When Adventure Meets Infectious Diseases

Paul Sax: [00:00:14] Hello and welcome to the Let's Talk podcast. I'm Paul Sax, editor in chief of Clinical infectious Diseases. And today's guests are Mike Reiss and his wife, Denise Reiss. Mike and I go way back. We were college friends, and many listeners may know Mike as a longtime writer and producer for The Simpsons. What they may not know is that he and Denise are among the most well-traveled people on the planet. Over the years, they've visited well over 100 countries, including destinations that do not appear on typical travel itineraries. Two years ago, I interviewed Mike about his travels, and one detail especially caught the attention of my ID colleagues. Despite all this globetrotting, Mike's travel preparation consists largely of checking the weather and packing a suitcase. So today we'll talk about some recent adventures. And importantly, when travel finally led to a serious illness much closer to home. This is an ID podcast after all. Mike and Denise, welcome. Thank you.

Mike Reiss: [00:01:12] Great to be here.

Paul Sax: [00:01:13] So, Mike, we've established that you've traveled more than almost anyone I've ever met, actually, anyone I've ever met, except for Denise. So over the years, have you slowed down at all?

Mike Reiss: [00:01:23] You know what? I engineered a new career for myself. Where? I am a lecturer on cruise ships now, and we're at sea about ten months of the year. And it really, you know, it keeps Denise in constant motion. She's always moving, so she's happy, but I don't have to pay for it. And I like that. And, you know, it's a little more comfortable than just sort of the rough travel we were doing just at the mercy of local hotels and local drivers. It's still getting us the places we've never been. Every you know, there's a lot of trips to the Bahamas, but just on our very recent cruise, we went to Angola and The Gambia.

Paul Sax: [00:02:13] You mentioned that Denise is the one who wants to keep moving. And you're really the architect of these adventures. So how did you become interested in seeing so much of the world?

Denise Reiss: [00:02:21] When I was a kid, you might remember that Europe on $5 a day was a very popular thing. These travel books. The idea of going to Europe in the 70s was so inexpensive, and my mother was the one with the interest in this. So she had a couple of kids, me and my little brother. She just said, let's go to Europe together. And my daddy stayed at home. [laughs] We had a really crazy, wonderful adventure for very little money. So I remember when we got back from that trip, we were at the airport waiting for daddy to pick us up. My mom said Europe didn't seem foreign enough. Next year I want to go to the communist countries. Back then ordered a tour, an American Express tour of Russia and all what we knew was the Iron Curtain countries. We went to Poland and Romania. So she wanted this more foreign feeling. And then the year after that, she said, I want to go around the world. So I got used to that. She and I were very close, and we traveled very well together and had the most wonderful adventures, something different from almost anybody I knew.

Paul Sax: [00:03:28] Wow. So it's kind of in your blood. So in the past year, like you mentioned, these cruises, what are some of the highlights that stand out? So Mike and Denise, both of you can choose.

Mike Reiss: [00:03:39] I was really happy to be hitting the new countries. I just mentioned Angola and The Gambia.

Paul Sax: [00:03:47] And Denise, what's your choice?

Denise Reiss: [00:03:49] We had a couple of really crazy adventures very recently. One of them was swimming with whale sharks and we were very close. We were so close. Mike was sure he was swimming into the whale shark's mouth.

Mike Reiss: [00:04:02] There was literally a current pushing me into its mouth, and I had to kind of fight that.

Paul Sax: [00:04:09] How does this compare to some of the other dangerous things you've done?

Denise Reiss: [00:04:12] I suppose the most dangerous would be when we booked a submarine cruise, the submarine trip down to the bottom of the ocean to see the Titanic.

Paul Sax: [00:04:21] Yeah, I remember Mike had sort of an escalation of his Hollywood fame. Briefly.

Mike Reiss: [00:04:27] I was famous for four days, and I gotta say, that was more exciting and much scarier than going to the Titanic to be in the middle of kind of a media circus like that. The phone and the email just never stopped ringing. People just kept calling and calling, and I don't know how they got hold of me. And later I found out, any way you can get ahold of somebody, they did it. They tracked down my siblings and got my number or my publisher or my speaking agent. Every way in they could find. They found. And I was hearing from all over the world and it never stopped.

Paul Sax: [00:05:10] It was also a lesson in the short attention span of the media, because it instantly ended.

Mike Reiss: [00:05:14] There were four days when it was missing, it was missing, and the media had glommed onto this idea that there were, uh, 96 hours of oxygen in the submarine. When the sub went missing, Denise and I both knew they're dead. We knew it instantly, she said, I'll bet it imploded. And I would go on the news, you know, they wanted to interview and they go, do you have any hope? I go, I have no hope at all. They say, well, yes, well, thank you, but we still have hope. And they just stretched it to 96 hours. And they were acting sort of like it was a game show that like at 95 hours, everything's cool. And one hour later, boom, everybody be dead. But of course, on the fourth day, they found the wreckage and realized the sub had imploded after two hours.

Paul Sax: [00:06:08] Yeah, oh my gosh, what an experience. It sort of relates to the next question I'm going to ask Denise, which is in all these years of travel, what is the closest you've come to seeing while you're away? Oh gosh, this might have been a bad idea.

Denise Reiss: [00:06:22] Well, there was a moment when we were separated and Mike was going down into the submarine, and I had a thought that if something happens to him, no one at The Simpsons will ever talk to me again. And I told Mike that when he returned and he said, The Simpsons. What about my family? That was an odd feeling. Just recently, I think we were in French Tahiti, and we went out with a French woman who said she could show us manta rays, didn't realize we would go into a very wild ocean. We found a lot of them. It was very exciting. They were huge. It was a little bit scary. I would come up for air and I'd see Mike sort of floating out into the ocean, into this wild ocean full of waves and rocks, so that I thought, well, let's get back in the boat. But the Frenchman wouldn't hear of it. She was really enjoying seeing the giant mantas.

Mike Reiss: [00:07:16] In Africa, we did something called walk with the cheetah. You just walk with the cheetah, you know, you're walking it like it's your pet dog in the jungle. At one point they're going pull his tail. He likes when you pull his tail. And I thought, no, he doesn't. So then when it was done, I googled the place I go, can this be safe? And the answer is no, it's not safe at all. And these cheetahs have mauled tourists a lot.

Denise Reiss: [00:07:44] I had a great time. I love seeing Mike with the cheetah, but we found out, yeah, this is very, very dangerous.

Paul Sax: [00:07:51] Well, at least it's not run with the cheetah because they would certainly, certainly outrun both of you.

Mike Reiss: [00:07:56] [laughs]

Paul Sax: [00:07:56] No disrespect to your land speed. Anyway, last time, Mike, when I interviewed you, I ended up like, inadvertently antagonizing some of my colleagues. You know, I meant to sort of criticize the mercenary ones who run travel clinics. You know, there are people who are running travel clinics mostly for money, but I ended up insulting everyone, even the people who are doing good service. So I am sorry to them. And I just want to ask you, in your comedy, have you ever accidentally insulted somebody that you didn't intend to? I mean, I know that comedy involves a lot of that. What's happened to you?

Mike Reiss: [00:08:32] There are a couple of times I know on The Simpsons, we did a joke that really hit people wrong and not a lot. You know, I did the math that we've done 80,000 jokes on the show, and maybe three of them really offended people. And there was one where Bart tells Homer to say to Lisa, you're adopted and we never liked you. You know, that's a good Bart line, but we didn't realize that is a major fear of adopted children. And wow, we heard from so many people. And I bring this up only because our mutual friend, Suzanne Martin, was doing a sitcom about a girl who feels she doesn't fit in her family. And she said, I'm calling it, "maybe I'm adopted." And I said, no, you're not. She said, yes, everybody loves the title. And I said, you're never going to call it "maybe I'm adopted." And the show finally came on the air and was called "Maybe It's Me."

Paul Sax: [00:09:38] Much better.

Denise Reiss: [00:09:39] I think there was also a time when Bart was mouthing off in class and said, I have Tourette's. And you had to change that also.

Mike Reiss: [00:09:47] Oh yeah. We had to change that, he pretended to have Tourette's syndrome did not go over well. I wound up being sued by a kid with Tourette's. We changed it to rabies in the rerun. And you know rabies is still not funny. But, you know, if you pet a foaming dog, that's your fault.

Paul Sax: [00:10:06] So you wrote about Denise getting really sick from one of these trips, and I read it. It was very funny, but I was struck by how worried you clearly were. Tell us what happened.

Denise Reiss: [00:10:17] It was the end of a wonderful cruise to Mexico. We had a great time. We did many, many things. It was at the very end. I had a stomach ache almost at the last night, and I remember we went to Shabbos. It was a Friday night. The rabbi said, for those of you who can stand, let's stand to say this prayer. And I turned to Mike and said, I can't stand.

Paul Sax: [00:10:37] Oh my God.

Denise Reiss: [00:10:38] I knew it was pretty bad and I didn't eat dinner that night, which Mike knew was bad. And then the next morning I didn't eat breakfast. This was all very strange behavior, and I was just barely getting off the ship. As soon as we got off the ship, I was still in quite a bit of pain, but I still think it's a stomach ache or this will go away. And then while we were in San Diego, we stopped to see a Doctor Who exhibit at the Comic Con Museum. And I'm looking at the show and I'm going, I need a wheelchair. And then I said, Mike, I need, is there a bench here? Can I lie down? He said, there's a bench here, but it's occupied. I said, it doesn't matter. I have to lie down on it. It was that serious. And then as we were getting our rental car, I said, Mike, I usually do all the driving. But I said, Mike, I can't drive. I'm too sick. Can you take me to the hospital? I was in too much pain to continue. So with that sentence, all Mike heard was I have to drive. He hasn't driven in 20 years or something. I'm always the driver. And so we had to figure out directions. I googled what is the nearest emergency room in San Diego? It's not that easy to drive. The driving is very fast and I think they're very aggressive drivers.

Denise Reiss: [00:11:50] So I'm trying to help with directions. It's very confusing. Anyway, we finally get to the closest medical center, which was the United States Navy. Drove up to the base. The soldier at the booth said, what are you doing here? Are you a soldier? Are you in the military? And Mike is desperate. He says my father was. [laughs] So somehow this big fire truck came down to meet us with these wonderful paramedics. I guess they said, who's the lady with abdominal pains? Oh. That's me. And so as soon as they engage with me, as soon as they talk to me, there may be some law or rule that you can't turn me away. And so even the soldier at the booth was saying, but they're not military. The guy just dismissed him and he said, follow me. We followed the fire truck into the emergency room. There was no parking, but they let Mike park somewhere and it was such an emergency. A lot of doctors took care of me immediately. We still didn't know 100% what it was. They thought it was appendicitis and they were ready to take out my appendix. But then they said, let's just look. They took a CT scan of my colon. Let's just get the swelling down. The inflammation down. I knew I had to stay in the hospital. It was just that serious.

Paul Sax: [00:13:01] I have communicated with Mike since then. And just for our listeners, you know, they'll be very familiar with this infection you had, which was Shigella, which is also known as E coli. It's a form of E coli that's really, really sick from it. Mike, uh, what did you think while this was all going on?

Mike Reiss: [00:13:19] You know, I was scared, I was scared, and I was trying to be a dynamic husband, but mostly, you know, I said, I'll sleep here with you. I won't leave your side. But partly I, I just didn't want to get back in the car and drive somewhere. I stayed by her side, but you know, it was bad. And I think Denise actually has very high pain tolerance. Yeah, she married me, but she was really suffering and it was horrible. I mean, I'll just jump to the real scary moment where she was just calling out to her dead parents and I go, wow, you didn't, you know, you didn't even want to see them when they were alive. But suddenly she was like, take me, take me. And I go, oh, this is really bad. And so that was it. I was quite worried. And in fact, you know, it took, I think, a couple of days to finally get the diagnosis of E coli and Shigella. And so Denise said, well, what is it? And I'm on her phone and I'm looking and I'm reading her everything about E coli except the last paragraph that said, there's a 1 in 6 chance of dying. I didn't tell her that part.

Paul Sax: [00:14:31] We're joking about now in hindsight, but obviously it was a very serious illness. And Denise, at what point did you realize this is not just another bug? I mean, obviously guys travel so much. You have stomach bugs all the time.

Denise Reiss: [00:14:44] I had many, I guess you'd call it dark nights of the soul. I was in the hospital for five nights the first couple of nights when I had to get up and go to the bathroom. I was hooked up to two IVs. I was in utter pain getting in and out of bed, and I remember being in the dark bathroom and thinking, well, I've had a very good life. I've had a very full life. I thought there was no way I can live with this. I'm going to have to end my life if this is all I'm ever going to have. That's how dark and scary it gets. And I did get maudlin, as Mike says. I said, oh, if my mother and father could see me now, they'd feel so bad for their little girl. I did get very sad about that, so I knew it was a terrible illness. I remember I had wonderful Navy people looking after me, Navy corpsman, very efficient, businesslike people. And I remember saying, do you think I'll make it? Do you think I'll live? And they were like, oh, sure, sure, I don't know. I don't know what they really thought. So I knew there was trouble and I didn't really see a clear path to getting better. The other thing is my stomach. I walked in with a flat stomach and even the Navy corpsman said you had a flat stomach. What happened to your stomach? It just got huge. Like I was pregnant or something.

Paul Sax: [00:15:57] These infections in the abdomen cause lots of what we call distension. You know, the illness is like this. Take a long time to completely recover. I mean, even after you get out of the hospital, people often feel fatigue and just not themselves for weeks.

Denise Reiss: [00:16:11] Even after I left the hospital and I stayed while I was in a hotel alone for a week because Mike had a contract to fulfill. So I was on my own and I stayed in a hotel. So there was at least there was a front desk, there was breakfast served, there was something for me, and I could walk a little bit around the hotel. And then I stayed with friends. As I was recovering, I still wasn't sure if I was ever going to be well again. And I wrote a desperate email to our friend Andy Borowitz, who had had a twisted colon.

Paul Sax: [00:16:40] Oh yeah.

Denise Reiss: [00:16:41] He had had very major pain in the same area. His was a little different. I didn't have a twisted colon, but something in me halted all. All functioning in my colon. I think they called it a total breakdown of your digestive system.

Paul Sax: [00:16:55] Well, you had colitis. When it stops, it's called an ileus.

Denise Reiss: [00:16:58] I had ileus, everything broke down. Nothing was functioning. I remember writing to Andy Borowitz asking him, were you ever friends with your colon again? The colon felt like a stranger in my body now, something that not really taken for granted. I was proud of my stomach of iron and now it was. I was like carrying a basket of snakes. It felt very different, felt very foreign to me.

Paul Sax: [00:17:22] How has this experience changed the view that you two have of some of the exotic travel that you do? And of course, we're talking right in the recent wake of of the hantavirus cruise ship outbreak. So Mike changed your attitude at all?

Mike Reiss: [00:17:37] I was fine. It certainly didn't change me. The real shocker is I had to bail on her at the hospital. We had a contract for another cruise that Denise had worked three months to set up the paperwork. It was an Australian cruise. I needed a working visa and she put so much work into it. She said, you have to do the cruise.

Paul Sax: [00:17:58] Oh gosh.

Mike Reiss: [00:17:59] And so I did it and I spoke on it. A nice three week cruise, and then I come back to her. So I'm leaving Denise to go take a cruise because I'm the world's worst husband. But I'm kissing her goodbye, honey, I love you, and you're going to be fine. And I walk out and I had to come back in to say, uh, if you die, where do you want your body? Because we hadn't discussed it. I did that, I go on the cruise, I come back and we have another cruise booked and Denise is ready to get on. And it's pretty much the exact same cruise, the one that nearly killed her. She's getting on the same itinerary this time. I think it was LA to Mexico. It just looked like, well, time to finish the job. But she got back on it no problem. And she within days you were eating everything.

Denise Reiss: [00:18:51] I did recover and we started doing a lot of wonderful things again, so I'm grateful for that.

Paul Sax: [00:18:56] One thing that Andy jokes about is that when he has spoken about his experience, which was this a volvulus that nearly killed him, he says that he did recover. Sometimes the people he's talking about to like, applaud or say, thank goodness. And he said, well, of course I recovered. I'm here right now.

Mike Reiss: [00:19:13] [laughs]

Paul Sax: [00:19:13] Some rapid fire questions. What's the most overrated destination?

Mike Reiss: [00:19:18] I'm going to go with Christ the Redeemer in Rio. And you get there you go. It's not that big. And there's very you know, it's sort of done what, art Deco style. So not a lot of work went into it either.

Paul Sax: [00:19:32] Plenty of people up there though.

Mike Reiss: [00:19:34] Rio kind of in general is that kind of place where you get there and there's not a lot going on. Big city. You see the overrated Christ. Then you go on the sugar loaf and look up at the Christ, and then you're done.

Denise Reiss: [00:19:51] We just saw another Christ the Redeemer in Funchal, Madeira, part of Portugal. It was interesting to me that that was four years older. It came four years before the much more famous Christ the Redeemer in Rio. But what Mike really got a kick out of was this Christ the Redeemer had been struck by lightning in his head. So his head was was kind of broken and they haven't repaired it. It was kind of cool to see him with a gash skull. It was very weird.

Paul Sax: [00:20:20] Okay, so what's the most underrated destination?

Mike Reiss: [00:20:23] Oh, my pitch is easily Iran. Iran, which we're currently flattening, is literally one of the nicest places I've ever been. Beautiful country full of lovely people, amazing sights and the people there, not the government, the people love America. They love America. Everyone in Iran has a cousin who came to America and got rich as a dentist or an engineer or something. So what we're doing right now is just so contrary to who they are.

Paul Sax: [00:20:58] It's very sad, very sad. Denise, what do you think? Underrated destination.

Denise Reiss: [00:21:03] I'm not sure because I love everything so much. I know, I know, Mike objected to Finland. He didn't think there was enough for him to do there. And I know he objected to Honduras. It was all pretty interesting to me.

Paul Sax: [00:21:16] Yeah, well, you know, I think that's one of the things that makes Mike's writing about travel so funny is that sometimes he'll take places that are very popular and slam them, like he did recently with Patagonia, which I, by the way, my wife and I really love. So a couple more questions, please. You were most nervous before visiting, but ended up loving. Mike?

Mike Reiss: [00:21:35] Got to go back to Iran.

Paul Sax: [00:21:37] Okay.

Mike Reiss: [00:21:38] Or I can say Syria, the nicest people in the world, and I wish the entire world was full of Syrian people. They were so friendly and lovely.

Paul Sax: [00:21:48] Do you have any places you think people in my line of work should visit?

Mike Reiss: [00:21:52] Africa is pretty good to look for sickness. I think I got terribly ill there once. I think I talked about it on your last podcast.

Paul Sax: [00:22:02] Any place left on your must see list, Denise, have you covered the whole globe?

Denise Reiss: [00:22:07] I want to go on the Orient Express.

Paul Sax: [00:22:09] Ah.

Denise Reiss: [00:22:10] I think in some way Jules Verne was the architect of some of my travels, some of my desires in life. I was absolutely determined to go to where he entered the center of the earth in Iceland. We went into that cave and we went to Stromboli, where he came out from the center of the earth. I was determined to go on a submarine to 20,000 leagues under the sea. Whatever I could get going. I would also like to do the Trans-Siberian railroad someday. I remember I talked about that to my mom and she went, ah poor Mike.

Paul Sax: [00:22:43] Since you are the person who's, like directing the travel, Mike, do you ever weigh in and say where you want to go?

Mike Reiss: [00:22:49] Yeah, just twice out of 150 countries. I wanted to go to Morocco. That was one of our first exotic trips because I liked the Morocco exhibit at Epcot Center, Epcot Center, by the way, for people who don't travel, does an amazing job of recreating nine different countries. I'm not kidding. You get there. They've really, it feels like you're there and they have just the most appealing Morocco in Epcot. So go to Epcot and try out these different countries to see which ones you want to visit. But I picked Morocco, and then after she dragged me all over the place, I said, you never took us to India. Why? Why haven't we gone to India? And she said, you're not going to like it. And I said, well, come on, the Beatles went there and I told my dentist, I said, oh, we're going to India. And he said, I don't recommend that. And he's from India. We went and it's a rough place to visit. It's a little too intense. It's a little too crowded.

Paul Sax: [00:23:54] I think it's intense in multiple domains.

Mike Reiss: [00:23:57] I have a new travel book out. It just came out the day we're recording this. It's called Bad Trips. I think you can guess what it's about, but it's called bad trips. So it takes you through one year of just nightmare vacations.

Paul Sax: [00:24:11] I'm sure it is very funny and it gives us places to avoid. Anyway, listen, Mike and Denise, thank you so much for joining us today. Denise, we are so glad that you have recovered from your illness, but at least it allowed you to speak to some infectious disease doctors. Take care, both of you.

Mike Reiss: [00:24:29] Bye bye.