Detour from Normal (8 page)

There are many things I've come to love about Phoenix. Mostly it's the home of our friends or, I should say, my wife and children's friends. I don't have many friends of my own, so like a parasite I mostly feed off their lives. That's OK by me. I couldn't ask for a better family, and fortunately, unlike me, they do attract many quality friends. There are always kids over at our house. Some visit so often that I feel they are my own children. Even dogs come to visit. We've had as many as nine dogs in our home at one time.

I love our comfortable home. Beth is big on making it that way. Through dedication she keeps everything clean and in its place—as much as is humanly possible with two teenagers routinely sabotaging her efforts. She decorates inside the house for every holiday, and when the holiday is over, all the many photos of the family and interesting interim knickknacks go back up in their place.

Then there are the pet rats. I feel so sorry for them because their already short lives are almost always cut shorter by gruesome tumors. Unfortunately, they were bred to be susceptible to cancer for our own selfish needs. They are the sweetest animals though. We love our rats so much that they stay in the family room with their cage right behind the sofa where they can see and be part of everything going on. They frequently scamper around on the sofa with us, using our legs for ramps to the coffee table or the love seat next to it. When we let them out, before exploring, they always come to us first to say hello, licking our
ear lobes like dogs with their tiny tongues, or tickling our cheeks with their long whiskers. They often snuggle under our arms or sit on our laps and groom themselves.

There are other things about home: the convenience store clerk with short black hair who always has a kind word; the mom-and-pop neighborhood hardware store run by the oldest people I know, which holds its own against the big retail chains only because those old-timers can tell you how to fix anything. Not to mention my favorite ice cream shop, Chinese restaurant, gas station, and movie theater. Just knowing where everything is and the quickest routes to get there, knowing all the speed limits, where all the speed bumps and school zones are, and what traffic is like at different times of the day. My favorite thing is to be with my family inside my home or be tinkering on a project in the garage. I'm not much of a yardman, much to Beth's chagrin. All these things make my home what it is. I was so happy to be back to enjoy it.

When I came home, no one pampered me or treated me like an invalid; they just treated me like me, which was exactly what I needed—I was eager to resume a normal life. I got around pretty well but had lost a lot of strength. At night I slept all right but could only sleep on my back to protect the staples on my belly. I couldn't imagine what they looked like, and I hadn't gotten up the nerve to look.

After several days my incision started to ache, and it was time to remove the bandage that had been on my belly since my surgery. I gently peeled the tape off around it, leaving a rectangle of glue. For the first time, I saw the zipper on my belly, all twelve inches of it. It wasn't a very pretty sight. It was ragged, red, and angry looking. Each staple had red halos around the punctures in my skin. It was clear that I needed to address it. I'd taken showers in the hospital a few times by wrapping
myself in plastic wrap to protect my bandages, IVs, and PICC, but this was the first time I would shower without protection. Running the warm water over the long cut and staples was soothing. I patted it with a soapy sponge to clean it the best I could. That really helped the irritation. I soon became an expert at rebandaging myself, and I stayed on top of the health of my incision.

I couldn't wear my old clothes yet, partly because I was so thin that half of them would have just fallen off anyway, but mostly because a lot of my incision was below the beltline. It was just too uncomfortable and probably unsafe to wear regular pants. I had to come up with a way to protect it. First I had Beth find me some black pants that were like pajamas. When that wasn't enough, it was time for some engineering. To keep anything from touching my incision, I put two pairs of socks inside the elastic waistband of my new pants to keep them off my incision—one on each side. Jokingly I called them my six-shooters.

Chapter 6

BAD SLEEP

After only a week, I was feeling stellar. On May 4, my surgeon, Dr. Demarco, gave me his stamp of approval to return to work. I was on short-term leave, but with four job losses in five years due to three layoffs and a company going out of business, I didn't want to give any reason for my new employer to let me go. On May 9, I returned to work. At first everyone was excited to see me and had many questions, but things quickly settled into familiar routines.

Apparently no one noticed my odd pants or the telltale lumps from my six-shooters. What they particularly noticed was my weight loss. I can't imagine seeing someone, then seeing him or her again only a few weeks later nearly twenty-five pounds lighter. Work seemed progressively easier as the week whizzed by and I quickly caught up. I had unimaginable energy, and people were beginning to wonder if I was OK. "Of course I'm OK. I feel fantastic," I'd respond. The concern grew, and unbeknownst to me, word got back to Beth. Of course, she was noticing things, too: I was talking more rapidly and sleeping less. I was abuzz with ideas and filled with vigor.

I had spotty sleep through May 11. By May 12, sleep was impossible. Overwhelmed, my racing mind collapsed, reduced from its recent
brilliance to a barely flickering candle. Increasingly scatterbrained and incapable of functioning as an engineer, I was forced to leave work early on May 13, unsure when I'd return. The next six days seemed the longest of my life. Attempting to function without sleep was unimaginable. With a freshly repaired colon, I'd been overly cautious, but on May 16, I took a Dramamine and two Benadryl and drank two mugs of Sleepytime Tea over the period of an hour and a half in a desperate attempt to induce sleep. From those I managed only three hours of slumber. Normally, any single one of those would have knocked me out for the night. Fearing overdose, I refrained from trying anything else.

Beth was able to schedule an emergency appointment with Dr. Demarco to discuss my dilemma on May 17. Aside from the few hours the day before, I'd already gone five days straight without sleep and several more with only a few hours of sleep. We met with him at his Scottsdale office, which was a lengthy drive for us. As we spoke, he was very standoffish and reluctant to help. He stated that I was sound from a surgical standpoint and would have to see a general practitioner for my sleep issues. We left no better off than when we'd arrived.

On the drive home, Beth and I were both astonished that a medical doctor would turn his own patient away, clearly in dire straits. There had to have been something within his power: someone to refer me to or someplace he could admit me for help. We could only surmise that he feared legal repercussions or that he suspected mental health issues and wanted no part of that.

Later that afternoon I took my daughter to the dentist's office for a routine teeth cleaning. I'd been to the office regularly for well over ten years and knew the route by heart. I was so debilitated by that time that during the two-mile trip to the dentist's office, I took two wrong
turns. In frustration I asked my daughter if she would navigate for me. It required my full concentration just to drive. I was unable to even carry on a conversation and still hope to make it to my destination.

Before that day, people might have assumed I was hypomanic or manic because of my rapid speech and elevated energy. In reality I was no different than someone on amphetamines. My only disability was that I was accelerated. Now I had burned out from whatever coursed through me. While waiting for the dentist to finish, that changed in an instant. The fog that had enshrouded my brain vaporized, and I was once again whole. To test that conviction, I attempted a conversation with the receptionist—something that would have been impossible when I'd arrived. We conversed comfortably for over fifteen minutes until my daughter was released from the dentist's care. Returning home, I further evaluated my abilities by executing a very random and convoluted route while speaking with my daughter all the while. I was easily able to drive while talking, confident of my exact location at every turn. For a brief moment, my life seemed normal once again.

Recalling this incident later, I recognized it not as a return to normal but as my first brush with mania. It was so subtle that, even now, I cannot identify anything that had to be sacrificed for that brief moment of clarity. Indeed, there seemed to be no negative consequences whatsoever. The improvements I experienced, however, were not at all random; they were in direct response to my disabilities—everything I'd
had difficulty with earlier was a breeze after I transitioned to that first level of mania.

Unfortunately, as the day wore on, I found that I still couldn't sleep. That night, knowing that it was imperative that I somehow rest my brain, I tried something desperate: I lay perfectly still on my back with my hands crossed over my chest and my eyes closed. I focused on an imaginary black spot in my mind, inhaled slowly, exhaled more slowly, and paused before repeating. Beth had taught me the breathing technique just that evening. In no time I'd been able to drop my heart rate by twenty beats per minute. I was confident the technique would prove the equivalent to sleep, providing the rest my brain desperately needed.

I lay immobile and continued the practice for four hours straight—and it nearly drove me insane. As dawn approached on May 18, I bolted from the bed like cornered prey, then paced and growled as imaginary captors closed in for the kill. My world was compressing rapidly, and the heat of that compression was reaching the boiling point. I rushed downstairs and outside to breathe, to cool, but there was no relief. Beth came to my rescue, and I tried to explain that something was wrong, that something bad was going to happen. Her response was "We need to go to the ER."

Part 2

CHAOS

Chapter 7