Pain Don't Hurt (10 page)

In the bathroom I walked in with my eyes down, approached the sink, splashed water on my face, and glanced up almost as if by accident. I was trying so hard to be casual. It shook me to my core to see myself. I had no color at all. My lips were a sort of fish-belly gray. There were minor shades of difference between the whites of my eyes and the rest of my face. I looked like what I was, a piece of garbage just circling the bowl. Nearly dead. And scared out of my fucking mind.

I walked out of the bathroom to find Justin standing right by the door. I tried to smile.

“Dude, I look like shit.” I laughed.

Justin didn't crack a smile. He folded his arms across his chest and cocked his head to one side. “Yeah, I know. I know you do. You look awful. Now, call your doctor.” Then he handed me my phone.

I made no effort to protest.

I called Dr. Staffen, whom I had also informed that I had no intention of having surgery before I left Pittsburgh. I told him that I may have made a poor decision initially and that I wanted to discuss my options.

Dr. Staffen put me in contact with the Cleveland Clinic, currently the best hospital for cardiology and heart surgery in the country. I was clear, clear as a bell that I wanted to come back to fight. I didn't care how. There had to be a way. Dr. Staffen did the legwork to place me at the Cleveland Clinic and in the hands of Dr. Gosta Pettersson, the man who would be doing my surgery.

The options were discussed. Having a mechanical valve put in was off the table, as I would then definitely need to be on Coumadin, a powerful blood thinner, which would make returning to fighting completely impossible. The option I was considering was a procedure that would instead put in either a cadaver valve or bovine valve to replace my defective valve.
If
my heart returned to its normal size once the defect causing it to enlarge was fixed, and
if
the healing went so perfectly that I didn't need to be on any blood thinner (there was still a good chance that I would), then that would be my only chance to return to the ring. The drawback? I would need to have the valve replaced in fifteen years, as it would wear out, and
none
of those ifs were guaranteed. My heart might still stay enlarged, and I might still need to be put on blood thinners. But I had to try.

I decided that I would rehab in Latrobe at my parents' house because this allowed me to be close by but not in the same house. This was a difficult decision, but I needed to be in a familiar place, even if it was a difficult place. My mother jumped at the chance to get to take care of me, and to my surprise my father offered to come to the hospital in Cleveland to be there for me when I came out. He had never offered to be there for me in any capacity before. It almost brought me to tears hearing him say it.

The night before my surgery I sat in a hotel room, texting people. The risk of mortality for a normal person during a valve replacement surgery isn't terribly high. For a diabetic, the level climbs slightly higher. I had friends messaging me, wishing me luck, making jokes. Suddenly Justin popped up.
How are you feeling?

I told him I was good. I felt fine. Excited to not have to train for a long time, which was a lie, given that the idea of being restricted for so long absolutely terrified me.

So, can I have the Thai shorts that Rick Roufus gave you if you die?

Typical Justin. Cracking jokes. I told him he could have them, complete with Jérôme LeBanner's blood spatter! Then he turned serious.

Be strong, Mark. You're going to come back to fight, I know this. Let your heart heal. Just let it. I love you, brother.

I had literally never heard those words before from a man in my entire life.

The next day I woke up very early and drove to the hospital with Amy, my friend and still my wife, but mostly a woman with strong know-how when it came to surgeries and hospital stays. I was taken to a room where I was changed into a gown and a ridiculous cap. Before I was taken upstairs, where they would hook me up to several machines that would monitor every possible life force in me, Amy, whom I was barely still making it work with but who was still by my side, snapped a picture of my throwing up a “hang loose” sign. As they hooked me up to the IV and began explaining the anesthesia, I felt this fear in me surge. I didn't want to have to do this. I didn't want to have to risk it. I wanted to go home. I wanted life to be normal and without all of this. I wanted to just go back to training. . . . .

“Now I want you to count backward from ten, Mark . . . ,” the anesthesiologist said calmly as the liquid made its way through my IV. . . .

I love you too, Justin. I love you, Mom. I love you, Dad. I love you, Colin, Amy, Benjamin, Patrick, Ronan. I love you guys. Please be with me, God, or whatever is out there, or anywhere. Help me. Be with me now. Make it all okay. Make it go well. Let it be the best heart surgery ever, and let my heart heal. Let me come back. I must come back. I have to fight again. . . .

“Ten . . . nine . . . eight . . .”

chapter ten

People fear death more than they fear pain. It's strange. . . . Life hurts a lot more than death.

—
JIM MORRISON

. . . They are pulling something from my throat. . . . I feel like a fish
being yanked from some black depth and into the light. Everything is watercolor and without borders, shapes mashing into each other. I am panicking, reaching for anything and everything, struggling to breathe without agony. In my mind I am being forced back by a slew of arms into some soft coffin; sleep takes me again before I can fight back.

. . . It's been hours since the first time I awoke, but I don't know this . . . not yet. All I know is pain. My world is eclipsed by an oppressive veil of ache that starts at my center and bleeds out. Every breath I take is preceded by a bargaining, a prayer. . . .
Please, God, let me just breathe without this pain and I will do anything
. . . then I breathe and the sledgehammer, the elephant's foot, drives into my sternum again. I am almost hiccuping, and I have tears in my eyes. Jesus Christ, am I alive? Is this right? Something must be wrong. I expect to look down and see some gore-coated clawed hand dressed in a tangle of veins shredding through my center, carrying with it every nerve that has ever coursed through me. I start to reach one hand up to wipe my eyes, only to have my arm stop an inch or so above the bed, but my muscles continue to contract and I let out a gasp as the resistance instigates a cacophony of screaming within the nerves in my chest. I am restrained. I have this image of wishing myself through the bed, backward, away from the pain, the restraints, and just falling to the floor whole again. I feel like the earth after a tornado has ripped it up. My arms shredded trees lying to the sides, my chest once a road, now with a swath cut through it, the piping ripped up, my dick some sad dead animal left by the side of the road, taped to my leg with a tube dangling from it. . . .

I turned my head to the side and met the eyes of my father. My first feeling was terror. Here I was splayed out, totally helpless, and he was right next to me. I don't know what I thought he might do, and the fear faded quickly as he saw my bleary eyes blink and my attempt at looking surprised through the myriad of drugs I was on.

“If I didn't know any better I'd say you were about three sheets to the wind! You look blasted!” He chuckled a bit, but his attempt to bust my balls was feeble. My father looked like he hadn't slept. He looked worn, and he looked frightened. Again, this was a first.

Amy sat next to him. My wife. My wife with whom I had three beautiful children. My wife who had put up with so much bullshit from me. There she sat, smiling. Amy was an RN in a hospital at this point, and so she wasn't just a support in my life but was the best kind of friend you could want in a hospital. She immediately stood up and placed a hand gently on my face. She looked clearly into my eyes and said, “You're okay, Mark, you're going to be okay. The surgery is over and it went well. Just try to sleep.”

“Fuck this, I'm hungry. I need food.” I was mumbling, I was so drugged up. They had me on a specific diabetic diet as per the endocrinologist's orders. It was awful, and my body historically has burned through more carbohydrates than most diabetics are told to eat given how athletic I am. I wanted real food. My father lit up upon realizing that this was a problem he could solve.

“Well then, let's get you outta here and get you some food. There's a Polish deli right across the way. But you're gonna have to walk. Your choice though. It's either more of this crap or a proper Reuben! What do you think?”

His eyes were sparkling at the idea of disobeying authority. He was such an asshole, but he was a rebel at his core. The idea of getting me to go down an elevator and to walk across a walkway while wearing a hospital gown and hooked up to machines thrilled him, because he knew it would piss all the doctors off. He was an equal-opportunity miscreant who valued quantity over quality. The more irritated folk, the better.

“Yeah, let's go. I gotta go.”

They both helped me up and onto my feet. I shuffled slowly down the hall, every step and breath a new sting. When doctors would look at me funny, my father would boom, “He's just getting a little air, just for a minute,” cutting off their arguments before they were made. I'd have been more worried if Amy hadn't been there as well, moving whatever tubes were around me to keep me from catching on anything. The three of us made our way down the elevator and outside into the brisk evening air.

We plunked down at a table while others in the restaurant stared. We all ordered Reubens, and goddamn if it wasn't the best food I have ever had in my life. I looked at them both. You are given new eyes after major surgery. My wife, still here after all of my absentee behavior. We might not make it work, but our friendship was cemented in those moments. My dad, a tyrant and the bane of my existence, but the only father I will ever know. I had a gentleness in me that wasn't there before. I was glad to be alive, glad they were there, and really glad to have this awesome fucking sandwich.

After we ate, they returned me to my room and I fell into a blissful slumber. I spent the rest of the next day and a half going in and out of sleep. Nearly every time I would open my eyes, my father and Amy were there. Sitting, waiting, watching.

When finally I was awake and functioning after several days, I started asking about my catheter. I wanted it out. I had jokingly said before the surgery, “So if you are going to put one of those things in, please make sure you take it out carefully. You're taking part of my heart; at least leave my dick intact.” On a Saturday morning, the day before they released me, they woke me up early and sent some young nurse in to remove it. I braced myself as he pulled the sheets back, grabbed ahold of the tube, and unceremoniously gave the most vicious yank.

“
Hey, man, what the fuck! You're going to tear it off!
” My typically bass voice came out like a high-pitched teenage squeak. My worst fears were coming true. Not only was I at kitten strength, but here some half-wit was about to tear my penis off and I wouldn't be able to do anything about it.

“Just relax, sir, I know what I'm doing.”
Yank. Yank.

“HOLY SHIT! ARE YOU KIDDING ME? ARE YOU KIDDING ME? GUARDS! SOMEONE! HELP!”

My shouts echoed through the hospital as I tried to crawl away from this fucking sadist, who I was convinced at this point had a personal vendetta against me. The charge nurse came in upon hearing my yelps and hurried over to the bedside.

“Okay, you know what? Why don't you go on, I can handle this.” He dismissed the other nurse rapidly as I glared at him.

“Hey,
thanks for not taking it with you
! Is there anything left? Holy shit . . .”

I leaned my head back on the pillow as the charge nurse deftly deflated the balloon and removed the catheter in one quick and painless pull.

“I'm so sorry, Mark, he's new.”

“It's okay, man, just next time maybe don't send the new guy to pull out the catheter. It's like he was trying to start a lawn mower, for Christ's sake. Thank God I already have kids because I'm pretty sure now it's just for show. . . .”

We both laughed. Shortly after that, I was allowed to go to the bathroom by myself. I kid you not, the first time I tried to pee after the catheter incident, piss shot in a stream at a perfect right angle. To avoid painting the walls I had to pee sitting down for a week. Thought he had fucked me up permanently.

Sunday morning I was released and went to my parents' house. I was supposed to spend twelve weeks doing
absolutely nothing
. My father and I spent the time watching sports and cracking jokes. One morning we went to Sunday breakfast together and one of the guys at the diner made a crack about my tattoos to him. He barely raised his eyes before muttering, “He's a grown-ass man, he can do what he wants.”

At the twelve-week mark the doctor said they would do an echocardiogram to check both the size of the left ventricle, the part of my heart that had enlarged (it had enlarged to seven centimeters; it's never supposed to go over five centimeters), to see if it had shrunk back down, and to see where my cardiac ejection fraction was at. Only then would I know if I was ever going to fight again. After a few weeks I was finally allowed to remove the bandage and actually take my first shower. Peeling that bandage off and seeing the unbelievable mess of gore, and hiding behind it an eight-inch incision, was sobering. There was blood caked on so thick, I almost couldn't see the dissolving stitches. In the shower I went after cleaning all of that off obsessively, despite the pain. It made my soul ache to see myself so battered, so bloody, and not by my own choice. I hated it.

I was doing my checkups at Latrobe Hospital with Dr. Staffen a few times a week. I was on ACE inhibitors and painkillers. I had successfully avoided needing to take Coumadin or any other blood thinner, which was fantastic. I avoided taking my painkillers as long as I could and sometimes would go through a day without any. Given my brother's background, pills freaked me out. At the sixth week Dr. Staffen proposed that we do the echocardiogram early. He said I was healing very rapidly, and he felt that it wasn't too early to check. I was terrified. The results of this test would in fact be either the green light or the death toll for my career as a fighter.

The evening of my echocardiogram, the phone rang. I answered it hurriedly. The voice on the other end was Dr. Staffen himself.

“Mark . . . you sound out of breath. Why?”

“I just rushed to the phone, what's the story?”

“Mark,
don't rush
to do anything! At least not yet. Listen, I don't know what to tell you. You're a freak of nature. Your left ventricle is down to normal, and your ejection fraction is at sixty percent already. You are way ahead of schedule, my friend. We can start rehabilitating you now. Congratulations.”

That was it. Barring a serious setback, I had just been given the green light. I would rehabilitate and go back to training. And I would fight again.

I got off the phone, and if I hadn't thought it would have brought me to my knees with pain, I would have screamed. Instead I laid a hand flat against my chest and just closed my eyes and mumbled, “Thank you.”

My rehabilitation lasted until the beginning of 2007. I welcomed the year with an open heart (ha ha) and an open mind. I felt hopeful. In mid-January I was done. I cannot tell you how incredible it felt to be told that I could go back to training. That day I went to a local gym, intending just to get a sweat on, just to feel the leather in my hands. I pulled my jump rope out and started at a slow pace; it felt like dancing. Pulling my gloves on just to swat a bag felt like embracing an old friend. I was working lightly for an hour maybe, when suddenly a sharp pain struck me right in the center of my chest. I stopped immediately and pulled my gloves off; running a few fingers over my chest, I felt a strange springy lump.

Then my phone rang.

It was my mother calling. My father was sick. Something was wrong, and they were taking him to the hospital. I changed my shirt and jumped in the car to drive to the hospital, a drive I could at this point probably have made with my eyes closed.

The hospital staff was already sick of my dad by the time I got there. There was nothing they could really tell him except that he was big, broken-down, and old. They suggested he fix his diet (a subtle suggestion was made to him to perhaps slow down his drinking), but that was it. We went home and I called my doctor, the memory of that shooting pain in my own chest nagging at me. Two days later I was in having my chest X-rayed, then staring at a bright glowing coil on the X-ray film that wound its way up my sternum.

“So, that is the wire that is essentially holding your chest closed right now.”

I think Dr. Staffen had grown to like how I didn't get grossed out easily, so he let the technical verbiage fly a little looser when he talked to me.

“And this lump that you are feeling is this little thing.”

His pen hovered in a circle over a tentacle of the glowing coil that seemed to reach out to one side. “A piece of the wire has come slightly uncoiled and is pushing out. So, someday we may have to go in and fix that.” He turned and looked at me. My expression must've said something to the effect of
Not today, bro
. He nodded and basically told me it didn't need to be done today. I left, running a finger over my strange little wire lump as I walked out.

I went back to training every day, slower at first, easing into it. Then more and more. My father fell sick again in early February. The doctors were a bit more concerned, but he was adamant that he was fine. He was flying to Las Vegas to see the NBA All-Star Game. He had been going to most of them from 1997 on. The younger players loved him, as he was such a throwback, and on occasion I had accompanied him in the past. My mother was pissed off that he was leaving. She was worried; though she wouldn't ever tell me what the doctors had said, she clearly didn't want him to go. Despite anyone's advice or concerns, he checked himself out and flew to Las Vegas. He was supposed to stay for five days. The day of the game, February 18, which was a Sunday, my mother called me to tell me that he was flying back home that day.

“Mom, it's the day of the All-Star Game. . . . Why would he be coming home today?”

“He's not well, Mark, he wasn't well when he left but he just
had
to go. . . . He's really not well.”

Her annoyance was barely hiding her worry. I knew how this went. He would go in for a few days, she would pitch fits about how he never took care of himself, and then he would get out and be fine for a few months, rinse, repeat. My father was eighty-three years old at this time. I had done the panicking thing before. I refused to worry right away. When she said that he was going to be taken to the VA hospital right by the airport, rather than Latrobe, which was closer to home, I felt a little more concerned.