Breathing the Fire by Kimberly Dozier

Author:Kimberly Dozier
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Fox Chapel
Published: 2011-07-04T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 10

body battles

The emotional pain that continued to haunt me was not the only thing attacking my blast- and surgery-weakened body, but I wouldn’t find that out until the lab results came back a few days after my June 12 “closing” surgery.

At first we thought everything had gone well with my surgery and that my only job ahead was to heal. I would start physiotherapy as soon as the grafts were more firmly established. My legs were covered with strange gray sponge bandages that were attached to tubes and a vacuum pump. The bandages gently suctioned away clear fluid that my healing grafts were producing. I assume it was lymph fluid and sometimes blood. Whatever that stuff coming out of my body was, just looking at the bandages and their various suctioning appendages made my stomach turn.

The suction pressure of the bandages hurt, but according to my plastic surgeon, it was nothing like it used to be. “We used to have to change the dressings on grafts a couple times a day,” Dr. Kumar enthused. “You used to be able to hear us coming down the hall by the screams of the patients we treated. That’s no more since these babies came along.” The bandages cost tens of thousands of dollars apiece to rent, since much of the device is reusable. The company that makes the bandages doesn’t sell them or, at least, didn’t at that time. I had at least four on me, and considering Dr. Kumar’s description of the earlier process, these were worth every penny. But they were still stomach-turning.

“That isn’t me,” I shuddered. In between prayers and trying to meditate, I tried to concentrate on something Pete’s dad shared from the Buddhist tradition. “Tell her she’s not her body,” he said.

I tried to fixate on that, but with every ache or stab of pain, my body brought me back to the physical realm with a screaming vengeance.

Meanwhile, my family was in the next room receiving bad news. The lab results taken during the big closing operation had come back positive for Acinetobacter baumannii. We knew the bug was on the surface of my skin, hence the isolation procedures doctors had already put in place, but this meant the bug was populating inside my body. The doctors had tested my wounds, especially near the titanium rods in my legs, and found that the bacteria had dug in deeply.

So I joined the roughly 10 percent of U.S. troops who came back infected with what we called Iraqi-bacter, although the bacteria exist worldwide. (The current literature says it has a 10 percent prevalence, but almost every military patient I’ve met so far mentions having to fight it too.)

There’s debate over where the infection comes from. Initially doctors thought it came from the Iraqi soil and was blown into troops’ wounds by blasts. But recent research at the Army’s National Trauma Institute in San Antonio indicates the bug became virulent by being exposed to antibiotics in combat hospitals and spread from there to patients.

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