A Shocking Experience

Ouch!

My job has provided me with a lot of amazing opportunities.  Fun things.  Neat things.  Sad things.  Even sometimes painful things.  Case in point, earlier this year I “grappled” with a professional MMA fighter.  The moves he performed were legit, but we were in a controlled setting I knew he wasn’t going to really hurt me.

Fast forward to today.  For weeks, we’d been talking about doing a segment on tasers on our morning show.  We found a professional who was willing to share his knowledge on the weapons and allow my coanchor Emily to “pull the trigger” so to speak on a taser.  The target: me.

I must say I was not forced or coerced into doing this.  It’s something I’ve always wanted to experience.  You always hear about tasers and see the stories with other reporters getting zapped.  In the last few years, two of my other coworkers had fallen victim.

Last week, we met with Chuck Doan.  Chuck is a police training specialist and someone I completely trusted for this project.  He explained what would happen and how it would fell.  We did it with me already on a mat, because most of the injuries from getting tasered is from falling to the ground.  It’s not the taser that actually does the harm.  And that’s why we wanted to do this segment.  It was a way to dispel some of the myths surrounding these devices.

Also, I was not going to be shot with the barbs either.  1) That would be extremely painful.  2) It would rip my clothes.  So this morning, Chuck and Emily spoke for a while about when police use a taser, why, and the potential for harm to the victim.

Leading up to today I had been calm and cool about it.  I posted that I was doing it on Facebook and got a flood of responses from people.  Some kidding around about me peeing in my pants (another misconception).  There were more serious concerns about possible cardiac arrest.  Again, I trusted Chuck’s words from our meeting before, and I had seen two other coworkers do this, so I wasn’t worried.

That is until I was there on the floor getting ready for this.  My heart was beating so fast, I’m surprised people couldn’t pick it up on my microphone.  And once the time came to actually do it, I could tell Emily was nervous.  Who wouldn’t be?  No one wants to zap an innocent bystander.  At least most of us don’t.

I was told the shock would last for 5 seconds.  That was the longest 5 seconds of my life.  It’s really hard to explain how it felt.  I wouldn’t characterize it as pain.  Definite discomfort though.  The ultimate zapping.  Well, maybe not ultimate.  Immediately after it was over, I got up to my knees.  I didn’t feel any different really.  There was that feeling of coming down off an adrenaline rush.  I could also tell where he had clipped the probe (probably not the right word) to my leg.  It was actually just clipped to my pants.  Most importantly, I didn’t cuss (this was live TV) and I didn’t pee or poo in my pants like so many had joked about.

My advice to you as you read this, if a police officer ever tells you to do something and you’re innocent, do it anyway.  You don’t want to get hit by one of this outside of a controlled setting.  Please take a few minutes to  watch the video, as Chuck and Emily do a much better job of explaining the importance of tasers and police using them properly.