During the month that followed, my family did a good job not feeling sorry for me in front of me. I felt trapped in my body and in our living room, lying on the couch face down the entire time.
People visited almost every day. My brother told me jokes and we played cards to pass time.
Every other day they drove me to a military surgeon’s office, since he was one of the best in the city. The trips in the back of a Soviet car with no seat belts and bumpy Tbilisi roads were rough, but nothing in comparison of what awaited me at the surgeon’s office. I screamed for an hour, while they changed the bandages and dressed my wounds. They didn’t sedate me or give me painkillers. It took a couple of weeks before blood showed up on my bandages, a sign of live flesh. I had second, third and, in some places, fourth degree burns that spread over the back of my left thigh, part of my butt, and some areas on the back and upper arm. They had me walk from the car to the surgeon’s office to keep the blood circulating. I couldn’t straighten my body and walked with my left hip sticking out to the side.
After a month of treatments, the surgeon said he’d done all he could and they had to take me to the burn center for a skin graft surgery. My wounds were too deep and would not heal properly. Without surgery there was a high likelihood I would never walk straight, he said.
Burns are among the most vicious types of injuries. There’s the initial pain so severe it sends one into a shock for days. Then there’s numbness, while the flesh makes sense of things: like a still morning after a nighttime disaster — all the damage is finally visible, but the impact is just beginning to unravel, quietly. Then, one starts to feel again, the nerves regenerate and there’s a deep pain, sometimes shooting pain in random places, at random times. All along, one’s mind plays tricks: a smell or breeze, or anything lightly touching the body, feels like a personal attack.
While everyone was focused on my burns, my mind was going wild. Once a shy and reserved child, I became a chatterbox spitting out unfiltered comments on everything and everyone. I told a family friend that if she were serious about losing weight she wouldn’t be eating so much. I bet she struggled to feel sorry for me at that moment. I actually hated when people did.
Moments in Words 