One of my best friends was a woman from New Jersey. She was also an alcoholic. She had really short hair and a thick Jersey accent. We used to talk about all the problems she was having with her husband. We really connected. Her husband ended up leaving her while she was in rehab. That was a common occurrence. I remember another patient having her husband come visit her, only to have him tell her he was through. He just couldn’t take it anymore, so he broke her heart and left. So I was lucky—it was amazing that Joanie still spoke to me at all.
I stayed in touch with my friend from New Jersey for a while after she got out. But it wasn’t long—maybe a few weeks—before the emails stopped abruptly. A short time later, we were told that she had passed away. She took a few steps back into the real world and drank herself to death.
You wouldn’t believe some of these stories. They thought I was special because I had a bullet in my head, but some of their tales were just crazy. The heroin stories were always the worst. There was one nice guy I met who had tattoos all over his body. He was really interesting, really down to earth. He’d just been remarried. We talked a lot about our relationships. One day, he showed me his track marks. He told me all kinds of stories about his dark desperation. He used to shoot up at work.
The drug stories always shocked me. The crazy places these people would get stoned, all the time they wasted, and so much money just snorted up their nose or shot into their veins. So much money—more than most people could make in a year. It was so sad.
After my family day outburst and her session at Betty Ford, Joanie started coming down to visit me every weekend. It was like she’d doubled down on me. Eventually, she starting coming down on Thursdays and leaving on Sundays. She was gentler, kinder, even though I still blamed her for everything. But that was just my insecurity and confusion. I was crazy. I’d look around and try to find a reason for feeling the way I did. Joanie was closest to me, so she became my emotional punching bag. I don’t know that I can fully understand how badly I hurt her. She carries the memory of that terrible day with her. I imagine that she always will. She never left my side, even when I tried to drive her away—even when I blamed her for my behaviour. Even when I put a gun to my chin, pulled the trigger and blamed her.
While at the Betty Ford Center, Joanie wrote about that day in her journal. When I see it through her eyes, the enormity of what I did breaks my heart. It makes the reality that she stayed with me that much more of a miracle.
Joanie’s Journal
October 7, 2008, around 2:30 p.m., I sat not more than two arms’ lengths away. What only took a second to happen seems to last forever as it plays through my head over and over again. What could I have done to stop this? I came home to my husband sitting behind a shed with a gun lying in front of him. In an instant he grabbed the gun, stood up and faced me, looked at me and said, “This is what I have been thinking about”—at that moment he placed the gun under his chin. While he stared at me you could hear a dull pop sound. His mouth and nose filled with blood. His chin swelled up with blood. He stood looking at me and said, “Look what you made me do.” I thought he was gone.
As I dialed 911 he walked into the tack shed, grabbed a paper towel that he placed under his chin, walked over to the back of his truck and put his shirt on—continuing to walk around he went into the barn and grabbed a towel. He came out of the barn and sat down and started to pass out. I was losing him. The lady on the phone kept saying “Hang on someone will be there soon”—soon wasn’t coming soon enough.
Then he got up and walked back to the tack shed and sat down in front of it. As he sat with his chin resting in his hand, I started to lose him again. He was slouching over, his eyes starting to roll back. Then he stood up and went to where everything started—behind the tack shed, and he sat down.
The police showed up. There were so many—they seemed scared. No ambulance yet. None of the policemen seemed to help. Finally the paramedics showed up. I don’t remember seeing the ambulance arrive, can’t remember Clint being put into the ambulance. Waco showed up. Louise showed up. The police kept asking what happened over and over again. I was afraid they were going to show up and be mean, aggressive and forceful so I told the lady on the phone it was an accident and he was shooting rabbits. I told the same story to the police.
Louise drove me to the hospital in Gardnerville. When I walked in there were so many people. Blood everywhere. I heard them talking about putting a trach in his throat. There was so much noise. They wouldn’t let me stay in the ER room. Everything seemed to get loud and anxious and they led me out of the room. Told me to go to the hospital in Reno and that Clint would be flown there by helicopter. Louise drove me to the hospital. When I got there a few minutes later a lady doctor came out to see me, told me they were having a plastic surgeon doctor come and look at Clint and they might do surgery that night. I was asked about a donor card. I was told they might put a trach in his throat again. Plastic surgeon came out to talk to me and said he was taking Clint into surgery that night. He sounded very positive—first sound that everything will be all right. The doctor said I should go home if I needed to because the surgery would be a few more hours and I could see him after. Mary took me home to get my car. I grabbed a few things and went back to the hospital.
During one of Joanie’s visits shortly after she went to the Betty Ford Center, I was ranting and raving at her in the lunchroom. She walked away from me. A counsellor went over to see if she was okay. “You know, you don’t have to take that from him,” he said.
“I’m fine,” Joanie said. “I’m going to go say goodbye.”
She walked back over to me. I was still furious with her, seething.
“I’m sorry you feel this way,” she said.
“Screw you,” I growled. “Get the hell out.”
Joanie didn’t flinch. “I hope you have a nice weekend,” she said. “I’m sorry you feel the way you do. But I still love you.”
“Fuck you.”
And she left—just walked out the door. I caught up to her and apologized before she got in the car.
If Joanie was willing to do whatever it took to help me survive this—to help us survive this—I was going to do whatever it took, too. I fully bought into the program then. Even if I hated every minute of it, I owed it to the people who stood by me to see this through.
32
Post-Traumatic
I FIRST LEARNED ABOUT POST-TRAUMATIC STRESS DISORDER IN January 2009. Tina kept bringing it up, suggesting that there might have been more to my jugular injury than the scar across my neck.
I thought it was complete bullshit. I was a professional hockey player, not a Vietnam vet.
“Clint, you’re messed up,” she said. “And do you know why you’re messed up? It’s because of that accident in Buffalo.”
I blew her off. “Whatever, I was back playing in ten days,” I said. “I would have come back sooner, but they said I couldn’t until the stitches came out. I was brought up tough. You get on the horse, you get bucked off, you get up and get back on the horse. When that’s your mental makeup for forty-eight years, you stand by it. Don’t give me this crock of shit.”
“Well, what was your life like after the accident?” she asked.
“Severe obsessive-compulsive disorder, my depression got really bad, constant nightmares and eventually insomnia,” I said. “And then I started self-medicating.” Shit.
Tina said she thought one of the reasons the NHL Players’ Association was trying to help me with this rehab stuff was that I hadn’t received any help back then. That was her theory, anyway. Who knows? She focused on the skate-blade accident as the catalyst for my psychological issues, but also tied in the things that had happened to me earlier in life. I had nightmares for years after my dad smashed in those windows in the middle of winter. The cop-car sirens haunted me and the cold consumed me. I thought we were going to freeze to death. Then he left one day and didn’t come back. There’s trauma in that.
After
the accident, the effects of that trauma sent me into even more of a spiral. I swallowed a handful of sleeping pills and chased it with a bottle of whiskey. My heart stopped. My NHL career ended. There’s trauma in that, too.
The rage has always been there. That switch goes on and I’m a monster. I was channelling things I couldn’t even begin to comprehend. Suddenly, I was drinking my face off, taking on cops, and walking into gyms and picking on the biggest goons I could find. Normal people don’t do that shit. The roof of my mouth was barely healed, and there was a bullet lodged millimetres from my brain.
Yeah, I knew something about trauma—but I had no clue how to deal with it. I kept fighting Tina on this. Post-traumatic stress? Was she crazy? My entire career was defined by that injury and my ability to come back from it quickly. That wasn’t my problem. It was proof that I could take on anything.
It took me a good month to buy into her reasoning.
“No,” I said. “This is all bullshit.”
“Did you think you were going to die?” she replied.
“Well, yeah, I thought I was going to die. But we’ve been through this. I handled all that.”
“Don’t you think it was traumatic?”
“I got over it in a few days. I was fine.”
During one of our sessions, Tina handed me this book called Waking the Tiger by Peter Levine, a renowned expert in trauma. The first chapter is about a young impala getting attacked by a cheetah. As soon as the cheetah lunges for the impala, it falls down like it’s dead. The impala isn’t pretending to be dead; its instincts have pushed it into an altered state of consciousness that all mammals experience when death is imminent. We often talk about “fight or flight” as the two main responses to danger, but the third response is to freeze. That impulse can do two things for the impala. If the cheetah thinks the impala is dead, it might drag the motionless prey to its lair to feed to its cubs. When it has a moment to escape, the impala will wake up and make a break for it. It shakes its body, literally ridding itself of the traumatic stress. On the other hand, if the impala doesn’t have a chance to escape, its altered consciousness means it won’t suffer when the cheetah rips it apart.
I really like animals, and this story had lots of action, so I bought in. Tina explained the concept to me. As humans, we’re taught to not do what the impala does. We’re taught to be tough, especially men. We’re taught to fight. And we’re taught to contain the natural instincts that help shake out the trauma that cripples us. Don’t seek help. Don’t cry, especially not in public. “Unlike wild animals,” Dr. Levine writes, “when threatened, we humans have never found it easy to resolve the dilemma of whether to fight or flee.” This stuff was a bit much for me to take in at the time, but the more I read and discussed it with Tina, the more it started to make sense. The lasting effects of trauma are the result of that negative moment being trapped inside of us, frozen and without resolution. It destroys us from the inside.
“The long-term, alarming, debilitating, and often bizarre symptoms of PTSD develop when we cannot complete the process of moving in, through and out of the ‘immobility’ or ‘freezing’ state,” Levine said. That impala collapsed when it saw a cheetah chasing it down at seventy miles per hour. On the outside, the impala looked dead and gone. But on the inside, its nervous system was still spinning at seventy miles per hour. It’s like slamming on the gas and the brake pedals in your car at the same time, Levine says. All that energy has to go somewhere. As a human, we aren’t very efficient at getting rid of it. It comes out in the form of anxiety, depression and dysfunctional behaviour. When we can’t get rid of these problems, we become fixated on them—returning, again and again, like a moth to a flame. The result, Levine says, is that many become so riddled with fear and anxiety, we’re never capable of being comfortable inside ourselves.
That was chapter one.
Fuck. Me. It was all I needed to read. Two decades of hell, distilled into a few pages.
A couple days after my crash course in trauma, I got a panicked call from Joanie. She had been on her way from Gardnerville to visit me in rehab. The roads were icy through the mountains, and on one of the hills, another car slammed into her.
She wasn’t hurt, but it was a big enough wreck that a number of cops came, an ambulance roared up, and it was a tense, terrible scene. The last time she’d seen anything like it, I was gushing blood with a bullet in my head.
“Clint, I was so proud,” she said over the phone. “I held it together. I didn’t even tear up until I got back in the car. And then I just started to shake and couldn’t stop crying.”
“Christ, Joanie,” I said. “That’s exactly what you’re supposed to do! That’s exactly it.”
After that, Tina started doing these exercises with me, like word association and listening to the noises you’d hear in a quiet room—stuff like that. It was amazing how this shit just poured out of me. I cried for three days, uncontrollably. She didn’t know it was going to be a three-day deal. It takes most people three hours. Every time she saw me, I broke out in tears.
“I don’t know—you did some voodoo shit to me,” I said. “Now I’m a frickin’ blubbering baby.”
I cried more than I’d ever cried in my life. Two decades of unaddressed trauma poured out of me in three days. I think it scared Tina to see how deeply messed up I really was.
We are a toxic bunch, aren’t we? We want everything to stay inside, where it doesn’t belong. If it stays inside, it’s toxic. Our society stays toxic because of it. If I’m going to cry, I’m going to cry, because that’s the way I’m made. If I’m depressed, I’m just going to say I’m depressed. What else am I going to do? I can’t deny it. It’s nature, and we need to do what nature intends us to do.
I started to realize that my anxiety always got worse as soon as the sun started to go down. Maybe it was because that’s when my dad would come home—I don’t know. He’d come home and be drunk and there would be a fight. I really started to wonder whether all this childhood trauma was a major factor in my anxiety. Who really knows? Still, talking about it with Tina helped me get a lot of this shit to the surface.
During one of our sessions, Tina had me draw a picture of myself on a plain black piece of paper. Not just a self-portrait, but a picture showing the pieces inside me. I drew a white outline of a man with yellow bolts of electricity charging through him. There were these large blue cylinders, rolling up and down him. In his head, there was a man walking back and forth on a tightrope. The bolts showed the chaotic energy constantly bouncing around inside my mind. The steamrollers were the part of me constantly trying to contain it all—pushing down on my chest, trying to smooth it all out. The man was angry. He never stopped moving, never stopped yelling—just went back and forth, back and forth, yelling and screaming. He was the part of me that I always heard talking. He represented my obsessions and doubts and insecurity. He was my rage. The source of everything, guarding my mind on a tightrope.
Most of these exercises weren’t even associated with the skate accident. It was weird: at the end of each one, I’d have tears streaming down my face. I think that made Tina a little bit worried, to be honest. There was no cognitive beginning or end to it. It just happened.
She did the same thing with the gun incident. It was caused by trauma and was causing new trauma, a vicious cycle. I had no idea about all this emotional therapy shit. Why do we drink? Why are we the way we are? Why do we think about suicide? Why? I’d never given it a second thought.
I fought that place so hard. I hated it. I had thought, Thirty days and I’m gone. I wanted to get back to my job, back to my marriage, back to my life. I just wanted to get out of there. I’d been to enough therapists and psychiatrists to know that I was a little bit off. It was always the same: OCD—check. Depression—check. I’ve got some issues. Give me some pills and let me get on with life until it all falls apart again. So in rehab, I was just the same. Yeah, I had too much to drink. Yeah, I have a drinking problem. Yeah, it wa
s just an accident. And now I’ve done my thirty days and I’m better now.
I didn’t even have a clue until early February. Tina is the reason I got there. I owe everything to her, because she is the one who convinced me I was still in so much denial after the jugular vein accident. Shit was flying because I never dealt with the reality of trauma. Now I look back and realize how my life spiralled downward after that accident. The whole time, I was like, Tina, fuck off. But, like Joanie and Dudley, that woman helped save my life.
I got out in April. When it was time to finally leave, six months after it all began, I knew I was a different man. There was no doubt it had helped. I was no longer a jaded asshole who hated everyone. When I first arrived, everyone was scared of me. At the same time that people liked me and saw that I was a nice guy, they also saw that I was a monster. Everything had changed. I now understood myself better than I ever had before. I had bought in. I was even mentoring other patients and had become friends with some of these guys who came into the program after me.
A couple of weeks before I left, they let me go home for a weekend. By that point, I had done my time. This was a test, like being on parole. It had been half a year since I had sat in that shed and pulled the trigger. I was pretty emotional. I knew I’d have to turn around and head back to the rehab clinic in a day. But seeing the ranch, my horses, my dogs, felt like a beautiful return, like a roaring ovation in an arena when you’re weak from almost dying but rushing with life. It wasn’t difficult to be back at the spot where the shooting happened. That was the past. This was now. And this was home.
The Crazy Game Page 23