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Erika Lee Bigelow was out for St. Patrick’s Day in Portland when she saw a card advertising a contest hosted by the beer company Guinness. You had to write a 50-word essay finishing the sentence ‘The perfect pint of Guinness ...” The grand prize was a pub in Ireland. That’s right, you could win your own pub. So she wrote her essay: “The perfect pint of Guinness is simple: dark, rich, cool. A shamrock imbedded atop a creamy white pool. Guinness glides gracefully into glass, time woes, worries

This week on Sound Effect, we listen back to stories of survivors.Silver LiningsAfter leaving a Tacoma karaoke bar one night, Jason Padgett was mugged by two men. He suffered a concussion and developed post-traumatic stress disorder. He also became one of just a handful of people to develop a condition known as acquired savant syndrome. Now he’s a mathematical genius. Padgett talks about why, if he could somehow go back in time, he would choose to suffer the attack all over again.A Change Of

Sound Effect's Gabriel Spitzer talks with Tacoma resident Jason Padgett about the night he was mugged outside a Tacoma karaoke bar, and how that incident changed the trajectory of his life. Padgett suffered a concussion in the attack, as well as internal injuries. He also developed post-traumatic stress disorder and obsessive compulsive disorder. Only later would it become apparent that Padgett had somehow become one of just a handful of people to develop what's known as acquired savant syndrome

Autumn Rusch was born with holes in her heart – so many, that her cardiologist described it as looking like it had been shot with a BB gun. As she grew up, her condition worsened. She was hospitalized for weeks on end, and her heart would at times reach an unimaginable 300 beats per minute. At the age of 14, she was given a new heart that would prove a great match. She recently celebrated her 20-year anniversary with it. To put that into perspective, only about 57 percent of heart transplant

To live in the Northwest is, to some extent, to roll the dice. If you lived through the 1965 Seattle earthquake, or the Nisqually quake in 2001, or if you just read the New Yorker article about the “really big one” destined to hit our region, you know this well: There are forces under our feet that could just shrug our cities off into the abyss. The push and pull of continental plates is so huge compared with a puny little human. And yet, for a man named Kelcy Allen, the act of a child shielded