Hank Beasley was a typical high school student on the surface. He had a job. He wrestled for the varsity team. He hung out with his friends on the weekends.

But on October 24, 2011, a tragic incident with a gun nearly ended Hank Beasley’s life. The chain of events that led to this began months earlier.

“Summer going into junior year, I was having a good time,” Beasley said. “I would say I got started in some stuff I probably shouldn’t be doing. I would always do stuff to look cool. I was drinking a lot, and partying, and it was a fun summer.”

He had just gotten a car, and soon after began looking for a job to pay for gas and other expenses.  But on the way home from one job interview, he got in a car accident.

“I was in Frisco after I was coming back from interviewing for a job, only like five weeks after I got my license,” Beasley said.  I was lost, so I was looking at my phone to get directions coming up on this huge intersection. I actually ran a stop sign, but I didn’t know I ran it until about five weeks later. I hit my head on the steering wheel and forgot everything.”

The accident totaled both Hank’s car and the other involved, and sent both drivers to the hospital.

“I hit this guy, t-boned him,” Beasley said. “He was in the hospital for five weeks. He was on life support, and it was really sad, and I had to live with that guilt that I had almost killed this man after only driving for like five weeks. I was really upset, it hit me really hard.”

When the school year began, Hank put the accident out of his mind.

“After like a month I had forgotten about it a little bit,” he said. “I was doing pretty good after that, I started the junior year, I was actually doing really great in school. I have always struggled getting straight A’s, but I was actually getting pretty close, I think I only had one B, which was really good for me.”

Although his grades had improved, he was still partying on weekends, and along with several friends, began working out excessively.

“My friends were all trying to get jacked in the gym, and working out every day,” Beasley said. “A lot of the guys I was around started this thing called pro hormones. It’s like a synthetic steroid, and one of my really good friends started it, and I wanted to do it too. It’s called Raptor, and I didn’t really do my research on it. I didn’t know the side effects, and how angry it can make you.”

To prepare for the wrestling season, which starts in early November, Hank began a 30 day cycle of the synthetic steroid called Raptor. This prohormone is legal if the user is over 18. A testosterone builder, it behaves in the same way as steroids, replacing the body’s natural testosterone with boosted synthetics. Side effects can include liver/kidney problems, premature closing of growth plates, anger, rage, depression, and impaired brain function.

“I didn’t realize it, but prohormones make you really volatile and angry at the world,” Hank said. “That whole month I was being horrible to my whole family. I was calling my sisters all these horrible names all the time, and yelling at my parents for everything. I was basically tearing apart my family’s relationship, and I didn’t even realize it.”

Not only was his behavior at home erratic, but his actions with everybody were out of the ordinary.

“I was being horrible to everybody and making really bad decisions, really aggressive decisions,” he said. “I never really got into fights, I’m not a fighter, but I got into like three fights that month.”

At the beginning of his cycle, Hank didn’t realize that he was acting unreasonably.

“I was so focused on getting big,” he said. “It messes up your mind a lot, more than you would think it would, because it gives you all this testosterone that you aren’t used to having, and it’s synthetic, so it’s boosted. It makes you feel like you are so powerful, and it makes you grow muscle really fast. If you ever saw me then, it was abnormal looking. It didn’t look natural at all, and I definitely wasn’t acting natural.”

As his 30-day cycle came to an end, however, he began to see the toll that his use of prohormones was taking on his relationships. The weekend before his cycle ended, after another fight with his family, Hank decided to stop taking Raptor.

“I had like a breakdown that week and decided I was done being fake and that I had to change,” he said. “I realized that I can’t keep taking these because they are making me horrible to everybody. That week was good because I was truthful to myself, I admitted to myself that I was the cause of the wreck and everything, and I was getting closer to my family and trying to tell them everything and be nicer to them.”

However, without the post-testosterone cycle, which slowly eases one off of the synthetic testosterone and restore’s the body’s natural chemical balance, Hank was as unstable as he was before.

“I decided not to take it anymore, which I didn’t realize was a huge mistake, because you have to take your post cycle,” he said. “If you don’t, you don’t have any testosterone, so it makes you feel really weak, and you can’t really control it.  You are supposed to take a post-testosterone cycle to build up your testosterone slowly.”

        Unaware that his testosterone balance was unstable, Beasley prepared for wrestling season as normal. The Sunday night before the season began, Hank Beasley went to bed, excited for the season to start the next day.  But Hank didn’t wake up the next morning. He woke up a month later in the hospital with what the police report says was a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head.

“So I went to bed, excited for the next morning, and I don’t really know what happened after that,” he said. “I woke up in the hospital four weeks later, and my whole family standing in front of me. That whole night was just a total blur, it felt like I was on drugs, but I wasn’t.”

When Beasley awoke in the hospital, he was breathing through a tracheostomy, a device to assist patients with ventilation while in a coma.

“I couldn’t breathe on my own. I couldn’t talk on my own, I had to like write on a piece of paper. I couldn’t walk, I was stuck in bed,” Beasley said. “That whole four weeks was just like blank, I don’t remember. I was in a coma, and it’s hard to explain what being in a coma was like. It’s like those four weeks just never happened.”

Although it was disorienting to not remember four weeks of his life, Beasley felt an overwhelming sense of calm.

“It brought me a lot closer to God,” he said. “I had weaned away from him, kind of.  There were so many things that could have gone horrible. I’ve had numerous doctors tell me how lucky I am. I should have died that night, obviously.  I lost so much blood, and they had never heard of anybody surviving something like that. But the fact that I can still talk and don’t have any brain damage or didn’t lose an ear or anything is pretty amazing. People can say that God’s not real, or that he doesn’t do anything, but there has got to be something out there that saved my life.”

Since the incident, Hank has also become closer to his family.

“It brought me a lot closer to my family,” he said. “I tell them a lot more stuff now; I’m not secretive with them.”

Returning to school was a difficult decision for Hank- after six weeks of absence, he knew the rumors would be flying.

“I don’t know who started it, or who told the first person. I don’t understand how everybody knew that same day that it happened, or that Monday,” he said. “I considered being home schooled; I didn’t really want to come back to the same school. I think it really hit me a couple of days later that everyone was going to be thinking all this stuff, and I can’t ever tell everybody what really happened.”

The rumor mill had certainly lived up to expectations: many knew something had happened soon after Hank was hospitalized. Beasley’s current girlfriend, senior Megan Hodge, had heard the story before they became involved.

“Before we started dating I knew everything that had happened because I had heard the story from his friends,” Hodge said.

Megan feels an even higher level of respect for Hank because of the rumors he has dealt with, and the rest of his recovery.

“He is hands down the bravest person I have ever met and I’m so proud of him,” Hodge said. “From coming back to school after being out for 3 months, catching up in his school work, going through surgeries, and so much more, he had taught me to accept situations and not be afraid to face the challenges they may bring. Watching how far he has come through this whole process has been absolutely amazing.”

Despite the rumors that followed him in the halls, Hank found that coming back to school actually provided another support system for him.

“The whole school helped me out a lot, and I would not have been able to do any of this without my friends,” he said.  “They were there, by my side, through everything, and they still are. It was hard on them too, obviously, because I was their best friend, and to see me in the hospital for four weeks. I could never do anything to make up for what they did through everything in that month and the months afterward.”

Beasley still faces repercussions from the incident. In addition to many surgeries and treatments to minimize the scar on his right cheek, he is still undergoing mouth surgeries.

“It’s still something that he is recovering from mentally and physically,” Hodge said. “He has had three surgeries so far, and another one coming up, so it is definitely something that comes up and I always want to make sure that he knows I’m here for him no matter what.”

The upcoming surgery is to widen the range of motion in his mouth.

“I am still going to have surgery, because I couldn’t open my mouth very much,” Hank said. “I still can’t open it all the way, so they did a mouth surgery and I have to have another one in September. It is definitely a long process.”

For Beasley, the scar is a permanent reminder of his past.

“I always beat myself up because of it,” he said.  “The worst part is knowing that maybe if I had been smarter, and told my parents when I was feeling weird, or told my parents why I was being so aggressive, I could have gotten help. But there is really nothing I can do about it now, all I can do is learn from it and be a lot better.”

Hank is open about what happened with those he is close too, and although he is recovering, it is still very much a part of his life.

“As much as we try not to talk about it too much since it is a sensitive topic, it comes up often and we do talk about it,” Hodge said. “I’m not afraid to ask him about anything that happened and he isn’t afraid to tell me. There are times when he’s insecure about the whole situation, and it means the world to me that I’ve been able to help him through it.”

Hank has learned from his mistakes, and remains closer to and more honest with his family than before.

“You are in high school; you are supposed to have fun,” he said. “But if you are going to do it [party], you need to be really safe about it. Don’t get crazy, and don’t let it ruin your family. Be honest with your family, tell them where you are going and what you are doing. I think being honest with your parents is the most important part.”

Beasley has determined that synthetic steroids were a poor choice, and advises any considering them to opt for a more natural way to build muscle.

“Honestly, the synthetic steroids, they are just really stupid. It’s not worth it at all,” he said. “No one is going to look at you any differently just because you are ‘jacked,’ and you can get there naturally. Maybe it will take another month or two, but then at least you can look yourself in the mirror and say wow, I look super good and I did this all by myself, I didn’t have any help. That’s definitely a really good feeling, that you deserve it, you worked that hard, and you didn’t need to get that way by some fake substances.”

Those around Hank consider him brave and are humbled by his amazing route to recovery.

“All in all, he has been such an inspiration to me, and I will always continue to apply what I’ve learned from him in my life,” Hodge said.

As a senior, Beasley has a job. He still hangs out with his friends and girlfriend on the weekends. Except for the three inch scar on his right cheek, he is still a typical high school student.  But on the inside, significant changes have taken place.

“Knowing that all this could end in a second, you can’t take it for granted,” he said. “It’s made me more motivated to do things. I am not saying I’m perfect, I’m not at all, and I still make a lot of mistakes, but it gives me something to look back on and say hey, don’t do that, look how far you’ve come.”

The research from this story was done with the help of the following articles:

http://www.wisegeek.com/what-are-the-most-common-testosterone-side-effects.htm

http://forum.bodybuilding.com/showthread.php?t=1948341&page=1