Feet In Smoke: A Story About Electrified Near-Death

February 5, 2012 6:57 AM

Like a lot of people, I'd always assumed, in a sort of cut-rate Hobbesian way, that the center of the brain, if you could ever find it, would inevitably be a pretty dark place, that whatever is good or beautiful about being human is a result of our struggles against everything innate, against physical nature. My brother changed my mind about all that.
posted by unSane (42 comments total)

Wow, the imposter syndrome shows up, and then evaporates. Brains are weird.
posted by leotrotsky at 7:22 AM on February 5, 2012 [1 favorite]

Wow. Brains are weird.
posted by Glinn at 7:30 AM on February 5, 2012 [1 favorite]

How does this kind of accident happen? I've heard that some guitar amps use a cheap-o method for filtering AC line noise, by putting a capacitor between hot and ground on the power input. If that one cap fails, pretty likely in aging and roughly treated gear, the ground (connected to the strings and tremolo bar) becomes electrified.

That cap could be snipped out, and the line current filtered with a power strip or some other method, I would guess. Wherever this fault comes from, there should be a recall and retrofit required, and an awareness program.
posted by StickyCarpet at 7:36 AM on February 5, 2012 [1 favorite]

So very Philip K Dick.

Another of the nurses, when I asked her if he'd ever be normal again, said, "Maybe, but wouldn't it be wonderful just to have him like this?"

Kinda insensitive if you ask me.
posted by Foci for Analysis at 7:43 AM on February 5, 2012 [3 favorites]

Would a windscreen have helped on the mic to prevent electrocution? Or are they not thick enough? Always wondered that. And almost always practiced in my bare feet on dangerous old equipment. *makes sign of cross*

Great story.
posted by resurrexit at 7:58 AM on February 5, 2012

Beautifully written.
Great Sunday morning read.
Thanks, unSane.
posted by bru at 7:59 AM on February 5, 2012 [1 favorite]

Amazing. Thanks so much.
posted by purenitrous at 8:01 AM on February 5, 2012

How does this kind of accident happen?

Usually because someone tried to stop a guitar amp humming by lifting the ground. Then there's a short in the amp which normally would blow the fuse, but instead takes the chassis live, and therefore the ground to the guitar. The strings on the guitar are grounded, so they are now at 120v. The singer puts his lips to the mic, which *IS* properly grounded, and that 120v flows up his arm from the strings, through his heart, and to ground via his lips. Perfect recipe for cardiac arrest.
posted by unSane at 8:03 AM on February 5, 2012 [11 favorites]

(This is why lifting grounds on guitar amps is so dangerous)
posted by unSane at 8:04 AM on February 5, 2012

I believe Ace Frehley had the same thing happen to him -- it inspired the KISS song "Shock Me", in fact.
posted by pineapple at 8:08 AM on February 5, 2012

also, what Bru said. Great post, unSane.
posted by pineapple at 8:08 AM on February 5, 2012

Yes, excellent Sunday morning read.

I've tried many times over the years to describe for people the person who woke up from that electrified near-death, the one who remained with us for about a month before he went back to being the person we'd known and know now. It would save one a lot of trouble to be able to say "it was like he was on acid," but that wouldn't be quite true. Instead, he seemed to be living one of those imaginary acid trips we used to pretend to be on in junior high, before we tried the real thing and found out it was slightly less magical—"Hey, man, your nose is like a star or something, man." He had gone there....

This reminded me a lot of the story of Jill Bolte Taylor, who had a stroke which wiped out a lot of her left-brain function for some time. She talks about it here at TED. The interesting thing is that Taylor is a brain research scientist, so she is able to apply some interesting perspectives to what happened to her. She describes a really incredible experience of life inside her brain while segments of it were offline - a feeling of actual oneness with the universe, an openness to humor and beauty, loose associations of things - some of this reminds me of that, but it also sounds a little more variable and complex for Worth, and I suppose that may have to do with different areas of the brain being affected and healing. Taylor wrote a book about all of this called My Stroke of Insight, which is a fascinating story and definitely reorganized how I think of not only the brain, but human nature and the kinds of experiences that are accessible to us. She now does speaking gigs and has taken on the cause of donating brains to science to advance our knowledge of this organ with its incredible mystery and complexity.

Thanks for the story. I'm glad it had a happy ending, where for so many it doesn't, and they seem like really lovely people, the whole family.

I was also a little in awe of the re-creation for this TV show. How difficult would it be to do something like that? Whew. Both my parents have had grave illnesses in the past and, even though they recovered, I don't think we would want to recreate those anxious scenes and walk through them again. I still cringe at hospital environments because of those long hours of fearful waiting.
posted by Miko at 8:12 AM on February 5, 2012 [10 favorites]

Is "lifting the ground" on a guitar amp something one could do inadvertently? I don't want my daughter to get lectrocuted. How do you recognize if the ground is lifted in a guitar amp? (I have no idea what "lifting the ground" means.)
posted by Infinity_8 at 8:21 AM on February 5, 2012 [1 favorite]

Wow, what a story. The human brain is amazing and mysterious. Thanks for the great read.
posted by Ron Thanagar at 8:31 AM on February 5, 2012

Fascinating. Thanks for the link.
posted by PhoBWanKenobi at 8:36 AM on February 5, 2012

When I lived in New York a woman was electrocuted by some sort of short that electrified a sewer grate. She was walkng along through the slush and zapped. It happened right in front of my physical therapist's office. His super, who was the first person to get to this woman, told him that when he was holding her, waiting for the ambulance, her last (and only) words were a quietly delighted, "I know what this is now."

Has haunted me for years.
posted by dirtdirt at 8:39 AM on February 5, 2012 [62 favorites]

Is "lifting the ground" on a guitar amp something one could do inadvertently?

Not usually. Typically what happens is that two pieces of equipment (eg the amp and the guitar pedals) are plugged into two different mains outlets and for various reasons you get a big 60Hz hum (the infamous 'ground loop).

One way to 'solve' this is to disconnect the ground from one of the pieces of equipment (eg the amp) by literally unsoldering the wire or removing the pin or putting in a 'ground lift' switch. But the equipment is now ungrounded and dangerous for all the reasons above. The actual solution is to sort out the ground problem, but loops are notoriously hard to track down and in the pressure of a live situation it's very tempting for someone to just disconnect the ground.

Some vintage guitar amps (eg my 1970s Fender Twin) originally came with a ground switch on the back. This had three positions, two of which were grounded (different phase) and one which lifted the ground. These should all have been disconnected now so the switch does nothing but they still make me nervous.
posted by unSane at 8:51 AM on February 5, 2012 [4 favorites]

(The kicker is that when you lift the ground to solve a ground loop, the equipment is usually more or less grounded through the second piece of equipment -- that was what was causing the loop -- but then you unplug your amp and take it home and never bother to reconnect the ground and one day you're singing in the basement and BLAMMO).
posted by unSane at 8:55 AM on February 5, 2012

Wow, the imposter syndrome shows up, and then evaporates.

This is more like Capras. I can't remember who said it (Oliver Sachs in The Mind's Eye, maybe?) that recognizing someone is a feeling, and when you have the visual cues that the person is there but don't have that accompanying feeling, that's what you get.
posted by Obscure Reference at 9:04 AM on February 5, 2012 [3 favorites]

Great story -- thanks for posting. As a stroke survivor, it's uncomfortably close to home. (I'm also a musician and have had my share of shocks, but nothing as horrendous as the one in the story.) It's amazing how the brain compensates -- or doesn't -- for sustained damage of one form or another. I have read Jill Bolte's book, which is terrifying and magnificent. My stroke left me essentially unimpaired. I was lucky, however, that my wife was at home when it happened and that there was a hospital only 2 or 3 miles away. I was receiving care within 20 minutes.

Subsequent to the stroke, however, I have had two episodes of Transient Global Amnesia, one after having an ablation procedure to correct the heart arythmia that caused the stroke, and one after extremely active sex. Both of them put me into a Groundhog Day sort of temporal loop, where from minute to minute I could not remember what had just happened. The effects lasted for several hours.

I understand that 1 such episode is considered to be exceedingly rare. Indeed, the nurses in the hospital where I had the first one had never seen the condition, though they had heard of it.

I have had 2...
posted by Guy_Inamonkeysuit at 9:10 AM on February 5, 2012 [6 favorites]

I love John Jeremiah Sullivan...here's an article of his I uploaded for an FPP, about him attempting (and failing) to be an investigative journalist in Mexico.
posted by Ian A.T. at 10:01 AM on February 5, 2012 [1 favorite]

I've always understood the word "electrocute" to mean the person dies. You can't start a story with a phrase like "in the strict sense of having been 'shocked to death,' was electrocuted" if the person was not, strictly, shocked to death. It's a little weird, then, to read that the dead brother went on to play himself on Rescue 911.
posted by buriednexttoyou at 10:04 AM on February 5, 2012 [1 favorite]

Thanks for a great link/story. Last year, my grandmother was hospitalized with a perforated stomach, and went through some nerve-racking days at ICU, where no one knew whether her brain had been damaged from the resulting procedure (a 4 hour operation, where the anesthetist had warned us in advance of a risk of permanent brain-damage).
When she woke up, she was like Worth - hilarious. In this hospital, they only admit two relatives into the ICU at all (not two at a time, just two designated relatives throughout the treatment), but one day, they let my cousin's wife in with my cousin and myself. And Gran, excited by this new guest, started telling us about life, her life, everyones life, our lives, and our roles in her life. And about all the people who had visited during the last few days. She was clearly on some magical high. It's something I will never forget. It was crazy, but it was also somehow life-confirming. She was so full of emotion and imagination. She had imagined visitors, she saw landscapes, and she felt a strong need to instruct us about our life choices in a very loving and sweet, but also explicit manner. It was all her good sides out in the open.
When she was transferred to a normal department, and the rest of our relatives visited in a state of shock, there was an odd disconnect. They were still dealing with the prospect of death and seeing a very sick old lady, while we felt she was extremely, even absurdly alive and young.
Gran doesn't remember a thing. She got back home as angry and reserved an old lady as ever. But now, my cousin, his wife and I know better....
posted by mumimor at 10:14 AM on February 5, 2012 [10 favorites]

Subsequent to the stroke, however, I have had two episodes of Transient Global Amnesia, one after having an ablation procedure to correct the heart arythmia that caused the stroke, and one after extremely active sex. Both of them put me into a Groundhog Day sort of temporal loop, where from minute to minute I could not remember what had just happened. The effects lasted for several hours.

My father had something similar in the years between strokes; I know of at least two times when he simply couldn't remember the last, oh, five years or so. Where he worked, how old he was, where we now lived, etc. He didn't seem alarmed so much as confused. Then a few hours later, he'd remember again.
posted by emjaybee at 10:20 AM on February 5, 2012

Another of the nurses, when I asked her if he'd ever be normal again, said, "Maybe, but wouldn't it be wonderful just to have him like this?"

Kinda insensitive if you ask me.

I read it that way at first, too. But then I thought that maybe the nurse has seen a lot of people come through and not recover fully, and was preparing him for the possibility that this was the new normal.
posted by kamikazegopher at 11:13 AM on February 5, 2012 [1 favorite]

I think the nurse was shoring up the idea that "like this" was better than "dead."
posted by localroger at 11:23 AM on February 5, 2012

Exactly.
posted by kamikazegopher at 11:51 AM on February 5, 2012

Great story and beautifully written. I just bought his book of essays - thanks for this.
posted by greenish at 12:02 PM on February 5, 2012

- Infinity_8-

I could be mistaken, but I think we’re mostly talking about older tube amps here. Does anyone know if this is a possibility with newer, and especially small non-tube amps? I can’t imagine there being anything that dangerous with a Line 6 amp. There’s all kinds of dangerous things going on with tube amps or any tube equipment, don’t let your kids mess around in there.

I got shocked many times when I was younger, but never that serious. Nothing is more surprising than going to sing into a mic and having someone hit you in the head with a 2x4.
posted by bongo_x at 12:22 PM on February 5, 2012

bongo_x, this is possible with any equipment powered from 120 volt mains. It's not the high voltage from the hollow state power supply that gets you, it's an inadvertent short of 120V to the mic input which fails to blow the fuse. Ground loops are a problem for modern equipment -- I work on scales, which use wheatstone bridges to return millivolt-level signals, so I've had my share of grief with them -- and cutting the ground is still a cheap, effective, and dangerous solution to the problem.
posted by localroger at 12:47 PM on February 5, 2012

That said, is there some reason these microphones are made of metal? Make them of plastic and the problem goes away, at least in the particularly dangerous mouth pathway version.
posted by localroger at 12:49 PM on February 5, 2012

The kind of amp makes no difference. They all work at 120v and if they aren't grounded properly, like any piece of electrical equipment, they can kill you.

Tube amps *are* more dangerous when you open them up because they use extremely high voltages across the power caps -- up to 600v -- and as a result they can kill you even when they're not plugged in if you put your hand in the wrong place.

(Typically you have both hands in the amp, and you get 600v between your hands, which drains right through your heart, and you're dead right there. This is why it's good practise to (a) drain the power caps before working on a tube amp and (b) keep one hand in your back pocket when you do.)
posted by unSane at 12:52 PM on February 5, 2012

That said, is there some reason these microphones are made of metal?

Stage mics take horrific abuse, and are built to withstand it.
posted by unSane at 12:54 PM on February 5, 2012 [1 favorite]

My dad was like this after his cardiac arrest. The description of things swinging from tragic to comic and back again is very apt. As long as the person you love keeps improving, it's mostly comic when they think their hospital room is a bank, or say they have to go to Kohl's to buy some pants so they won't have to wear this ugly dress anymore, or don't speak for 24 hours except a single, enthusiastic "GESUNDHEIT!" after someone sneezes. But if it was going to be that way forever? Part of me is not convinced that it's better than nothing. Not to say that living like that is definitely worse than being dead, but I don't think the judgment is as obvious as that nurse was trying to imply. And that's not even taking into consideration that long-term care would bankrupt most families in this country.

Still, it was a beautifully written story, and brought back some fun and funny memories instead of the usual dark clouds that surround those months in the hospital with my dad.
posted by vytae at 2:30 PM on February 5, 2012

This reminds me of a family friend, an actor, who suffered a massive stroke in his 30s. He eventually recovered, but for months he grappled with language, and in his efforts to find the correct words to express himself, would come out with some fantastic word lasagna, sprinkled in with the ocassional Shakespearean phrase. We still use some of his inventions, like the time he saw some squirrels playing in the park and said, "Look at those stickerballs!"
posted by memewit at 2:56 PM on February 5, 2012 [3 favorites]

"I've always understood the word "electrocute" to mean the person dies. You can't start a story with a phrase like "in the strict sense of having been 'shocked to death,' was electrocuted" if the person was not, strictly, shocked to death. It's a little weird, then, to read that the dead brother went on to play himself on Rescue 911."

But he did die, at least five times. It's just that they kept bringing him back.
posted by Kevin Street at 3:19 PM on February 5, 2012 [4 favorites]

The nurse spoke to me from the corner of the room in an unexpected tone of admonishment, which stung me at the time and even in retrospect seems hard to account for. "It ain't like big brother's gonna wake up tomorrow and be all better," she said. I looked at her stupidly. Had I not seemed shocked enough?

Bedside manner: you're doing it wrong!
posted by en forme de poire at 7:00 PM on February 5, 2012

This story is seriously amazing, btw, thanks for posting.
posted by en forme de poire at 7:04 PM on February 5, 2012

"What was it? What was your vision?"

He looked up. The tears were gone. He seemed calm and serious. "I was on the banks of the River Styx," he said. "The boat came to row me across, but .. instead of Charon, it was Huck and Jim. Only, when Huck pulled back his hood, he was an old man … like, ninety years old or something."

I kinda hope he'll found a new religion based on this vision...
posted by Harald74 at 5:56 AM on February 6, 2012

But he did die, at least five times. It's just that they kept bringing him back.

Ah, this is obviously some strange usage of the word "death" that I was previously unaware of.
posted by buriednexttoyou at 10:20 AM on February 6, 2012

Ah, this is obviously some strange usage of the word "death" that I was previously unaware of.

Clinical death
posted by en forme de poire at 5:37 PM on February 6, 2012

14 years ago I picked up a copy of The Oxford American, a quarterly literary magazine published out of Oxford, Mississippi. It sat on my shelf until last week when I decided it was time to read it and throw it away. The theme for the issue was 'music', and among the articles on Elvis impersonators and elderly black bluesmen was THIS STORY, "Feet In Smoke" by John Jeremiah Sullivan, one of the first things he ever had published (I believe). "This would make a great MetaFilter post!" I thought. "But how can I link to a long-gone issue of a small press journal?" The answer, you see, is for the author to get famous and republish it in a book of essays from which it is excerpted as PR. Congratulations, unSane, I've never been so happy to be scooped. (P.S. In the original article, your nose is like a monkey.)
posted by Harvey Kilobit at 8:48 PM on February 6, 2012