Beyond the Bear (16 page)

CHAPTER 14

Diving with Captain Nemo

Since I was a teenager, I’d thought of birthdays as more than
an excuse to party. To me, they were a time to reflect upon the gift of being alive. Among my most memorable celebrations was sitting at the edge of Half-Moon Rock, arms wrapped around my knees, watching the rising sun spread a golden glow across Kentucky’s Red River Gorge the day I turned nineteen. I spent my twenty-first in red-rock country near Sedona, Arizona, in a canyon of sandstone walls and emerald-green waters, camped out with friends, Maya, Maya’s friends, and a bottle of Bushmills.

My twenty-sixth came and went at the Hampton Inn with bears in the lobby, my mother in the adjoining room, my brother across the hall, and a mini-fridge stocked with Ensure. The closet, windowsill, and dresser-top were cluttered with medications, hand sanitizer, Bacitracin, saline, gauze, bandages, and a goulash of other medical supplies. Friends showed up with music, books on tape, and a chocolate cake concocted in a blender. Propped up with pillows on the couch, dressed in bandages, pajama bottoms, and a sleeveless undershirt to keep from irritating the wounds on my upper arms, I could have been turning ninety-six as lousy as I felt. Still, I felt grateful to be alive, more grateful than I knew possible. Amber and about eight others were there that night, sitting beside me on the couch, on my bed, and cross-legged on the floor. My friends worked it hard, trying to keep things upbeat, telling stories, cracking jokes, and teasing me about my mullet, a tuft of hair along the base of my skull, the one Dr. Kallman left me with when he went at me with the electric razor. The man’s a gifted surgeon but a lousy barber.

“Nice do, dude,” was the general consensus.

As an outpatient camped out in a hotel room, I had even more visitors and fewer rules, which did not please my mother, who kept our adjoining door open more often than not. Her protective instincts on overdrive, she’d tell me when it was time for friends to leave and for me to go to bed, which made me feel like I was back in middle school. On the up side, I no longer had people I couldn’t see or talk to poking me with needles or taking my blood pressure at all hours of the day and night. I no longer had people micromanaging my bowels and bladder. I finally got a little privacy, although that’s hard to trust when you can’t see those you’re hoping aren’t there.

Left alone to rest one afternoon, I began for the first time to confront my new reality, taking stock first of what I could “see.” In a Malaysian jungle after sundown, I’d experienced blackness so thick I couldn’t detect my hand in front of my nose. But this was not that. It was more like I was looking at distant galaxies through the Hubble Space Telescope. Billions of specks of light of various size and intensity, superimposed upon clouds of light from neon pink to iridescent blue, faded into infinity. It reminded me of stars being born.

I then started exploring my wounds, all in various stages of healing. I sat up in bed, leaned forward, reached up under the back of my shirt, and let my index finger linger a moment at the puncture wound on the side of my lower back. My fingers then crawled upward to another that was so near my spine I wondered how close I’d come to being paralyzed. I paused a moment to feel lucky, to wonder if the daypack I was wearing had saved me, before bringing my hand back down to my side.

I pushed back the covers, reached down the left leg of my pajama bottoms, and lightly ran my fingers over the buckshot pattern of wounds on my thigh where the bear first nailed me in midair, then apparently re-sank her claws a few times as she yanked me out of the brush. They were the most painful of the lot, especially when being cleaned and packed, an experience sometimes so excruciating my whole body would transform into a clenched fist. I have no memory of how or when I got the wounds on my wrists. I’m fairly certain how and when I got the ones on my upper arms and shoulders. They came when the bear had me pinned to the ground in the final moments that I could see.

I hung my head a moment and focused on breathing. After several long, slow, gut-deep breaths, I slowly lifted my head, then raised a shaky hand to my face to let my fingers have a look around. Starting at my left cheekbone, they paused a moment in a place that felt vaguely familiar, then inched their way toward my nose. Exploring gingerly with my fingertips, I encountered so much swelling I could find no discernable bridge. With fingers getting goopy from Bacitracin, I followed suture lines up to the middle of my forehead, pausing at the trouble spot just left of center.
Ugh.
Is this thing ever going to heal?
I continued on toward the top of my skull and into the stubble of my rebounding hairline. I then lifted my other hand and, with one on each side, tried to comprehend the new shape of my head. Swollen here, dented there. Whatever that was atop my neck felt like it had bounced off the tailgate of a truck doing sixty. Upon further inspection of my right temple, I could feel a metal plate just beneath my skin. Too much. I dropped my hands in disgust.

I slumped back down into bed and pulled the covers up under my chin. I lay there ten, fifteen, twenty minutes begging for sleep. No chance.
I may as well get this over with.
Lying on my back, I slowly raised my hands to the epicenter of my injuries. What I found there were the oozing, crusty, swollen bulges of what had been my eyes.
God
,
this is sick
. My head started spinning.
I leaned over the side of the bed, certain I was going to throw up. At that moment I was glad I was blind so I’d never have to see myself in a mirror.

My fourth surgery was an effort to sort out my scrambled sinuses, which had scarred closed and were not draining correctly, making me cough and inviting infection. It was also one more attempt to close up my forehead after the edges of the wound went from red to brown to black. Dr. Kallman was trying every trick in the book to get my forehead to heal. He had consulted the head of his practice, Dr. Dwight Ellerbe, and several other specialists, when one of them recommended a hyperbaric chamber. Breathing 100 percent oxygen under pressure delivers up to twenty times as much oxygen to damaged tissues, which stimulates new blood-vessel growth and revs up the process of healing. It may not help, Kallman told me, but it sure couldn’t hurt.

First step—ear tubes. Like when diving, only inside a giant steel canister instead of water, eardrums must be equalized to keep air pressure in the inner ear in synch with the atmospheric pressure. Otherwise eardrums can burst. Equalizing isn’t possible when you’re breathing through a trach. Getting tubes put in my ears by a doctor was so painful I wondered how ruptured eardrums could possibly hurt any worse.

Inside the chamber, it’s standard practice for patients to wear a breathing apparatus similar to the ones worn by F-15 fighter pilots.
But nothing about my case was standard. The facility was new, and I was its first patient with a trach. Ray Barrett, the technician overseeing my treatments, adapted tubing to fit over it, which at first felt like trying to breathe through a garden hose. With a little more fiddling and a shorter length of tube between my trach and the regulator, I was set to go. Dress code was 100 percent cotton. No synthetic clothing, no petroleum products of any kind, were allowed inside. One does not enter a hyperbaric chamber without some risk, the least appealing of which is spontaneous combustion.

Ray, who dove with me to keep an eye on my vitals and talk me through in case I panicked, remembered me from Girdwood. He’d seen me taking tickets at a showcase of Alaska bands at the ski resort’s Sitzmark Bar & Grill. He’d also been to those bonfires at Max’s. For moral support, Brian dove with me as well. That made accommodations a bit tight, with me propped up lengthwise on one side, and those two sitting side by side across from me on a bench. Two hours a day, seven days a week for a month, Brian and I would duck inside our little submarine with the man we called Captain Nemo.

A sort of cross between Steve McQueen and a conservative version of George Carlin, the captain told raunchy jokes and regaled us with stories of his commercial diving days, mostly from the Chukchi and Beaufort Seas, but also of underwater welding in Cook Inlet in zero visibility in tides so strong he had to be tethered to the oil rig to keep from washing away. The chamber was monitored by colleagues on the outside, and when the captain didn’t want them to hear certain things, he’d pass Brian a note; Brian would laugh, lean over and whisper into my ear, then I’d laugh, as well as one can laugh through clenched teeth and a hose in his neck.

He did his best to amuse me, or at least keep my mind off my body’s ravaged state of affairs. He brought in a wooden Tic-Tac-Toe set, which was fun until I kept beating him, and then he was done with it. As a group project, the three of us decided to learn Morse Code, and passed away the hours tapping on the sides of the chamber.

A month of hyperbaric sessions did wonders for Brian. After all those accumulative doses of 100 percent oxygen, he’d never felt so good. Practically giddy. This must be what athletic blood-doping is all about, he joked. The same could not be said of me. My forehead did not respond.

It would take the swapping of body parts to finally fix that mess. Dr. Kallman made arrangements through one of his medical-school mentors for me to have highly specialized, free-flap microsurgery in San Francisco. This fifth
surgery would involve harvesting a rectangular graft of skin and blood vessels from my forearm as a patch, and covering the donor site with skin from my thigh. Then the forearm skin, along with its blood supply, would be relocated to my forehead, its vessels connected to the arteries and veins in my neck by tunneling beneath the tissues of my face. The texture and color wouldn’t match the landscape up there; I’d look like I’d been patched with a slab of rubber roughly the shape of Georgia. I didn’t care; I just wanted my body healed.

In mid-September, two months after the bear, I made my first journey in public that didn’t involve some kind of medical appointment. Brian and some of my friends arranged a coming-out gathering to hear reggae man Clinton Fearon at one of Anchorage’s top music venues named, unfortunately, the Bear Tooth. I was ready, despite my constant headache and queasiness, despite still hurting like hell, my pains both real and phantom. Due to nerve damage, I had a lot of numbness from my upper lip to the top of my skull, as well as most of my left thigh. Between the numbness there and the stiffness most everywhere else, I walked like a rickety old man with lead in his pockets.

One of the managers at the Bear Tooth, who was in my circle of friends, cordoned off a section of the balcony and made arrangements for me and my entourage to come in a side door and through the kitchen. I made my debut in my favorite Photonz T-shirt, thrift-store linen pants, a loose-fitting trucker’s hat, bandages across my forehead, and oversized shades to cover my eyes. Cooks, dishwashers, and other staff stepped out of the way and cheered as I shuffled by latched onto my Oregon friend Chris Van Ness’s elbow.

“Hey, Dan.”

“So glad to have you.”

“Great to see you out and about.”

“Hey, man, enjoy the show.”

I smiled and bowed my head in gratitude. I took the stairs very seriously, holding onto Chris’s elbow with one hand, gripping the railing with the other. By the time I reached the balcony I was ready for a nap. I was so damn tired of being tired.

The music and huddle of friends, including Amber, recharged my spirits to some degree. But it was a little too much reality for me, especially when Amber, after sitting with me a while, told me she’d be back in a bit, and headed down the stairs to do some dancing. I tried not to think about it, but it was there like a dull ache. If it hadn’t been for the bear, I would have been down there with her. I would have been down at the stage front and center, grin slathered across my face, swaying on the balls of my feet, watching Fearon channel his soul through a microphone. Being unable to see music being made was profoundly upsetting. Being unable to see the crowd interacting with music being made was just as brutal. If I still had eyes, I would have known or recognized many of the people down there. Unless someone was talking to me or had a hand on my shoulder, I felt completely alone, isolated in a place throbbing with people. At the end of the show, I was so physically and emotionally drained I could barely make it down the stairs and out the door.