Left for Dead (31 page)

The next and last procedure was to open a second incision, so that the mitt now would look like a primitively done fleur-de-lis. For this cut, they revisited my left side for skin.

I began about this time to inventory my body for areas as yet unoperated upon. There weren’t many. In the end, only my right
thigh would remain untouched. No one stuck a needle into it or anything. That had me concerned. I wondered what they were saving it for.

The last of the major medical projects was my nose.

It had been frozen pretty deep into my cartilage and bone. There wasn’t much to save. But before the whole works was cut away, they took an impression of the original, using a piece of chewing-gum wrapper. When Greg Anigian went back to work, he’d use the wrapper to re-create my nose’s contours.

In the interim, we had to improvise a way to keep my interior nasal passages moistened. The answer was a spray bottle. But since I now had no hands, guess who had to keep this little orchid’s humidity at acceptable levels? Another chastening experience.

They grew me a new nose. First, a vaguely nosey-looking object was cut out of the skin in the center of my forehead. Then, using pieces of cartilage from my ears and skin from my neck, they shaped my new nares to give the whole thing some structure, and got it growing, upside down, on my forehead. I was careful not to allow the kids to take pictures of my upside-down nose, lest they sell them to
The National Enquirer
.

I also discovered that my unique deformity was a foolproof tool for sorting out my true friends. They all laughed their fannies off when they saw me. Everyone else was just polite.

The key was to wait until the new nose was fully vascularized. Greg scheduled me for one replant operation that he scrubbed when a look at the replacement part revealed it wasn’t fully cooked.

Once he was comfortable with it, he cut the new nose loose,
swung it around on a pivot of skin, brought it down and sewed it into place. Then they stitched up my forehead.

At this juncture, I looked like some has-been pug, my nose a misshapen muffin below an odd little curlicue of skin. The final step was to take a piece of rib from my right side and attach it between my nose and palate to give the new feature some structural uplift.

I think they did a pretty fair facsimile of the real thing, and I was happy with my new nose, with a single reservation. Since the nerve supply remained intact when it was swung down, every time I’d take a shower and the water hit my forehead, my nose would itch.

Beck and I were not communicating at all during this period, except on practical issues such as his health. There wasn’t time. I was too tired and too stressed out and he was too sick. All I knew for a fact was that I did not plan to grab the kids and walk out, or send Beck to some convalescent center. At least not right away.

I did see evidence that he’d reformed himself, in part. There was that telephone call from Dr. Schlim’s office, totally out of character. He was reaching for me, and I soon had a partial explanation why—the epiphany on the mountain. He also appeared genuinely contrite for all the pain he’d caused. What’s more, Beck seemed to see the kids and me in a new light, maybe the light that awakened him on Everest. At this point he couldn’t run away if he wanted to, but he didn’t seem to want to.

I’d built up a lot of scar tissue over the previous eight or nine
years, however. It was going to be very difficult, if not impossible, to trust him again. Even if Beck swore to me that he was a new man, it would be just words, not easy to believe. Although I didn’t say it, or even think it at the time, he needed to prove himself. Action was necessary. If we were going to turn things around, it wouldn’t be a big slow bend in the road. It would be a U-turn.

My brother Howie was the catalyst.

Howie was being his old reliable self: completely nonjudgmental, that incredible empathy. One time when we were all in Jamaica he befriended this scruffy character named Hedley, who became Howie’s fast friend. Never mind that Hedley had a drug problem and that the security people wouldn’t let him near the hotel, he and Howie were good buddies. Hedley doubtlessly was in it for a possible buck or two, at least at first, but Howie’s goodness must have shone through. He even trusted Hedley with a credit card, and wasn’t disappointed.

Howie flew to Dallas in his funeral suit the moment I called to tell him Beck was dead that Saturday morning, and arrived not long after we learned that Beck was alive. He took the children out for hamburgers, and kept an eye on things until he was sure my friends were providing us the support we needed. Then he said something funny about not liking crowds and flew home to his wife and daughter.

We continued to keep in close touch through Beck’s constant medical crises into August of 1996, two months after the amputation, when Beck finally was well enough recovered for us to plan a brief family outing. Dr. Anigian delayed a scheduled procedure on Beck’s left hand for three days, and we all flew off to
Fripp Island, a short distance up the South Carolina coast from Hilton Head, where Howie, Pat, and their daughter, Laura, joined us.

Within a day of our arrival Howie became seriously ill. I remember he walked up from the beach looking ghastly. “I really feel bad,” he said. Howie’s skin was white and he was sweating. He complained of chest pain.

There’s a history of heart disease in my family. Howie was overweight and smoked most of his life. It seemed pretty likely to Beck and to me that he was having a heart attack.

Howard walked up to me ashen, with a sense of pending doom. He was sweating profusely. Even my old doctor books would describe that as looking an awful lot like a heart attack. I thought to myself, Howard, you simply cannot die on me here. If you do, I’m going to have to walk into the surf, and just keep going.

We got him to a nearby hospital, where the doctors also believed a heart attack had occurred. But when they did a sonogram as part of their battery of diagnostic tests, they discovered a mass on Howie’s liver. Next day, a CAT scan confirmed it: Howie had a primary cancer tumor on his liver, a hepatoma. It was big and the type of tumor that grows like a weed.

I reacted to this news much as I’d reacted to word that Beck was frozen dead to the side of Mount Everest. I went numb. I
couldn’t absorb it. My capacity for pain was momentarily overwhelmed.

I immediately knew Howard’s likely outcome. I wanted to tell him that dying just isn’t that hard. I’d done it once. I knew something about it. And I knew that for me, it would be much easier to face a second time. The fear is greater than the reality. If dying was really so difficult, there’d be some poor Bubba out in West Texas who couldn’t quite get the hang of it and would be immortal as a result.

I never got around to telling Howard all this. Nevertheless, he managed his own death with a fair measure of grace.

In Beck’s case, we’d mobilized to rescue him, not realizing the impossibility of what we were trying to do. Now, I wanted a second miracle, a second rescue mobilization. Like an answered prayer, it materialized. This time, however, love and hope weren’t enough to pull Howie through. Instead, it would be me and my family who were saved, in a wholly unforeseen way.

To my infinite amazement, Beck got involved.

Atonement definitely was on my agenda after Everest, but I didn’t respond to Howie’s needs as an act of expiation. First of all, I loved him. That was a big part of it. I’d been wrestling with
the question Who do you love? and realized it was my family, the people who make up my existence. Now that I wasn’t shielded by my goals, and had no other way to go hide myself, it was natural to respond as I did.

Also, I got involved with Howard because I was really trying to figure out how to actually
be
a different person. Peach and the kids always had been important to me, but I hadn’t acted as if they were. In Howie’s case, in the past I might have been sympathetic, but I would have left everything to Peach. Now I became viscerally engaged. I did not want to stand by and watch. I did not want to be immaterial in this.

It began the moment Howie didn’t feel well at the beach. Beck sat with him and talked to him. From then on he threw himself into it. Before, he might have said to me, “I can’t possibly do this. I don’t have the time.” Now he was saying, in effect, “I’m on your team.”

Howie was in a miserable state. He had this terrible tumor, and all kinds of trouble with his managed-care system, Kaiser Permanente. I did not hold out much hope for saving Howie, but I also knew that if we didn’t move ahead in a hurry, nothing would happen. If there was anyone who should be able to help a person in his situation, it was a person in my situation. That’s what I thought, at least. In truth, I was totally impotent. It was frustrating beyond all belief.

I couldn’t get the system to give a shit if Howie was alive or dead. I called the head man at Kaiser Permanente
dozens
of times. I could never get past his secretary. He would not return my phone calls. When I did manage to get hold of a human there, he’d say, “I’m listening to ya. I’m hearing ya. I know where you’re coming from. What can I do to help you?”

Of course he was going to do nothing. He was reading from a script. He didn’t have the authority to do squat.

I’d ask, “Would you please have someone who can do something call me back?” And he’d just say again, “What can I do to help you?”

I called and called and called. I thought, These yahoos! I’ve never seen anything so insensitive, so
brutal
. Here’s a man who’s dying and they can’t return my phone calls.

Beck never would think of making a doctor’s appointment for me or the kids. But with Howie he became quite aggressive. I remember he chewed someone out. Called him a miser and said he didn’t care.