In this week’s episode, both storytellers must navigate heartbreaking dilemmas as they try to figure out how to convey crushing news.

Part 1: While doing fieldwork in the Congo, Stella Mayerhoff must track down a local researcher to deliver devastating news.

Stella Mayerhoff is a primatologist turned science communicator. As a scientist, Stella traveled the world—from Puerto Rico to the Democratic Republic of Congo—studying various primate species. She now draws inspiration from her time in the field, writing to share the sense of adventure and real-world impact that science offers. Stella has written for Georgia State’s College of Arts & Sciences, Georgia State University Research Magazine, and Science ATL, and is currently pursuing a master’s degree in Science Communication at UC Santa Cruz. When she’s not chasing a story, Stella enjoys spending her time with her cat, TBD, who owes his perfectly odd name to a moment of writer’s block.

Part 2: During his second year of residency, Sam Blackman is tasked with caring for a dying child whose mother’s unwavering faith clashes with his scientific approach.

Sam Blackman is a physician-scientist and pediatric oncologist. He's was founder and former head of research and development at Day One Biopharmaceuticals, a company focused on drug development for childhood cancers. He’s currently an entrepreneur-in-residence at Google Ventures. Sam is an avid storyteller, baker of bread, and recently climbed Mt. Kilimanjaro. Sam lives on Orcas Island with his wife, having successfully launched their first and only child off to college.

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

PART 1

As a child, I loved Saturday mornings. I would run downstairs and I would look through our collection of VHS tapes. I would search one by one with each tape, passing up every ‘90s kid's favorite movie. Matilda, no, The Sandlot, no, The Lion King, no, until I found it, a documentary all about ocean explorer Jacques Cousteau.

Now, this may have single‑handedly ruined any chances of me as an adult winning '90s trivia, but the countless mornings that I spent watching that movie instilled in me a love of adventure and animals. I would sit mesmerized by Cousteau and his crew as they ventured out into the ocean. I was in awe of all of the animals that swam across my TV screen.

Now, don't get me wrong. The Lion King is a fantastic movie, but this documentary was real life.

Stella Mayerhoff shares her story at Waller's Coffee Shop in Atlanta, GA at a show sponsored by Science ATL in October 2024. Photo by Rob Felt.

Years later, when I went off to college, I still loved animals, and so I decided to take a primate behavior class on a whim. Suddenly, I was transformed once again into a child, completely enamored with the idea that scientists got to travel around the world, studying incredible animals in incredible places. I decided that I wanted to do the same.

After I graduated from college, I went to work with bonobos in captivity for a year. Now, bonobos are often described as being very similar to chimpanzees. In many ways, that's true. They are primates. They're also a great ape species. But, unlike chimpanzees, they're relatively peaceful animals. Also, something particularly interesting about bonobos is that females run bonobo society. Needless to say, I fell in love with them.

I quickly decided that I wanted to study bonobos in the wild. I was committed to it. However, bonobos only live in one country in the entire world, the Democratic Republic of Congo, which is home to some of the densest forests in the world and also a place where field work is particularly difficult and dangerous.

But if Cousteau could venture out into the oceans and study sea creatures, I could cross rivers and travel through the forest to study bonobos.

I decided to apply to my dream job, studying bonobos in the wild. I was hired to work for a project in the heart of the Democratic Republic of Congo at a remote field site where I'd be studying social lives of bonobos.

Before I left, a professor of mine told me it will be hard in ways that you could never imagine. I came to terms with the fact that it would be the most challenging thing that I had ever done and possibly would ever do. I wanted to be as prepared as humanly possible and so I packed everything I could possibly fit into my bag. I had enough medication and first aid supplies to fill a small pharmacy. I bought medical evacuation insurance, which explicitly stated that they would bring back my body even if it was in pieces.

I reached out to former field assistants and got their advice so that I could face any challenges that would lie ahead. I wanted to be as ready as humanly possible.

When I left for Congo, I quickly realized that just getting to the field site would be an adventure all on its own. It took two days just to get to the capital city of Kinshasa. From there, we took a tiny little propeller plane across the country and landed intentionally in a field. I was met there by the field site manager and, from there, we walked for six hours. We crossed two rivers and took a dugout canoe part of the way until we finally arrived at camp.

At any given time, there were roughly 10 people or so at camp. Each one of us stayed in a tent, and our only source of water was the river. We also had one somewhat‑functioning solar panel that we would use to charge our equipment. And once a day, we would be able to send out text‑only messages via a radio satellite email system.

The work was brutal. We would wake up long before the sun got up and walk an hour, sometimes two, just to get to where the bonobos had slept the night before. Then the bonobos would wake up, and we'd actually start our day. They would go everywhere through the forest, and we would follow them up cliffs, across rivers, through the jungle, wherever they went, recording their behavior and what they ate, taking fecal samples and urine samples all to better understand some of our closest evolutionary living relatives.

The forest was also nothing short of relentless. We would chase after the bonobos through the forest and we would get scratched by these vines that had a sandpaper‑like texture. And they would scrape us through our clothing. Then later, when we exposed those to the sun, they would burn because of a photosensitive chemical left behind by those vines.

On a daily basis, we got attacked by driver ants, which are known to have such strong, large jaws that they're used in the villages as makeshift stitches because they will clamp down and close a wound.

Early on in my experience, I ran into an elephant that was flapping its ears at me, which is a sign that it was very much time for me to run as fast as I possibly could. One morning, before the sun came up, I was walking with my headlight, and I saw it reflect back to me in a pair of huge, beady cat eyes. And I watched as a leopard slipped away quietly into the forest.

Another day, I narrowly missed stepping on a boomslang, which is one of the most venomous snakes in the entire world.

There were so many things that made it difficult, but there were also so many moments that made it incredibly worth it. There were days that the bonobos would take us to the most beautiful parts of the forest and they would rest for a little bit. I could take off my backpack and sit down, and I'd look up and above me would be a group of baby bonobos playing and tackling each other, swinging fearlessly through the trees. It was absolutely incredible.

My favorite moment of the entire time was one day when I was walking and the group of bonobos that I was walking with decided to slow it down a little bit. I realized that everywhere in front of me were bonobos just walking. Then I heard something behind me and I turned around. I realized that the rest of the group, which had been trailing far behind us for most of the day had finally caught up with us. Suddenly, I was surrounded by bonobos in every direction around me, peacefully just walking alongside me. It was the closest thing I had ever experienced to real magic.

One day when I was at camp, a stranger arrived from the village. This was very abnormal because the village was several hours of walking away and so people didn't just casually walk into camp. The man explained to me that he was looking for Nora, and Nora was also from the same village. He was a local that was hired for the project. I knew generally the direction that Nora had taken into the forest but beyond that, all I knew was that he was somewhere out tracking the bonobos.

But I'd been tasked with finding him, so I filled up my water bottle, I put on my backpack, and with another field assistant, I set out into the forest.

As we walked, we would periodically stop and make a long call that we called a whooping call. This was something that we used in the field to be able to communicate very far distances from one another. So we'd walk and we'd walk, and I'd stop and I'd let out a call, “wooh-hooh,” but I didn't hear anything. I walked and I walked and I walked, and I’d let out another call, but I didn't hear anything again.

After nearly two hours of walking, I finally heard Nora return the call. We bushwhacked our way through the forest until we were able to find Nora. Once I saw him, I told him the news, "Votre bébé est très malade. Vous devez retourner au village immédiatement." "Your baby is very sick. You need to return to the village immediately."

But that was a lie. The truth was that Nora's baby had already died of malaria. The man from the village had told me to tell Nora that his baby had only been sick because Nora still had to make the walk all the way back to the village.

We walked in silence. Deep down, I think that Nora knew. There was something about the way that he stared at me without responding to what I had just said and then abruptly took off for camp. He walked so fast that I could barely keep up with him, and I was grateful for that. I wasn't able to think about what had just happened when all I could think about was putting one foot in front of the other as fast as I possibly could. And it occurred to me that Nora was probably doing the same.

When we got back to camp, Nora remained silent. He packed up his things and he left for the village. The moment that he was out of sight, I had tears streaming down my face.

That night I wrote home. “Today, I lied to a father so that a false sliver of hope would get him back to the village, make him go the whole trek back to the village where his wife would tell him that his baby was already dead.”

Looking at my watch, I realize he knows by now. He has made it back to the village and his entire world has shattered.

I thought back to what my professor had told me, “It will be hard in ways you could have never imagined." She was right. I had imagined dealing with the psychological pressure cooker that is remote fieldwork. I had imagined using up all of my medical supplies. I had imagined being so tired and sore from running through the forest and chasing bonobos and crossing rivers that I could barely move. But I had never imagined that day. And I realized that the only way to adequately anticipate what lies ahead is to realize that you can never adequately anticipate what lies ahead.

But the field also taught me that that doesn't only hold true for the bad things. It holds true for the good things too. Just as I will never forget walking so fast behind Nora that day in the forest, I will never forget walking peacefully through the forest with bonobos walking around me in every direction.

It has been seven years now since I left Congo, and to this day when people tell me or ask me what it was like, I still don't know how to answer. What I do know, though, is what it taught me. That even through hardship and the most unfathomable moments of heartbreak, there are moments of magic.

I'm now in my final year of my PhD program, studying primate behavior and cognition, and it too has been hard in ways I could have never imagined. But I know now to look for the glimmers of magic. And when I do, I realize that once again I am surrounded by the things that I love and it's wonderful in ways I could have never imagined.

Thank you.

PART 2

I'm the firstborn child of a Jewish pediatrician. And for the first ten years of my life, I was all in on both. I was the kid who was raised conservative, but when he was eight or nine, would walk by himself to the Orthodox temple down the street because the conservative just wasn't enough Jewish. I was the kid with the chemistry set in the basement. I was the kid who wanted the leftover surgical instruments that my father had at his office. When people asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up, I said I wanted to be a doctor and a rabbi, because, of course, you can do those two things together.

Then in my teenage years, when I got a little bit older and saw what both of those things meant, they both disappeared. My parents split up because my father's relentless focus on work alienated him from his wife and his children. And it destroyed my faith in religion and it destroyed my desire to be a physician.

When I was 18, I fled New Jersey for the Midwest as an agnostic soon‑to‑be philosophy major burning down everything that had happened to me in the nearly two decades prior to that.

Sam Blackman shares his story at Jewelbox Theater at the Rendezvous in Seattle, WA in November 2024. Photo by Elizar Mercado.

At the University of Chicago, God is not allowed in the philosophy department. It's not. It's illogic, it's reductionist. Belief was not an argument. You can't substantiate the assertions that you're going to defend by just saying, “I believe.”

And as I went deeper and deeper into this reductionist hole, I came out the other side wanting to be a scientist and wanting to be a physician, but not like my father. I wanted to be a physician scientist. I was 20‑something in the age of PCR and molecular medicines and molecular biology. I firmly believed that I was nothing but the sum of my genetics and epigenetics, and that everything about who I was and what I thought was just the sum of an infinite number of synaptic connections in neurotransmission.

I worked and I got into medical school and I got into graduate school. I went through and came out eight years later as a physician‑scientist nonbeliever, focused more than anything else on wanting to take care of children with cancer.

I started that journey in, of all places, Cincinnati, Ohio, a city that I didn't know very much about and was artificially transplanted to courtesy of the National Residency Matching Program, and thrown into my intern year, which was a meat grinder unlike anything that I had ever experienced. On call every third night, trying to balance the needs of patients with the needs of science.

As I went further and further into this, I had discovered that this job was impossibly hard sometimes. Midway through my second year of residency, I not only didn't have faith or religion but I was questioning whether or not I even believed in myself as a doctor. I found myself, after endless nights on call, short‑tempered and impatient and frustrated.

I did an oncology rotation in the middle of my second year and on morning rounds one day, we came to the room of a patient who had been admitted overnight, a little girl named Brianna who had, without a doubt, the worst brain tumor ever. She had this tumor that grew inside a structure at the base of her brain. It could not be removed. All of the treatments that we had were ineffective. Radiation doesn't work. Chemotherapy doesn't work. There was nothing for her.

She had been in the hospital for a number of weeks, and it chewed through her mother. It chewed through previous teams. Her mother is so angry because she knew that there was nothing that we could do.

When I started that rotation, started that month, we'd get to the room and we weren't allowed to go in. I said to my attending, “Why can't we go into the room?”

And he said, “Brianna's mother doesn't want us to come in, doesn't want us to examine her.”

I said, “How are we supposed to take care of her?”

“Well, we'll look at the labs and we'll look at the nursing record overnight, but, you know, we'll just sort of wing it what are we going to do.”

From time to time, Brianna's mother would come out and ask us to do things. She didn't believe in science and, frankly, why should she. Her child was going to die. There was nothing that we could do.

But there were things that she wanted us to try and we would negotiate these things with her. She didn't like the fact that we had to give high doses of steroids to reduce the swelling caused by the brain tumor. She wanted to substitute that with homeopathic remedies. And we said, “No, we couldn't do that.”

She didn't like the fact that Brianna was always plugged into IV fluids and said, "Can I give her herbal teas instead of all the IV fluids?" And we said, "Yes, you can. We don't have a problem with that."

She came out one morning and said, "Can we give coffee enemas to Brianna?"

And I said, "What?"

My attending physician at the time said, "I've never heard of this." He turned to me and goes, “Is this a real thing?”

He goes, “Go to the library and find out where this comes from.” Not because we're going to actually do it, but I think we were just so curious.

So I went and researched where this belief in coffee enemas came from. It's this thing called Gerson therapy, which, parenthetically, is not real science. But I came back and knocked on the door and explained to Brianna's mother why we couldn't give coffee enemas. That I had gone to literature and actually looked it up, and I laid out the reasons why. And because we had listened to her, because I had gone and taken her request seriously, she did something remarkable. She let me into the room.

For the rest of that month, we would make our rounds every morning and I would be the one person who was allowed to go into the room and examine Brianna and talk to her mother about the plan for the day. I was feeling like Brianna’s doctor.

But rotations only last for about a month in residency and things end, and you move on to the next thing. And I moved on.

A number of weeks later, I was out. I had a night off with my wife, when I got a call on the way home. I got a page from the nurse from a unit in the hospital called The Pavilion, which is the place where the palliative care patients would go at the end of their lives.

The nurse paged me and I called back. She said, “Hey, listen. We think Brianna is going to die tonight. We know that you were close with her mom. Do you want to come in?”

I was a little scared, because I'm just a second‑year resident. I'd never attended a patient's death before.

So I dropped my wife at home and I called the on‑call attendant. I said, “Hey, listen, there's this little girl and she's got this horrible tumor. She's probably going to die tonight and I have no idea what I'm doing. If I go to the hospital would you come and meet me?” And he said yes.

We both got there around 10:00 at night, and there's something really remarkable about hospitals at night when all the lights are out. It's very, very quiet. You walk through these halls and you get to the end of the hall, and there's a room and all the lights are out. There are monitors on and there's nothing you can do, or so I thought.

My attending said, “You know, there are things that we can do. We can give pain medicine to make it easier. We can give oxygen to help reduce the agonal breathing. We can bear witness.” And that's what we did for hours through the night.

Sometime around 2:00 or 3:00 in the morning, we were standing out by the nursing station. The nurse came out and said, “I think Brianna may have stopped breathing.”

And my attending said to me, “Do you want to go and pronounce her dead?”

I said, “I don't know what to do.”

And he taught me, because there's a ritual. So I went into the room, which was all dark except for the monitors, and I performed the ritual. I took my stethoscope and I placed it on her chest and I listened for a full 60 seconds for the absence of a heartbeat. I put my fingers on her wrist and felt for the absence of a pulse. And I looked at the clock and I made a mental note of the time of death.

And I said to Brianna's mother, "I'm so sorry for your loss." Then I went to leave. But before I left, I turned and I said, "Is there anything I can do for you?"

She said, "Would you pray with me?”

Now, I'm in Cincinnati, Ohio, and I'm the firstborn son of a Jewish doctor who doesn't believe in God, who just believes in science. And I'm being asked to pray over the body of a dead child. My every instinct said, "Say no and leave,” because I’d be lying to myself, and lying over the body of a dead child seems like the absolute wrong thing to do. But in that moment, I realized that Brianna's mother believed me to be the doctor that I had wanted to be, had hoped to be.

So I went back to the room and she closed her eyes, so I closed my eyes. She held my hands and so I held her hand. Then she started to pray. Fortunately, she said words of a prayer that I've heard only a few times, but fortunately I knew.

“Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.”

Thank you.