742: The Thing I'm Getting Over
This episode appears to contain dynamically inserted ads. Transcript timestamps may be approximate.
There's not much to the story of how Chase got injured. He was invited to a New Year's party in Philadelphia. He flies in, goes to the party, goes back to an apartment where he's staying with three other people. Gets up around seven in the morning. Lack of sleep, still hung over, maybe a little drunk from the night before. And I went to the bathroom, and I tripped. And next thing I know, I'm on the ground. All three of them are like, around me. They're like freaking out. He's concussed, there's no where he is or what's happening. They're like, get up. And I was so confused. I was like, OK, I'm trying. And I was just like faced down on the ground. My arm was like this, and I was like pushing. And they were like shaking. The moment I realized I was paralyzed was they were shaking my leg. And I like kind of knew something was happening to my leg. I was like, are you touching me? And they're like, yeah, we're shaking your leg. You don't feel that. And I was like, no. At the hospital, he got into this trauma, an internal bleeding, and a spinal cord around the C4 vertebra. They told me, may never walk again. He can't stand, he'll control his arms, he'll use his hands. It's not clear he ever will. Somebody has to feed him. He's all alone, no visitors. He's basically a mobile in front of a television that's set to Comedy Central, which those particular weeks, he says, was reruns of the office most of the day. He said he watched from season one all the way up through the finale of season nine, and then season one began again. And one day early in the ICU, he's on a group chat with his buddies, which means, since he can't pick up his phone, a nurse reads to him what they are saying, and then he dictates what to write back. And they're trying to cheer him up. And they come up with a project for him, a goal, a heroic goal, an unusual goal, a goal that is the reason that I wanted to talk to Chase. This goal, they really started as a joke. My one friend Julian said, get better. Dan said he'd let you kick him in the [BLEEP] when you get home. Oh, wait a second. Let me just stop the story right there.
Transcription truncated.