The Harder They Fall (26 page)

Of course—I was in high school in the early to mid-seventies—all the kids were doing drugs, smoking dope, stuff like that, and it never even crossed my mind to try the stuff. I was offered it but just turned around and walked away. You got called names and teased, but I thought I’m just not interested at all. Plus this was about the time I started getting into running a little bit. I wasn’t very good, but I thought, “No way.” And that was against the rules anyhow. So I went from there, and my running time did start to take off when I got into college. Drunks and drinking, nope. And when things started to change was after my competitive running career. I retired from competitive racing at that high level, back in 1988 after the Olympic trials, and then we moved back to our dairy farm. About two months after we’d been back, I got into a real bad farm accident. It busted up all my ribs and punctured my lung. I broke my arm and had a piece of steel driven into my chest. My left leg was just about torn off. At that point, I was laying on the ground and my wife Mary’s calling the ambulance, and we’re waiting for them to get there, and you don’t know if you’re going to live or die and are in an incredible amount of pain. And so the ambulance finally arrives and they get into our little hospital and do all this checking out. And about a half hour later, after I go into the hospital, the nurse comes in and says, “Richard, I’m going to give you a little something. It won’t take the pain completely away, but at least it will kind of take the edge off a little bit.” She gave me this shot. And I had no idea what it was. And I’m telling you, about twenty minutes later, I got this warm, fuzzy feeling in my head that I had never felt before. And it was like a million bucks. The pain was still there but it was like, “Ah, big deal!” I didn’t even care. I remember waking in the room. I said, “Man, what was that you gave me?” She said, “Well, it was Demerol, a narcotic painkiller.” Every three or four hours, she would come in and give me another shot. Honest to goodness, at that point, if the sheriff of our county, who came out to the farm accident, would have come into my hospital room and said, “Dick, we could take you
out to the farm and wrap you back up in the maw of that machine and turn the power take-off on and let you flap around a few more times and kind of re-create how the accident happened,” I would have said, “That’s fine, but bring that nurse with the needle.”

I was already getting off on that stuff. I didn’t know it yet, but I was. I’d never felt a drug high before. For a couple of days, I was in our local hospital. They got me kind of stabilized and then transferred me down to the Twin Cities [Minneapolis and Saint Paul, Minnesota], where I had two or three operations. I was in the hospital for a number of weeks. After a week of the shots, one day the nurse walks in and says, “Richard, we’re going to discontinue giving you the Demerol shots.” It was like they were taking away my teddy bear. And I go, “You’re kidding me. Man! I just got out of surgery a couple of days ago. I have a lot of pain.” “Oh no, we’re not stopping it, we’re giving it a new way ’cause your butt’s like a pin cushion.” And I said, “How’re you going to do it?” And she said, “I’m putting a needle in your vein. See that plastic tube?” “Yeah.” “Well, it’s attached to that pouch of Demerol up there.” And she handed me a little button thing. “This is set so that every three-and-a-half minutes you get a dose. And instead of having to wait twenty minutes to hit you, it’ll be instantaneous.”

Honest to God, I could hardly wait to push that cotton pickin’ thing. Seeing me react, she laughed and I pushed the button, and right away felt a tingle go into my arm. And it was like,
wham
,
boom
, right to my head. The problem was that they were giving me a pretty big dose and it knocked me out. It would make me fall asleep. So I remember getting that first shock or first push and losing consciousness. I woke up thirty minutes later thinking, “My gosh, I missed eight doses!” So I wore my runner’s watch. I set the alarm to go off every two-and-a-half minutes, and I set it next to my pillow. So I’d give myself a little jolt, knock myself out, and two-and-a-half minutes later I’d hear
ding
,
ding
,
ding
,
ding
. Whether I needed relief or not, I’d push that button again. At the time—now it’s so much easier to look back and see all those signs—but at the time, you don’t think anything of it. So then eventually they weaned me off of that and put me on Percocet, which is heavy-duty too. But I took it in a normal pill. I was sent home with some Percocet, and then gradually they weaned me off of that.

Most people get off the analgesic and don’t have a problem with it. I, too, was fine for two-and-a-half years, until we—my wife, Mary, my small son, Andy, and I—were coming home from a couple of days away from the cows. And we were about forty miles from home, and a lady came barreling through a stop sign on a connecting road and just T-boned our car. I busted up my back and had some whiplash and a bruised spinal cord—and I was right back in the hospital. As I lay in the ambulance, I knew I was hurt but that I wasn’t going to die. But, man, all of a sudden it was déjà vu: “I betcha I’m going to get some more of that Demerol.” Sure enough, it was almost the exact scenario. They went from the shots over to the drip in the vein, then down to the Percocet. I got out of the hospital after a couple of weeks and was sent home with the Percocet, and was using it not as I ought. If it said one to two tablets every four to six hours, I took two every four hours. I would call for more, and because I was from a small town, with that kind of drug you’re supposed to have a written prescription. Well, our pharmacy, that certainly didn’t have a fax machine, said, “Listen, Doc, we’ll take it over the phone, and just send it to us.” So the pharmacist would fill it for me without a written prescription.

After a couple of months, I went back for my last checkup with her. As I left, she said, “Dick, this is your last. Here’s a prescription for 30 more Percocet, but when this is done, it’s done. You’ve started to feel better now and it’s been long enough. Ibuprofen or aspirin should do the trick.” “Okay,” I said, but home again, I started having an anxiety attack. I’m thinking as I pull into the parking lot of the pharmacy, “Man!” Before I know it, I’m looking at this prescription. “This is it. Thirty and it’s gone!” So there was the store next to the pharmacy, and I knew they had a copy machine in there. So—again, I had never stolen a piece of bubblegum in my life, I’d never been in any trouble—but I went in there and thought, “I’m just going to run this through and see what it looks like. And if it looks really good, maybe I’ll keep an extra one or two, just in case.” Well, I ran it through there, making sure no one was looking. The second I pushed the button, I felt guilty. Then I really felt stupid. When I came out and looked, you could tell it was a copy. The pharmacist would have had to be the most stupid person in the world to take it. I thought, “You’d better throw this
away before somebody happens to find it. They’re going to start asking me questions.” So I sat out on my truck, and I’d never smoked in my life and had no idea how to operate the cigarette lighter. It took me about five minutes to figure out you have to push it in for it to heat up. Finally figured that out. It got hot and I sat out there and lit that copy on fire. Opened the door of my truck, and the sheet burned, and I watched the ashes blow away in the wind. Went in with the real prescription, got it filled. Took it as prescribed but to the max side of it. Once I go through with it, I’m fine. Back working on the farm, fine. That was late July or early August of 1992, and I was fine until January of 1993.

I’d been in Fargo, North Dakota, at an agricultural seminar. Got done with it. Was back running a little bit, not hard, but out running. It had snowed all day long, and I’d always liked running in a snowstorm. I went out for a run. I was running down this one-way street with the traffic, knowing that’s not the way to go. But with the sidewalk clogged with snow, I thought I’d run on the main street until the next block and turn off on a side road. Well, I never made it. I ended up getting hit in the back by a truck. They found me lying in a snowbank and loaded me up into an ambulance, at which point I came to. As they took me to the hospital, I asked what had happened. “Oh … uh … you got hit by a car or truck when out running.” “Am I going to die?” “Oh, no, but you’re banged up pretty good.”

Honest to goodness, I almost started high-fiving the ambulance driver. I knew I was about to get more Demerol! I had that warm fuzzy feeling again without even getting the drug—anticipating. At the hospital, almost the same scenario repeated. They checked me out and shot me with Demerol, put me in my room. Then shots for a few days, then the IV, then over to Percocet. Got home, was laid up and recovering and such.

When feeling well enough, I drove down to the Twin Cities to do a speaking engagement. And on the way home, about forty miles from home—I should not have been driving that day because of blizzard warnings, but I was eager to get home—I was driving a Ford Bronco truck, and it came out from behind a windbreak and the wind caught my truck and it slid across this icy road and hit a big, tall snowbank and rolled about a
dozen times. The emergency crew tried to cut me out ’cause I was hooked upside down. It was twenty below, and they couldn’t get the Jaws of Life to work, so they basically yanked me out of there the best they could, as they smelled gas.

That same week, I was scheduled for a checkup with the doctor. Instead I was hospitalized—same floor, same room, same nurse as only a few weeks before. And on the stuff again!

A few years ago, after three years of sobriety, I gave a talk at a little elementary school in a small town nearby where we live. Afterwards—you know, kids are great because they’re not afraid to ask you anything—this little girl, about second grade, came up and said, “Mr. Beardsley, did you ever like purposely get into an accident so you could get the drugs?” I was dumbfounded! I never even thought about that. She set me back on my heels like I hadn’t been for a long time. I sat there thinking and thinking about it and gave her an answer, and then thought about it more that night. I never purposely jumped out in front of a vehicle or drove my truck into a ditch, but without question, I put myself in situations subconsciously. Sure I didn’t want to die. I loved life. But I loved the drugs and put myself into situations where there was a pretty good chance that something could go amiss—where I’d get into an accident or car wreck or whatever and get some of the drugs again. I mean, it took me three or four years of sobriety to admit that.

So I’m in the hospital for another ten days, I’m discharged, get sent home with some Percocet. I’m lying at home, been on my back a lot, taking a lot of the pills, and one afternoon Mary came home from work and we sat around downstairs. I said, “I’m going upstairs and take a nap.” I wasn’t feeling good. We live in an old farmhouse with narrow steps. I get to the top of the steps and either blacked out or got dizzy and slipped. Anyhow, I fell backwards down the stairs and ended up busting some ribs. It was a Friday, so Mary was home and took me to the hospital. The doctor they wanted to have me see was off for the weekend. They just had the on-call doctor, and they were giving me big doses—shots—of Demerol every three hours. My roommate told me that the doctor coming in Monday was a really good doctor but with a poor bedside manner. So Monday
morning, I’m in the far bed, and the doctor walks in and pulls that old curtain as if that’s going to keep out any sound of what he’s ready to tell me from the roommate. He’s got this clipboard, and he doesn’t come up and address me, “Hey, I’m Dr. So-and-So.” He just comes up to the side of the bed and opens up his chart. He says, “Beardsley, I think you’re addicted to these painkillers.”

And I yelled back. (Usually I’m an easygoing person.) I said, “I am not addicted to this stuff. You could cut me off of them right now.” I-don’t-ever-need-this-stuff, I’ll-show-you kind of thing. He said, “Now, I’m not just going to cut you off. We’ll wean you gradually off of them and get you back on the right track.” Of course I didn’t want to hear that, although he was right. Dead-on 100 percent right! So they gradually weaned me off the Percocet and put me on some methadone, which made me real sick. In fact, if I took the methadone and didn’t lay down for the first forty-five minutes afterward, I would end up throwing up. So I got home and they got me off that too, and I was fine until …

That would have been late February, and I was doing pretty good. I wasn’t using anything after that for two or three months. I was back running a little bit, and went out for a run one day, and go about 150 meters down the road, and thought, honest to God, someone had come up and stabbed me in my lower back. The pain was excruciating. I couldn’t right myself. I hobbled home and got into my car and drove to the family doctor. By the time I arrived, I had these big knots in my back. “Yikes, we got to get you into some physical therapy,” the doctor said. And also he wrote a prescription for some Percocet. When he asked, “Have you ever used painkillers before to help with any problems? Of course I had but didn’t want to tell him that. I just said, “Yeah.” He said, “Have you ever used a drug called Percocet?” I played dumb, “Maybe one time a doctor …” You know, I could have spelled it backwards for him! So he wrote me a prescription for 30 or 40 Percocet and then put me into physical therapy.

Three weeks later, when I wasn’t a whole lot better, I went to him and he said, “Dick, you know I have to get you to a specialist for that. I can’t keep giving you these painkillers ’cause they’re very addictive, and we need to get this condition taken care of.” So he sent me to an orthopedic back
specialist, who did a bunch of stuff and planned to test some more. In the meantime, he was very liberal with his prescription pad. Now not for one moment have I blamed any doctor for the problems I had, because doctors are between a rock and a hard spot. They have compassion for people, plus I could make myself hurt a lot more than I was just to get the drugs. So the specialist wrote me a prescription for 60 Percocet, and I walked out of there. I never had 60 before, and of course, I was using them two or even three at a time now. I continued to go back and get more and more and more. Well, finally I ended up … that was late summer of ’93 … by January of ’94, they figured out that I had these busted-up vertebrae, and had to go in and do about eleven hours of surgery. For the twelve days in the hospital, they had me on the IV pump and then on the pills. Then I got out, and once I started getting recovered from the surgery itself, my back actually felt much better. I remember thinking, “You know, I really need to get myself to not be using these painkillers. Dick, enough is enough.”