The Fire Part 2: Most Things Medical

If you have not read the first part of this tale I suggest that you do so, so you can know how I got to this point. Once again I warn you that this will be graphic.

I'd like to remind you that I am not writing this to elicit sympathy or pity from anyone. I don't need or want it. I also need to inform you that I am going to have to split up the medical stuff. The medical part is just too damn long for one post. I promise I'll write the next part as soon as I can.

Anyway, when we last saw our intrepid heroine... I was in the ER and a nurse asked me if she could do anything for me. I said, "Will you please knock me out!" I was having a bad day and desired a visit to the state of unconsciousness. Thank God, she did.

Well the nurse did an excellent job because I did not wake up until early afternoon (she knocked me out around 4AM). I don't even remember the helicopter ride to the hospital. I don't care if Elvis was piloting the thing. I was glad to be completely out of it. I woke up in a burn unit on a ventilator because of the lung full of smoke I got (it was my fault, see part one) and with both of my hands and wrists heavily bandaged.

I was told that my hands were badly burned and would need skin grafts. They also told me that I had broken my neck. It was a C-7 burst fracture. A burst fracture is when the bone shatters not just cracks. When this happens the spinal cord is usually damaged. I've seen the x-rays and I came within two millimeters of that happening.

I have been told by my Mom (who's a nurse) that 95% of the people who get this kind of fracture die. Of those that survive 95% of them end up paralyzed from the neck or shoulders down. I'm not quite sure if those statistics are correct but from the way the hospital staff acted and what they said to me it must be close.

I was told that my neck was their biggest concern and that even though I needed skin grafts I should be home in about two weeks. I was also told that my Mom was on her way. She lived two hours west of me in Tennessee and the hospital was two and a half hours east of where I lived in North Carolina so it took her a while to get there.

I passed out again after the short conversation with the doctor (he did most of the talking) and when I woke up again my Mom was at my bedside. The first thing I said was, "I didn't think you'd come." We weren't on the best of terms at the time. The second thing I said was, "Mama do you know how long I hung on up there and no one came and got me." It wasn't easy to talk around the ventilator tube shoved down my throat but somehow I managed. In the beginning I was convinced that I hung from the window for at least twenty minutes. When time slows down like that and it seems like time is much longer than it actually is, it's called time dilation.

The doctor and a nurse came in to ask me questions. I started shaking and nodding my head in answer to their questions and boy did they freak out. They told me not to move my head because I was only in a neck collar and I needed to be in a full back brace. I was ordered to use my feet to indicate yes or no. My Mom told me later that she never thought that someone could shout or sound exasperated by just conversing with their feet but that somehow I had managed to do just that. What can I say; I've got mad skills in that department.

The next few days are kind of hazy as I was on a continuous morphine drip with a button I could have someone push if I needed more. It's not like I could push the button myself. :-) I had my dressings changed twice a day and usually started crying about ten minutes before they came to do it. Though they gave me even more pain meds for the dressing changes it came nowhere close to killing the pain I felt when the air hit my raw hands. Some pain gets so bad that nothing helps. Even when my dressings were on I could still feel quite a bit of pain but I was so bombed I didn't care much. From what I was told serious burns are the most painful thing a person can experience and survive. The worst pain of all I'm told is the end stage of terminal cancer. I'll tell you one thing, experiencing that kind of pain did wonders for my pain tolerance. I was pretty much a wimp before all of this happened and now you'd have to drop a cinderblock on my foot to make me say ouch.

I need to tell you something about burns here. They speed up your metabolism big time because it takes a considerable amount of energy for your body to heal from serious burns. You lose a lot of weight and you are told to eat five meals a day to help compensate for this. Eating was fun because someone had to feed me and being fed by someone else as an adult is weird. It either feels like you're being teased or attacked with a fork. Besides, since my Mom fed me most of the time she was always trying to sneak in more vegetables on me.

They also brought me these lovely concoctions called burn shakes. Nasty! They consisted of ice cream, raw eggs, protein mix, extra sugar, and anything else they could think of to put in there and pack on the calories. I didn't like them much but they were slightly better than the hospital food if they were chocolate flavored. I apparently didn't do a good job of eating as much as I should because the nutritionist visited me almost every day to tell me that I needed to eat more. It got to the point that the interns were offering to bring me anything that I wanted to eat. Every person on the burn unit staff was so good to me and I'll never be able to thank them enough. I don't know how they can do the job that they do and not go crazy.

So I waited about a week until they did the skin graft because they have to do a lot of debridement before the graft surgery. Basically that meant that they used scrub brushes or surgery to get rid of the dead skin and tissue. Yes, I was under general anesthesia when they did that. Plenty happened before the graft surgery though.

The burns were bad. Here comes the gross part. I am one of those people who have to know the whole truth even if it is ugly. I prefer the ugly truth to a pretty lie any day of the week. So when they took my dressings off twice a day I had to look. I was burned down to both my big and middle knuckles on all of my fingers on both of my hands. They were the color of black coffee. I could see exposed tendons on the back of both of my hands. When I looked at the side of my left hand where my pinky is I could see the bone all the way down the side of my finger and hand. I should tell you that there was no damage to the palms of my hands. I was holding on to that windowsill too damn tight for that to happen.

I got off the ventilator on Christmas Eve day. Then I started coughing up huge amounts of black phlegm, this went on for days. There was a suction tube kind of like what they use at the dentist (but bigger) that was used to suck the phlegm out of my mouth. People started coming in and taking portable x-rays of my chest for a few days. I had no idea why at the time. Here is why they were doing that. One day I started to cough something up. It was solid and got stuck in my throat. I couldn't breathe. Luckily for me the nurses were there. They came at me with an oxygen mask and I indicated as best as I could that I did not need it and that I was choking on something. They turned me on my side, pounded me on my back, and I coughed up a mucus plug. A mucus plug is something that can form around the ventilator tube in your lungs and it is essentially a big, hard, slimy booger. The plug was about three inches long and about as wide as a bratwurst. (I told you that this was going to be gross.) The intern on duty was so proud of me and so impressed with the plug's size that he paraded it around the burn unit for all of the staff to see. Burn unit workers are great people but very strange people as well.

One day a physical therapist came by and said that they wanted to get me up and walking. So I got out of bed and stood up with her and a nurse's help. I was very weak. I then proceeded to walk around the burn unit. I thought at the time that everyone was making too much of a fuss over the fact that I was walking. I found out later that just because I could move my feet that didn't mean that I could walk. They had to make sure that the spinal cord wasn't damaged and getting me up and walking was the final test.

Nobody tells you this shit while it's going on. It wasn't until much later that I learned just how close to death's door I was that first week. I knew I was listed as being in critical condition, I just didn't know how critical I was. I also had no idea that they were so worried about the damage to my neck. I had someone tell me once that I must have made up my mind to fight and survive. I told him that this was not the case. All I knew was that I was alive and that I was going to do everything I could to get better because I wasn't going to let the bastard who did this to me win. (What?) I had no idea how close I was to death or being paralyzed. I wasn't motivated by bravery. I was pissed off and motivated by anger.

After I was on the burn unit for a couple of days I was told that the fire was caused by arson. This did not surprise me because somewhere in the back of my mind I knew that stairwells usually don't just catch on fire and that the fire spread way to fast for it not to have had some help. They hadn't caught the person/people responsible for it yet and I will cover that in part four. I will let you know that I was not the main target.

So we finally get to the skin graft. They took skin from my thighs and put it on my hands. It was a lengthy operation and lasted about fourteen hours. The graft sites hurt almost as badly as the burns did. And dear God in heaven it ITCHED! They put my legs under a sun lamp every day for a few days to help the graft sites heal faster.

So, the skin grafts were done and everything was peachy. And then it very much wasn't. Over the next week I watched my skin grafts fail and saw the tops of my hands rot away. Every day it got worse. The back of my hands turned a grayish color and the skin started to slide off.

This time I was completely aware of how serious things were. The doctors could not hide the worried looks on their faces every time they took my dressings off. One more thing you should know about burns, they take a while to declare themselves. In other words, the true extent of the damage sometimes isn't apparent for several days. I was very close to losing my hands. By the way, the leading cause of death from burns is infection. Your skin is the largest organ the body has and protects you from all sorts of threats.

At this point a single doctor took over my case. I will call him Dr. M. He is a plastic reconstructive surgeon who specializes in hand reconstruction. He had an idea that saved my hands. It also saved the life of the girl I told you about in part one. She was in dire straights too. If someone is burned over sixty percent of their body they only have a forty percent chance of survival. Take whatever percentage of someone's body that has been burned, subtract it from a hundred percent and the remainder is their chance of survival (it is different with kids and the elderly though).

Dr. M took a special dressing that was usually used on patients with severe skin ulcers and tried it on us. It had never been used on burn patients before. The dressing is a suction dressing that literally sucks off the dead cells and stimulates blood flow. It worked on both of us! Thanks to Dr. M the dressing got FDA approval for use on burn patients.

So after that when I looked at my hands they were raw, but red and bloody, just what we were hoping for. The question was what to do next. First Dr. M put surgical pins straight down the middle of the bones in my fingers to straighten them out. Bad burns cause muscle contractures and my hands had turned into claws. It was really weird to see the ends of the pins sticking out from my fingertips. The ends had little balls on them. Now that my fingers were straight enough to be able to be covered by tissue again I found out how Dr. M intended to cover them.

He informed me that he was going to perform a bi-lateral groin flap. ??? A bi-lateral groin flap is when they take the skin and tissue on your hips (not your crotch thank God) cut pockets in them and then sew the hands into the hips in order for the tissue to grow onto the hand. I wasn't very thrilled with the idea but it's not like there were any other options. My burns were too deep to support another skin graft. So I had another long surgery (twelve hours) and then spent the next three and a half weeks with my hands sewn into my hips.

This is where I will leave you for now. Sorry to leave you hanging like this but as I said before all of the medical stuff would just take too long for me to put into one blog. Here's a hint as to why, I've had over thirty surgeries.