My Life, Deleted (8 page)

“Where are my pain pills?” I'd ask.

She'd tell me they were behind the plant, out of sight, or in the kitchen drawer with all the pots.

“Why did you put them there?” I'd ask, seeing no rhyme or reason in those particular locations.

“I was cleaning,” she'd say.

I was confused, wondering if this was normal. After this kept happening, it seemed more than coincidental, but not wanting to make waves, I just took note of it.

However, it also didn't help build trust that she kept leaving the room to make telephone calls. Here I was, struggling to find my place in the house and our family, and she was disappearing to go talk quietly somewhere to who knows who. Was she making plans to leave me? Did she think her job with me was done? Was she making arrangements for someone else to come and take me away?

I started covertly following her into the hallway to listen. That's when I realized she was mostly confiding in her closest girlfriends, Karen and Johnna.

“I don't know what we're going to do,” Joan said. “He doesn't know the dogs, he doesn't know his kids, me. Nothing. And I don't know how to take over the business.”

Once I realized she wasn't trying to get rid of me, I was relieved. I was also glad that she had people to go to for emotional support when she was frustrated with me, my medical issues, our relationship, or our financial situation. I only wished that I had someone of my own to call because she always seemed happier and better equipped to deal with me once she got off the phone. The only person I really had to talk to about my difficulties was Joan.

But now that I fully understood how much the ramifications of my injury were wearing on her, I tried even harder to hide my emotions and to hold back even more details about what a difficult time I was having. This, however, only fueled my inner turmoil and made me feel increasingly frustrated and ill-tempered. Sometimes it built up so much, I felt like I was going to explode.

One day I teared up as I watched a medical documentary about babies being born, featuring scenes of the father holding his newborn for the first time, crying tears of joy with his wife, and cutting the umbilical cord.

I've been there, bringing children into this world, and I want to remember how special it was.

As I felt a mix of emotions overtaking me, I went outside and sat in the lounge chair facing away from the house so Joan couldn't see me. Hunched over with my elbows on my knees and my face in my hands, I cried for a good five minutes, trying to muffle the sobs so Joan and the neighbors couldn't hear me. This was a moment I didn't want to share with anyone—or burden them with. When I was done, I wiped my hands and eyes with my T-shirt and went back to my chair inside, trying to act as if nothing had happened. These outbursts helped release some of my stress, but the relief was only temporary. My well of darkness seemed bottomless.

For obvious reasons, I never told Joan about those moments although I did catch her having one of her own in the shower one morning. Hearing her sobbing, I came in to check on her.

“Are you okay?” I asked, reaching in and rubbing her back.

“Yeah,” she said, trying to hide her face, apparently trying to protect me from seeing her cry just as I'd been trying to protect her. “It's just hard.”

Sometimes, though, the rage came over me with such force that I was unable to control myself, and I'd snap at whoever wasn't cooperating with whatever I wanted to do, including the dog.

“Mocha, get outside!” I yelled at our brown Lab. She didn't understand why I was raising my voice to her, so she peed on the kitchen floor, which only complicated the situation. “Stupid dog!”

At that point Joan jumped in, trying to calm poor Mocha—and me—and mopped up the mess on the tile. “Go sit down, Scott. I've got it.”

But the dog didn't get treated any worse than Joan, Taylor, and Grant—or the rude car insurance agent I cursed out after he wouldn't listen to my side of the problem.

“That stupid son of a bitch!” I'd mutter loudly, usually after a conversation hadn't gone well or I'd had difficulty communicating with someone.

After I'd calmed down, Joan told me this was one bad habit that hadn't changed since my injury, joking that she wished it had. Although I'd been largely nicer and more compassionate since the accident, she said, I was just as short-tempered and even more intense than before the accident. She said we couldn't be sure, though, if it was me or the pain medication.

I wasn't immediately cognizant about the reasons for these outbursts, but thinking about them afterward, I realized I was feeling tortured about being lost within myself, not knowing if I was ever going to feel right again. The new Scott was battling with the shadow of the old Scott, whom I pictured as lost somewhere in the crevices of my gray matter. I was supposed to be getting better, but I felt I was actually getting worse in the sense that I still had no memories. Not a single one had come back as the doctors had promised. Meanwhile, I could sense my family was waiting, desperately hoping that the memories would return along with the man they had once counted on, the man Joan described as “the
rock,
” who seemed to have disappeared into thin air.

The old Scott, Joan said, was a guy who knew what he wanted and would speak his mind, loudly, when the mood struck him, which tended to intimidate people, partly because of his size. I wanted to hear more about this man, whom Joan described as an “alpha male.”

“What's an alpha male?” I asked.

“Watch the way people react to Tony Soprano,” she said, knowing that
The Sopranos
was still one of my favorite shows.

Telling me to disregard the Mafia ties, extramarital affairs, and violent problem-solving tactics he often employed, she explained that Tony and I had been uncannily similar in terms of our language and mannerisms and our approach to running the household, even down to buying the same car, a Chevy Suburban. In one episode Tony said something like “It may be 2003 outside, but it's still 1950 in this house.” Joan said that was true for us too in the old-school way we lived: I'd always brought in most of the money, she'd made decisions about where the kids went to school, and we'd never let Grant and his girlfriend lie kissing on the family room couch.

She also said that although I'd retained Tony's strong family loyalty, I seemed much more sensitive and emotional these days. She didn't seem to be making a judgment about it, but I still wasn't sure I liked the feminine sound of that. I'd heard men on TV say, “Quit acting like a girl,” or “You're crying like a woman,” and yet that's what I was doing. I wanted to be more like what my impression of a man was, the strong rescuer who put his fist down and solved everyone's problems. But at this point I couldn't even solve my own problems, so I guessed there wasn't much I could do about that. I was slowly coming to grips with the possibility that the old Scott wasn't going to reappear, and this was just the way things were going to be.

Chapter 7

W
HEN JOAN TOOK ME
to see neuro-ophthalmologist Thomas McPhee, we were hoping to get a more specific diagnosis for my partial loss of vision and, ideally, a cure.

“Is my sight going to return?” I asked him. “Or can I expect to wake up someday and all the vision will be gone?”

McPhee said my right pupil looked fine and the retina was intact, but he needed to do some testing before he could give me a prognosis. He had me lean my face into a machine with goggles and look at a series of black-dot patterns.

I had no trouble seeing any of the dots with my left eye, but I could see only those that appeared in the upper two quadrants of my right eye, with total darkness below the line that went from four to eight o'clock.

The technician printed up the results for McPhee, which were no surprise to me because they were just as I'd described my vision impairment. The doctor agreed with Goodell's opinion that my problem was likely caused by a microscopic hemorrhage in the optic nerve, and he could suggest only one treatment: an aggressive ten-day trial of prednisone. If the steroids worked to repair the damage, he said, I should start seeing improvement within those ten days.

We made a follow-up appointment for a couple of weeks later, but on our way out I told Joan I wasn't very encouraged. “That didn't help much,” I said.

“Well, let's give this a shot and see what happens,” she replied.

My skepticism unfortunately was proven out. By the time we were ready to go back, I still couldn't see out of the bottom of my right eye, and although McPhee had already told us the steroids were the only treatment he could recommend, we still hoped he might refer us to a surgeon who could offer us an innovative treatment.

Before going to McPhee's office, we stopped across the street at Scottsdale Healthcare to pick up the records from my hospital stay. This went faster than expected, so with the breeze wafting through the windows of Joan's parked Porsche Boxster, I took the opportunity to relax a bit and get some sun while she sat next to me, reading the medical reports.

I was sitting with my eyes closed, on the verge of dozing off, when Joan startled me. “Son of a bitch, you had opiates in your system,” she said.

Rattled, I sat up and shouted, “What the hell does that mean?”

“Wait a minute, let me finish,” Joan said, sounding pissed off.

What did I do? What did I screw up now?

I tried to wait patiently until she'd finished reading the page, after which she let out a big sigh. “Okay, that makes sense now,” she said.

“Good,” I said. “Now, you want to tell me what the hell that was all about?”

Joan said she'd read the report from the second ER doctor first, which showed that I'd had opiates in my system, but that was because the first ER doctor had already given me morphine for the pain.

“Okay,” I said, “but what the hell is an opiate?”

Joan explained that an opiate was a narcotic such as morphine, Percocet, or oxycodone, like what I was taking for my headaches.

“So why did you get so upset at first?” I asked, confused.

“Because if you took something for pain that morning, prior to the fall, it would show up in your system, and they would think you fell because of the medication you took,” she said.

Not understanding the subtle differences in meaning for the words
drug
and
medication,
as in recreational drugs versus prescription drugs, I mistakenly thought she was saying I had a drug problem. I also jumped to the erroneous conclusion that she thought I'd had drugs in my system before I got to the hospital and that's why I fell. If this was true, it would certainly explain why she kept moving my pain medication around the house.

I tried to digest the contradictions in what I thought she was saying and piece the puzzle together. But I couldn't make sense of it; I was going to have to ask her straight out. I looked at her and asked, very seriously, “Am I a drug addict, and if not, is someone in our family?”

Joan's face went blank. I could tell I hit a nerve, and I braced myself for the answer.

“Why would you ask that question?” she asked.

“Why? Because every time I go to get my pain medicine, it's never in the same place that I leave it. You are constantly moving it on me. Why is that?”

Joan put the papers down, turned toward me, and told me something that made me sit up in shock. “Scott, you are not a drug addict, but Grant is. I have to keep hiding your pain medicine because Grant might take it and get high if he finds it when he comes over.”

“Oh, my God,” I said, processing Joan's reaction at the same time I was dealing with my own. She looked somewhat relieved to have finally told me, but she clearly had not been prepared for my blunt question.

Part of me also felt relieved—that she hadn't been hiding the pills from me. But that emotion was more than countered by the devastation of learning that my son was a drug addict, not to mention the trauma of having that same emotional wound ripped open once more by discovering that I'd forgotten yet another major problem or life event. It seemed that every time I was able to form a thin new layer of protective skin over that wound, another discovery tore off the fragile scab.

Along with these emotions came sadness and fear because I didn't know enough about addiction to help my son. What I'd learned about addiction came from catching a few episodes of the A&E show
Intervention
and VH1's
Celebrity Rehab
with Dr. Drew. Although I knew this was a bad turn of events, I didn't know how bad. Having little knowledge and no context to quantify the extent of this problem, I felt as if I'd been hit in the head with a fifty-pound sledgehammer. Then, with so many conflicting emotions raging through my already overtaxed brain, I went numb.

The only positive development was that Grant's erratic behavior was starting to make more sense.
Intervention
had taught me that drug addicts and alcoholics act like jerks because they care only about themselves. I started running through the times Grant had behaved badly recently: the episode with the Christmas lights, acting out at Taylor's birthday dinner, the way he kept falling asleep, and his irrational outbursts of anger. During his weekly calls and occasional visits since I'd come home from the hospital, he'd usually talk to Joan for anywhere from twenty to sixty minutes then talk to me for about five. I'd been trying to figure him out and build a relationship, but it was difficult. Once he asked how I was feeling and I said “getting better,” he'd switch topics to his job, his girlfriend, or himself. Now that the mystery was solved, I felt as though I could understand him a little better, and this gave me at least a small dose of comfort.

But now, after dealing with this bombshell, I still had to go inside to see McPhee for what I expected would be more bad news about my eye.

Just like the last visit, the doctor put drops in and conducted the same tests. “Has there been any change?” he asked.

“No,” I said. “There's been no change for the better and no change for the worse.”

McPhee began a long-winded explanation about the eye's complicated physiology and the scarcity of treatment available for my condition. I was in no mood for this—I just wanted him to get to the point—so I interrupted him.

“The treatment didn't work, obviously. Will I ever get my eyesight back in my right eye?”

McPhee explained that some people had much worse vision problems than me, and even though my full sight could return, it was unlikely if, as Dr. Goodell had speculated, the fall had caused a hemorrhage in my optic nerve because such damage was usually permanent. The longer my sight didn't improve, he said, the less likely it was going to.

“Is there anything else that can be done?” I asked.

He reiterated that the prednisone was the only treatment he could recommend, and now that it had proven ineffective, he didn't have anything else to suggest.

“Does this mean I'm considered legally blind?”

He said no, my vision was still good otherwise, so I shouldn't have any problems driving, nor would I need additional glasses. That was all well and good, but I had one more question. Joan had already told me that if my sight didn't return, I wouldn't be able to fly planes anymore, but I wanted to hear this directly from the doctor.

“Does this mean I can never fly again?”

“Unfortunately, you can't fly for hire as a commercial pilot, but I'm sure you could fly as an individual, private pilot,” he said.

A damaged optic nerve was about the best diagnosis I was going to get for my vision loss. I'd known in my gut that this was not going to change, and even though it had nothing to do with my memory, I'd been wanting this information, waiting for it so I could get some form of closure.

“Well, I guess it's permanent,” I said.

“I'm afraid so,” McPhee said.

“That's it,” I said to Joan. “I will never see out of my right eye again.”

That's when it finally hit me. Joan had told me how much I'd loved the freedom of flying a plane above the clouds to escape the insanity of life on the ground, to fly us to Las Vegas for the weekend or to Palm Springs for our anniversary, to take the kids on a family ski trip, or even to fly my parents in on one of our chartered jets. It was my passion, my life's dream, not to mention an avocation that had made us a lot of money. I hadn't sat in a cockpit since my accident, and it wasn't as if I missed being a pilot, because I couldn't remember what it felt like to fly, but I still felt angry. This was just one more thing that had been taken away from me. First my memory, then my eye, now a career. What the hell was next? Even if I did get my memory back, I still wouldn't be able to fly commercially again.

The negative thoughts started coming at me in a rush, my anxiety mounting into a panic with each new scenario I feared would happen next.

If this is permanent, will my memory loss be as well? Is the rest of my body going to start failing too? Will I start forgetting things I learned since the accident?

I felt like I was losing what little hope and control I had left, and a blanket of hopelessness fell over me. I disintegrated into tears, crying so hard I couldn't even talk.

My life
is coming apart, piece by piece, and there is
nothing I can
do to stop it. I'm
on a death-defying roller-coaster ride of misery, only I didn't ask
for a ticket and now I can't get off.

McPhee sat quietly and let me vent while Joan hugged and tried to console me, even though she was crying now too. When I was finally able to get a few words out, I apologized to the doctor. “I'm sorry, but it's just been a real difficult road here,” I said.

“I understand,” he said. “But you'll get used to this to the point where you won't even notice it.”

He said I could get a second opinion and repeat the MRI if I liked, but he wanted me to come back in six weeks for a follow-up. As we were leaving, I told Joan that I didn't see any point in coming back only to receive the same prognosis again.

I'm not sure if I grieved my vision loss properly, because as soon as we got back to the car my mind shifted back to the Grant situation, with all the emotions that evoked, and I went on another ten-minute crying jag.

Not only is my vision loss permanent, but my son is addicted to painkillers and cocaine. I wish I could remember, but did I not encourage or support him enough? Was I mean to him? Was this somehow my fault?

Joan rubbed my back and my leg, letting me get all the emotion out, until I was ready to head home. Still, on the drive back, my ruminations continued, as I came up with more questions about possible causes for Grant's condition.

After I was settled in my chair at home and had tried to deaden my headache pain with more medication, Joan and I dived deeper into the issue. It had been a rough day, which made it even more difficult than usual to try to absorb a lot of information, but I felt I needed to take in as much as I could.

“When did his drug use start?” I asked.

Joan said Grant began using drugs in his junior year of high school, but we didn't know until it escalated during his first semester at ASU in the fall of 2007. “He was in school barely a month,” she said, when we pulled him out in October and took him to rehab. “He wanted help.”

From there, the questions I'd been thinking about on the drive home started pouring out of me: “Is it something I did or didn't do it to make him turn to drugs? Did I not teach him the right way to grow up? Did something bad happen in his life?”

Consumed with doubt that I had been a good father, I listened quietly as Joan told me a story she'd been saving until I was ready to start dealing with the negative issues from my past. Up to this point, I'd been having so much trouble coping with what was in front of me, she knew I couldn't handle anything more.

“Well, he did have a head injury when he was eleven,” she said. “And we always questioned whether there were some residual depression issues that might have led to his low self-esteem.”

Grant was playing touch football during recess at school, she said, and took an elbow to the head. I was at home that day, and she was working in the recovery room at the Greenbaum Surgery Center at Scottsdale Healthcare–Osborn when she got a call from the school nurse, who was a friend of hers. The nurse said Grant had been hit in the head, was vomiting, and needed to be picked up.

Joan asked me to bring him home to relax, which I did, but once we got there he didn't get any better. In fact, he complained he had the worst headache of his life and continued to throw up.

Our son was in tremendous pain and I was worried, so I called Joan at work and she told me to bring him to the emergency room at Scottsdale Healthcare–Shea, which was only five minutes away. Meanwhile, she called some of her trusted ER nursing colleagues to tell them we were on our way. The nurses met us in the triage area and immediately took him back to see the doctor.