Death Grip (21 page)

“What are those?” he asked. “Some sort of medicine?”

“Anxiety, man. Anxiety.” It was our first of many trips together, and we were just getting to know each other.

“Really? You're popping anxiety pills up on the rock?”

I told him that I had to, that I took the medicine daily for a panic disorder and that my doctor had said I'd need them my whole life. Later, as Michael stayed in touch during my struggle to quit, he told me, “I had to wonder how that worked, you being a climber and all.”

Around the turn of the century, I had a Flatirons training circuit I'd do at least once a week, a mixture of free soloing and bouldering on the First, Second, and Third Flatirons that comprised miles of hiking and thousands of feet of climbing. I loved flogging myself this way, alone and in constant motion for hours, sweat stinging my eyes, red planes of sandstone flying by, the Ponderosa dropping away to become a lush green carpet and the city a distant roar beyond. In general on the Flatirons' east faces the rock is tilted only at a forty-five- or fifty-degree angle, and you can usually find good ledges to chill out on—it's almost a hybrid between rock climbing and scrambling. I nearly always felt comfortable soloing up there (it's a Boulder rite of passage), but as 1998 became 1999 I started to feel erratic, unpredictable bursts of fear. One afternoon, I had a terrible panic attack alone on a foot-wide ledge one hundred feet up the East Face of the First Flatiron. I eventually calmed down, took an Ativan, and reversed back to the ground, but the experience had so shocked me that I felt panic flares whenever I climbed past that spot again. I never quite knew when or why the attacks would hit—was it from not eating enough, overexertion, mood swings? Or maybe those little white pills?

I actually tried to quit the pills twice, in 1999, my first semester as a creative-writing major in CU's master's program. That September, I made it down to 0.5 mg of Ativan over a few weeks but became so shaky, sweaty, and agitated that I quickly upped my dose. Out at the rocks, I'd felt myself go from fit and focused to paranoid and irrational. Exposure—drop-offs—filled me with horror; every hold looked loose, as if it might explode and precipitate a fatal fall; and I could barely bear to watch friends climbing, fearing I'd witness a terrible accident. When I broached the subject of my mounting fear with the psychiatrist he never implicated benzos, even when I asked if he thought I'd been on the pills too long. Instead he suggested another medication, “alprazolam, which also has some great antidepressant properties.” As I recall, he neglected to mention that alprazolam is generic Xanax, a benzo with high potency, rapid onset of action, and a short half-life (six to twelve hours, to Ativan's ten to eighteen
7
) that essentially makes it “benzo crack,” with the potential for profound interdose withdrawal. In fact, I don't recall him telling me that Xanax was a benzodiazepine at all. On alprazolam, the anxiety worsened immediately. One week in, up on CU campus as I rode an elevator to meet a friend at the biology lab where he worked, I had a perfectly pointless panic attack—elevators had never bothered me before. “Whatever these pills are, they aren't doing me any favors,” I thought as I huffed into the hallway in a tizzy. I asked the doctor to switch me back to Ativan, tried to quit again that December, and hit the same wall at 0.5 mg, going straight back to two milligrams a day. I had neared the threshold both times, unaware that each dosage reduction was going to be tougher than the last. I would later realize I'd given up because of rebound anxiety, a flare-up in anxiety symptoms caused by tapering too rapidly, mistaking it for my baseline state. The psychiatrist never suggested otherwise. “It's your panic disorder coming back, Matt,” was the party line. I tended to believe his assertion that this panic disorder was a lifelong condition we could never again leave untreated. The evidence was right there before me: Each time I tried to quit my pills, the panic came back worse than ever. In fact, this same sort of “relapse” can happen with all the psych meds thanks to the changes they inflict on neurotransmitter systems, trapping people into becoming patients for life.

By 2002, I'd completed my master's degree and moved to Carbondale, to work as an associate editor at
Climbing
. I calculate this as the last year I knew peace, before the pills dulled my edge as an athlete, before tolerance withdrawal made the anxiety so pervasive that I could no longer rely on climbing skills I'd spent sixteen years honing. By 2003, the anxiety had in fact become so bad that I started seeing a therapist again, a woman down in Glenwood Springs. I'd also taken a job as senior editor for
Climbing
's main competitor,
Rock and Ice
, right across the street. My therapist knew about my taking benzos, but not the wine and weed. “We have to get you off these nightmare drugs,” she told me one day during session. “They're not doing you any favors.”

With the therapist, I worked my way through a somewhat dated series of tapes, exercises, and readings on panic anxiety. The tapes featured two Southern women bantering idly with a psychologist. (“Ah do declare, Beulah Mae, I saw a bare-chested Negro upon my front lawn and felt mah heart go all aflutter.”) I couldn't relate to their dialogue—their quaint antebellum agoraphobia treated little with my own—but I did use the relaxation tape to get to sleep at night. It felt like a huge step backward to have to work another panic program after I'd already successfully done so in my early twenties. Why this again, why now? Why the need for therapy again? Hadn't I already grappled with the life events, childhood trauma, and poor dietary choices that initially drove the panic? I knew exactly what panic attacks were and what caused them, and yet I kept having them anyway—on the rocks, in traffic, in movie theaters, at the office. More and more often, the attacks amassing to tower ever higher like monsoon thunderheads until life became all but unbearable.

In late 2003, bored, curious, and a bit desperate for outside chemical intervention, I began ordering the muscle relaxant Soma over the Internet. I remember justifying it with,
Well, hell, I'm already on these two pills, Paxil and Ativan, so what's another?
Soma soon turned to Vicodin, for which I'd long had an affinity, though on the come-down, they only made my anxiety worse. I'd sit there on my deck each morning, shivering with paranoia as the sun failed to thaw my soul. I hid it all from my friends, from my coworkers, from my then girlfriend, Katie, a strong climber, fit blonde, and wise soul who'd moved to Carbondale from Boulder. Alone in my efficiency on nights Katie didn't stay over, I'd tuck into the wine, weed, and pills. And if she did stay over, I made sure I was well medicated before her arrival. In some sick way, I loved it, despite the fear. Or maybe I liked this sick fear, liked seeing how far I could push it. Years of practice had made me an ace at masking both panic and drugging; I have a good poker face. Later, during a mental-status evaluation in 2005, at my absolute sickest with withdrawal terror, a psychiatrist at the Mapleton Center would write, “In discussing the patient with the staff prior to meeting with him, they stated that from their perspective he reported a high degree of subjective anxiety but did not appear outwardly anxious.…” Neither did the doctor detect any anxiety in person: “[Matt] was not fidgety, did not have a facial expression reflective of anxiety, and did not have a tendency to create anxiety in me which I often experience … in the presence of someone manifesting the outward signs of anxiety or panic.” Perhaps being a climber, where you learn to mask your fear lest it contaminate your partner, had helped with this.

The biggest, longest-lasting panic attacks came when I smoked marijuana, not surprising given the high THC concentration of modern strains and their profound psychotropic effect. The fits roared in as thunderous as freight trains in those vulnerable periods of interdose withdrawal, leaving me sweaty and enervated, my right eye frozen half-closed as if I'd had a minor stroke. Still, I kept smoking. And God forbid I get separated from my pill bottle—then it would be even worse, with nothing on hand to “save” me, like an asthmatic fumbling for his inhaler. I took to stashing pills everywhere: the master bottle at home, miniature travel bottles for work, trail running, or the cliffs, one in my car, another in my climbing pack, one in a windbreaker pocket. So many squirrel caches all over I could barely keep track of them. There was no doubt that I was now an addict.

Finally, looking for a solution—any solution to the anxiety—I quit smoking pot. It helped for a spell, until it didn't.

Whether the Vicodin and Soma had triggered a final, catastrophic slide into chronic tolerance withdrawal is to my mind immaterial. I certainly would have or already had arrived there anyway: Benzos were the engine driving this train. (My psychiatrist would later attribute my increased anxiety to Vicodin and marijuana abuse, but never to benzos.) By Christmas 2003 the Ativan had jumped to three milligrams a day, and then four. I'd feel better for a little while with each dose increase—maybe a few weeks—then begin anew experiencing dread, insomnia, spates of attacks, and trouble breathing due to what had become chronic low-grade hyperventilation. It just got worse and worse, a classic downward spiral. By spring 2004 the psychiatrist, with whom I'd consult by phone back in Boulder, suggested we switch to a longer-acting benzo, Klonopin, three milligrams a day, which seemed like a step in the right direction: a seeming “dose reduction,” stabilizing the anxiety with an eye toward eventually tapering off once I'd “treated” the panic disorder with this new medicine. What I didn't know—but should have suspected from the way that first Klonopin knocked me on my butt—was that in terms of equivalency, one milligram of Klonopin roughly equates to two milligrams of Ativan. That is, I'd gone from four milligrams of Ativan a day to six.

Ironically, in order to escape my fear, I was hurtling toward the abyss. As a climber, I should have known that you can't run from fear but must instead turn to face it or it will kill you. I'd learned then promptly forgot this lesson as a teenager in the Sandias, when my friend John and I set off one midsummer day to climb a 5.9
+
called
Aviary Ort Overhangs
, a right-leaning arch/dihedral on the dark, somber north face of a spire called the Thumb. The route follows a big crack along the arch, the right wall a blank pane of red rock, the left a series of stair-stepping roofs. I took the first lead but, as I came closer and closer to running out of rope (and gear), I couldn't find a satisfactory ledge to stop on and belay. Only two years into lead climbing, I'd not yet learned that it's better to stop short of the end of the rope and build an anchor should you find a stance. In my inexperience, I'd climbed right past the first belay.

Small, shadowy depressions in the right wall, which looked like ledges from below, tempted me ever upward. I yelled down to John that I was going to push on, but each “ledge” turned out to be a sloping, crackless ramp. Soon John, tattooed, muscle-bound, his head shaved to the quick and wearing a big, awkward backpack jammed with our water, running shoes, and rain jackets, had to climb with me—“simul-climbing.” Simul-climbing is hairball even with loads of gear between the climbers, but I was having to run it out, going twenty feet between pieces; we couldn't chance a fall. Finally, I came to the end of the arch where the crack closed shut two hundred feet off the talus. I could go no farther—I only had two pieces left, a small nut and a TCU. I fashioned a belay as best I could, then braced into a stem on two footholds and belayed John up. “Try not to fall, dude,” is what I told him, but fall indeed he did as he reached my stance and led off into the crux. Ungainly backpack on, eyes bugging with tension, scrabbling to stay in balance on a delicate traverse, John was saved only by a drooping, downward-pointing piton he'd clipped off the belay and by me taking the force of the fall in my legs, before it came onto and in all likelihood tore our miserly anchor.

Be it on the cliff or in a fresh bottle of pills, you can't just continue along blindly, uninformed, unthinking, hoping for the best. You'll only get in deeper. By summer 2004, the tolerance withdrawal had become so pervasive that I was consistently failing on climbing goals. That August, I demurred on a ridge traverse of the Sierra's many Minarets peaks before a friend and I even tagged the second summit. I'd been training all summer, but psychologically I could not continue. Come autumn I had to stop climbing at 2:00
P.M.
each day and could only sit back and watch friends, baffled that they weren't feeling this terror and could keep trying, keep taking falls with impunity. I'd watch them as one might watch footage of astronauts on the moon, doing something so dangerous and alien as to be nearly unrelatable. Even though I'd always been a climber, and this is
exactly
what I do, I found myself benched. It felt permanent.

Despairing, not caring, I ordered more Vicodin. If I couldn't climb hard, I could at least
drug
hard. I'd range through the day on benzos and Vicodin, pounding Dr Pepper so I could stay awake at my desk; I started to get fat from all the sugar. I wasn't so good at my job in this loopy state: I'd often, without consideration, write incendiary articles (“America's 10 Best and Worst Bouldering Areas”) or
Onion
-style parodies of facets of the climbing world. But climbers have their sacred cows—as rowdy as we can be, most of us don't like to be made fun of, which garnered me negative attention on climbing forums. So I'd use aliases to snipe back at my critics, logging in as Sally Cummings, Rick Spoot, L'Innominato, Dongi Bzaznyk, and Hentai Bukkake, the latter of whom sent a series of e-mails to the editor of a competing magazine posing as a Yakuza gangster seeking to buy a famous female professional climber. I was drugged up, out of it, crazy in the worst way. I'm not proud of any of this. The flame wars only made my anxiety worse, entangled me in petty, hand-wringing battles over something I'd once loved—climbing—that had gone dark for my sad twilight as an athlete. Come night, I'd come home, silo more Vicodin, pour out wine, and plop down in front of the TV playing Halo until I passed out on my futon, my fluffy black cat Spike on my belly. I had the big Vicodin, the ten milligram ones, and was taking up to ninety milligrams a day. I was a nasty piece of work, all edgy and paranoid, no filter on my mouth. This was not the me I'd set out to be or that anyone would want me to be: Drugs take that from you. They ruin your personality. They make you angry.