It's So Easy - Duff Mckagan [7]
Then I heard Andy, my best friend from childhood, come in the back door. He called, “Hey, what’s up,” just as he had ever since we were kids. Andy, I’m upstairs, I wanted to answer. But I wasn’t able to. I could only silently sob. I heard him start up the stairs—he must have seen my wallet in the kitchen. He made it upstairs and came down the hall.
“Oh, shit, it’s finally happened,” he said when he reached my room.
I was thankful to have my friend there. It was comforting to think that I would die in front of Andy. But he had other ideas. He pulled some sweats on me and began to try to move me. He must have felt a jolt of adrenaline—otherwise there is no way Andy could have carried the two hundred pounds of dead weight of my bloated body. As he carried me down the stairs and out to his car, the searing, stabbing pain in my intestines spread farther down to my quadriceps and around to my lower back. I wanted to die.
The doctor I’d had since I was a kid lived just two blocks away, so Andy took me there. Though Dr. Brad Thomas was my longtime physician, I hadn’t let him see me very often once I descended into full-blown alcoholism. Together, Andy and Dr. Thomas carried me to his first-floor office. I heard my condition being discussed and I felt the prick of a needle in my ass. Demerol. Nothing. Another shot of Demerol in my ass and again nothing, no relief whatsoever. One more shot. Again nothing. The pain kept on spreading and I was starting to panic. I whimpered as my spirit began to blacken and fade.
They decided to rush me to the emergency room at Northwest Hospital. Dr. Thomas told Andy to drive me, as it would be faster than waiting for an ambulance. He said he would meet us there. Andy drove as fast as he could without jerking the car too much—every little movement made me moan and cry.
As they put an IV drip of morphine into my left arm at the hospital, the staff asked me questions I could not answer.
“Name? Address?”
Andy answered those.
“How much do you drink on a daily basis?”
“Are you on drugs right now?”
I just whimpered.
I was mute from pain. The morphine wasn’t working as I knew it should. I knew a thing or two about opiates by that stage in my life. I knew the warm rush they offered, yet I was getting none of it.
They wheeled me into a room next to another guy on a gurney. The motion made me writhe in agony.
“Dude, I broke my back,” said the guy in the other bed. “And I’m glad I don’t have whatever you have.”
Dr. Thomas and an ultrasound technician ran a scanner over my organs and I saw my doctor’s face go white. My pancreas, apparently swollen to the size of a football from all the booze, had burst. I had third-degree burns all over the inside of my body from the digestive enzymes released by the damaged pancreas. Only a few parts of the inside of your digestive tract can handle the enzymes, and the outsides of your organs and your stomach muscles are definitely not among them—it just burns all that tissue.
A surgeon with thick glasses explained the surgery. They had to take out the top part of the pancreas—cut it off. Sew me back up. And then I’d have to be on dialysis for the rest of my life.
Suddenly I understood the pleading mouthed by miserable souls back to antiquity, those left breathing after being run through with a rusty sword or scalded with hot oil. I was there.
I summoned all my power to whisper to the ER doctor.
“Kill me.”
I begged over and over.
“Please, kill me. Just kill me. Kill me. Please.”
CHAPTER TWO
It happens in a flash, life does. Only the ever-deepening lines on my face tell me that I have been alive for a while. I don’t feel any different. I still have geeky and adolescent thoughts. I still tell the same dumb jokes. I look up at that cedar-shake roof on the house in Seattle—now looking a bit the worse for wear—and think, Hang on, didn’t I just have that redone?