Kill Me (17 page)

THIRTY-THREE

Things were not the same with Adam.

After his dramatic disclosure about the true circumstances of his stepfather’s death, and my obviously inadequate response, Adam never expressed any interest in moving in with us in Colorado. He’d stayed with Bella in Cincinnati and continued his homeschooling adventure.

Thea stubbornly maintained that my even more stubborn adherence to a lifestyle that was chock-full of risk had short-circuited Adam’s desire to move west. I wasn’t convinced. I placated myself by rationalizing that it was my son’s risk-avoidance, and not my risk-approaching, that was the real issue. He was looking for an excuse to stay within the odd cocoon he enjoyed with his mom, and my X Games lifestyle provided him with a convenient reason to do it.

My wife and I disagreed about Adam’s retreat from our home and our lives, and chose not to argue about it. We didn’t exactly agree to disagree. We merely agreed not to bicker.

Although Bella had previously been unwilling to cash the checks that Thea and I had been sending to Cincinnati to help support my son, she finally relented and began to allow us to contribute financially to Adam’s care. Bella, whose employer had recently stopped providing his staff with health-care coverage, was especially grateful that I put Adam on our family health insurance policy.

I was thrilled to provide the support. But I recognized the irony, too: Now that Adam was excluding me from his life, I was becoming a caricature of an absentee father. To cushion my hurt, I focused my paternal energy where it was always accepted with a wide smile: Berkeley.

Thea and Adam and I settled into what for me was an unsatisfying routine. Thea and I phoned him frequently. He didn’t answer. We left messages. He rarely returned our calls. When he did call, the conversations were brief and awkward. He’d ask about his sister. They’d talk and laugh.

We frequently invited him to join us at our home in the mountains in Ridgway. He would say he’d think about it. We’d never get an actual reply. He never showed up on that doorstep.

He didn’t totally avoid seeing us. We managed to lay eyes on him occasionally. But the visits were in Ohio, not in Colorado; they lasted for a night or two, not a week or two. We took him out to dinner at neighborhood places he liked near his home in Cincinnati. He gave us good-natured lessons on how to eat a three-way without getting covered in chili and cheese. He laughed and giggled with his sister and was cordial and friendly with Thea. But when he was alone with me he acted like he had someplace else to be.

The biggest change in my life? The connection — the one that had been growing between us since that first day he’d asked me if Cal was his sister — disappeared. My son treated me like a distant uncle.

Each time I saw him, each time we spoke, though, I fell more and more in love with him.

Each time I yearned to get a little closer.

Each time he eluded me.

I did manage to finagle one more extended visit with Adam. It took my best bait.

At my invitation, Adam agreed to accompany me on a visit to see Connie before his uncle’s health declined any further. The father-and-son trip to visit the brother and uncle took place in 2004 shortly before I broke my wrist in the Bugaboos — and therefore before I knew anything about the Death Angels — but not before Connie’s illness had robbed him of his ability to maneuver around his own house in his chair.

Adam refused to let me pick him up in Cincinnati in my plane on the way east, so we took separate commercial flights to New York City. My first chance to hug him didn’t happen until he strolled up to me on the platform at Penn Station only five minutes before the Acela was scheduled to head north toward New Haven.

Our embrace was awkward. I hugged him, forcing myself to temper the exuberance I felt. He didn’t hug me back.

Morosely, I thought that the physical act was a lot like hugging my disabled brother. Emotionally, it was more like hugging a statue.

Connie and Adam connected during the visit like two flat surfaces painted with contact cement. Connie was wheelchair-bound and both his energy and his mobility were gone by then, but despite his limitations he and Adam were inseparable for the few days my son and I were in New Haven. When Connie slept or rested Adam didn’t hang out with me, he hung out with Felix. Adam peppered Felix with questions in fluent Spanish about his uncle, or about Guatemala. He was fascinated by Felix’s stories about the history of hostilities and the local politics in Chocola. He had a particular curiosity about the plight of the local coffee economy. I was hurt at being excluded, and actually considered the possibility that Adam was using his relationship with Connie as retaliation for whatever it was that had fractured between him and me.

On another level, I was touched by Adam’s connection with my brother. I saw evidence of what was missing between my son and me, and I felt an unfamiliar emotion, too.

Envy.

Adam made long solo walks to campus to spend time in Yale’s libraries and to visit the philosophy department where Connie had taught for so long. He read every word that his uncle had written since he’d arrived at Yale as an assistant professor. He somehow tracked down videotapes and DVDs of lectures Connie had given and even got hold of a copy of the old dissertation his uncle had written at Penn more than two decades before on the ethical considerations of post — World War II foreign policy in Europe.

Connie gave Adam gifts of books from his personal library — dozens of volumes of texts that were full of his penciled annotations. To ensure that the tomes wouldn’t be bruised or battered on their journey from Connecticut to Ohio, my son and I packed the books up as though they were Fabergé eggs. I took pleasure in the mundane tasks of wrapping and shipping because the chores gave me time with my son.

For Adam? I could’ve been the guy behind the counter at the local pack ‘n’ ship store.

That trip to New Haven was all about nephew and uncle, not about father and son.

THIRTY-FOUR

Remember the phone call that interrupted the board meeting I was attending in that wonderful conference room that floats above infinity on the hillside above Santa Barbara?

The phone call that caused me to gather my things, interrupt the meeting, and stumble from the room?

That telephone call?

No? How about the riff of my ring tone?

Ob-la-di, ob-la-da, life goes on, bra/La la how the life goes on.

Not mine. Not my life. My life seemed to stop right then and there.

With that phone call.

The bones in my wrist — the one I’d busted in the Bugaboos in the spring of 2004 — hadn’t healed properly. My arm was still casted more than five months after I followed Newton’s Law and the crumbled cornice down that icy chute in Canada. Every time my local orthopod did a final X-ray to check how my two fractured bones were fusing, he would shake his head and say, “You’re really a slow healer. You know that?”

I didn’t know that. I’d always thought that I’d bounced back from injuries like a kid.

I remember being puzzled for a minute or two. But that was all.

The woman on the phone that day, the one who’d surprised me with the call on my cell during the board meeting, was an orthopedic surgeon at the Health Sciences Center in Denver. She was also the Rocky Mountains’ designated wrist goddess — “the best wrist guy in the state” — my local doc had called her. By any measure, she was brilliant; she was an Israeli who had trained at Brown and Harvard, and had ended up in Denver to be close to the mountains. I’d heard from friends who had seen her in the back bowls at Vail that watching her attack the bumps was a physics lessons and a dance recital all at once. But her bedside manner? Think about the attitude an Israeli soldier might adopt at a border checkpoint in the West Bank: That was the atmosphere in her clinic.

Cuddly, she wasn’t. But she was the doc that I’d been referred to after my wrist bones seemed immured from the prospect of healing.

My wrist, and its bones’ prolonged reluctance to fuse, had caused my Israeli genius some head-scratching angst. After making a not-too-subtle insinuation that the root cause of the medical mystery was probably my fault — it certainly wasn’t hers — she’d questioned me at great length about my diet, my current health, and my exercise habits. I’m sure my aggravation at her digression showed as she’d focused particular attention on three things that to me seemed immaterial to understanding the genesis of my recalcitrant scaphoid: I’d had a recent pattern of headaches, some intermittent mild nausea, and I’d had a cartoonish episode on the treadmill during which I’d lost my balance and almost broken my other wrist.

After hearing my litany of woes, she’d mumbled something in a language I didn’t speak and ordered — yes, ordered — me to submit to a slew of additional tests, including a bone scan and two MRIs, one of my wrist, the other of my head.

I squeezed the inconvenient scans into my schedule early in the morning of the day of the board meeting I had to attend in California. The second the technicians were done with me, I raced from the clinic to the airport where Mary was waiting for me with a warm jet and hot coffee.

The phone call to my cell phone in Santa Barbara was my Israeli wrist guru’s way of passing along the results of that morning’s workup.

“You have an aneurysm,” she’d said. “In your brain. It’s not good.” No warm-up. No “Is this a good time to talk?” No “I have some bad news.”

Simply “You have an aneurysm. In your brain. It’s not good.”

Just like that.

My first thought upon hearing the news?
How the hell would you know? You’re a wrist guy.

La la how the life goes on.

I’m an
n
of only one, but days later, when I was finally able to take a deep breath and reflect on what had happened, the post-diagnostic blur struck me as something like waking up and suddenly finding myself being escorted into the front car of a particularly sinister roller coaster.

The events of those days flashed by rapidly, way too fast for my senses to experience them as any more than momentary blurs. Landing at Centennial, driving to Denver, checking in at the wrist doc’s clinic, her hushed but perfunctory “I’m so sorry,” the raw images from the MRI, the elevator ride to see another doctor, this time a neurosurgeon — a frigging neurosurgeon, Jesus — his take on my bulging artery, and his use of the words “natural history” to describe the life cycle of aneurysms like the one I had sitting in such an inconvenient location in my brain. The guy actually wasn’t a bad artist and drew a cartoonish depiction of my brain and its aneurysm so I would have a concrete representation of my condition to share with friends and loved ones.

Appointments were made for me at clinics for more tests, prescriptions filled. Instructions given. I passed by person after person whose faces were saying “I’m sorry about your news.”

The greatest irony? The guru still didn’t know why my wrist wasn’t healing.

Ha.

I drove home that first day and tried to be even-keeled as I told Thea the news. How bad was the timing? It could hardly have been worse. Thea was in the beginning of the third trimester of her pregnancy with our second child.

She nodded a lot and held my hand. Underneath, I was a wreck. I was counting on her to be my rock. She was, undoubtedly, counting on me to be around to help her parent our children.

I gave her all the good parts of the bad news first.

“It may have been there my whole life,” I said.

“The doctors say it could be stable,” I said.

“Nothing may have to change at all,” I said.

By nature, Thea wasn’t as optimistic as me. Or her denial was worse. Sometimes I can’t tell those two things apart. “Can they operate?” she asked.

“He said it’s not in a good location for surgery. They can’t get to it easily. It would be risky to go in.”

“How risky?” she asked.

“There would almost certainly be some damage.”

“Damage?” She swallowed. “To your brain?”

“Yes.”

“How much damage?”

I pondered the question. I’d pondered it plenty already, but I wanted to be clear as I presented the dilemma to Thea. The truth was this: Where damage to my brain was concerned I’d already concluded that there was no such thing as an acceptable amount. Finally I said, “Much more than if they leave it alone and it doesn’t rupture. A lot less than if they leave it alone and it does.”

My wife recognized the conundrum immediately. “Dear God,” she said. “Now what?”

“More tests. More opinions. We take it slow. No rush to judgment.”

Overnight I’d become a medical cliché machine.

I’d also decided to let my optimism, or my denial — whichever is the part of me that lets me believe I can survive anything — do the talking. “Hey? Maybe it doesn’t change,” I said. “Ever. It could’ve been there my whole life, right? That’s what they said. It could be stable. They said that, too. They did. It could just … stay there. But I’ll get all the new tests. I’ll listen to the doctors. For now, though … for now we just sit tight and we watch it.”

Thea’s inclination was to fix broken things, not to watch them. “Then why are you having headaches? And why the nausea? If the bulge is stable, why did you fall off that treadmill? Why all that? Why now?”

I could tell that maintaining my denial around Thea was going to be a chore. I said, “I don’t know.”

“After the tests, if the doctors say it isn’t stable, then what?”

“What do you mean?”

“If it blows?” she asked, dabbing away tears. “Ruptures, I mean. What then?”

Blows?
I had a sudden image of my head exploding like Krakatoa. I shook it off. “It could kill me. Or it could end up being … like a terrible stroke. I could be …” I decided to use the word from the conversation with the comic in Nobu. “Gorked.”

I didn’t reveal the derivation of the acronym.

She didn’t ask. “Oh God,” she whispered.

“Yeah.” I reached out and held her.

“What do we do?” she wanted to know.

“We go on,” I said. “We just go on. We watch it.”

“We do,” she agreed after a few seconds of indecision, but her inflection was unclear, and I could easily have attached a question mark to the end of her two-word declaration.

I realized something then that provided me with no solace: If she and I were running toward a finish line, and the most terrified would have been judged the winner, we would have broken the tape together, tied for that dubious prize.

Was the aneurysm going to kill me?

Depended on whom I asked.

I was being treated by some fine doctors, but I didn’t trust anybody’s opinion much. I had spent enough time in academia that I was a subscriber to the belief that experts are actually people from out of town, and since I was fortunate to be in a financial position to be skeptical, I took a few side trips with Mary and Trace, flying around the country getting second opinions from the nationally recognized aneurysm gurus. And then I got second opinions to the second opinions.

Presbyterian in New York.

Mayo.

The Cleveland Clinic.

Mass General.

UCLA.

Multiple strategies were discussed. Some of the wizards preferred to clip the thing, others felt a surgical bypass was the way to go. A minority felt I was a perfect candidate for endovascular embolization, or coiling.

The whole time, I was checking the professional literature myself to translate everyone’s advice into English and to learn what I could about my bulging artery.

The best data I could find showed that the five-year survival rate of people approximately my age with aneurysms like mine wasn’t great. The percentage of people with similar arterial bulges who didn’t suffer a leakage or rupture during that period was low. Too low for comfort.

I didn’t love those numbers. Any of them.

Not too surprisingly, Thea and I interpreted the risks differently.

She had asked me this: If I were standing on my skis on the top of an impossibly tough cliff in known avalanche country, and God himself told me that my odds of making it down alive were twenty percent, or thirty percent, would I go? Would I point those two boards down that hill and push off?

Thea’s question was born of her point of view: She believed that with that aneurysm, fate had dealt me a bad hand. The odds I faced weren’t good. And I had no choice but to rue that hand.

Fight like hell, yes. But rue that hand.

I had begun to look at my dilemma slightly differently. In the weeks since my diagnosis I had begun to see the whole game, the big picture. With that long lens, I actually liked my hand. I’d lived forty-something interesting and satisfying years, had managed — against odds — to mature during those years, had a great family, a terrific wife, and more money than anybody had the right to ask for.

I’d had a career that was mostly a joy, one that had made a difference in a few lives. I had some terrific friends.

And now I had an aneurysm, sure. That part of the hand was certainly a clunker. With that turn card flipped up on the table, I granted Thea that it wasn’t a
perfect
hand I held. But play it I would. After all, the river card could still change everything.

In my game, life always has a river card.

I thought about the question she had posed for a long time before I answered.

I finally explained my perspective like this: “If I were standing on my skis on top of that same impossibly tough cliff in known avalanche country, and God himself told me that my odds of staying alive and healthy were piss-poor
unless
I skied down, would I go? Would you want me to point those two boards down that hill and push off? Would you?”

Thea’s mouth opened about a centimeter. Her eyes opened a little wider than that. “Is that your version of optimism?” she asked finally, just the slightest cushion of affection in her tone.

“It is.”

“You believe you can beat this, don’t you? Defy those odds?” she said. “Don’t you?” Her eyes were tearing up when she asked me, her voice cracking from the pressure of my peculiar strain of optimism.

She was querying me about hope. She was praying that she had enough for me, and that I had enough for her.

I said, “I have three reasons to believe I can beat this.” I pointed to her belly. “Make that four. How much motivation does a guy need?”

I never told her, of course, that my risks were limited. If the aneurysm ruptured but didn’t kill me, I had already hired some professionals who would complete the job.

Death Angels or no Death Angels, I planned on beating the aneurysm. It was that simple. Although some people lost their fights against the same foe, I knew that a few other people had lived long productive lives with conditions like mine. The neurosurgeons I consulted early on didn’t talk much about odds. One of them, a particularly cold prick in Rochester, told me in response to my question about probabilities that the outcome for me would be binary. He explained that if I chose to avoid surgery, I’d either survive the aneurysm, or I wouldn’t. “Odds are for Vegas,” he went on. “I went to Harvard Med. I didn’t go to Caesars Palace.”