Warrior Pose (23 page)

When I wake up in my bed the following morning, I feel like a tank rolled over me. My head is spinning, and the pain is overwhelming me again. I reach for my pants on the floor, fumble with the pockets, and find the vial of morphine tablets the Manila doctor gave me. I swallow one, then curl up on my side, gazing out my bedroom windows at the Hong Kong skyline as the drug kicks in. I can hear my breath sounding slower and louder than usual as a woozy sensation of pleasure floods my whole body. The city begins to blur, and I slip into a coma-like haze.

CHAPTER 12

Fusion

S
AN DIEGO has long been a mecca for sports medicine and some of the best back surgeons practice there. It's also where my two sisters and mother live, and they have found a top neurosurgeon and arranged for me to have an emergency evaluation and immediate surgery. It's going to be a long, tough flight out of Hong Kong, and the pain is so deep that, even after five days of bed rest, I don't see how I'm going to make it. I shake the morphine vial. Plenty of pills. I'll have to medicate myself all the way.

My current girlfriend, an American named Pamela, has been living with me here in Hong Kong for more than six months. I've been on the road so much that we've hardly seen one another. I down three morphine pills as she helps me get ready for the trip. Then I cinch my elastic brace as tight as I can get it around my lower back and limp out the front door, with an arm over Pamela's shoulder for support, as our driver pulls up in the bureau's old Mercedes to take me to Hong Kong International Airport.

Halfway there, I'm so doped up I throw up out the back window the entire way. I'm still in a stupor as they put me in another wheelchair and push me to the boarding gate, where I say good-bye to Pamela. A flight attendant helps me into a first-class seat for a seventeen-hour flight to San Diego. Sitting next to me is a glamorous American fashion model who just finished a photo shoot in Asia. As we gain altitude, she leans over and says, “Excuse me, I recognize
you from the news. I'm sorry to mention it, but you don't look so well. Are you okay?”

I'd love to be a fascinating flight companion and engage her in spellbinding conversation, but I can't even sit up straight. I begin to slur a polite response, and then suddenly become sick again, all over both of us. Flight attendants rush to the rescue. I lapse into another haze.

An acrid stench, like there's something dead in the room, forces me awake in the early light of dawn. It takes a few minutes to realize it's me, smelling almost as foul as I did after months in the Gulf without a shower or change of clothing. My mouth tastes like Smokey Mountain dump. My temples are pounding, and I feel like my head might explode.
Where am I?

As I squint at the room and try to focus, it looks like a quaint bed-and-breakfast, with dark oak antique dressers and nightstands, a flowered quilt, fluffy throw pillows, and powder blue walls. Every muscle in my body aches. My lower back is screaming. My left leg alternates between complete numbness and throbbing pain.
Where am I?

Slowly, it all begins to come back to me: collapsing in Manila; throwing up all over someone during the flight from Hong Kong; my sister Valerie picking me up at the international airport in San Diego. I'm in the guest room of her historic home in Coronado, a small island in San Diego Bay connected to the mainland by a gently curving blue bridge. I have two siblings, Valerie and Pam. Both live here in Coronado. My mother, Doris, is here as well. It has long felt like home base to me even though I only lived here briefly between the jobs in Dallas and Boston.

I can barely get out of bed. Groggy. Dizzy. My back on fire. Nauseated. Everything blurry. Hobbling to the bathroom for a drink of water, I have to steady myself by holding the wall, then the doorframe, now the sink. Dry heaves. My head is pounding. I grab a toothbrush from a porcelain rack on the wall, squish a load of toothpaste into
my mouth, and brush like crazy, but I can't get the terrible taste to go away. Then I run a hot bath. My back is so shot it's a struggle to get into the wide tub. Drying off and dressing myself afterward is a Herculean task. If I weren't still so stoned on morphine it would be impossible, but the drug also makes me feel woozy, off-kilter. That reminds me: Take another pill. The nightstand. My wallet. The pill jar. One or two? Two.

We have an appointment to see a surgeon at the Neurosurgical Medical Clinic in San Diego, so after breakfast, which I can barely eat, Valerie helps me into her car. As we cross the Coronado Bridge, a sense of emptiness drags me down, like gravity might pull me right through the floorboard. My thoughts usually spin a mile a minute, but now my mind is an empty void and there's a dull ringing in my ears. I'm trying to be jovial but can't stay with the conversation. I catch myself staring into space like a zombie.

At the doctor's office I can barely pull myself onto the exam table for an X-ray. Afterward, my sister and I wait in a lobby while a technician reads the results. I hurt so much that I have to fold my head down toward my lap and grit my teeth while we wait for the doctor. “You're going to be okay,” Valerie says in her usual upbeat and loving way as she reaches for my hand and gives it a gentle squeeze. I just grunt, trying not to be sick again. Finally, after what feels like an eternity, we're ushered into the surgeon's office.

Dr. Sam Assam is silver-haired and dignified, like an actor playing a seasoned physician on one of NBC's prime-time drama series. I hear my words slurring as I slowly tell him the whole story; the slip from the ledge, the years of pain, the medications, the snap in my back as I sat in the Manila Hotel. I spare him details of the scene I caused on the airplane.

“I don't know how you managed it,” Dr. Assam says with dispassionate authority while comparing my current X-ray with the original from 1986, which my sister somehow got the doctor's office in Boston to send out on time. “You've spent seven years with a mildly broken back, and now it's a major break.”

Like the first doctor those many years ago, he uses a pen as a pointer to trace the dark lines, comparing the X-rays this time, showing
me the difference. In the first X-ray, the line is thin and runs part way through the pedicle bone on the left side of my fifth lumbar vertebra, which sits right above my sacrum. In the new X-ray, the line is thicker and runs all the way through the pedicle bone.

“We might think of it like a small crack in a picture frame that suddenly splits across the glass,” Dr. Assam continues. “It's very serious. If it opens further and impinges on your spinal cord, you could be paralyzed.”

Dr. Assam insists, in his distant and professional demeanor, that surgery is the only option. The procedure is called a “fusion-laminectomy,” and it's major surgery. There will be two incisions. The first one will be on my left side, near the iliac crest of my pelvic girdle. The doctor explains that this area of the pelvis holds a large amount of red bone marrow and is ideal for bone graphs. He will slice pieces of bone from the iliac crest, then make a second incision along my lower spine. The broken pedicle will be removed along with the discs between my two lowest lumbar vertebrae, L4 and L5. Next, the sides of these two vertebrae will be scraped down to expose their marrow. The chips of bone sliced from the iliac crest will then be “laminated” against the vertebrae and exposed marrow. Then they stitch me back up.

“In time,” Dr. Assam says confidently, “the bone chips and shaved vertebrae will fuse into a bone mass that will stabilize your back.”

I can barely follow him, but it sounds more like a construction project than a surgery, like welding iron rods together to bolster the frame of a building. I feel profoundly resistant to anyone cutting into my back, but what choice do I have? Dr. Assam is making it clear there is none. I close my eyes and a collage of images that have become etched in my subconscious float through the darkness.

My chronic pain and this surgery are nothing by comparison. I have always feared missing work more than I ever feared war zones or injuries, but there's really no choice. To pump myself up, I have a little inner conversation:
This is great
, I tell myself,
I only have to miss three or four weeks and it will mean an end to all these years of pain!

“The surgery takes at least two hours,” Dr. Assam says, breaking my little pep talk. “Then there's a recovery process during which you'll be in a large body brace. You'll need to rest and relax, then, eventually, do some physical therapy. Depending on how quickly the fusion takes, you could be back to work in less than six months.”

Six months!
I can't miss that much work. So I negotiate, pressing for the earliest possible date I can return to the field if everything goes perfectly. I'm still slurring my words and it's hard to stay focused, but I push Dr. Assam hard even though I can tell he's not used to this. When I have him down to a “best of all worlds” scenario of less than two months, I say, “Okay, let's get it over with.”

I'm flat on my back, watching Styrofoam ceiling panels whiz by as I'm wheeled down the hospital corridor into surgery on a gurney. The chemical smell in the surgical theater reminds me of the odor people in war zones exude when they're gripped with fear. The atmosphere of the room feels tense. Monitors are buzzing and beeping. Black cords and plastic tubes are strung like tinsel everywhere. Surgical instruments click as attendants position them in perfect alignment on steel trays. Rubber gloves snap; bright lights
glare. People in medical gowns with greenish masks and white gauze head-covers roll me onto my side to expose my lower back.

The anesthesiologist slips a needle into a thick vein on the back of my hand and places an oxygen mask over my face. A few deep breaths now. The room sways. Voices dim. I close my eyes and drift off into the mountains of some far-off place where a revolution is underway, getting ready to go live on
NBC Nightly News
.