FITNESS CONFIDENTIAL (13 page)

Chapter Seventeen

SOMETIMES YOU GET THE BEAR,
SOMETIMES THE BEAR GETS YOU

I found out I was dying like this.

There was a training regimen going around at the time among top pro athletes called the “sleep high, train low” method. The idea was that you would sleep at high altitudes but train at low altitudes because spending time at high altitudes increases your red blood cell count. This is good because red blood cells carry oxygen to your muscles, which increases your energy and stamina. When you hear about blood doping in cycling or the Olympics, this is what they’re trying to accomplish.

But doping is illegal, not to mention bad for your health.

This wasn’t.

There’s a device called a hypoxic altitude tent that’s basically a clear, square tent you put around your bed that makes your body react as if you were at altitude. I wanted to try using it to see if it would give me a competitive edge for the Furnace Creek 508 but, as you might imagine, they’re not cheap.

Luckily, I had a plan.

I’d convinced one of the companies that make the tents to give me one if I endorsed their product, but I was only going to do that if I was certain it worked. The plan was to check my red blood cell count before I started sleeping in the tent and then, three months later, check it again to see if there was a change. If I saw a significant rise in levels, I’d know it was effective.

So I went to my friend, who’s also a top Beverly Hills doctor, to get my first baseline test done. Let’s call her Deborah, not because it’s her real name, but because I’ve always liked that name. Even though I’m pretty much an open book, I figure my friend might like a little privacy.

A few days after I gave the blood sample for the baseline, I got a call from Deborah. “Honey,” she said, “I got your test results back.”

“Yeah, great. Just leave them at the front desk and I’ll come by and pick them up.”

“No, no. You have a problem. Your blood is all whacked out. Your red and white cell counts are very low.”

This didn’t alarm me. I thought I knew what the problem was. “You know, Deborah, I came in and gave blood after a four hour bike ride in the heat. My blood was probably just dehydrated.”

“Dehydration usually makes the critical numbers go up,” she said. “That means your numbers are probably even lower than they look on these results. We need to get more tests.”

“Okay, I’ll come in and your people can draw more blood.”

“No,” she said. “I’m sending you to a doctor who specializes in this.”

Even though I didn’t say it, there was no way in hell I was going to another doctor. So my blood was whacked? So what? Nobody’s perfect. I’ve never really been a doctor guy. I know you’re supposed to get routine checkups, but the only routine I have with checkups is not to get them. Unfortunately, Deborah knew me well enough to know that’s what I was thinking, so she made the appointment herself, figuring I wouldn’t disappoint someone who went out of their way for me.

And that’s how I found myself in the offices of a famous TV doctor. Trust me, you’ve seen him. Aside from being on TV, he’s worked with a lot of professional and Olympic athletes. You don’t even have to ask him about it. He’ll tell you.

It usually takes a long time to get any kind of doctor appointment in Beverly Hills, but because Deborah is one of the top radio oncologists in the city, I found myself in the TV doc’s office the next day, getting the star treatment. They took, no exaggeration, somewhere between twenty-five and thirty vials of blood, along with every other sample he could think of. They also did a complete body scan using some sort of multi-bazillion dollar machine, which spits out statistics like your muscle density, bone density and body fat to an absurdly exacting percentage.

Finally, the TV doc entered.

He walked in with a swagger, too cool for the room, then shook my hand and said “I couldn’t wait to come meet the guy with a lower body fat percentage than me.” Even though he had yet to send the gallons of blood he took from me to a lab, he already had a theory as to what was wrong.

People who train as intensely as I do—between twenty-five and thirty hours a week—sometimes excrete blood through their small intestine, which comes out in their fecal matter. His theory, I guess, was that the blood I was losing through my small intestine explained my low blood cell count. Or something. I couldn’t completely follow the logic.

In any event, he wanted even more samples.

That night, I was having dinner at Deborah’s house. She wanted to know how things went with the TV doc and I told her that he had a theory that required extensive investigation into possible abnormalities in my fecal matter. Actually, what I really said was, “He wants to play with my poopy.” She wanted to know why and I told her his theory. Before I could even finish explaining, she threw down her fork in disgust. I thought she was angry because we were talking about excrement during dinner, but it turned out she was upset for an entirely different reason.

“He totally missed it,” she said, burying her face in her hands.

“Missed what?” I asked. “If you already know what’s wrong with me, why am I fucking around with TV doctors?”

“I’m a radio oncologist,” she said. “Blood is not my expertise. But I know enough to know you have a real problem and he’s not going to find it in your toilet. That’s it, you’re going to see Anne.”

“Anne? Who’s this genius? What TV show is she on?”

Deborah rolled her eyes. “She’s not on any TV show, although there is one that exactly describes doctors like her.”

Yeah. You guessed it.
House
.

Next day, I’m in Dr. Anne’s office—not her real name, by the way. As I sat in her waiting room, I was surprised to discover that I was surrounded by very sick people. They looked gaunt and frail. Some had yellowing skin.

What the hell am I doing here, I thought? I’m not like these people. I just rode six hours on the bike this morning! I’m in great shape!

Next thing I knew, they brought me in to see Dr. Anne.

I was expecting to find someone like Deborah, a type-A Beverly Hills go-getter. Instead, I was surprised to meet Deborah’s polar opposite. Anne was soft-spoken, slightly distracted. She always seemed to be doing two or three things at once, which was understandable considering how busy her waiting room was. She reminded me of the girl next door, if the girl next door was board certified in medical oncology and internal medicine.

Dr. Anne had a gentleness about her. I instantly fell in love.

“So how do you know Deborah?” she asked.

Everybody kept asking me that question, which struck me as odd because I’d been close friends with Deborah for over twelve years and no one in her circle seemed to know who the hell I was. But I guess it made sense. Along with being a friend of mine, Deborah was also a client and I rarely socialize in public with my clients, mostly because everyone always wants to ask me about the celebrities I train. As a rule, I never talk about them to preserve their privacy, so it’s easier to just avoid the social scene altogether.

So Anne took a small amount of blood and sent it off to have some preliminary tests done right away. While I was waiting for the results, Deborah walked in. That’s odd, I thought, knowing how busy her schedule is. For Deborah to show up in person meant that she thought something was really wrong.

For the first time, I felt a sinking feeling.

Soon enough, the three of us were given copies of my initial test results. To me, it was like reading hieroglyphics. Out of nervousness, I started asking questions.

“Give it to me straight. Do I have hep?”

Anne, squinting at my results, said, “we can’t rule it out.”

“What about AIDS? I have AIDS?”

She looked up at me. “Are you homosexual or an intravenous drug user?”

I shook my head. “No.”

“Lots of partners?”

I paused, but she clearly wanted an answer. “Well … yeah.”

“Then we can’t rule it out.”

That response was starting to piss me off. “If I said ‘common cold,’ would you say, ‘we can’t rule it out’?”

But before Anne could answer, Deborah piped up. “Anne, you know what we have to do here.”

Anne nodded. “Yes, but we might as well stick to procedure. Wait until all of the blood tests come back.”

“But you know the blood test is going to tell us to do it anyway, so let’s just do it.”

“What are we talking about here?” I asked, growing frustrated. “Do what?”

Anne turned to me. “A bone marrow biopsy.”

“Okay,” I said with a shrug, although I wasn’t really thinking about what that meant. “Let’s do it.”

Anne began to hem and haw. “Actually, I have them done at Cedars. I don’t do them here any more. Besides, my nursing staff is already gone for the day.”

“I’ll assist,” Deborah said, insistent.

Anne shook her head. “It’s late. I have an appointment I have to get to and it would take too long to give him the sedative.”

Here’s something you should know about me. I’ve always had a high pain tolerance. When I was playing high school football and broke my leg so badly that the doctor described it as powder because it was shattered in so many places, I never had a single painkiller for it. And all of my shoulder surgeries? Same thing. Not one painkiller. You want to talk dental work? I’ve had my share of fillings and caps over the years. Not one shot.

I told you that to tell you this.

Because of my natural resistance to pain, when Anne said they didn’t have time to give me a sedative, I shrugged and said, “Let’s just do it cold.”

This turned out to be a case where my alligator mouth got my bird brain into trouble. When they said sedative, in my mind I was thinking Vicodin or Percocet. You know, the kind of stuff Elvis put in his peanut butter and banana sandwiches. I later realized that when they said sedative, they were talking more like the Michael Jackson kind—the stuff that knocks you out. If I’d thought about it even a second more, I would have remembered where bone marrow is—in the middle of your bone, right next to a ton of nerves.

“Let’s get started,” Anne said.

As I lay on my stomach, Anne took a scalpel and made a tiny incision in the small of my back. You know how when you cut yourself shaving, you don’t feel it right away? Same thing. That wasn’t so bad, I thought. But that’s because we hadn’t really started yet.

How do they harvest bone marrow, you ask?

Good question, one I wish I’d thought to ask. Turns out, it’s with a hollow, stainless steel rod about as thick and long as an unsharpened pencil. I glanced at Anne’s slight frame and wondered if she had the strength to push what looked like a ten-penny nail through bone. Anne took the rod, slipped it through the hole she’d made in my skin and pushed down until I heard crunching sounds as it penetrated my hip. At first, it just felt like pressure as she ground through the outer part. Not a wonderful feeling but not too bad.

And then she hit the nerve endings.

Try to remember the last time you did something that hurt like hell. Stubbing your toe, maybe. You can remember the incident, but it’s hard to remember the pain itself. That’s your mind’s defense mechanism at work. Our minds don’t allow us to remember the true severity of pain, because if you did, it would drive you crazy.

Same thing here.

I remember that it hurt as much as any bone that I’ve ever broken, but I’m hard pressed to remember the specifics of it. I did what I always do when faced with severe trauma—instead of tightening up, I went completely limp and settled into the pain.

Somehow that made it bearable.

I was careful not to flinch, partly because I was afraid that might cause more pain, and partly because I was showing off for the ladies.

“How’s the patient doing?” Anne asked.

“Good,” Deborah replied. “I think he just fell asleep.”

I mumbled something about how I wasn’t asleep, but that I was doing fine and then added, as a joke, “Are we there yet?”

It turned out, we were. Anne had finally arrived at the marrow. She pulled out the instrument, checked it, and then said something I really didn’t want to hear.

“We didn’t get the sample we needed.”

I tried to keep from groaning. “Does this mean you need to create another hole?” I asked.

“No,” she said. “Same hole. We just have to go in deeper, that’s all.”

Oh, boy. Still face down on the table, I gave her the thumbs up to go ahead, and she did. I have no idea how long it took—pain-time is different from real-time—but eventually she got the marrow she needed.

“We’ll send it off to the lab,” she said, “and I’ll let you know as soon as I hear.”

She put on a compression bandage and told me I couldn’t shower or sweat for twenty-four hours. That sounded like hell to me. I was okay about not sweating for twenty-four hours, but not taking a shower? I don’t know about you, but I love my showers. If I’d known that I couldn’t take one for a full day, I probably wouldn’t have said yes to the whole deal to begin with.

The next day, when the time limit was up, I was finally able to take my shower, followed by a large dinner and a shot of scotch, which helped me fall asleep because it was still daylight out—part of my training plan.

At 2 a.m., the alarm woke me.

I pushed my dogs, Sophia Loren and Stella DuBois, out of bed and let them out to go to the bathroom. They weren’t happy because they knew what this meant—I was going to be gone all day on an eighteen-hour bike ride. That’s forever in dog time.

An hour later, I was out in the cool night air pedaling my bike down Valley Circle Boulevard in Calabasas. It was fifty-nine degrees outside and I was sweating and shivering. That’s normal for a nighttime ride. Ten hours later, in the hundred degree heat of the day, I was still sweating and shivering. That’s not normal. But I didn’t think anything was really wrong, because I figured that anyone who could ride a bike as long as that couldn’t possibly have a problem.

By the middle of the afternoon, my cell phone started ringing.

This was unusual, because anyone who had that number knew not to call me on my big Saturday rides. I ignored the call. But the person called again. And again. And kept calling until I finally had to answer.