Pain Don't Hurt

by Mark Miller

  Without family functions to bring us together, I didn’t see Colin anymore after that. I heard through various people where he was—North Carolina; Washington, DC—but I didn’t see him, not for long stretches of time. I was living my life and he was living his, if you can call that living. My wedding happened, and he wasn’t there. My children were born, and he was absent.

  In March of 1994 I was driving through Latrobe. It was right around my mother’s birthday, and I was going to take her out. I stopped at a red light right near Saint Vincent Cemetery, the cemetery my parents would eventually be buried in. A horrifically junky car pulled up next to me, and in my peripheral vision I could see the driver waving to get my attention. I turned, and there was Colin. He looked awful. Like some animal had been using him as a chew toy. I rolled my window down, a half smile on my face, and he said, “Excuse me, but do you have the time?”

  There was no sarcasm in this question. He wasn’t doing it to be funny. That slaughterhouse glazed look in his eyes told me this. My own brother didn’t know me. The smile left me and was replaced with a stony look, hiding the crumpled-up feeling inside of me. He had no idea who I was. I stammered out the time, and he thanked me and drove off. Never a fragment of recognition passed over his face. Not one blip of a signal to tell him that this man whom he was speaking to was his flesh and blood, his brother. All systems running in him were down. He had succeeded in escaping so far inside himself that even family had become foreign. Somewhere inside my heart I felt strings break.

  It wasn’t until Father’s Day of 2006 that I actually saw him face-to-face and had a conversation with him. I didn’t mention the red-light encounter and neither did he. My feeling is that he wouldn’t have remembered it if I had. I was amazed to see him at a family gathering. He had weaseled his way into seeing my dad again, mostly by the clever use of a current girlfriend who was motivated by her own selfish gain. Inevitably the whole day was uneasy, and it didn’t help when Colin started asking for handouts. That day ended badly. After that I saw him around occasionally at bars. I drank socially then, but it was rare. If he was there, I’d sit with him, I just didn’t have the strength to try to avoid his addiction, and I didn’t care. Half the time if I didn’t tell the bartender ahead of time not to allow him to put anything on my tab, he would start running it up the minute he saw me sitting there. I would never chase him down or try to get the money out of him. I would just accept that I should have been more careful, and I would pay the tab. I dealt with the fact that this was as much of a relationship with my big brother as I was likely ever going to get, and I still wanted one so badly that I just accepted it somehow. I just didn’t know what to say to him anymore, especially if we weren’t drunk.

  chapter nine

  Courage is the resistance to fear, the mastery of fear, not the absence of fear.

  —MARK TWAIN

  I am a fighter, which means that to some degree I had to get comfortable with doctors, hospitals, and injuries very early on. I am also a man living with a congenital heart defect (CHD) and type 1 diabetes. It is interesting for me now to think about how little those conditions affected my life, how they never made me feel any different, any less strong, until they did. That was partially my father’s doing. He wouldn’t have me feel any less strong, health conditions or otherwise. I faced countless surgeries on my feet, my knees, my shoulder, my face, my back, all because of the career I had chosen, and I faced them with a knowing shrug and almost a smile, aware that I put myself in a position to incur these scars, these badges. I was never sidelined by CHD, only by things I had invited upon myself. . . . Until finally, it caught up with me.

  In 2004 I became a father another two times over. My wife gave birth to twins. It was both wonderful and heartbreaking, as our marriage was truly on the rocks. The pregnancy and birth of my sons Ronan and Patrick delayed the inevitable for a while, though I was not emotionally available to Amy, and my eye was wandering. My career was not quite at the level I wanted it to be at, and much of that was self-inflicted, as I was now a professional at self-punishment. If I didn’t perform well in a fight, I took all the tools my father had ever given me, went into a depression, and castigated myself for months. Now that I had “bad father” and “lousy husband” slowly being added to the list, I could barely stand myself. In 2006 I moved to Austin somewhat temporarily. Truth be told I was bouncing all over the place just trying to find someplace to be. I was trying to get away from Amy, and I was afraid of staying close to my kids. Maurice and I had fallen out of contact and I was too shy to try to find him. That spring I had been told about something called the S1, a kickboxing organization that would be putting on fights in Miami, Florida, in August. They wanted me to fight. So, in the month of June I went back to Pittsburgh to get my medicals. It wasn’t uncommon during a routine checkup to have the doctor clearing me look startled at the sound of my heartbeat. It was highly aberrant and had been since I was born. A few times in the past I had been sent to get EKGs to make the promotions feel more comfortable about clearing me. I had never run into a problem. I had a weird valve, one that would need to be replaced most likely when I was in my fifties; that’s what the doctors had told me. By then I would be done with fighting, so I never worried. This time, the same thing: the doctor requested an EKG. I huffed and puffed but I went ahead and booked it. A few days later I went and had the EKG. The doctor called me later that day and told me, much to my shock, that I should go and see an actual cardiologist. Something was off. Of course something is fucking off, I told him, you know me, I have a weird fucking valve. Regardless, he sent me to a heart-specific doctor “just in case.” A few years previous I had had to jump through similar hoops. My cardiologist that time had put me on a treadmill and made me do a “stress test,” where they hooked me up to all kinds of electrodes and machines, and I ran as they slowly elevated the treadmill and increased the speed. At about a minute in I had grabbed my chest and started shouting, “Oh my God, I feel so light-headed, what is happening!” The nurses freaked out, and the doctor, white in the face, ran to pull the plug on the treadmill. Before they could shut me down I started laughing and begged them to increase it. I ended up running at the highest elevation at the top speed for five minutes before they felt satisfied. I also got the highest rating on a stress test ever performed in that hospital, and a whole lot of angry looks from the doctors. The bright spot now was my looking forward to playing my mean little trick all over again.

  The cardiologist requested an echocardiogram. After I had it I made time to go and visit my orthopedist. I had had back surgery ten years previously. I was training very hard and my back had started bothering me again. He decided that it was essentially overuse, and he suggested that I stop training for a while. I smiled at him, shook his hand, and decided that I would be totally ignoring that advice. I had grown incredibly good at ignoring doctors. As I was walking out of the building from visiting my back doctor, my phone rang. The office of Dr. Staffen, my cardiologist, the one who had performed the echocardiogram, was calling me. I answered and the nurse told me to be in his office first thing in the morning.

  “What is this about? At least tell me what the fuck this is about,” I grumbled at her. My tone was terse, but my heart was jumping. I knew enough to know it isn’t a good thing when a doctor demands that you see him right away.

  “I can’t tell you any more, just be in his office first thing in the morning.” She hung up quickly.

  I didn’t sleep more than ten minutes that night. The next day I walked into Dr. Staffen’s office and my ass was barely on the chair before he decided to let loose with the “good news.”

  “Your ejection fraction is hovering around twenty percent, Mark. A normal person’s is sixty-five percent. Your heart is in bad shape, my friend. Very bad shape. Not to mention your left ventricle is now enlarged given how much you have been taxing it, and to compensate for the malfunctioning valve. There’s no way I can give you my blessing for this fight. No way. It would be a
suicide mission.”

  I should mention . . . I have a serious problem being told what I can and cannot do by anyone, much less a guy in a white coat who has clearly never set foot in a ring or cage.

  I didn’t feel fear initially. It was odd. I felt anger. Intense, violent anger. I wanted to flip the doctor’s desk over and grab him by his neck. I wanted to scream at him, “What the fuck do you know? You don’t see how I train. You don’t get to tell me what I can and can’t do. Nobody tells me what I can and can’t do. You’re not my fucking dad.”

  And I liked Dr. Staffen.

  Instead, I asked, politely, and through gritted teeth, for a second opinion. He gave me the name of some doctor over at Allegheny General Hospital. I called and made the appointment for July 5 to have a transesophageal echocardiogram.

  Now, I don’t have a problem being anesthetized. I have a problem with the idea of waking up in the middle of a procedure. To do this particular echocardiogram they feed a camera down your throat to get readings of your heart from a closer proximity. They also knock you out to do this, because human beings statistically don’t like having cameras stuffed into their throat while they are awake. In fact, they tend to get relatively combative. I was reassured many times that I would not wake up in the middle of this procedure. Well, I woke up during the procedure. I started flailing and trying to scream, which caused me to gag violently. Thankfully, it was at the end of the procedure, so they had already gotten what they needed. I was restrained and pinned down as the tube was fished out of me, then turned to my side as I continued to gag and retch. Needless to say, I wasn’t in the best mood when the doctor came back to read me my results. Some flimsy bearded jerk-off in a set of heavy glasses and a white coat, with the bedside manner of a houseplant, came over carrying a clipboard and told me, without making eye contact, that my career was over. This pasty little prick who probably had never even lifted a weight in his life, much less been an athlete, told me that my fucking ejection fraction was actually 15 percent, that my fucking left ventricle was definitely enlarged, and that if I continued to pursue training I would probably fucking die. That my future would definitely entail surgery and a mechanical valve, which would put me out of work as a fighter forever. I blinked at him and nodded, hardly hiding my distaste for his snide demeanor. He started discussing the specifics of the surgery I would need and I cut him off with a loud “Can I go now thank you” and made for the door with him calling after my back, saying, “Mr. Miller, I highly recommend that you look into getting this surgery.”

  I got on my plane back to Austin with absolutely no intention of pursuing surgery. If the end result was that I would die in the ring, then so fucking be it. I just didn’t care. But I was going to fight, at least one more time.

  Austin is next-level hot in the summer. In the United States, there is nothing harsher than a Texan summer. It isn’t just hot, either. It is humid beyond belief. We are talking occasional highs of ninety-five degrees with 90 percent humidity. A simple stroll down the street feels like walking through sheets of hot syrup. People hide in the summer. They either bounce from one air-conditioned building to the next, or they post up at the river and float half-submerged in water, drinking Lone Star for hours, until they have thoroughly pickled themselves. I had been training at a gym in Austin called Randy Palmer’s South Austin Gym. While training there I had met Justin. Justin is his own breed of human being, and it is the best sort. He is the brother I always wanted. Justin is as open-minded as he is moral. He is accepting, and empathetic, and hard-nosed about human kindness. When I first met him he was a chef at a fine restaurant. He came into Randy’s to train in kickboxing; he was familiar with Muay Thai, as he had previously been to Thailand, where he had done a stint as an English teacher. Justin was gifted gypsy feet when he was young. His mother was an author and afforded him a life lived all over the world as a child. Her career didn’t tie her down, so she moved constantly, and this meant that she raised an incredibly worldly and compassionate person. Justin looked like he should have been a bouncer. The first time I saw him he came to one of the classes I was teaching at the gym. He was six feet two and huge with a flattened nose from multiple breaks, enormous broad hands covered in scars, and a freshly shaved head, standing in a ratty T-shirt and gym shorts. He looked like an old-school British pugilist. But the influence of a life lived abroad, a life touched by an abundance of culture and difference, glimmered through Justin at all times. We connected very quickly, mostly through bad jokes and an appreciation of different things—music, art, and food. Justin invited me to his restaurant, and I invited him to my classes, and eventually to be a person whom I trained one-on-one with. This wasn’t just me training him. Justin was a fast learner, and he helped me too. Justin was the closest friend I had had since childhood. When I returned from Pittsburgh we met at the gym to train. He immediately asked what the results had been. I tried my best to bullshit him.

  “Mark, seriously? I don’t know if anyone has ever told you, but you are total shit at lying, man. Now, what did they say? Is it your valve?”

  Justin’s inky eyes were drilling into me and his expression was shifting from one of mild irritation to one of worry.

  “The guy said that my heart needs surgery, but it’s whatever. I’m not doing it before this fight. The end. No more. So let’s just train.”

  I turned around, feigning annoyance. Justin snorted behind me and muttered, “Oh, yes, sir. Terribly sorry to have put you out, sir.” He started gathering pads up and climbing into the ring.

  We trained like this for few days, neither of us really saying anything. Justin was right. I’ve always been a bad liar. I can’t hide very well, so I default to what I was taught. You come under fire, you just bark at people and they leave you alone. Justin wasn’t afraid of me. He didn’t buy my idiotic posturing, and he actually loved me like family, which made him a bigger threat. I didn’t want my mask of stoicism to slip in front of him. I didn’t want him to see that I was actually scared and he was the one person who might have been able to coax it out of me, so I was rude, dismissive, and standoffish. Finally one Thursday, everything changed.

  Justin had been tolerating my self-indulgent pouting since I had returned. He hadn’t pressured or pushed on me further, and he even allowed me to show up and really not talk at all. In true Justin fashion, he was just there, without requirement or demand; he was just there to support me. This Thursday it was particularly sweltering. The walls were sweating, it was so hot. Thick rivulets of condensed sweat collected and oozed down the peeling walls of the gym as we trained. Justin and I were in the ring, doing some pad work. He had brought the suitcase pad, a pad designed to be held by a little handle and braced against the lower leg for the person throwing to practice low kicks against. I was throwing kicks for one round, during which Justin’s eyes kept flickering across my face strangely. At the bell Justin suddenly threw the pad down and turned away from me, mumbling, “Yeah, well, we’re fucking done for today, dude,” rubbing his brow with his fingers in a totally vexed manner.

  “We’re done? What do you mean we’re done?” I pulled one glove off and started walking toward him. “That was one fucking round! I know it’s hot, but what the shit, Justin? . . .” I pumped extra venom into my inquisition. Justin was pacing around, avoiding me, his back to me. Something was wrong, and I was defensive. Suddenly he whipped around, his expression a twisted mix of concern and anger. He came within inches of me. He didn’t yell. Justin didn’t yell. Instead his voice took on a parental tone laced with irritated exhaustion, and he spat his words through gritted teeth.

  “You know what, why don’t you go look at yourself, Mark? Just go have a look at yourself. You’re blue. You’re fucking blue in the face, and I’m not going to stand here and cosign on to your self-destructive bullshit.” He reached a hand up and wiped sweat from above his eyes. Either the heat was doing it, or Justin was near crying. His eyes were red and shining. “You look like a fucking corpse, Mark, goddamn.”r />
  I muttered something. Something abrasive and flippant, but I ducked under the ropes and made my way to the bathroom. Truth be told, I didn’t feel right.

  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.