Jeff Henigson on BBC Outlook

Yesterday, a notification popped up on my phone. “Traffic to your website has increased by 600 percent,” it said. I opened an app that can show visitor data, and, sure enough, the number had skyrocketed. People were stopping by from the UK, Russia, Nigeria, the Philippines, Finland, Liberia, Sweden, and dozens of other countries. It could only mean one thing: the story I’d recorded here in Seattle with BBC Outlook had been broadcast around the world.

Two weeks ago, at KUOW public radio in Seattle’s University District, I sat down for a conversation with Asya Fouks, a BBC journalist sitting in a studio across the Atlantic. BBC Outlook features “extraordinary personal stories,” and my teen battle against brain cancer and nuclear weapons had qualified. I was excited.

I’d been listening to BBC Outlook for the past few weeks, trying to get a sense of the questions that might be posed, and the story that I wanted to share. Of course much of mine is told in WARHEAD, but from my perspective as a teenager. I knew the conversation I‘d have with the BBC presenter wouldn’t stop there.

It ended up being a very easy interview. Asya is fluent in Russian, and she even gave me some perspective on the title of the story written about me thirtysomething years ago. We went over the one and a half hours booked by BBC and the folks at KUOW had to gently boot us out. I thanked Asya and Tom Harding Assinger, Outlook’s producer.

Last night, alone, I tucked myself into a comfy chair and pressed play on the BBC Outlook website. I soon heard some very familiar music, Sting’s Russians, which had touched me so when I was a teen, and I knew—or thought I knew—what was coming: the story of my teenage battles, against cancer and the Cold War, and for my father’s love and respect.

That was all there, but what was different was the ending. The Outlook story didn’t end the way WARHEAD does. Outlook peers deep into my adulthood, to the conversation I had with my father a month before he passed away. Hearing it again there, in a chair he once sat in, brought me to tears. I slept deeply last night, in peace.

Thank you to Asya Fouks, Thomas Harding Assinger, BBC World Service, and KUOW.