Stories That Define Us: How the Addict Saved a Life

Dr. Mani Sivasubramanian is a heart surgeon in India. His specialty? Pediatrics. His patients? Children whose hearts are so bad they will die if he doesn't operate, and so fragile that sometimes they die even when he does. But before the children there were other patients, like a homeless drug addict the police picked up on the streets of Mumbai, India at 2 a.m.

As a young surgeon Dr. Mani extracted "maggots from the festering leg ulcer" of this man and contemplated an all-important question that seemed to constantly haunt him: "Does everyone really matter?"

As he plucked the maggots from the leg of the homeless man he struggled with the randomness of it all — who lives, who dies, who matters. And then, he told me, he got through those moments in an unusual way:

"I told myself stories. Like this one: A rich man's little four-year-old daughter is walking along Marine Drive when she hears a tinkling sound. Her prized ring had slipped off her finger, and rolled onto the highway.

Unthinking, she turns to run after it, not seeing the Mercedes speeding at 80 mph down that lane.

At that very moment, the unshaven, dirty old man, bombed out of his mind with the latest shot of whatever he was injecting himself with, restlessly rolls over in his dazed slumber and knocks over a trash can beside him. Crash!

The rattling sound distracts the little girl, who stops and turns to see what the noise was ... and the speeding vehicle zips past. A few seconds later, the little girl runs onto the street, picks up her ring and steps back on the platform.

Neither the girl nor the drug-addict are aware of how close she had come to being run down by the car. Yet, he had saved her life!

And by cleaning up his wound at that ungodly hour, and putting him back on the streets, maybe I was helping him save another.

Elaborate, I know. Even fantastic. Today, I have other reasons to believe that everyone matters, that everyone is equally important. But in the wide, unlimited spectrum of the universe, we see and experience a tiny fragment, yet presume to 'understand' and 'know' causality and consequence. (We don't.)"

Dr. Mani does what so many of us do — we "create" stories about people and situations we know nothing or very little about in order to justify or excuse our anger, our actions, our perceptions. Yet, he chose to create a positive story.

Ed Brenegar, a pastor and business coach in North Carolina who works with the homeless, came out of his church one day and found a man crossing through the parking lot obviously drunk. To Ed the man was homeless, another addict, and an intoxicated one. No judgment, just noticing. Then the man saw the alumni sticker on Ed's car and said, "I went there." And rather than nod and get in the car Ed said, "Really? What was your major?" And he engaged him in conversation as he would anyone because Ed knows we all have a story. It turned out that several years prior the man lost both his wife and child in an accident. He turned to drinking to cope with the pain, and then lost everything else. In time, and with Ed's help, the story had a happy ending. The man sobered up (not overnight), got off the street, then returned to help the homeless himself. He died several years ago, still helping the homeless, leaving behind his story, one of millions that inspire others.

As a professional writer, I'm a story teller. And I know the power of story to change us. Whether it is a story we create, as my friend Dr. Mani did, or a story we discover, as my friend Ed did, stories determine our actions. We justify or vilify, help or harm, create or curse opportunities and people with our thoughts about what we think, believe or project about a person. What stories are you telling yourself about homelessness?

Photo credit: Tim Morgan