Needles and courage

I used to be afraid of needles. Actually I was afraid of something more specific: blood leaving my arm through a needle. I warned all my pediatric nurses that I experienced an inexplicable light-headed reaction seconds after they drew a few milliliters of blood from my arm. I also told them I could handle shots, which was the truth, in case they thought I was a wimpy ass kid they could complain about at lunch time.

"But you seem so calm," they each said, laughing to themselves. Then they drew the blood, sometimes without reclining the chair or putting up my feet, and it was lights out. I typically spent the next 15 to 45 minutes wrapped in a fleece blanket and hung upside down in a dark room while a nurse practitioner held a Capri-Sun to my lips. Then my mom and I walked on eggshells to the family minivan in oppressive heat. Sometimes I stopped halfway to lower my head and burned my palms on the hot blacktop pavement. I returned home dazed, punctured and burned. At least that is how I remember those episodes. I could have made a dozen bucks each time if the law allowed for petty pediatric malpractice. But I wouldn't have if it did. As bad as I felt for myself, I felt almost as bad for the nurses.

My mom told me I inherited my fear from her. I cannot remember seeing my mom have any similar problems, but I doubt I was with her when she might have had them. I told her that I was not afraid and that what happened to me was a knee-jerk reaction. But she insisted I was afraid.

Decades later, or admittedly a few years later, my mom tackled chemotherapy and multiple bone marrow biopsies, accomplishments that I am embarrassed to write in only one independent clause. But that was sort of how she did it: quickly and with grace. She asked a lot of questions and requested plenty of drugs that might have lessened the pain, but I don't remember any complaints. And the drugs did not lessen the accomplishment because fear is always justified.

"I love my doctors," she would say after she was alert enough to lift her head off my shoulder. "I couldn't feel a thing." My high school teammates who used to brag about trying to drink a gallon of milk in one hour would have described my mom with a word: gritty.

My mom received dozens of blood transfusions before her stem cell transplant last October, so my fiancee and I met at the Dean Dome one summer evening to donate at the UNC blood drive. I was less afraid than I was years before only because my mom seemed to handle things a hundred times worse with ease. I should have been more worried for myself.

I shook like a leaf and sweated like a pig for an uncomfortable hour-long donation. My body temperature seemed to rise, fall, and rise again in mere minutes. The pain of the needle was only slight as always, but my body still winced at the drawing of blood. The nurses explained that I neither drank enough water nor ate enough food. I explained I was just a wimpy ass kid. I continued to shake in the canteen afterward, but I was happy. I could not wait to tell my mom what we did. She was surprised and concerned for my health. The sick caring for the healthy must be nearly exclusively human, and it showed me, like many other things did that long summer, that my mom was still my mom.

Needless to say, the American Red Cross was not eager to have me back and neglected to call me for a year. But late last June, a bit more than a year after I watched donated blood from anonymous strangers keep my mom going on her way to her transplant, they called me to ask whether I would donate again.

If only you knew I used to hang like a bat in pediatric storage closets, I thought to myself. "Sure."

And so I drove to Durham on July 6 to donate again. I drank so much water that I had to stop at a gas station on Durham-Chapel Hill Boulevard to take the longest pee of my life. I ate so much food that, well, you can imagine. I farted razorblades.

It was worth it. My donation lasted eight minutes, and I did not feel anything but a brief needle prick. I contained my stupid pride in the canteen while I flipped through the future appointments book and made small talk with other bandaged North Carolinians. They gave me a free T-shirt as a trophy. I called my mom.

Today I returned for my third donation and quickly learned that a nurse in training would administer for me. I knew I had to give more this time. I told her I preferred to use my left arm, but she quietly asked me if she could use the big vein in my right instead. I consented. She asked a billion questions of her supervisors and told me she was nervous. She tightened my arm band, loosened it, tightened it, took it completely off and put it on again. She taped a plastic tube to my wrist and told me I was hairy. She poked a slow poke. She and her colleagues decided to forgo the needle guard for reasons I was unwilling to see. I must have grimaced.

"Are you OK, sir?" she asked as much for the nurses breathing down her neck as for me.

"I'm fine," I said as convincingly as possible. She was a momentary model of my mother. Deliberate, nervous, poised, transparent. Steadfast. I called my mom.

"I donated blood again," I said.

"What?" she blurted. "Are you OK? Are you driving? I would have come to get you."

"I'm fine, Mom," I said.

"Next time I'm going with you," she said.

I thought that was a great idea.

Quinton Coples makes public statement on sack lunches

I was browsing Carolina football news this afternoon when TarHeelBlue.com hosted a public chat room with star defensive end Quinton Coples. The room had been going for awhile, so I wrote my question with speed and failed precision. My contribution to the transcript is below.
  
Me: Which do you like better: eating a sack lunch or giving one? Or both? 
QC: Sacking someone. It's a different feeling.

Slamming a grown man on his face with a jolt to the lower spine and eating bologna and cheese on wheat are different as Coples described. Of course spicy brown mustard with avocado can narrow the gap. Given some grapes, an apple and cookies for the hungrier of days, and the two approach equivalency.

But Coples did not reveal such a thought with his decisive answer. The guy might eat four gourmet buffets each day at the Loudermilk Center for Excellence. Would he stir to the sound of a crumpling brown paper bag or the sight of delicately sealed homemade sandwiches? Evidently not. 

Nom nom nom nom nom.

The tortoise and the hare race at last

Years ago my friend Daniel told me he could beat me in a 40-yard sprint. His assertion surprised most people for reasons I have already written, so I will be brief in describing them again.

In 2001 Daniel was a South Davidson High School all-conference offensive lineman, a distinction that typecast him to me as a strong athlete who lacked finesse and speed. His commitment to exercise peaked in his college years, but his confidence waned when he fell out of a water polo inner tube and failed to remount for the remaining seven minutes of the match while both teams watched with awkward intensity. Months later he missed four consecutive uncontested layups in as many seconds in an intramural basketball game before I ended his misery. These insufficient motor skills surfaced again many years after college when we played basketball for the second time.

"I don't think I've ever seen him jump off one foot," I said.

"I think he figures he has two feet and might as well use them both each time," a friend reasoned.

We planned to race a couple years ago the night before the Carolina football season opener, but I could not show for a reason I cannot remember. My absence tilted the odds in his favor.

"Daniel will win," many of my friends said. Over the last two years I let them say what they wanted while I enjoyed fast food, peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and beer. I liked the competitive banter and thought racing would end it with a decisive win. I finally agreed to race tonight on the eve of the 2011 football season.

"Will you train?" a friend asked me a week ago.

"Not gonna train," I said. "Gonna win."

The banter will continue at the football tailgate tomorrow. No, I did not exactly lose, but I certainly did not win. And all of you who thought I would miss work next Tuesday with two strained hamstrings, know that my legs are fine. I ought to thank Daniel for that.

Daniel announced he would execute an "active warm-up" alongside my knee touches before the race and pranced around Hooker Field like a ballerina, swiftly thrusting his knees to his chest before extending his toes into graceful, soft-landing leaps. The sight was as memorable as the inner tube incident but without an ounce of self consciousness. I watched dumbly with my unused camera in hand and strained to reach past my knees.

Daniel wanted to win and look foolish before doing it. I wanted to win and look foolish after doing it. I am glad I forgot to buy the cigar.

We naturally tried again. Please note Daniel's post-race trot.

Half Dome hike at Yosemite

My girlfriend and I spent three days with her father and brother in a camper in the Sierra Nevada mountains near Mammoth, Calif. Her father is an experienced outdoorsman who asked us to pick our activities upon arrival. We hiked to the modest waterfall near our campsite, visited a vacant bear den, watched a couple movies, drove to the many mile-high lakes and more impressive falls, observed a boiling hot creek from an elevated cliff and hiked into the snowy-bottomed San Andreas fault and one of its dark caves.

All this sounds post-your-pictures worthy, but none of it compared to what we barely accomplished on our last full day in the Sierras.

"We could hike Half Dome at Yosemite," her dad suggested on our first day in the mountains. "But I'm not going to lie to you; it's an intense, 12-to-14 hour hike."

My girlfriend and I glanced at each other for less than a second. "Sure."

I had never heard of Half Dome since it is a continent away from where I live, so I judged it as easy. It was not even a whole dome by name. I should have researched Half Dome on my phone after my blind consent for reasons you will learn. Here are two of the least compelling reasons: The Half Dome hike is 8.6 miles one-way with a 4,800-foot ascent.

"We'll have to get rolling at 5 a.m." he said. We did exactly that 36 hours later. The truck ride to the hike's launching point lasted a bit more than two hours. We slept most of the way.

The first part of the hike was a steep, paved trail along a whitewater. My girlfriend struggled with altitude after a matter of minutes. I was worried. We stopped for a snack break at a bathroom with running water and drinking fountains. Energized and optimistic, we chose to start on a set of mountain switchbacks instead of taking the shorter but steeper Mist Trail, a path that sprayed mist onto hikers from the majestic Vernal and Nevada Falls.

Park officials had posted sad reminders of three hikers' deaths from one week earlier around the bathrooms. The hikers took the Mist Trail and swam between the two falls in the Merced River, which had unusually dangerous currents because of extensive winter snowfall. They went over Vernal Fall.

Despite our more distant approach to the top of the higher Nevada Fall, we still got a great view at the end of several switchbacks. Here is one of them.



Here is another looking down from the top of Nevada Fall.



The trail eased into a flat, sandy path after the top of the fall until we reached a sign that advised hikers on bear encounters. The bears that inhabit Yosemite and most of the 48 states are black bears, the kind you would most like to have visit your campsite. Black bears are only interested in hikers and campers for the food they carry or store. A mother black bear is also mean if you get near her cub. Besides these instances, they would rather avoid the hassle of a human encounter. Hikers are supposed to hold hands and act ferocious if they see a black bear. I was not worried about bears, but I should have been worried about something else.

The hike's incline increased until we reached the base of a rock dome just below Half Dome. Several hikers on their way down told us the smaller rock dome's stone steps were the hardest part of the hike. We were woefully behind pace to make it back to the truck with daylight, so we had to decide whether we would continue to the summit or safely retreat.

"I am not going this far without making it to the top," my girlfriend said. I agreed.

The steps themselves were not difficult for me, but I did feel afraid of height for the first time in my life. The steps were secure enough, but a dehydrated hiker could easily slip and slide down the smooth rock face for hundreds of feet on either side. My girlfriend lost her breath in the middle of this smaller dome, but we were fortunate to sit and collect ourselves for a few minutes before reaching the base of Half Dome.



Seeing the final 400-foot rock climb in a glance was more terrifying than gratifying. The summit was deemed impossible in the 1870s. Somebody must have hiked it because the park drilled two lines of poles into the rock dome and threaded parallel cables through these poles so that lay hikers could use four contact points during their ascent. Traffic between the cables always goes both ways, so hikers' lives depend on communicating with each other. Many hikers get this close only to turn around because of height, steepness and traffic. Not seeing this arrangement until I was there was a mistake.

I would have turned around like so many do, but the descending hikers insisted the cable ascent was easier than the stair climb. So up I went with my girlfriend 15 feet in front of me.

This final climb up Half Dome is squeezed on either side by a 4,800-foot drop to the Yosemite Valley floor. I wisely decided not to look and kept my eyes directed at my feet and hands. I figured I could not fall if I moved one limb at a time and avoided panic. I missed a right-hand reach for a cable but maintained my balance. I waited a few minutes to collect myself and continued to the top. I laughed at myself for thinking an hour before that I could focus on my girlfriend's progress in addition to my own.

I felt lucky to be at the top for a spectacular view but unlucky to have to go back down. Half Dome is named for the way it looks. Those who reach the summit can crawl to the edge and stare straight down to the valley nearly a mile below. I would have tried to capture that image, but either my phone or myself might have gone over the edge.



Our summit rest was short because we wanted to cover as much ground in daylight as possible. I quickly discerned that descending the Half Dome cables was almost twice as difficult as ascending them. I chose to go with my ass facing the valley floor. My girlfriend followed me in similar fashion. I thought I would warn her of cracks and other rock oddities before she reached them, but I quickly found that I needed to handle myself.

My shoes were not fit for the descent. Instead of firmly placing my toes into the rock, my shoes helplessly slid down Half Dome while my knuckles whitened with importance. My girlfriend saw this but maintained her composure for me. I rested on the two-by-fours that connected each pair of poles between each shoe slide. I prayed a little.

"Try leaning back a little and using your arms more," she suggested. Leaning back did not sound like a healthy choice, but I trusted her. I stood more perpendicular to the rock instead of leaning into it and pulled hard on the cables. My shoes stopped sliding. My fear of heights might be talking, but she might have saved my life.



The hike down the stone steps was easy. We knew we needed to hurry to use the daylight. We leapfrogged back and forth with a man and his young son who had climbed the cables ahead of us. Darkness fell when we reached the top of Nevada Fall. We waited for the man and his son to get better numbers. Using two flashlights and two headlights, our group of six followed the beaten switchback path looking for bears, cliff edges and misplaced rocks in no particular order.

We made it back with nothing worse than sore knees and blisters. The man's wife was waiting for us with SUV headlights shining. We had almost agreed that one of us would ride in the family's SUV to our truck and return to pick up the other three when the man's wife interrupted us.

"The ranger and I saw a bear walk in my headlights across the road."

So in we piled, the man's son in his lap and my girlfriend in mine. A vehicle transfer, one missed turn and two hours later, we arrived back to our camp at 4 a.m.

We are proud we hiked Half Dome. We will never hike Half Dome again.

Note: Yosemite reports that "relatively few" people have fallen from the cables and died since 1919. Most deaths occur during or after inclement weather when the rock face is wet. Californian Hayley LaFlamme fell from the cables and died on the day I started writing this post, Aug. 1, 2011, less than one week after my own Half Dome hike. Four have died on the Half Dome rock climb since 2006.