Left for Dead Read online

  Mount Kilimanjaro didn’t enter my plans until I began seriously considering the Seven Summits Quest, leading up to the Everest climb. Kilimanjaro may be among the better known mountains in the world, and, at 19,340 feet, it is tall enough to make trouble for the unwary, especially those who do not take sufficient time to acclimatize themselves. Still, Kilimanjaro is not really a climb. It is a good hard hike on which you encounter lots of amateurs.

  I went to Africa near the end of December 1995 with a group led once again by Skip Horner. We flew into Nairobi, and then drove to the trailhead in Tanzania. There, we met our group of porters—mostly males, but a few females, too—led by a genial fellow named Genesis.

  Besides performing the usual porter tasks of humping our gear up the mountain and making and breaking camp, Genesis’s team also sang. As far as I know, they are the world’s only singing porters (the Dani chanted), a true a cappella choir who’d mastered a range of tunes in their native tongue (Swahili, I think), including some original compositions. They sang them for us in a series of daytime concerts. I enjoyed that a lot.

  I did not enjoy much else. As we crossed the broad grassy plain that gradually slopes up to Kilimanjaro proper, I was taken with the usual mountaineer’s crud: vomiting, aches, etc. Although its cause forever will remain a mystery, my best guess is that the cooking got me.

  My salvation was a doc on the trip who’d luckily brought along an antiemetic—basically a heavy tranquilizer—that stunned me into an extended slumber from which I awoke feeling pretty awful.

  As I dressed that morning, Skip Horner accosted me with the mountain guide’s signature soft solicitude, saying, “You may not enjoy this, but you are going to go to the top.” He was right all around. After a three-day hike up a gentle grade, we rested and then made the usual midnight assault to the top of Mount Kilimanjaro, Uhuru Peak.

  I now was poised for Mount Everest, which I was scheduled to climb that spring. The mountain had been on my mind for at least four years, ever since Aconcagua, but I wanted to correctly prepare for it. In my view, it would have been presumptuous to climb, say, Denali, and maybe one other mountain and then go to Everest. The Seven Summits are not just about summits. For me, they also were about process and people and being part of that world.

  Following the 1994 expedition to Carstensz Pyramid, I called Skip Horner and asked him who he thought was the best Everest guide. He said he thought Rob Hall was probably the most experienced guide on the mountain. I contacted Rob and asked to be included in the 1996 climb. He welcomed me aboard.

  Nineteen ninety-six was an important year for me. I turned fifty that year, and had read somewhere that you shouldn’t expect to climb supertall mountains much after that age. You start getting into physiologic problems. You’re on the downhill side of the power curve. I realized that I was losing just a little bit of edge every year, that I didn’t have quite the same level of strength and endurance. The window was closing on me.

  Outside of work and sleep, about all I had done for five years was exercise and climb. My life had taken on a monastic quality. Now, with the Everest climb just five months away, I stepped up my conditioning program.

  Peach:

  The first I ever heard about Everest came at a restaurant in Dallas where Beck and I were eating hamburgers. An acquaintance, John Hazleton, came up and congratulated Beck on being accepted on the expedition. My teeth nearly dropped out. Not only had I known nothing of this, I also was unaware of what it would cost: $65,000.

  What made this news all the more disturbing to me was that Bub was about to go on a wilderness adventure of his own, a school expedition to the mountains of West Texas, which had me very concerned. This was an annual event. On a recent trip one of the boys suffered pulmonary edema, the same condition I believe my husband developed on Denali. I knew it was dangerous, and I wondered how well equipped the leaders of this outing were to deal with such emergencies. From the evidence, not very.

  By this time, nearly three years after Antarctica, I’d grown accustomed to leading my life separate from Beck. We all still resided under the same roof when he was in town, but he and I were intimate strangers.

  When he was gone, I refused to stay at home, the mountaineering widow and her brood. So, for example, when Beck went to Kilimanjaro, I took the kids to New York and had a great time with them. I certainly wasn’t going to wait for people to invite me over to their house because they felt sorry for me.

  I never exercised fewer than five days a week, and had been getting out of bed for my workouts at four or four-thirty every morning, six days a week, for five years. My schedule with Brent was three one-hour sessions a week—all strength work—alternating with three days when I concentrated on endurance and aerobics. These sessions usually started with the lower-body cross-training machine. Then I moved to the revolving staircase for thirty minutes before finishing up on the recumbent bike, also for thirty minutes. Sundays were the only days I didn’t work out.

  Now I added an hour of aerobics on strength days, plus an extra half hour on aerobic days in the morning, and another hour in the afternoon. This required patronizing two different gyms.

  I did not take any vitamins or minerals or supplements, or pay particular attention to what I ate. I was on the see-food diet. If you see food, you eat it. In this way, I finally built myself up from the 150 pounds I weighed when I started climbing to 180 pounds, where I wanted to be.

  Pat White:

  Peach was not happy about Beck going to Everest. I remember that my husband and other people worried that Beck might get frostbitten again. But the joke was “That’s nothing. Wait till he gets home and Peach takes a bite out of his ass for being that stupid.”

  Peach:

  I tried to get him to talk to the kids. I said, “You need to talk to them in case something happens to you and you don’t come back.” He didn’t do that. When I asked him for power of attorney, he became furious. I said, “It’s not a choice.”

  Meg:

  When I found out he was going to climb Mount Everest, I felt a little betrayed. I sat him down here in the house after he came back from Kilimanjaro. I said, “Please, please, don’t go. It’s way too dangerous!”

  He said, “The death rate on Mount Everest is not that high.”

  I suppose that’s true for people who don’t even make it to Camp Two. But I’d read somewhere that a lot of people who make it to the top don’t make it back down. I really didn’t want him to be there. He didn’t give me a satisfactory explanation.

  I didn’t believe anything was going to happen to me. I truly believed I was going to go away for a few weeks and come back intact. The whole problem would disappear. I discounted Meg’s fears because I was so sure nothing would happen to me.

  Cecilia Boone:

  We went over to their house the night before Beck left for Everest, to tell him good-bye and to wish him well. Peach was in the bedroom and would not come out.

  Garrett Boone:

  The two kids were there. In front of us, he kept telling them this was going to be okay. It wasn’t dangerous. Rob Hall was the best out there. He’d planned everything very conservatively. It was going to be fine. I didn’t listen to what he was saying so much as why he was saying it. The kids obviously were worried about their father being away and their mother being so upset.

  Cecilia Boone:

  He was talking to us, but clearly the message was for the children, too.

  Pat White:

  Just before he went to Everest, we had a coffee meeting. Peach was very conflicted. She said it was hard to go to the airport with him. She said, “I’m angry, but at the same time I’m terrified something might happen. You don’t want to send someone you love out to face peril having chewed their ass off. You want to hug them and tell them you love them.”

  Terry White:

  The people who know Beck did not require he become a mountain climber in order for us to enjoy him as a human being, and to respect him. This was his need
, not his friends’ need. He didn’t need to do this for us. About six weeks before he went to Everest I sat down in his office and closed the door and told him he didn’t need to do this to prove to me that he was my friend. If he didn’t go that was fine with me. I think he was surprised, and I think he appreciated it. But I don’t know how much it slowed him down. It was probably something I should have said sooner.

  I don’t remember my exact response to Terry, but in essence it was “I appreciate what you’re telling me. But I want to do this. I’m prepared to do it.” I was touched by what Terry said. Most people do not have the courage to stand up and say, “Deny your dream. No one will blame you.”

  In part, I was going because I had something to prove to myself. But at this late moment, I might as well have been jumping off a cliff. You maybe reconsider the idea on the way down, but there’s no turning back.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  When I came off the mountain, I first had to deal with what I was, and where I was. One of the odd twists to this story was that nobody—including me—knew how badly I was injured. First I was dead. Then I wasn’t. Then I might as well have been dead. Then came Madan K.C. and the helicopter rescue. I wouldn’t know the whole unhappy truth of my medical condition for weeks.

  All the photographs I’d ever seen of frostbite were of horribly swollen and blistered hands. At the clinic in Katmandu, my hands were cold and the gray color of a piece of meat that’s been left in a leaky freezer bag for a couple of years. But there was no swelling, gross discoloration or blistering. I knew what frostbite was. When the tips of my fingers were frostbitten on Denali, it was really painful. This time there was no pain at all.

  Except in my psyche. It was humbling at the Yak & Yeti to discover they’d stationed some guy outside my door to come and wipe my ass if necessary. I’d go without eating for a week to avoid something like that, which practically was the case, in any event.

  Fortunately, Dan showed up. Then we went out to eat something. We found a lovely little restaurant in the hotel, a beautiful setting, and right off the bat I realized they didn’t know what to do with me. How were they going to serve me?

  I had to find something on the menu you could eat with a spoon, and even then Dan had to feed me. I was not thrilled with that.

  Then there were other people’s responses: the Nepalese official who stared me up and down; the housekeeper who dropped her mop. I was beginning to see how it feels to be a freak.

  But I still didn’t sense what a disaster had occurred.

  Back home in Dallas, where Terry White oversaw my medical needs, it was arranged for me to meet the hand surgeon, Mike Doyle. He asked me to spread my fingers, make a fist and cross my fingers on both hands, all of which I was able to do.

  Mike said, “You’re probably going to lose most of your fingers on your right hand, and the tips of your fingers on the left. We need to get a scan done so we can look at the vessels.”

  He called me later that day. I could tell he was really upset. “I don’t know how to tell you this,” he began, “but you don’t have any blood supply in your right hand. It stops above the wrist. And you have very little in your left hand. I don’t know what to say.”

  My frostbite was so severe that no vessels were functioning. They had frozen in place and filled with thrombosed coagulate. The reason I hadn’t seen any edema or swelling was that they were completely dead: no vessels, no fluid.

  This was a terrible surprise. I basically had a set of dead puppets. I was still (temporarily) able to pull the strings on them, because the controlling tendons extended into my forearms. But my hands were as good as gone.

  My son, Beck, and his friend Charles White went to work on the TV remote control, gluing little paddles of wood to it so I could press the buttons. I was both touched and immeasurably saddened by that gesture.

  We have a bright friend, Yolanda Brooks, who advises businesses on how to make their buildings handicap accessible. She brought by the books showing how to type with your teeth, and a whole range of other such devices, each page a testament to my inability to take care of myself.

  There were some grimly funny moments. I remember sitting in a chair when a big chunk of my right eyebrow, hair included, fell off in my hand. Later, as I was walking down the hall, my left big toe broke off and went skittering away.

  Our lamps were an interesting surprise. They turn on and off at a human touch. Of course, when I touched them with my dead hands, nothing happened.

  I did try to see if we could get something back in my hands. I went to hydrotherapy twice a day, seven days a week. I did all the exercises. But all I was doing was working my dead puppets.

  As you do that, you notice your fingers, one by one, start turning to stone. One day you can bring one of them all the way down. Next day, halfway. Next day it’ll wiggle a little bit. Next day, nothing. Gradually you watch them solidify, quit working, start to shrink and then mummify.

  At my wrists you could see the demarcation between living and dead tissue, where my body was trying to shed its dead member. It can actually do that with something small, like a finger or toe. But with something big like a wrist and hand, you have to cut it off.

  Of course, my nose had been frozen, too, and would fall off. But I wasn’t really worried about my face at that point. I figured the worst that could happen there was I’d just be incredibly ugly. It did bother me, though, that I had to tie a pork chop around my neck to get the dog to play with me.

  My hands were a different story.

  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.

  Peach:

  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 signific
ant 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.