Breathing the Fire

My doctors were faced with a stark choice: They could gamble and hope what they were seeing was temporary bruising. But if the tissues were actually dying, that meant the doctors were giving the bacteria breeding in the dead tissue a chance to course through the rest of my body and kill me.

Many doctors new to the field will take the more conservative course of action. They'll amputate the limb and save the patient. But my surgeons had been deployed in a war zone for about two-thirds of their yearlong tour, some of them for more than that. They'd gambled before and won. Nancy explained that after some debate, they took a chance with me, putting heating pads on my legs, changing them frequently, to help stimulate the circulation.

After about 36 hours, the gamble paid off. By the time I was awake enough to be aware of my legs and what had happened, the risk of amputation had mostly already passed.

It remained a possibility the doctors wouldn't openly share with me, though. The jagged, burning chunks of shrapnel had done major damage to my quadriceps, the four major muscles that power my upper leg. So many muscles were shredded that by the time the dead tissue was painstakingly removed from the living, my broken femur bone was exposed. In later surgery at Bethesda Naval Hospital, the remaining muscle had to be rearranged to cover it. And then doctors could only hope the grafts they put on the massive burn, a foot and a half by 8 inches, would take. If they couldn't cover the femur again, they'd have to consider taking the leg off. (They opted not to tell me about that possibility until after the surgery had been carried out and had worked.)

In order for my muscles to heal and for those later grafts to take, the surgeons at Landstuhl knew they had to clean the area of the damaged flesh, dirt, and bacteria that the blast had blown in. Otherwise the area would contaminate any future grafts and slow or stop healing.

So, according to my mom, every day at Landstuhl, surgeons would powerwash the dirt and dead, burned tissue from my legs. Picture strapping a patient to the operating table and turning a fire hose on her at full blast. It was Nancy's bandage change on overdrive. These “washouts” were so painful they had to be done under full anesthesia and each one counted as surgery. By the time I was discharged from the last hospital weeks later, the surgeons had lost count of how many procedures I'd undergone. The guesstimate was “at least two dozen.” Detailed records hadn't been kept at the Baghdad or Balad trauma hospitals. The doctors fixed me and moved me on.

A Story of Recovery . . .

With the dozen or so surgeries to close me up now over and all the progress I was making, you might think I'd feel a huge sense of relief: The danger was past, I was out of the woods, except for the healing and recovery.

Instead whenever I wasn't doing physiotherapy, I was ambushed by all the other things I'd been able to silence until then or at least muffle in my psyche.

Now I had nothing but time to think about the bombing, Paul and James, and their families. Images of them repeatedly hit me, and each time my mind said no. I didn't see their bodies at the bomb scene. I hadn't seen their funerals. For me they remained frozen in time, doing a Memorial Day shoot.

And I saw every memory through the fisheye of narcotics, intensely magnified and leavened by the multiple nerve depressants that were meant to control my physical pain. From hour to hour my emotions roller-coastered, mostly crashing down.

Mornings were the worst, when physical and emotional pain would one-two me the moment I opened my eyes. They hammered me my third and fourth weeks at Bethesda Naval Hospital. I never slept much, and the nurses and doctors interrupted my sleep periodically from 4 a.m. to 7 a.m. or so as they did their morning rounds. After their rounds I'd try to catch another hour of sleep before breakfast arrived and I stirred. I'd realize that opening my eyes meant facing the day, so I'd try to shut them and will myself back into unconsciousness.

Finally I would be forced to rise, blinking, looking around at the IVs, the tubes, and the bandages. Reality would hit, and I'd start sobbing.

The nurses and corpsmen were unfazed by my tears. I was just one of many on that hallway who had lost someone. The women corpsmen, especially, told me it was tough sometimes to walk into a room of a strapping, tattooed 6-foot Marine who was bawling his eyes out because he just woke up from a nightmare about his buddies. “You never know what to say,” one told me. “When someone who looks that tough and that strong is sobbing like a baby, it breaks your heart.”

Or the corpsmen would find a soldier propped up in bed with tears rolling down his face because he'd opened his eyes in the morning and locked on the stump where an arm or a leg used to be. So the corpsmen would walk into my room with my morning meds, catch sight of my tear-streaked face, and ask, “Anything I can do?”

I'd usually mutely shake my head, and they'd nod, walk out, and leave me be.

When the hearing specialist stopped by to assess the damage to my shattered eardrums, she got as far as “I'm the hearing specialist, and I . . . ” Midsentence she saw my red-puffed face and stopped halfway to my bed. “And I won't be doing your hearing test today,” she said with a small, sad smile. She neatly turned and walked out.

. . .

“So my heart stopped twice?” I asked Pete.

“Who told you that?” he asked too quietly. I'm glad Schieffer had left the building by then. Kiwis aren't diplomats. They bluntly say what's on their mind, and Pete would have done just that.

That's when I realized my own family was keeping details from me. They'd been told I wasn't capable of handling it, and they believed it.

So I was on my own, holding the line against the medicate-it, make-it-go-away therapy when a team of visiting psychiatrists came to my room to offer me drug therapy. They wanted to discuss my options regarding which drugs might help and why. I was already on an old-fashioned upper, amitriptyline, but not for mood treatment. Dr. Burns had explained that I was receiving a small dose but not enough to have a mood-lifting effect. He said the drug had a secondary benefit: alleviating nerve or neurologic pain throughout the body that comes from the breaks, the burns, the grafts, etc. But I thought even the little I was getting was enough. I didn't want anything else added to the chemical soup in my system.