Left for Dead

coming together to overcome adversity and be a wonderful example to other individuals. Unfortunately, Peach and I were hanging on by our fingernails, and it was not at all clear that we would even survive. We certainly were not going to be that ideal couple. I married Peach in large part because she was a much better person than I am and very thoughtful to others. I at least had that degree of introspective awareness. Peach married me because I wasn't boring. We certainly both got what we bargained for, although I am not sure that Peach wouldn't have been happier to have me more boring than I managed to be. Any story about Everest that we would write from our viewpoint would not be the usual kind of triumphal mountaineering tale where unique individuals overcome great odds and go on to stand on the summit of a great mountain, having conquered nature. Ours is really more a story of tragedy and sustained perseverance through hardship. That ultimately became the reason for writing the book—to demonstrate the price that is paid, surely by those who perished on the mountain, but even more so by those left behind. The parents, the spouse, the siblings, the friends who will have to go on forever with a hole in their lives. In order to write such a book, I had to come to grips with the fact that I would have to portray the truth of my own deeply flawed soul, and that would require a level of brutal honesty that at best would be unflattering and expose parts of my life of which I am not particularly proud. Mountain climbing as an obsession is a selfish endeavor, and there's just no way to get around that fact. Reading the book after it was finished, I was struck with how completely different Peaches and my memories were of many of the shared experiences in our lives. Both of us were telling the story as we remembered it, but in many instances it was as if we were in entirely different universes. My co-author, Stephen Michaud, interviewed all the others and presented their voices. Any part of the book that contains my voice is written by me. The story portrayed in Left 4 Dead takes us to the year 2000. We were beginning to work through the tragedy of the mountain and the great tragedy of losing Peach's brother. Since 2000, life has gradually returned to normal. On many days I am largely unaware of the loss of my hands as my new reality has become commonplace. When I originally got back from Everest, I could not have imagined that I would ever see that experience as a positive event. But the two-by-four that slammed me across the face forced me to stop and re-evaluate my life, because I simply couldn't continue living as I had before. The patterns of behavior that had made me successful as a physician were destroying my personal relationships, and I knew that I would have lived the rest of my life as a very successful, but very lonely, individual. Pathology as I know it is an idiot savant skill practiced in a room by oneself. I have the ability to look at stained human tissue slides, visualize an individual sliced in any of three axes, anywhere in the body, at any age, and recognize whether this is normal or diseased tissue. While pathology is a fascinating career and presents interesting puzzles to solve, it is not exactly what you would call a people profession. Wonderful opportunities that I would never have imagined came out of the Everest tragedy. I developed a second career as a professional speaker doing keynote addresses. The public speaking takes me into other people's worlds, and for the time that I am there with them, I immerse myself in different professions, different universes of individuals who live lives that are vastly different from mine and that I find rather fascinating. I have always been at some level a storyteller. Peach would say that I could talk the ears off a rubber rabbit. It's characteristic of Southerners to enjoy storytelling, and all of a sudden, one day I woke up and had a great story. That's been something I very much enjoyed over the years. We now have the experience of having an Everest movie and an Everest opera, both of which have been finished recently. The Everest movie features Josh Brolin playing me, and I thought that was a particularly good choice, as he is a Texan and would be able to at least understand and replicate the Texanisms that are part of my speech. I think Peach was also very pleased to see her character played by Robin Wright. I had an opportunity to go out to Los Angeles to meet with the cast, director and producer of the movie, at the Chateau Marmont. I don't think that when I kept trying to call it the Chateau Marmot, which is a small town in the