed again, So That's another reason
this didn't fit her because she's not She's not that victim,
and she doesn't feel like she's that victim.
Speaker 6 (34:31):
Now she's bigger. That she's bigger than one moment in
her life. Absolutely, you know that it changed a thing,
But you continue to have epiphanies and you continue to
have things that happen that that shift you. Yeah, chapters
in your life. There's not just two chapters exactly.
Speaker 5 (34:52):
Even if it's not a car accident. You know, I'm
not the same person I was before we had our
second child, before we had our first child, before I
got married, before I left college. You know, every life
event changes you.
Speaker 1 (35:03):
Something else that was striking about her story was that
how amazed when the paramedics and the fireman and the
rescue people showed up, How amazed that she was even alive.
They were like, he went to get the body bag.
Basically wow, because nobody's ever survived this type of accident, right,
a sudden head on. I think in a situation.
Speaker 5 (35:25):
She was in the military at the time that she
had the accident. Yeah what you said, Yeah, yeah, and
hated it. Huh. I can empathize with that.
Speaker 2 (35:36):
Square peg.
Speaker 4 (35:38):
But yeah, I mean, I just I this narrative is
so compelling to me. How this event Reallyina like sends
Amanda off first in one direction, the sense of finally
having found her calling. She was miserable in the military,
and like, oh, it's communications and I'm a public speaker
and I've finally found I'm discovering who I am. I'm
(35:59):
discovering who who you know? As she puts it, ad
Amanda is after almost dying or after disaster, as she
puts it, and then realizing, oh, wait a minute, you know,
like she's using herself and her disabled body as a
cautionary tale and like who wants to do that? And
discovering this world of disability advocacy, which I freaking love.
(36:21):
If you can't tell from my voice, I mean I
loved talking with Amanda. I could have talked with her
all day, just listened to Amanda tell Amanda stories.
Speaker 5 (36:29):
What a badass after disaster? That is great.
Speaker 4 (36:32):
Yeah, that's how she saw it before crash and after disaster,
and that's how she framed it for a long time
and then was like wait a minute.
Speaker 1 (36:43):
Next week on a live again. Scott McCoy, the beloved
singer songwriter behind bands like the Minus five and Young
Fresh Fellows, had spent his life living and breathing music
until a massive stroke in twenty seventeen shattered his ability
to speak, play, and understand the world around him.
Speaker 3 (37:00):
I've been there for twenty four hours. They finally got
the doctor to give me a MRI because he wouldn't
give me one because he said it's not a stroke,
said he's a drum.
Speaker 1 (37:10):
In this deeply human episode of Live Again, Scott opens
up about the long road of recovery, his first terrifying
moments in the er, and the odd beauty of watching
The Wizard of Oz while relearning language. With honesty, humor
and an artist insight, Scott explores what it means to
lose the thing that wants to find you.
Speaker 3 (37:28):
I think what it has done for me is it's
made me just more desperate to keep creating art.
Speaker 1 (37:39):
Our story producers are Dan Bush, Kate Sweeney, Brent die
Nicholas Dakowski, and Lauren Vogelbaum. Music by Ben Lovett, additional
music by Alexander Rodriguez. Our executive producers are Matthew Frederick
and Trevor Young. Special thanks to Alexander Williams for additional
production support. Our studio engineers are Rima El Kali and
(38:00):
EJames Griffin. Today's episode was edited by Mike w Anderson,
mixing by Ben Lovett and Alexander Rodriguez. I'm your host
Dan Bush. Special thanks to Amanda Clair for sharing her
incredible story. Amanda graduated with her master's degree in social
work in May of twenty twenty four. She's currently exploring
career opportunities and has worked as a professional public speaker
(38:20):
and advocate since two thousand and nine. If you'd like
to connect with Amanda, click the link in our show notes.
Alive Again is a production of I Art Radio and
Psychopia Pictures. If you have a transformative near death experience
to share, we'd love to hear your story. Please email
us at a Live Again project at gmail dot com.
That's a l I V e A g A I
(38:43):
N P R O j E c T at gmail
dot com.
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