Love, Zac

by Reid Forgrave

  He laid out a set of life goals. Some seemed charmingly simple; others seemed impossibly out of reach:

  3 months – get stronger, 6 pack

  2 months – get over red face and fear of judgement

  3 months – learn stocks

  1 month – get your connection w/ God back

  1 month – quit chew and Adderall

  1 year – get MBA

  1 year – get investment certificate

  2 year – become portfolio manager

  1 week – post more on social media

  Get into good MBA program, make 100K, drive sexy car

  5 year – want to be a millionaire by age 28

  1 month – want to stop spending money on stuff I don’t need

  2 year – motorcycle

  2 year – travel USA

  10 year – see a foreign country

  5 year – Super Bowl

  1 year – more Packers games

  Zac’s moods ping-ponged between an unrealistic sort of conquer-the-world optimism and complete hopelessness. Around the time he was graduating from Grand View University in the spring of 2015, Zac went to a local doctor to discuss his depression. He asked whether he should start taking antidepressants. The doctor gave him a pep talk. He told Zac he was a great guy, told him his own daughter thought Zac was the greatest guy ever, told him he needed to pray more. Then, he prescribed Zac a low-dose antidepressant. Zac asked if all his concussions could have played a part in his depression. No, the doctor told Zac. Concussions don’t do that to somebody. Zac took the antidepressants for a month. But he felt worse, and more depressed.

  “I was determined I would make it and succeed and guess what, nothing ended up working,” Zac wrote. “I started drinking and getting so shitfaced I often started pissing the bed and started to have my drinking problem come back. Some nights I would tell my friends and roommate I’m busy and sit in my room and drink alone. Before my senior year [in college] I also got a prescription of Adderall because I thought I had adhd. All I did was start abusing the Adderall right away. When I picked up my first prescription I went home and snorted several lines. The Adderall binges and drinking binges took its toll on me. . . . It seemed the only [way] I could get myself to seem smart and outgoing was to be high on amphetamines from the Adderall.”

  The situation didn’t improve. “I kept going out on the weekends and drinking my ass off though and using any drug I could find,” Zac wrote. “I still feel guilty because I feel like I let my brother down by saying how I was going to be the next wolf of wall street, but in reality, I struggled like a motherfucker to even show up. I hid all this from everyone I knew of course and still didn’t know how to open up to people to tell them how I felt. The summer was rough at work and rough at home . . . I love my family to death, but I felt like I was snapping on them for no reason some days and I could see that somethings I said were hurting them. It just seemed like anything and everything would want to set me off.”

  Things weren’t going any better with Zac and his friends. “Socially I was even more fucked up. I felt extremely insecure with myself and literally couldn’t talk to anyone cus of my anxiety. I felt like I couldn’t connect with anyone because my emotions were so fucked and I felt like I needed to stay in my room.”

  Without his family knowing—telling Ali but no one else—Zac started going to someone for help. Her name was Kamela Kleppe-Yeager, and her office was near the state capitol building in Des Moines. She was a speech-language pathologist, specializing in patients with concussions. In their first meeting, they talked about his issues. He brought up the concussions. She changed the wording for him, having him call the concussions “minor brain injuries.” That sort of wording helped Zac process what his brain had suffered through. This wasn’t just getting his bell rung on the football field; this was potentially something much more serious. She gave Zac a screening test that assessed five areas of function: his attention, his memory, his language processing, his problem solving, and his visual and spatial skills. His testing showed problems with memory and language, affirming issues Zac thought were affecting his everyday life. She noticed a delay in his speaking patterns. His brain only appeared to be able to retain memory for only about three minutes. “You sort of got a deer-in-the-headlights feeling—I saw that on Zac’s face a lot,” Kleppe-Yeager later recalled. “That level of internal frustration. And that interferes with your ability to problem-solve because you really freeze up. Tears would get in his eyes, but he wouldn’t actually cry. He’d become more quiet. What I wanted him to do was say it, talk out loud. And he would just freeze up.”

  Zac kept going back to her once or twice a week, fourteen times in all over the course of a few months in the spring and summer of 2015, as he was finishing college. She taught him how to develop a “working memory,” sharing simple techniques for retaining information. Taking copious notes. Setting multiple calendar reminders. Breaking up life problems into manageable chunks instead of looking at them as huge and chaotic. A healthy brain does that normally. A brain that’s not healthy—Zac’s brain—has to work hard to make sense of things like that. Instead of letting the information fall apart in his brain, Kleppe-Yeager taught Zac how to stitch pieces together. At one appointment, she gave him a worksheet filled with numbers and words. After a few minutes working on it, Zac started to get stressed. He had difficulty even reading the words. He felt nauseous. He told her he was having a panic attack. She said that’s what they were trying to fix. She asked Zac what he did for fun, and he couldn’t answer. Nothing seemed fun anymore. He told her he was always confused, and that he didn’t know himself anymore. She told him he needed to take antidepressants and see a neurologist.

  Zac scheduled more visits with Kleppe-Yeager, but one, two, three times, he just didn’t show up. Kleppe-Yeager could only guess why Zac stopped coming. He’d made steps in the right direction, but he had a long way to go. “It was like Zac knew what he wanted to say, but he couldn’t say it,” Kleppe-Yeager later lamented to me. “Some people do a better job of coping. Zac didn’t get that far.”

  After only four months, he quit the job working with his brother.

  With his memory failing him, Zac figured writing things down in a journal could only help. At times, the journal seemed like his best friend—the only one other than Ali he could open up to. One night in the spring of 2015, he pulled out a pen and at 9:40 p.m. started scrawling on the lined pages of a black spiral-bound Five Star Mead notebook.

  “I guess today really wasn’t that bad,” Zac wrote. “Instead of taking the antidepressant I went and refilled my Adderall script. Popped two 30 mgs and I felt like I was at least able to get myself to do something productive. Still had the mood swings throughout the day but at least got a nice euphoric feeling listening to music, cleaning, and playing Clash of Clans all day. My dad actually called me today and wanted to chat . . . I went for a 20 min jog today, just like usual, I got dizzy and walked about every other minute. I went like 1.4 miles in 20 mins. Pretty sad since I used to do like 4-8 miles at a 7 minute pace give or take . . . that makes me depressed . . . I feel like I’ve gained 10-15 pounds uncontrollably. The impulse binging needs to stop, but I don’t know how when I don’t even know I’m doing it.

  “Even with two 30 mg Adderall in me and about another 10 mgs I poored out and snorted, I still got lost all around Menards and the Dollar Store . . . IDK what it was but I felt like I kept walking all around the store and passed what I was looking for several times. I straight up felt confused on what I was looking and kept forgetting even right after I looked at my list. I only went for like 3 things too . . . I only have about a 3 minute memory after that I’m fucked. I even took three wrong turns on the way home. Shit happens I guess.”

  The next day, Zac was driving to Indianola from Des Moines, a thirty-minute drive that he’d made hundreds if not thousands of times before. He was almost in a trance and nearly hit a car. He got lost on the way to his parents’ house.


  For hours at a time, starting that senior year of college and going into the summer after graduation, Zac would go online and research the postconcussion symptoms that he thought were wrecking his life. He wondered whether this nightmare was the price of playing football, the sport he’d loved his entire life—the sport that, let’s be honest, he still loved, even if it contributed to his ruin. He kept reading about this scary-sounding degenerative disease of the brain that presented like Alzheimer’s but appeared in ex-athletes from contact sports decades before Alzheimer’s would typically set in. It sounded like a scientific word salad: chronic traumatic encephalopathy. He couldn’t even spell it correctly, but the symptoms all sounded familiar: Memory problems. Personality changes. Mood swings between depression and aggression. He read about former NFL stars who’d been diagnosed with this terrifying disease, but only after they died, often by suicide. Zac watched a PBS documentary about NFL Hall of Famer Mike Webster, who was essentially Patient Zero in the developing public health crisis surrounding this brain disease among former football players.

  “Some days I feel like IDK who I am anymore,” Zac wrote. “I’ve noticed I’m relying on drugs to try and be who I want to be. I need to stop, but at the same time I’m like Fuck it . . . I wont lie, I feel kind of scared and depressed about my future. I found some info online about CTE and got scared . . . I just wish I could be my old self and understand whats going on.”

  His old self seemed to be a ghost, replaced by this new person he didn’t particularly like. “My motivation has been slacking and I feel pretty depressed. I feel like I need to abuse Adderall to get anything done as far as talking to ppl. My impulse control seems to be getting worse. I just want to go on huge food binges and I can’t stop. Also have been feeling very impatient with people and feel like I just want to snap something. I miss the old Zac.”

  Through it all, the main person he confessed these vulnerabilities to was Ali. They’d been an on-again, off-again item since that New Year’s Eve they’d made love in the freezing-cold barn. She’d left Iowa for college at a private school in a small town in Kentucky. They were able to live their own lives when she was at school, each dating other people, each having plenty of wild times. But they would text nonstop and talk on the phone. When she was home from college, they were virtually inseparable.

  They thought their relationship was their big secret, that their friends didn’t know. They’d be at a bar in downtown Des Moines with a group of friends, and when one of them said their special code phrase—“Rum and Coke?”—they’d disappear together. They’d talk. They’d make up goofy dances on the dance floor. They’d make out. She loved how silly he was around her—she seemed to be the only person he could be like that around—and she loved what a thoughtful and thoroughly decent young man he was. For five years they played this game. “We’d always go back to each other—that was the one constant,” Ali said later. They got out of their small town and went on nondate dates in the big city, just the two of them: To P.F. Chang’s near the mall, to Zombie Burger + Drink Lab near the state capitol building in Des Moines’s industrial East Village, to Sakari Sushi Lounge on the Ingersoll Avenue commercial strip. He called her by a pet name: “Winslow,” her middle name. It was only when they were drunk when some other words would slip out: “I love you.”

  But at some point during the summer of 2015, something started to change. Maybe it was because Ali was going to be moving to Cleveland, Ohio, at the end of the summer to attend Case Western Reserve University School of Law, so their time together felt short. Maybe it was because Ali was the only person who Zac felt he could spill everything out to about these worsening troubles inside his brain. He swore her to secrecy on all of it; don’t tell anyone, Zac instructed, but especially not his parents. But that summer, a relationship that had been casual started to become something much more. They went on long walks around Gray’s Lake, an old gravel mine near an oxbow in the Raccoon River with a perfectly framed view of downtown Des Moines’s skyline. They went to the beach at Lake Ahquabi near Zac’s parents’ house, threw clumps of grass at each other, and stared at the clouds as children and their parents rented paddleboats. They held hands, first in the dark, at a movie theater, and eventually in public. “You’re the mac to my cheese,” Zac texted her. She calmed him more than anyone. She convinced him that he needed to tell his family what was happening. She told him that, no matter what was going on with his brain, they would figure it out. Together.

  On the night of his twenty-fourth birthday, Zac Easter and his cousin Cole Fitzharris met at the Sports Page Grill in Indianola, ordered Coors Lights, and waited for Zac’s parents to arrive. Zac was nervous. His cousin could hear it in his voice. By this point, June of 2015, not quite six years since his final football game, Zac had become convinced that his five diagnosed concussions (plus who knows how many more that were never diagnosed) across a decade of using his head as a weapon had triggered his downward spiral.

  Meanwhile, Zac’s parents believed their son was on top of the world. Somehow, through a combination of hard work and faking it, he’d just graduated from college, and even made the honor roll his final semester. Last they heard, he was considered a star in the Iowa National Guard, maybe even bound for Army Ranger school if things broke the right way. They approved of this relationship with Ali, and they loved the fact that it was inching toward something real and special. A full life awaited their middle child.

  But his parents were buying into the mirage: the degree, the girl, the job, the stability. He’d just asked his first postgraduation employer for some time off from work when his parents arrived for his birthday dinner. Zac took an anxious swig from his Coors Light, gathered himself, then told them he needed to talk.

  “Something’s been going on with my head,” he began.

  From there, he laid it all out: He was quitting his job because he needed to focus on his health. He was often tired and dizzy and nauseated. He got headaches all the time. Sometimes while driving, he’d go into these trances; he’d snap out of it when he drove his car into a curb. Panic attacks came without warning. He had started writing down a long list of questions for his doctor; one of them was “Do you think I’m showing signs of CTE or dementia?” In fact, he already knew the answer to that one. He had just visited a doctor who specialized in concussions and who told him that, yes, he very well might have CTE.

  His parents were stunned. They knew some things were off. Sometimes on the phone it sounded like Zac was talking with marbles in his mouth. And they’d noticed that his bank account, which they still had access to, was suddenly hemorrhaging money. But mostly, they just assumed their son was a young man grappling with the growing pains of adulthood and independence.

  Now, though, he was telling them that he might have a mysterious brain disease that afflicted NFL players, haunting them for decades after their careers had ended. One psychologist even told Zac that he would end up penniless, homeless, and in a mental institution. Not could. Would. Zac had walked out of that guy’s office terrified.

  Myles Easter Sr. had seen the news reports of ex-NFL stars whose lives unraveled postretirement and ended in suicide. Mike Webster, Andre Waters, Dave Duerson, Junior Seau, the Sunday gladiators who once were the apotheosis of all that he worshipped about the game of football. But Myles never really believed this disease existed. To be honest, even the mention of it kind of disgusted him. CTE was an excuse, he had always thought: a bunch of millionaire athletes who’d had it made, who blew through all their money, who fell out of the limelight, who got depressed, who then killed themselves. But now, hearing his own son—still just a kid, no jaded pro, someone who had never played a day of football above the high school level—say that he might have CTE?

  “It just caught me so off guard,” Myles Sr. said later. “I was honestly dumbfounded.”

  The dinner table went quiet. Then, Brenda, Zac’s mom, broke the silence.

  “Well,” she said, “let’s fix it.”

  Sev
en

  The Doctor

  The first time Zac Easter steered Old Red into Dr. Shawn Spooner’s sports medicine clinic, in a well-manicured strip mall in suburban Des Moines, Zac couldn’t have known he was about to meet a kindred spirit. Spooner has the boy-next-door look that could make older patients uncertain whether he’s just some medical-school student on rotation: a buzz cut and a hint of a lisp, warm brown eyes and an easy smile, the limber muscles of an avid road cyclist, and the earnest manner of a doctor who really listens to your problems. Like Zac, Spooner grew up in small-town Iowa, in Kingsley, a speck of a town not far from where Iowa, Nebraska, and South Dakota converge, and a childhood home of US President Herbert Hoover. Like Zac, Spooner had played football in high school and still loves the sport. And like Zac at the time of his first appointment, Spooner had taken a recent interest in concussions. Zac had visited plenty of people to help his broken brain: therapists and psychiatrists, family practice doctors and neurologists. Few gave him confidence they were the right person to fix it, until Zac walked into this building one spring day in 2015.

  On Zac’s first visit, the doctor quizzed him on his head issues. It wasn’t like Zac’s speech was horribly slurred, but it didn’t take long for Spooner’s alarm bells to go off: Zac told him about previous concussions, in football and otherwise, and about how things were getting worse even though it had been several years since his last concussion. He told the doctor about his trouble focusing, and his up-and-down emotions, and the drinking and drugs he used to cope. The fact Zac was still struggling with what seemed like postconcussion symptoms for years after his last concussion was concerning. What had started Zac’s downward spiral—whether it was the concussions or preexisting mental health issues or some toxic cocktail of both—didn’t matter so much to Spooner as where Zac stood right now: isolated, anxious, socially avoidant. Zac spoke of the facade he put up even to himself; he was telling himself he was training to be an Army Ranger, but deep down, he knew that was a lie. He talked about his depression. Shortly before meeting Spooner, Zac wrote this in his journal: “Thoughts of suicide are creeping in my head and its freaking me out.”