Left for Dead (17 page)

Muffin finally keeled over, although Peach was suspicious that her death was staged. Not long thereafter—on Father’s Day, 1995, the year before I went to Everest—Peach presented me with a new cat, a clawed terror named Baby. I told her that Muffin had been quite enough, thank you, and that I really didn’t want another cat. Big mistake. Peach said, “Okay! You’ll regret this.” Baby became hers.

Whenever anything was too painful for Peach to handle head-on—when she really wanted to call me a horse’s ass—Baby was always there to help out.

A year later, I went off and got wounded. When I returned, Baby and Peach had totally bonded. There was nothing this cat could not have. Peach fawned over Baby, carrying him everywhere, and everywhere Baby went, he glared at me, the man whom Baby felt he had usurped. He was a liar, too, and said the most awful things about me, because that was in his character. He made up things that I supposedly had said and done to him. I always was trying to defend myself.

Missy, by contrast, was steadfast. She wasn’t at all sure of me the day I came home from Everest, and I sat on the edge of the sofa, all covered in bandages. I looked funny to her. I smelled funny. She wasn’t real sure.

This went on for about an hour. Finally she got right up next
to me and didn’t move a muscle until she finally decided, Yup! That’s Dad! and sat down beside me.

Baby was having none of that. He thought I was the funniest thing he’d ever seen. I mean, this animal was vindictive. Fueling that meanness was a threat I made at one point to make him go live with relatives.

The situation was manageable until one day when Baby discovered Muffin’s book of spells. We figured that out because bad things started to happen. Remember, Muffin was widely read. Baby was sort of illiterate, mostly because he was lazy. He could do only a couple of things. One was eat and the other was sleep. Other than that, he was adored.

Then I began traveling, and Baby saw this as the opportunity of a lifetime. He got out Muffin’s book, and virtually every time I left he’d wreak havoc somewhere in the world. The problem was that Baby wasn’t bright enough to have any sense of proportion. His idea of a lion, for example, was an itty-bitty toy that lived in a TV box.

Nor could he grasp geography. He had no concept of space and distance. If I went to Tennessee to deliver a talk, for example, and a town was leveled in Florida, we knew it was because Baby had worked his evil magic.

We began hiding my itinerary from him—just in case. As it was, the moment I was out the door we knew he’d basically try to blast me out of the air, drown me, get me shot.

My only recourse was to suck up to him, humiliate myself, which I gladly did, and which I gladly would still be doing. Alas for Baby, a 1998 visit to the vet to have his teeth cleaned ended suddenly in death under anesthesia.

We mourned for Baby. Even though he’d been the bane of my existence, I truly missed him. When Peach’s pain and anger toward me had to come out, it did so through Baby the cat. That allowed her to express herself, and made it easier for me to accept those words without becoming too defensive. After all, what do you do to defend yourself against a cat? Make him eat dry food?

Beck at Windy Corner, Mt. McKinley, 1989.

If you’ve never felt very good about yourself, you never really expect to, and therefore you don’t begrudge your lack of happiness. You’re never content, but you manage.

That is not to say you function normally. You are not emotionally whole, and you cannot bring much value to your personal relationships. But you can keep putting one foot in front of the other, day in and day out, just as you must do when you climb mountains. There’s even a certain grim satisfaction in succeeding in this way, by sheer dint of will and intelligence.

That was my outlook in the early years of my marriage. I did what I’ve always done best—work—and I courted a sufficient number of challenges and diversions to keep my mind engaged. It was a form of running away, of course.

I tend to be a little over the top at first with a new idea or interest. I’ll get fascinated and learn a lot about it. Then having scratched that itch, I move on to something else.

My first hobby was a Hobie; that is, a Hobie Cat, a type of
small sailboat in which I navigated Dallas-area lakes during my residency at Southwestern. This was not a fleeting interest. My long-term goal was to sail around the world. The cat was simply a first step in what I expected would be a methodical, protracted process leading to the actual expedition. Events, however, intervened.

I took correspondence courses in every imaginable subject, from oceanography to marine meteorology, acquiring as much technical knowledge and sailing skill as one can living several hundred miles from the nearest saltwater. I also attended sailing schools and assembled a large sailing library. Some of my practical experience was gained in the Caribbean, where I went “bareboating”—renting a boat with no captain or crew—on a couple of occasions.

If you think you’re good at shading the truth, you ought to see what it takes to convince some guy he should rent you, a stranger, his valuable sailboat for a few days. The first time I went I took along Tom Dickey and his then-wife, who was dubious enough to commit her last will and testament to toilet paper on the flight down from Dallas.

I instructed them not to ask any questions in front of the boat’s owner, just to stand there and look knowledgeable. If they were to inquire what the front and back are called, I explained, or what that tall thing in the center was, we might end up nailed to the dock, or drinking mai tais someplace, but we definitely would not be sailing.

Dickey called me Captain Bligh.

On my second bareboating excursion, I took along my father, my brother Dan, Tom Dickey, and my brother-in-law Howard,
who would be the team cook. Once again I had to warn this band of lubbers—Howie had done some sailing—not to betray their inexperience until we were safely away.

Sailing was a parallel to my later mountain climbing in that it involved the serious pursuit over time of the skills I thought I’d eventually need to achieve a somewhat unrealistic goal way off in the future. Gradually, I raised the bar. On the first trip we rented a thirty-two-and-a-half footer, for example. The second time the boat was a fairly sophisticated forty-one-footer. It was also like training to become a doctor, a matter of taking apart a chore and defining all the little baby steps that will get you where you want to go. Along the way, I picked up a succession of licenses and certificates, little trophies to mark my progress, substantive official proof of achievement, like merit badges or that God and Country Award I earned in Saudi Arabia but never received.

Out of sailing there also grew a second pastime—ham radio. This avocation lasted about two years. I enjoyed learning it, and I kept collecting ever higher licenses until I hit the top rank, which is called ham extra. By then I’d erected a one-hundred-foot radio tower in our side yard.

The professional portion of my life—the part to which I devoted so much time and energy—blossomed nicely. Unlike other physicians, who build practices over time, my group has a large and reliable clientele, the patient population at Medical City, whom we attend under contract with the hospital. Month to month, we serve at the hospital’s pleasure.

In 1982, I was elected president of the twelve-hundred-person medical staff at Medical City, a three-year commitment:
one year as president-elect, one as president and one as past president. At age thirty-five, I was easily the youngest person ever elected to the job. I spent my term in office employing the sorts of political and organizational skills few medical doctors are ever called upon to exercise. I discovered I had a gift for leading large organizations, that I can mold opinion and understand the logic of an impending struggle, no matter what’s being said. I also am not easily dissuaded.

One other obvious benefit of the job, when you work as a franchise as we do, is that your livelihood is unlikely to be taken away when you’re chief of staff.

I enjoyed it although—or perhaps because—my institutional and professional responsibilities were huge and unrelenting and tended to elbow aside competing claims on my time, particularly those of my wife and children.

Domestic life was not my forte. I wasn’t good at it—at all.

“All this work is for us,” I’d say to Peach. Whether that was or was not true, it made a good line.

My material success gave me something to hide behind, too. You certainly think that if you’re working really hard and you’re bringing home the bacon, and you give your family the things they want, that’s a big chunk of what you, as a man, are supposed to provide. I could say to myself, How bad can I be? I work hard. I provide all these things. I love them.

I would learn that loving someone, even loving them so hard your teeth hurt, is necessary, but not sufficient if you are not there for them. If you’re not there when they need you, then you force them to make a life without you. They have no other choice. You may believe that at some point you can turn around
and say, “Now, I’m ready.” But you’ll only discover that they’ve moved on. At some point you’re going to wind up a lonely old man, surrounded by your things.

It is possible that the hard work in the early 1980s had one other tonic effect, albeit a hidden one. Besides providing Peach and the children with creature comforts and financial security, as well as securing my own professional status, my three years as a doctor/administrator may have forestalled the return of my depression. I have no scientific evidence that this is so. But I can report that after my three-year commitment drew to a close, I rapidly decompressed.

Studies seem to show that those of us who believe we must achieve in order to merit love and respect—not just be ourselves—are vulnerable to emotional troughs when our opportunities to excel are restricted.

I have known Beck Weathers since he first came to the hospital. He is both a friend and colleague and our families are very close.

My routine is to visit with a pathologist, looking at the tissue slides, before I go see a patient. As a result, I see Beck a good deal, four or five times a week.

The mark of the good pathologist is wanting to know critical information about the patient, so that it helps him, or her, to provide relevant information in turn. Beck is excellent at that. We have a give-and-take relationship, which is professionally very rewarding.

Beck’s attractive qualities include his confidence. We build on
mutual respect in our profession. And he’s obviously a talker. Beck could talk the paint off a wall.

Terry and Beck are like a couple of nerds. They like to get together over a double microscope and look at slides of Terry’s patients and solve difficult problems together. They’ve always been friends.

Beck has keen insights, and an incisive approach to issues and problems, which we took advantage of when he was president of the medical staff. He’s a problem solver and a consensus builder. Beck can convince people that his point of view is valid. And he’s flexible enough to know there is more than one way of looking at things.

I recently was president of the medical staff myself, and I know that the job is really involving. It easily consumes a third of your time. Then it’s over. You’re no longer the person that everyone looks to for leadership and decisions. There can be a real letdown.

I missed the interplay of agendas and personalities, and the decision making. I got a lot of feedback as president, and most of it was very positive. I felt affirmed. When suddenly I was no longer engaged, full throttle, all the time, the black dog crawled back into my life. A brutal chapter was about to begin.

Depression does not overwhelm you in a day. It’s very gradual. At first you might just feel blue, or not zippedy-doo-dah. You don’t pay much attention to it. You think to yourself, Well, everybody has down days. You can’t be up all the time. Basically, you just try to ignore it, expecting it to go away.