Reporter’s tenacity after Iraq blast helps her survive

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.

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