Left for Dead (30 page)

My brother Kit showed up at some point, and one time went with me to a hydrotherapy session.

“Wouldn’t it be great,” he said, “if we could get a fake hand, paint it black and then dump it in the rolling water? Then you stick your hand under your arm and scream, ‘My hand fell off!’ ” I thought it was a pretty funny idea, and I would have done it if Kit could have found a fake hand.

During this same period, I was trying to preserve my independence, even while I was surrendering to my helplessness, which was an inescapable reality. As much as I didn’t want Dan wiping my fanny, I
hated
for Peach to do it.

Peach also oversaw my showers. We only tried a tub bath once. Everything went smoothly enough until I tried to get out, and realized I was too weak to do so. I thought for a moment that we’d have to drain the water and then call on some friends to drag me up over the edge of the tub so I could stand.

After quite a while I actually managed to get to my feet. Thereafter, when we needed to wash my hair, I’d get a small stool to crawl up on the counter by the kitchen sink. There I
knew I at least could roll off the counter to get back to the floor.

I never said anything, but there was a lot of tacit “I told you so” in this period.

There was self-recrimination. Not really over going to Everest. That
was
. As bizarre as this sounds, there was some recompense in having gotten myself nearly killed in a famous place. It made it easier. It’s different than being mangled in an industrial accident, or sticking your finger in a light socket.

I had survived, which was concrete, and a contrast to those folks who didn’t. That helps keep you going. After hearing me tell my story before an audience, a very famous American astronaut once said to me, “You must have had a horseshoe right up your ass that day.” Yessir. I know that.

Ultimately, things like helping out on the IMAX film of the expedition, which I did while my hands were still wrapped up, also were therapeutic. You’re not just sitting in your room, staring at the wall.

Yet the truth of my situation was brought home in unexpected ways. We had a party for Meggie at an arcade not far from our house. There was another party for smaller children—seven or eight years old—going on. These kids would come running by, see me, and stop in midstride, almost as if they were struck dumb.

Each such incident reinforced my awareness of just how much I’d changed, and how different I was from everybody else.

About the only significant physical pain I felt at this time was the infection in my right arm. It was red and swollen, and each day you could see the infection advancing up my upper arm. It took a number of tries before we found an antibiotic with the power to stop it.

With all my various infections, I would stay on a steady antibiotic regimen for more than a year. Every time I tried to stop, I’d pus out somewhere and have to start taking the antibiotics again.

The real agonies hadn’t yet begun. The joke later would be that I underwent so many surgeries over the next year (eleven in all) that the doctors didn’t waste time sewing me up. They just put in zippers. Actually, there was a kernel of truth to the joke. I proved allergic to the surgical tape that covered nearly every part of me at one time or another. So on top of everything else, there was the indignity of having my skin blister and slough off under my bandages even as the rest of me was being sawn, snipped and sliced away, bit by bit.

Mike Doyle found a reconstructive plastic surgeon for me, Greg Anigian, who would operate to save whatever function possible in my ravaged left hand. Greg later rebuilt my destroyed nose, too. Reconstructive plastic surgeons—“dirty” plastic surgeons, in hospital parlance—are very different from their colleagues who specialize in cosmetic plastic surgery. They are not vanity engineers. What they do is big-time stuff, and they tend to be fantastic at it. The better ones can sew a fart to
a moonbeam. I’d put Greg among them, even if he is an Aggie from Texas A&M.

The surgical strategy we agreed upon would place me under general anesthesia for sixteen hours as Doyle and Anigian cut and stitched away. Mike’s part was comparatively straightforward. Had there been anything left of my right wrist, we might have considered fitting me with some high-tech device, or at least trying to preserve as much tissue as possible against the day that truly advanced bionic technology would become available.

But since no part of the wrist was salvageable, the decision was simple: just trim the limb up to where my arm was the right length for a low-tech prosthesis, such as the one I now wear. This was what I called the nineteenth-century, or Civil War, side of my surgery. It was essentially a battlefield amputation.

The other side was twenty-first-century work: multistep, complex and time consuming, not to mention risky. Greg Anigian would perform microsurgery and tinker with tiny vessels. Thrombosis and more dead tissue were a real concern. I did not want double stumps.

One of the first things I noticed when I came out of this surgery was that they’d strapped a fetal Doppler monitor on me—the kind of device usually attached to pregnant women’s bellies—to keep a close watch on my hand’s circulation.

Anigian had a little of my thumb and most of my palm to work with. For raw materials, he harvested a length of fascia from the left side of my head, a piece of the left latissimus dorsi muscle (and its blood supply) from my back and a generous swath of skin from my left side.

He wrapped the muscle tissue around my stump and hooked it up to the radial artery. Then he attached the fascia around my thumb and sewed it to an artery, too. Finally, he wrapped the whole thing up in skin from my side, creating a sort of mitt for me.

I was waiting for Beck in the recovery room after his surgery. He’d been extubated, which means they’d removed the tube inserted in his trachea to help him breathe.

I don’t recall ever seeing anyone in so much pain. He was shaking uncontrollably. Although he still was markedly drugged, Beck was suffering major-league pain.

The anesthesiologist was there, and he decided to give Beck more morphine. The problem was, even a small dose on top of what he’d already been given, and Beck’s unassisted breathing would be inadequate. So, while he was administering the morphine, I went to the head of the bed to work with what we call an ambu bag, a self-inflating rubber bag commonly used to mechanically assist patients’ breathing by forcing air into their lungs. I think I kept at it for a half hour or so.

I awoke from this surgery with a serious case of the shakes. The pain was excruciating and it was everywhere. A simple touch felt as if I were being beaten with a two-by-four. It was like suffering some monstrous seizure, but I don’t think it was a seizure in the sense that my brain was driving it. More likely, my muscles
had just polarized and were firing out of control. Think of shivering, but with your muscles maxed out, not just a little tensed. Everything on full go, screaming.

Besides my dad’s physical appearance, he seemed to be doing all right after he got home from Everest. It didn’t hit me how injured he was until after the surgery to remove his hand.

In the recovery room, I watched him lift his head, trying to see around him. He was shaking. His head was shaking from the effort, and all of a sudden his pain hit me.

The area on my left side where they’d taken the graft was covered with an occlusive dressing; that is, a kind of airtight film with an elastic rim. If you are lucky, the dressing stays in place, sealed and sterile, and everything is fine. But if it slips, as mine did, and air hits the skin, that is a serious ouch.

A vast area of me was exposed, and this acreage promptly was colonized by a drug-resistant staphylococcus. The infection was painful and messy. A goo started leaking out of me. My entire left side underneath the dressing turned yellow-green. Pus and bacteria. I smelled bad, too. Cleared the OR. Sent ’em out of the room gagging.

They put a drain in my side and left it there for six or eight weeks.

Meanwhile, the full-body roar of rapidly misfiring muscle synapses finally quieted down until only my two amputations
kept at it. When you cut through those huge nerves, every one of them starts screaming and won’t stop. That lasted for a year. They just wouldn’t give up. The sensation is like constantly being hit in the funny bone. It’s disconcerting, an overwhelming jangle ripping right up both your arms.

When that finally subsided, a new sense took over—physical isolation. The hardest part of losing your hands is that you lose a huge amount of sensation. Forty percent of all your sensory input comes through your hands. These are serious input devices.

There are other obvious problems. You can’t grasp and manipulate things. Remember my juggling kit? Very little of my gear survived Mount Everest, but when I finally got the stuff in Dallas, there was my juggling how-to booklet and the three little balls. I
had
to laugh at that.

Naturally, I thoroughly studied my new circumstance and learned there’s a significant difference between surgical amputees, such as myself, and individuals who are born with no hands. They tend to adapt amazingly well. For instance, they can do astonishing things with their feet; there’s not much they
can’t
do.

However, they run into problems when they get to the age when arthritis sets in. They lose their limberness or develop back problems and can’t put their feet where they need to put them.

For me, the sensory isolation of amputation is the worst part. I am acutely aware of it daily. I still have an intact palm on my left hand. One of my few sensory pleasures today is to feel the texture of Missy’s fur as I pet her. It is both reassuring and kind of poignant. She is a constant in my life.

Still another surprise feature of my postdigital world has been my dreams. For whatever reason, they have become incredibly vivid since the surgeries. I’m aware of taste and smell now in my dreams. Everything is in full color, an incredible display. I have no explanation for this.

I’m also very much aware that I am dreaming. For example, I’ll be riding a bicycle down a country road and I’ll look down to see both my hands on the handlebars, working the gears and brakes. I don’t step outside myself. I’m very much within myself.

It’s kinda fun. It means that for one third of the day, or whatever time it is that I sleep and dream, I’m not diminished or handicapped in any sense. I run with the speed of a ten-year-old child, with no pain. I never tire. I’m a virtual Beck. Now, sometimes, I don’t have hands in my dreams. But when I do, I’m acutely aware. “Ha! I’m dreaming! See? I’ve got hands.”

Greg Anigian performed two more procedures on my new mitt, to give it a little shape and integrity. First, he cut down a bit farther in the space between my thumb and the rest of the mitt, making it look more like a mitten. Of course, he needed a little extra skin, which he took from my crotch—without asking.

I woke up after this surgery, looked down to see this incision across my groin, and cried out, “My God, is nothing sacred?”