Left for Dead (29 page)

Nineteen ninety-six was an important year for me. I turned fifty that year, and had read somewhere that you shouldn’t expect
to climb supertall mountains much after that age. You start getting into physiologic problems. You’re on the downhill side of the power curve. I realized that I was losing just a little bit of edge every year, that I didn’t have quite the same level of strength and endurance. The window was closing on me.

Outside of work and sleep, about all I had done for five years was exercise and climb. My life had taken on a monastic quality. Now, with the Everest climb just five months away, I stepped up my conditioning program.

The first I ever heard about Everest came at a restaurant in Dallas where Beck and I were eating hamburgers. An acquaintance, John Hazleton, came up and congratulated Beck on being accepted on the expedition. My teeth nearly dropped out. Not only had I known nothing of this, I also was unaware of what it would cost: $65,000.

What made this news all the more disturbing to me was that Bub was about to go on a wilderness adventure of his own, a school expedition to the mountains of West Texas, which had me very concerned. This was an annual event. On a recent trip one of the boys suffered pulmonary edema, the same condition I believe my husband developed on Denali. I knew it was dangerous, and I wondered how well equipped the leaders of this outing were to deal with such emergencies. From the evidence, not very.

By this time, nearly three years after Antarctica, I’d grown accustomed to leading my life separate from Beck. We all still resided under the same roof when he was in town, but he and I were intimate strangers.

When he was gone, I refused to stay at home, the mountaineering widow and her brood. So, for example, when Beck went to Kilimanjaro, I took the kids to New York and had a great time with them. I certainly wasn’t going to wait for people to invite me over to their house because they felt sorry for me.

I never exercised fewer than five days a week, and had been getting out of bed for my workouts at four or four-thirty every morning, six days a week, for five years. My schedule with Brent was three one-hour sessions a week—all strength work—alternating with three days when I concentrated on endurance and aerobics. These sessions usually started with the lower-body cross-training machine. Then I moved to the revolving staircase for thirty minutes before finishing up on the recumbent bike, also for thirty minutes. Sundays were the only days I didn’t work out.

Now I added an hour of aerobics on strength days, plus an extra half hour on aerobic days in the morning, and another hour in the afternoon. This required patronizing two different gyms.

I did not take any vitamins or minerals or supplements, or pay particular attention to what I ate. I was on the see-food diet. If you see food, you eat it. In this way, I finally built myself up from the 150 pounds I weighed when I started climbing to 180 pounds, where I wanted to be.

Peach was not happy about Beck going to Everest. I remember that my husband and other people worried that Beck might
get frostbitten again. But the joke was “That’s nothing. Wait till he gets home and Peach takes a bite out of his ass for being that stupid.”

I tried to get him to talk to the kids. I said, “You need to talk to them in case something happens to you and you don’t come back.” He didn’t do that. When I asked him for power of attorney, he became furious. I said, “It’s not a choice.”

When I found out he was going to climb Mount Everest, I felt a little betrayed. I sat him down here in the house after he came back from Kilimanjaro. I said, “Please, please, don’t go. It’s way too dangerous!”

He said, “The death rate on Mount Everest is not that high.”

I suppose that’s true for people who don’t even make it to Camp Two. But I’d read somewhere that a lot of people who make it to the top don’t make it back down. I really didn’t want him to be there. He didn’t give me a satisfactory explanation.

I didn’t believe anything was going to happen to me. I truly believed I was going to go away for a few weeks and come back intact. The whole problem would disappear. I discounted Meg’s fears because I was so sure nothing would happen to me.

We went over to their house the night before Beck left for Everest, to tell him good-bye and to wish him well. Peach was in the bedroom and would not come out.

The two kids were there. In front of us, he kept telling them this was going to be okay. It wasn’t dangerous. Rob Hall was the best out there. He’d planned everything very conservatively. It was going to be fine. I didn’t listen to what he was saying so much as why he was saying it. The kids obviously were worried about their father being away and their mother being so upset.

He was talking to us, but clearly the message was for the children, too.

Just before he went to Everest, we had a coffee meeting. Peach was very conflicted. She said it was hard to go to the airport with him. She said, “I’m angry, but at the same time I’m terrified something might happen. You don’t want to send someone you love out to face peril having chewed their ass off. You want to hug them and tell them you love them.”

The people who know Beck did not require he become a mountain climber in order for us to enjoy him as a human
being, and to respect him. This was his need, not his friends’ need. He didn’t need to do this for us. About six weeks before he went to Everest I sat down in his office and closed the door and told him he didn’t need to do this to prove to me that he was my friend. If he didn’t go that was fine with me. I think he was surprised, and I think he appreciated it. But I don’t know how much it slowed him down. It was probably something I should have said sooner.

I don’t remember my exact response to Terry, but in essence it was “I appreciate what you’re telling me. But I want to do this. I’m prepared to do it.” I was touched by what Terry said. Most people do not have the courage to stand up and say, “Deny your dream. No one will blame you.”

In part, I was going because I had something to prove to myself. But at this late moment, I might as well have been jumping off a cliff. You maybe reconsider the idea on the way down, but there’s no turning back.

When I came off the mountain, I first had to deal with what I was, and where I was. One of the odd twists to this story was that nobody—including me—knew how badly I was injured. First I was dead. Then I wasn’t. Then I might as well have been dead. Then came Madan K.C. and the helicopter rescue. I wouldn’t know the whole unhappy truth of my medical condition for weeks.

All the photographs I’d ever seen of frostbite were of horribly swollen and blistered hands. At the clinic in Katmandu, my hands were cold and the gray color of a piece of meat that’s been left in a leaky freezer bag for a couple of years. But there was no swelling, gross discoloration or blistering. I knew what frostbite was. When the tips of my fingers were frostbitten on Denali, it was
really
painful. This time there was no pain at all.

Except in my psyche. It was humbling at the Yak & Yeti to discover they’d stationed some guy outside my door to come and wipe my ass if necessary. I’d go without eating for a week to
avoid something like that, which practically was the case, in any event.

Fortunately, Dan showed up. Then we went out to eat something. We found a lovely little restaurant in the hotel, a beautiful setting, and right off the bat I realized they didn’t know what to do with me. How were they going to serve me?

I had to find something on the menu you could eat with a spoon, and even then Dan had to feed me. I was not thrilled with that.

Then there were other people’s responses: the Nepalese official who stared me up and down; the housekeeper who dropped her mop. I was beginning to see how it feels to be a freak.

But I still didn’t sense what a disaster had occurred.

Back home in Dallas, where Terry White oversaw my medical needs, it was arranged for me to meet the hand surgeon, Mike Doyle. He asked me to spread my fingers, make a fist and cross my fingers on both hands, all of which I was able to do.

Mike said, “You’re probably going to lose most of your fingers on your right hand, and the tips of your fingers on the left. We need to get a scan done so we can look at the vessels.”

He called me later that day. I could tell he was really upset. “I don’t know how to tell you this,” he began, “but you don’t have any blood supply in your right hand. It stops above the wrist. And you have very little in your left hand. I don’t know what to say.”

My frostbite was so severe that no vessels were functioning. They had frozen in place and filled with thrombosed coagulate. The reason I hadn’t seen any edema or swelling was that they were completely dead: no vessels, no fluid.

This was a terrible surprise. I basically had a set of dead puppets. I was still (temporarily) able to pull the strings on them, because the controlling tendons extended into my forearms. But my hands were as good as gone.

My son, Beck, and his friend Charles White went to work on the TV remote control, gluing little paddles of wood to it so I could press the buttons. I was both touched and immeasurably saddened by that gesture.

We have a bright friend, Yolanda Brooks, who advises businesses on how to make their buildings handicap accessible. She brought by the books showing how to type with your teeth, and a whole range of other such devices, each page a testament to my inability to take care of myself.

There were some grimly funny moments. I remember sitting in a chair when a big chunk of my right eyebrow, hair included, fell off in my hand. Later, as I was walking down the hall, my left big toe broke off and went skittering away.

Our lamps were an interesting surprise. They turn on and off at a human touch. Of course, when I touched them with my dead hands, nothing happened.

I did try to see if we could get something back in my hands. I went to hydrotherapy twice a day, seven days a week. I did all the exercises. But all I was doing was working my dead puppets.

As you do that, you notice your fingers, one by one, start turning to stone. One day you can bring one of them all the way down. Next day, halfway. Next day it’ll wiggle a little bit. Next day, nothing. Gradually you watch them solidify, quit working, start to shrink and then mummify.

At my wrists you could see the demarcation between living
and dead tissue, where my body was trying to shed its dead member. It can actually do that with something small, like a finger or toe. But with something big like a wrist and hand, you have to cut it off.

Of course, my nose had been frozen, too, and would fall off. But I wasn’t really worried about my face at that point. I figured the worst that could happen there was I’d just be incredibly ugly. It did bother me, though, that I had to tie a pork chop around my neck to get the dog to play with me.

My hands were a different story.