WITH OUR RELATIONSHIP back on track, we headed to Santa Monica, California, for a few romantic days of relaxing and writing by the pool. The trip really did the trick; it even made us wonder if we should move there.
We were fifty miles out of Phoenix on the trip home when Grant called on my cell. I had the Bluetooth speakerphone switched on, and I knew something was wrong when Grant asked Joan to take it off speaker. Hearing her say, “uh-huh, uh-huh, uh-huh,” and seeing the look of concern on her face, I knew what had happened.
“When did he relapse?” I asked after she hung up, telling her not to beat around the bush. If I asked, that meant I could take the bad news.
She explained that Grant had, in fact, relapsed several times recently and had been kicked out of yet another rehab program. His call to us today had come after his third relapse, following his moving in with a new set of sober friends from AA.
“All our relaxation and fun just ended with that phone call,” I said.
By this point I’d decided to hold my ground about cutting ties with him, so I told Joan I didn’t want to see or talk to him until he’d been sober for sixty days, and I didn’t want her giving him any money, food, or help of any kind. If he couldn’t make it to sixty days, then I would keep doubling the time until he could. Enough was enough. “You can talk to him, but I don’t want to,” I said.
A couple of days later we met with Grant’s counselor from his last program, and I told him my plan. He said it sounded fine and encouraged us to set and discuss those boundaries with Grant, which I did. Taylor didn’t want to be contacted either, and Joan said she would accept a call from him on Sundays so she would know he was still alive.
I was dreading the approaching date of Taylor’s departure for Los Angeles. Our bills were still mounting by the day. I could feel the pressure building in me, but even as I tried to keep moving forward, I was finding it much harder than usual to concentrate. Some internal pot seemed about to boil over. But instead of attending to it, I chose to press forward.
I was trying to flush the negativity from my mind when an exciting opportunity presented itself. A businessman I’d met during Grant’s motocross days approached me about buying the jet company—my contacts, trademark, software, website, letterhead, and brochures—with a couple of partners. We arranged to meet for a couple of days in Newport Beach, California. I insisted to Joan that I go alone, to prove to myself that I could do this.
I drove out to Newport, the meetings went well, and I was cautiously optimistic about the deal. We left it that they were going to seek some additional funding and get back to me.
On Wednesday, July 21, around noon, I was getting ready to return to Arizona when a crushing pain shot through my right temple and into my bad eye, causing my right visual field to blur and shift to the right. This was a new pain, stronger and sharper than my usual pain in the back of my head where my skull had split open.
“I’ve got a real bad headache,” I told Joan on the phone. “I don’t think I can drive right now.”
Joan suggested that I go back to the room and stay another night, but I’d already checked out, so I told her I was going to rest in the lobby and see if the pain subsided. I took some medication, and the pain did improve within an hour, but I waited another hour just to be sure. I didn’t want it to hit me again—or turn into something worse, leaving me stranded in the middle of nowhere. By 2:30 my pain was back to a bearable five out of ten, so I told Joan I was heading home.
For some weeks now I’d been feeling overwhelmed with emotion—fear, emptiness, hopelessness, and now anger—to the point where I could no longer control it, even with the Cymbalta. These feelings, on top of the pain of old and new headaches, were scaring me. I’d been trying to rationally think my way out of my fear, but nothing was working. I simply couldn’t cope with everything the world was throwing at me. I felt myself slipping into that dark vortex of ruminations again.
What if Grant never gets better? I might never have an emotional attachment to my son. What am I going to do for income? How are we going to afford the mortgage and the cars? How will we afford Taylor’s college education and ancillary costs if something goes wrong with the grants and the student loans? I feel like a failure—my wife has to produce an income because I’m not capable of producing anything. I don’t know what to do.
I was out driving around, trying to sort through my feelings and having a very difficult morning as I was working on the book chapter about my felony. It was very agitating and upsetting to me to relive all that. At one point I felt so overwhelmed I had to pull my car over to the shoulder of Interstate 101, where I sat, crying.
I don’t want to live like this anymore. I wish I’d died in my accident.
I got out of the car and stood next to it, my butt pressed against the door, about two feet from the line on the pavement that separated me from the cars and trucks whooshing by at sixty-five miles per hour. As I had done countless times since my accident, I visualized all the ways I could get myself killed in traffic by making it look like I’d had another accident. Bending over to tie my shoe and tumbling into the lane in front of a truck (never a car because I didn’t want to critically injure myself and survive). Stepping up onto the rim of the bottom edge of the open car door, reaching for something on the roof, and pretending to fall backward. Or walking out into the closest lane, pretending to stumble and lose my balance, and ending it all.
But as I stood there that day, my thoughts eventually went to the same place they always went.
What about Joan, Taylor, Grant, and my parents, family and friends—how would they go on if I did this? What would it do to them? I could never put them through this. After all, I know what it feels like when Grant threatens to commit suicide. My stomach turns, and I feel a burning sensation in my heart. It would kill Joan if either one of us actually died.
So instead I got back in the car. Deep down, I felt there had to be a reason or a purpose for my fall, and although I wasn’t sure what it was, I told myself that committing suicide before I could find out was not a good option. I willed myself to reach deep inside, to fight my way through these emotional lows, and to prevent my body from giving up the battle with my mind. But I honestly didn’t know how many more times I could pull through one of these episodes, especially when I was reeling from this new crushing pain.
When I got home I took some medication and sat in my favorite chair. It felt as though someone had stabbed me in the temple and sliced into my eye.
Joan came over to ask how I was. “Why are you so upset?”
“I have a headache,” I said dismissively, closing my eyes again. After about an hour the throbbing new pain diminished and I was back to my usual headache.
Joan and I escaped the Phoenix heat for my birthday weekend amid the cool pines of Prescott, a mountain town a couple of hours away on Interstate 17, where we stayed at the new summer home of our friends Dr. Rich and Kathy Silver and played a relaxing round of golf. The weekend was pleasant, but I felt as if I was just going through the motions, disconnected from everyone, and not really living in the here and now. I figured my strange feelings were caused by staying at someone else’s home for the first time, so I kept them to myself.
On Monday, I met with my attorney in Scottsdale, and had lunch alone because Mark was tied up. I was driving along Shea Boulevard toward the 101 freeway heading home when I came to a stoplight with six cars ahead of me in traffic. To the right was the open desert, and it was hot out. I felt the pain in my temple come on again, only this time it erupted much faster and more intensely, as if a harpoon had pierced the side of my head. The next thing I knew, my car was stopped on the desert sand. The gear was in park, the engine was still running, and the radio was playing. But I had no memory of pulling off the road.
How did I get here? Why don’t I remember what’s going on? This isn’t good.
Figuring that I had blacked out, I called Joan and told her what happened.
“Where are you?” she asked.
I told her I was near the hospital in Scottsdale and the office of Dr. Arlen, the neurologist who had ordered the SPECT scan, and was going to go see her. Joan said Dr. Arlen would probably just send me to the hospital for a CT scan, which is essentially what her receptionist told me to do. Joan asked if I was okay to drive, and I told her I could make it to the ER, which was just a few blocks away.
“How’s your head?” she asked.
“It’s killing me,” I said as I approached the hospital where Joan said she would meet me in the ER’s triage area. Inside the ER, a nurse named Deb, who had worked with Joan, recognized me and took care of me until Joan arrived. With Deb there, I didn’t have to persuade everyone all over again that I wasn’t crazy, that I really did have a brain injury that caused amnesia. Joan always said God puts people in the right place at the right time, and this was definitely one of those times.
You might think I’d feel a frightening déjà vu at being back in the ER with an excruciating headache, but I didn’t. This time I knew exactly who and where I was. I didn’t feel confused, and I was able to explain to Joan and the nurses what had happened in the car. I also didn’t feel paranoid or all alone, like I had the first time. I’d come a long way in the past eighteen months, but I was still scared that my condition had taken a turn for the worse. I was relieved to see my wife walk into the ER and to receive her hug and kiss.
“At least I know who you are this time,” I laughed.
When I became intensely nauseated all of a sudden, Joan asked a passing technician for a basin. She turned away to get a cool washcloth to put on my head when I started groaning, grabbing the right side of my head, and grimacing with agonizing pain. My legs shot out and grew rigid, with my toes pointed down, my arms flexed, and my elbows bent and pressed tight against my chest. My body began to shake all over and rock from side to side. I was having a seizure, which was like a foot or leg cramp you get in the night that leaves you really sore and limping for days afterward, only in this case the cramp had taken over my entire body.
Joan leaned over and pressed her arms down on my shoulders, trying to hold me flat and prevent me from hurting myself. But she was too small to restrain me. I flew off the bed toward her, landing face-down on the floor and smacking my jaw on the cold linoleum. They’d put me in a hospital gown by then, and although I would usually be happy to be wearing underwear so my naked butt wasn’t exposed, at that moment modesty was the last thing on my mind.
“I need help!” Joan yelled, which brought five ER staffers running, including Dr. Robert Londeree, a longtime ER doc whom Joan had worked with when she was a nurse.
A male tech squatted at my feet with Joan and took my arm to try to help me up, but I felt so disoriented I thought he was attacking me. I twisted to sit up and drew my fist back to go after him.
“Whoa, relax,” the tech said.
Joan quickly put her hand on my left shoulder to try to soothe me. “Honey, honey, it’s okay,” she said. “You’re in the ER and fell off the cart. It’s okay. They’re here to help you.”
Dazed, flustered, and flushed from the pain, I let them help me get up—slowly—and back onto the bed, this time with the side rails up.
Dr. Londeree greeted Joan with an awkward smile, given the circumstances, and after assessing me, he ordered a CT scan and some blood work.
“Can you give him something for the pain?” Joan asked.
The nurse put some morphine into the IV, and as the drug began to take effect, she faded away. Joan had to fill me in later because I promptly forgot most everything that happened for the next week, either because of my brain misfires, the heavy medication I was on, or both.
The doctors, who dosed me with painkillers and antiseizure medications that provided no relief from the symptoms, were unable to come up with a diagnosis. In between a series of tests that all came back normal, Joan said, I had bouts of confusion and disorientation, but I was also able to hold coherent and lucid conversations with her and the staff—at times cracking jokes left and right.
When, three days later, Barrow Neurological Institute wouldn’t accept me as a transfer by ambulance, Joan had to take me there in her car, somehow managing to keep me from banging my head against the window when I seized up along the way.
I spent several days at Barrow, where on my worst day I had a whopping fifteen seizures, which terrified both of us and wore me out. I lay frustrated and scared that my life was over.
“What is happening to me?” I kept asking Joan. “Why doesn’t anyone know what’s going on with me? Is this it? Am I going to die?”
“We’re trying to figure it out, hon,” she said. “Hang in there.”
After each convulsion subsided, I felt disoriented and weak. The pain was just too much to bear. “I can’t live like this,” I told her. “It hurts so much.”
By Saturday, the least bit of activity triggered a seizure, whether it was eating, going to the bathroom, or brushing my teeth. Nothing seemed to relieve my pain, including a new drug cocktail. I was so gorked out, Joan said she had to feed me and remind me to swallow because I kept nodding off with food or drink in my mouth.
On Monday I was transferred to the coveted epilepsy monitoring unit, where they covered my head with sticky white electrodes and took me off the antiseizure meds. The plan was to keep me hooked me up to a video camera and EEG machine to monitor my brain activity and determine where in the brain the seizures might be originating.
At times I felt like I was losing control over everything and that Joan and everyone else were hiding things from me, another side effect of the drugs. And by Wednesday I was not only fuzzy and confused but also paranoid, sure the doctors and nurses were all talking about me.
“I feel like everyone is out to get me and I don’t know where I am. I feel like I’m Jason Bourne,” I said, referring to the movie character CIA assassin who wakes up one day and doesn’t remember who he is but is rightly convinced that people are trying to kill him.
“Babe, I’m here and you’re safe in the hospital,” Joan said. “I won’t let anyone do anything. I’m right here.”
“I’m glad I got you.”
Finally the moment of truth arrived, and without the antiseizure meds, I was feeling more alert and could remember things again.
After reviewing the EEG data and videotape with a team of experts, Dr. Jason Caplan, the chief of psychiatry, told us that my seizures were not epileptic, meaning that my brain showed no correlated electrical activity, but were of psychological origin.
“First,” he said, “Mr. Bolzan, you’re not crazy. This is not in your control, nor does anyone think you’re faking it.”
My attacks and pain, he went on, were caused by my brain converting severe stressors into a sudden onset of involuntary symptoms. In other words, after all my efforts to hold things together, my body had been forced to give up the fight with my mind. Essentially, I had lost the fight with myself.
In addition to losing my memory, he said, I’d had to deal with our financial issues, Grant’s drug addiction, and new career challenges, so it wasn’t surprising that I would feel overwhelmed. But instead of dealing with those stressors, I’d been pushing them down, ostensibly to keep moving forward. Joan and I had always told Grant that he was his own worst enemy, and sadly, I had to admit we had something major in common after all.
“It had to come out somehow,” Caplan said.
My treatment, he said, would be to find a good therapist and learn some better coping skills. He gave us some names and said we could go home.
For the next two days I wasn’t allowed to drive or be alone in the house unless I was in bed or in my big chair. It was frustrating to feel I’d regressed twenty months to being dependent on everyone again. Still very tired, I slept a lot, but as the frequency and intensity of the convulsions fell off, we both hoped this frightening episode was coming to a close.
When I woke up Saturday morning, I felt like something miraculous had happened. For the first time since before my $46,000 hospital stay (all but $2,000 of which would thankfully be covered by insurance), I had no headache. I can’t even explain how relieved I felt when that gripping pain stopped. I bounced around the house with more energy than I’d had in weeks, so much so that I insisted on cutting the grass.
On Sunday I felt even better, well enough to accompany Joan to the grocery store.
“I can’t believe that I don’t have a headache at all,” I said, amazed.
“See what a drug-induced coma for eight days will do?” Joan joked.
“I know, this is so weird,” I said, my optimism in life renewed. “I feel great. Whatever it was, maybe it’s gone and I can move forward yet again.”
At long last—we hoped, anyway—the chains of pain had been broken.
Even though I’d had an extraordinary do-over in life, this new opportunity clearly came with its own unique challenges, not to mention the reality that I was going to have to deal with its physical and emotional ramifications—along with all the other stressors of everyday life—for some time to come.
That was the rhythm of my new life: two steps forward and one step back.
I ended up going back to see Dr. Barry, the same therapist I’d visited a couple of times but stopped seeing when I’d felt I had everything under control. Luckily, he wasn’t an “I told you so” kind of doctor.
We agreed that I should see him weekly for at least three months, but he cautioned that it could take years for me to internalize what I needed to learn—how to relax, to identify stressors, to listen to my body and mind, and to make necessary adjustments before I reached another crisis point. But what I most needed was to increase my self-motivation and self-worth and try to stop feeling that I was failing myself or my family.
He predicted that my biggest challenge would be to adjust to who I was now and accept that I might never know who I’d been before, to face the reality that I had experienced a death—in myself. I should grieve the old Scott, which might take years, rather than try to bring him back. And he advised that instead of obsessing about what I didn’t know or understand, I should focus on all I’d achieved since the fall without any knowledge.
No matter how strong or in control I thought I was, clearly my mind and body both needed to get stronger, just like when I played football. And the only way that was going to happen was by “working out” with Dr. Barry.
I just had to keep telling myself that I’d managed to retain some sort of innate strength and resourcefulness that would allow me to keep pushing through the roadblocks my new life kept throwing my way.