Beyond the Bear (14 page)

Lee told me stories of floating the Yukon River and hiking the Chilkoot Trail. Of taking up sea kayaking. Of traveling the country and the world. He never did give up fishing. He’d even had his own fishing boat. That got my attention.

He didn’t just help me get through my first raw days of darkness, he helped my friends and family get through theirs.

“Don’t alter your language,” he told them. “It just makes it awkward and brings more attention to the fact that he’s blind. Just have a normal conversation. It’s okay to say, ‘Nice to see you.’ It’s okay to say, ‘Have you seen so-and-so lately?’”

He taught them how to guide me without trampling my dignity.

“The instinct is to grab a person’s arm and push them along in front of you, which is awkward and intrusive. It works much better to go first and have the blind person take hold of your elbow.”

Most importantly, he taught us all that I was still capable of great things, that I was in charge of my own destiny.

“Dan still has vision,” he told my family. “He just can’t see.”

CHAPTER 12

Flailing Through the Fog

Long before I could begin to process my blindness, before I’d
slam my face into a doorjamb for the first time, before I’d burn myself pouring a cup of coffee, before I’d cut myself grabbing the wrong end of a knife, I had to muster enough strength to fight my way off the alternate-universe drugs. I had the strength of a mouse to do it.

When I was first being weaned off Propofol, there wasn’t a single thing I was capable of doing for myself. I was an incontinent twenty-five-year-old who didn’t have the strength or coordination to scratch an itch. Strangers with chirpy voices were rolling me onto my side like a spruce log, changing the sheets out from under me, and rolling me back. They were wiping my nose and washing my privates.

I needed pain relief, no question; I had so much augering, bone-deep pain. If the pain-med peaks weren’t in synch with my wound-care sessions, it felt like my face was being picked off one tweezer-full at a time, and the puncture wounds on my arms, legs, and elsewhere were being cleaned with battery acid and a wire brush. I wanted to scream bloody murder and shove whoever was working on me hard enough to bounce off the wall, but I was so debilitated all I could do was lie there and take it. These procedures were critical to my recovery, but from my perspective and twisted state of mind, the pain, fear, and helplessness didn’t feel all that different from being mauled by a bear.

No one wanted me to suffer, least of all those whose job it was to tend my wounds. But being drugged all the time got to be too much. During windows when the morphine was wearing off, the meandering delirium in my head would fade and I’d become aware of my surroundings, of muffled voices down the hall, of curtains being yanked closed around some other patient’s bed, of the occasional sharp laugh at the nurse’s station across from my room. I’d hear my stepdad’s voice. I’d hear my brother’s. I’d hear Jamie’s and John’s and Jaha’s. I’d just start to feel connected to the world when along would come the dreaded padding of soft-soled shoes. “Good evening, Mr. Bigley. I have something here to make you a little more comfortable.” I’d hear the flick of a thumb and index finger against the side of a plastic syringe before the plunging of La-La Land into my IV line.

During my more cognizant times, an awareness seeped in through the cracks that the drugs of good intention, to calm me and shield me from pain, were holding me back, and I had no desire to stay where I was—out of my gourd much of the time, half out of it the rest, bewildered one moment, terrified the next, unable to cry out, barely able to move. I’d made my decision back at the river to live, not just continue to draw breath. Lee Hagmeier had shown me what was possible. During my more lucid moments, I sensed I had a major battle ahead of me beyond the mending of skin and bone. I could feel the enormity of its weight pressing me into my mattress. Before I could inch my way toward the surface I needed the ability to think.

I’m not sure where the energy came from but my first effort to let it be known that I wanted off the heavy drugs was noted in my medical charts just hours after Lee Hagmeier’s first visit: “Patient agitated, flailing arms, refusing sedation med.” Once I’d gained enough strength and clarity to progress from thumbs-up/thumbs-down communication to scribbling on a notepad, one of the first things I wrote was, “No more drugs.”

Although I wouldn’t know this until later, my muddled state of mind had made Amber’s worst-case scenario come true. Still banned from my inner circle, she’d been checking in on a regular basis, and when my mother finally mentioned her, I had no clue who she was talking about.

“This girl, Amber, has been asking to see you. What should I tell her?”

Amber?
Amber . . .
Who’s Amber?
The only Amber I could think of was one of my brother’s old girlfriends.
What is she doing here?
Why would she want to see me? Why would I want to see her?

Thumbs-down.

My mother spared Amber the rejection; she just kept her involvement as it had been since giving her the boot—at bay and by phone.

Amber was not the crying type, especially at times it would have done her the most good. When overwhelmed, her emotions would go into full lockdown. It was when she least expected it that they’d sneak up on her from behind. She’d be driving down the highway alone in her truck and—wham. Or something on the radio that had nothing to do with her life, a killer heat wave in Europe, for instance, would have her gripping the steering wheel in tears. But slumping down in her seat and breaking into sobs at a Dar Williams concert soon after my mauling, when the singer threw “Fishing in the Morning”
into the mix, that time made sense.

Let’s go fishing in the morning

Just like we’ve always gone

You can come inside and wake me up

We’ll pack and leave by dawn

We’ll pack and leave by dawn.

The intensity of our attraction to each other being so new catapulted Amber into a head-on collision between longing and mourning. She’d never felt so confused. She did what she had to do to get through the days, the weeks, she was exiled from my inner circle. She’d drag herself out of bed each morning, tossing her quilt to the side. She’d plod through her morning chores, go for long walks with Hobbit, and curl up with him afterward on the floor. When evening came around, she’d go to her closet, put on her black pants, white blouse, and clip-on bowtie, pull her hair into a tight ponytail, and go through the motions at her summer job as a banquet server, delivering plates of pan-seared halibut and overcooked vegetables to people who barely noticed her.

Amber had told her parents that a “friend” had been blinded by a bear. How absolutely horrid, they thought. Can’t imagine such a thing. But when they came from Minnesota for a visit in late July, they were bewildered by how distracted Amber was, by how this friend’s mother was calling her with updates from the hospital, how whenever she ran into someone from Girdwood, this friend was the first topic to come up. When her parents took off on their own to do a road trip down the Kenai Peninsula, they kept seeing this friend’s name along the way, especially in Cooper Landing, on flyers for a local fund-raiser and on collection jars on roadhouse countertops. Over breakfast one morning, they overheard some guy on the phone drumming up donations for the Dan Bigley benefit. This friend of Amber’s sure has a lot of people pulling for him, they thought.

While Amber was struggling to accept her place in my life, or lack of one, I was inching my way back into the world of the living. I was weaned off the ventilator, my tracheotomy tube switched from cuffed to cuffless. With the help of physical therapists, I was starting to move again, which required breaking down into multiple steps simple maneuvers I’d done on my own since I was old enough to crawl. Like sitting up in bed. With a lot of help, I progressed from that to sitting on the side of my bed, first with a logroll onto my side, then the lowering of the side rail, the rolling of my legs over the edge, the pushing up onto an elbow, and finally, after a rest, the final push upright. Then just sitting, nothing more, just sitting there feeling dizzy and nauseous, my neck trying to support this humongous, foreign object that was my head. At first, I could stand it for only a couple of minutes, then five, then ten. Afterward, I’d be so fried I’d want to sleep for a week. Slowly, I built up enough strength and stamina to sit in a chair, then stand, then take a few steps behind a walker.

Two weeks after my reconstructive surgery, a week after being told I was blind, I graduated from ICU to the Progressive Care Unit, a sort of halfway house between intensive care and the outside world. I felt way too lousy to celebrate.

I’d developed a disturbing problem by then, a wound that was refusing to heal where the bear had split open my forehead, where the oval of bone had been temporarily removed during my reconstructive surgery. With five of the six arteries to my scalp severed in the mauling, the wound lacked blood supply, tissue had died, and the suture lines were pulling apart. Coughing not only felt like a Molotov cocktail hitting the roof of my mouth, but air leaked from the fissure in my forehead. Plus, I’d contracted MRSA (methicillin-resistant
Staphylococcus aureus
), a drug-resistant and potentially fatal staph infection.

I also had a constant headache, dull mostly with occasional shooting shards of pain. I had abdominal pain from my feeding tube, and endless irritation from the tube in my trachea. I had nausea, vertigo, nosebleeds, coughing fits so bad I’d puke, and a rash all over my body, a side effect of the heavy-duty IV antibiotics for managing the MRSA. These drugs also left me so itchy I wanted to tear off my own skin. Plus my mouth was as dry as yesterday’s toast. Early on, I could have only a wet sponge under my lips, then ice cubes to suck on. I felt so thirsty, I dreamed of medics backing a water truck up to my hospital bed and blasting me with a fire hose.

Since I could have nothing by mouth, I fantasized constantly about food, comfort food. Cheeseburgers and fries. Pizza. Chips and guacamole. I so craved solid food, I dreamed of people tossing Doritos back and forth over my head while I tried and failed to intercept them. I dreamed of my family loading me into the bed of a pickup truck, driving to a restaurant, and leaving me behind while they went inside to eat. I dreamed of trying to shove burritos and bratwursts into my stomach tube.

Experiencing a depth of misery I never knew existed was a huge distraction from mourning the loss of my eyes. Instead, I focused what little energy I had on just getting stronger. Among those pushing me in that direction was my acute-care occupational therapist, Will Berry, who would later become one of my closest friends.

Will knew nothing about me until picking up my chart at the nurses’ station prior to our first session. His chest tightened as he read. He slid my chart back into its slot, took a deep breath, gave a quick knock, opened the door to my room, and stepped inside. If he was stunned to see what a mess the bear had made of me he didn’t let on.

“Hi, I’m Will. I’m from occupational therapy. Hey, Dan, you ready to get started? Here’s what we’re going to do today . . .”

Before the end of our first session, given the music playing in my room, he knew we had something in common. Between helping me build enough upper-body strength to get myself out of bed and enough dexterity to button buttons and zip zippers, he talked of some of the live shows he’d been to and new jam bands he’d discovered. He even brought me a bootleg recording he’d picked up of a Les Claypool show.

He also helped me realize I’d lost something besides my eyes to the bear when, during one of our sessions, he waved essential oils under my nose.

Lavender, cinnamon, peppermint.

I shook my head no.

Sandalwood, patchouli, eucalyptus.

No, nothing.

The bear had ripped out my olfactory wiring, too. I’m sure Dr. Kallman had explained this to me at some point, but that was the first time it sank in that I had lost my sense of smell. At the time, I lacked the presence of mind to ponder what it meant to be left with only three senses, or to consider how intrinsically connected smell was to one of my remaining ones—the taste of food. I would realize only later that I would never again take pleasure in the smell of wood smoke, or of wild geraniums blooming in the spring, or of freshly minced garlic sizzling in a pan. A sense of smell could keep a blind man from drinking milk that had gone sour, or from mistaking a dry cleaner for a pastry shop, or from striking a match around a leaky gas line. I hadn’t even begun dealing with the blindness part yet; mourning the loss of smell would have to take a number and stand in line.

As the days went by and I became more present,
my circle of visitors grew wider. Some brought me recordings, others showed up with their guitars. One played a didgeridoo, which had every pair of shoes going up and down the hallway applying the brakes at my door. Whenever someone new came to see me, I was grateful I couldn’t speak; not only was my jaw wired shut, I was under doctor’s orders not to talk since everything from the roof of my mouth up had a long way to go to be healed. I was grateful because I didn’t have the energy for talking, much less caretaking, a tendency of mine. When one-sided talk stalled and silence turned the room into an itchy sweater, I felt no pressure to fill the gaps. When people broke into sobs, I didn’t have to think of what to say to make them feel better.

Even Maya came to visit. Everyone was excited for me to reunite with my Maya Bird, so named because when she got excited she chirped like a bird. I couldn’t wait to hear the whack of her tail against everything within a two-foot radius, and feel her nose against my skin. When the day came, Brian brought her in on a leash, closed the door, unhooked her, and patted the foot of my bed.

“Up, Maya. Come on, up.” She got all slinky and wouldn’t budge. “Maya, up girl, up. Up!”

Finally she jumped. A dog famous for her full body wag and toothy grin, she stood trembling at the foot of my bed with her tail between her legs. She jumped to the floor. Brian’s chest fell. He lifted her back up again.