A Life of Pain and Agony Turns Into Life of Triumph

Leslie Smith doesn’t remember striking the match. She only remembers standing, arms outstretched as if crucified, and trying not to scream as the flames seared her flesh.

She failed in her attempt at self-immolation, but from the fire sparked by hopelessness and kindled by years of depression, she was able to bury the demons of her past and embrace a promising future.

After years of battling mental illness that once left her suicidal and homeless, she achieved her childhood dream of becoming a scientist. Now, at 38, she is in her first semester of medical school at East Carolina University on a full scholarship.

“I feel like I’ve lived two lives,” Smith said. “Two very different lives.”

Few would have envisioned that future had they seen what Sister Helen Wright saw from her office window that autumn day 14 years ago.

The figure looked like a mummy. But it was a woman, her arms and legs wrapped in dirty, oozing bandages, limping painfully up the front steps of Sister Helen’s office.

She had seen plenty of needy people come to the door of her ministry before, but none in such pure agony.

Sister Helen rushed to the front door, where stood this young woman, tall, slender and swaddled in bandages that hid all her black hair and lovely face.

Leslie didn’t cry. She didn’t seem embarrassed or ashamed. She didn’t avert her gaze, unlike so many of the street people who came to the nonprofit coalition of churches known as Urban Ministries.

She told the nun she was recently discharged from a hospital burn unit, and needed food and salve. Could Sister Helen help?

“There’s something to this young woman,” the nun recalled thinking, then invited her in.

It was a painful path to Sister Helen’s door.

Leslie grew up in Pittsburgh, in a home beset by alcohol abuse.

“Everybody in the family paid a price for it,” she says.

She was a good student and developed a love of chemistry in high school. But she was a loner and wasn’t ready emotionally or socially when she left home for West Virginia University in 1978. She made the dean’s list the first semester but soon became depressed. By the second semester, she stopped eating and holed up in her dorm room.

“I never came out of that room,” she says now. “That was my cave.”

Before long, she made her first suicide attempt--an overdose of sleeping pills.

By the time her classmates had graduated in June 1982, she had been in and out of psychiatric hospitals seven times, tasted life as a homeless person and tried to jump off a building roof.

That same year, after a therapist recommended a change in her environment, Smith moved to Raleigh to live with her aunt.

But the aunt, a single mother of two with a sister dying of cancer, couldn’t handle Leslie’s problems. One day, Smith came home to find a note from her aunt and a plane ticket to Pittsburgh.

Frantic, Leslie feigned a drug overdose to buy time. Then she committed herself to Dorothea Dix Hospital, a state mental institution in Raleigh. Her plan: Be there for a few weeks. The weeks turned into two years.

For a while, she did well at Dix. She even took a class at nearby St. Mary’s College, earning an ‘A’ in English composition. She also earned a reputation for helping other patients.

“She was one of those people who always kept other people’s spirits up, even when she had enough on her plate,” said Sandra Sink, who worked at Dix as a staff member of the Governor’s Advocacy Council for Persons with Disabilities.

But her progress took a downturn. She stopped eating. She tried to kill herself three times. A new doctor took drastic action: no more medication. If Leslie refused to eat, she would be fed by a tube.

It was Aug. 21, 1984, almost a year since she had been admitted.

A headache brought on by the abrupt end of medication turned her into a “basket case,” Leslie said. That night, pacing the hallways, she spotted cigarettes and matches a staffer had left in the psychiatric ward.

She wiped away tears as she recalled what happened next.

“I took the matches and I paced for a while . . . to decide whether this is what I really wanted to do. . . . I was tired of living as an institutional patient. I was not happy, I was not productive, and I didn’t want to spend the rest of my life on this Earth as a mental patient.”

She pinned up her hair before she struck the match. Singed hair would detract from her corpse in the open-casket funeral she wanted. She tried not to scream as the flames enveloped her.

“I was in the pain from hell,” she recalled. “You can’t imagine how badly it hurt.”

Smith suffered second- and third-degree burns over about 30% of her body. Her withered left arm was useless for seven years.

After hospital treatment for the burns, she was sent back to Dix; within a few weeks she signed herself out. She lived on the streets, dividing her time between local homeless shelters and sleep on a park bench.

But with Sister Helen’s help, Smith started to heal. Sister Helen found Leslie a room at a home for mentally disturbed women. But on their initial visit, the nun noticed two women staring into space.

“Leslie, no, we can’t stay here,” Sister Helen told her.

Leslie didn’t belong in a place like that.

“From the very beginning, you just had a sense that there was a lot of grit there,” Sister Helen said. “You just had a sense that she was going to make it.”

Leslie credits Sister Helen with helping her believe in herself.

“She valued me, as miserable and raunchy as I was, because I was a human being,” Smith said, crying. “Nobody had ever done that. It made me feel like somebody in this world cared about me. She was like a saint.”

Leslie began volunteering at Urban Ministries. She lived for a while with Charlie and Marty Coe to tutor their daughter, Heidi, who has cerebral palsy. She sometimes made their life difficult, but “she was just a genius at finding out ways to teach Heidi chemistry, electromagnetism,” Marty Coe said.

After leaving the Coes, she spent three years in area rest homes, worked with the Wake County Mental Health Assn. and served on a state mental health study commission. With help from the state, she moved into her own apartment in 1990.

Two years later, she met Jan Drake, head of the molecular genetics lab at the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences in Research Triangle Park. Drake offered Leslie an unpaid job as a lab assistant. Buoyed by her dream of becoming a scientist, she decided to wean herself from the 44 pills she took daily, although her therapist warned against it.

“It was throwing my dream into my lap,” she said. “So I told my therapist goodbye.”

While Sister Helen helped Smith believe in herself, Drake made her realize she could be a functioning member of society.

Leslie took her last pill on Jan. 8, 1993--her 33rd birthday--and went to work. She was put on the payroll later that year.

“I would do my experiment and rush home and not be able to sleep, wondering what the results would be the next day,” she says.

Encouraged by Drake, Leslie enrolled at North Carolina State University. Then, in 1994, she won a Glaxo Wellcome Opportunity Scholarship, which recognizes students who have overcome adversity. She enrolled at Duke University and graduated with distinction in May 1997 with a degree in biochemistry.

With a scholarship from the UNC Board of Governors, she entered med school at ECU. She hopes someday to work with poor people of the southern Appalachians. There’s an obligation, she says, to help people who cannot afford good medical care.

“There was always somebody there when I wasn’t able to do it for myself anymore.”