They took me into the “changing” room on the second day. It was a small room that felt even smaller once they rolled the gurney in the middle of it. Mom held my head, so I wouldn’t turn around as a nurse began undressing my wounds. Every time anyone touched my wounds, I wanted to walk out of my body and leave the room. I never knew what was coming and they rarely told me what they were about to do. Maybe they thought if it all came as a “surprise” I wouldn’t worry about it too much beforehand. But it was all already painful and the not knowing made it even worse: I had learned that the quieter everyone got, the stronger the pain would be. After the first dressing, they decided to give me morphine going forward.
My surgery was scheduled for a week or two later. Time dragged on. In my 10-year old mind, I had a vision of getting the surgery the next day, then leaving the hospital in a week, and going to school on September 1st. I stayed at the hospital till the end of October, laying on my stomach the entire time.
I was hardly ever alone. Mom or grandma were always by my side, and we had visitors almost every day. My diet consisted of bland bouillons and vegetarian soups, boiled eggs and meat, porridge, buckwheat, and fruit. No salt, no sugar, nothing fried or pickled, no bread (unless it was special, dietary kind). Borsht tasted sweet and I dreamt of the day I could eat fried potatoes and tasty salty Georgian bread (a thicker version of Indian naan).
As I lay on the hospital bed with a tent over my body, facing the wall. To my left was another bed, where mom slept, and a window to the garden, where people went to grieve. To my right was the door into the hallway, which appeared farther than it actually was.
Because I couldn’t see my wounds, while they were on display for everyone else to see, I felt anxious when people in the room were not in my area of visibility. I tried to stay busy with books, drawing, and knitting, but my shoulders and neck hurt from being propped up all the time. Sometimes pain got too much and I felt like my wounds had swallowed me up. I was yearning for things that didn’t involve drugs, bandages, and hospital gurneys.
Every morning a nurse brought me pills, most of which were donated to the hospital and under a lock.
On the day of the surgery, they gave me morphine, as usual, and rolled me to the operations room on the top floor — a huge (for a 10 year old), mostly empty room with walls painted light green halfway through and a cracked ceiling. By the time I noticed the surgical lights and the machine to stretch grafted skin, my vision got blurred and I fell asleep. They grafted skin from my right leg to put it on the wounds on the left.
The post-surgery care was critical to the entire healing process. It included a red light burning therapy on the skin graft site. My grandpa, the only person who had the nerves to do it, moved a quartz lamp back and forth over the still raw flesh on my right leg, to basically burn it. He had to do it for five minutes every hour the entire day. They held my hands and feet, so I wouldn’t jump from pain. I was swearing at everyone with every bad word I knew and was convinced my family didn’t actually love me.
Moments in Words 