Tempered with Fire: A Life Story

By Barbara Knox

My memoir, Tempered By Fire, begins with an accident. I was seriously burned; it changed my life, but ultimately for the better. I then proceed chronologically: childhood in a small town on the plains, college, marriage, children, Ph.D. at 50, career, divorce, love relationships, eventual reconciliation with my husband. I retire to a farm and work to restore it to native forest.
Comments from readers: The author, comes across as likable, trustworthy, funny and charming; also self-deprecating and honest, quite deep.
The arc of her life is remarkable, with surprises around every corner, a great story.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Sep 7, 2011
• ISBN: 9781465348104

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Copyright © 2011 by Barbara Knox.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

My memoir is about actual people. In some cases I’ve given them different names and changed the situations in order to protect their privacy. In others I’ve forgotten their names and so have given them new ones. I have tried to be honest and truthful, but what I have written is based on my own memories and opinions. It may not always be an accurate representation of those in my story or of what they thought, said and did.

This book was printed in the United States of America.

cover artwork by Lorraine Arden

102492

For my parents, Chalmer and Ruth Snyder,

who gave me this life I have lived and written about

CONTENTS

Introduction

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Acknowledgments

Appendix I

Appendix II

Appendix III

INTRODUCTION

Sitting here in my comfortable old blue canvas lawn chair on the small patio at the back of my apartment, I pick up the binoculars in my lap and watch a nuthatch walking headfirst down the tree trunk of one of the two nearest old lawn trees, a black gum and a maple. Then I focus them on a groundhog coming out of his hole down by the black gum. My former husband Gaylord gave me these fine binoculars after we found our way back to each other. My patio is shaded by the deck of the apartment above and looks out over a lovely view: a wide lawn that slopes down to a meadow. Beyond and below the meadow is a mature forest with hiking trails and a stream flowing along the near edge, the Northwest Branch of the Anacostia River. This is the view from inside, too, through the sliding glass doors and large array of windows on the back wall, and a picture window on the side wall of my large living-dining room. The sun and the full moon rise over these woods. It’s this view that sold me on my apartment here at Friends House, a Quaker retirement community in Sandy Spring, Maryland, a northern suburb of Washington, D.C.

I remember many other places where I’ve watched birds and walked in woods, many miles of them hiking on the Appalachian Trail with Gaylord. Gaylord was named after his father but always called Gay until the word took on its current connotation. As a little boy he was even called Gay-Gay. I always knew him as Gay. He was the father, grandfather and great-grandfather of our descendants.

It’s late August, 2011, a beautiful warm day, and I’m about to turn 87. Birthdays invite memories. In daylight my memories are usually friendly, or if not, I can easily stuff them back into where I hide them. When I forget my keys and lock myself out of my apartment and think, how stupid, daytime memory reminds me of my Phi Beta Kappa key or my PhD. If I forget the name of a bird or a flower or of someone I know well, day memory rummages through my brain, usually finds it, and drags it back into my consciousness.

When I’m discouraged or depressed, memory prompts me to take a walk in the woods or call one of my two daughters or a good friend. When one of my adult children gets into the kind of trouble that tempts me to me blame myself for being a bad parent, like getting themselves deep into debt, making a bad marriage, or letting their kids run wild, day memory assures me that my children have forgiven me my mistakes and are old enough now to be responsible for their own.

When it seems to me that no one ever really loved me, day memory reminds me that although he seldom showed it in ways I could believe, my former husband did love me, and also a man named Toni, another, Rob, and a woman, too, Drew, and yes to what you may be wondering. I know my children, Laura, Margaret and Bob love me. Day memory reminds me that my little dog Brigit often checked each room until she found me, then settled herself down to continue her nap where she was near me.

If I’m ambitious about a new project but uncertain, day memory reminds me of how well I did in my unlikely run for Pennsylvania State Treasurer or when I gave the annual poetry reading at Juniata College, or of all the miles I hiked on the Appalachian Trail. And how I’ve matured, how much I’ve accomplished after a fiery car crash that could have ended my life. But in times past when I woke at night and couldn’t sleep for thinking about some problem or embarrassing blunder, instead of lulling me back to sleep with happy memories, my nighttime memory used to turn vicious and haul out all the awful, shameful things I’ve done in my whole life. It brought up the times I lost control and spanked my kids, hard, when they were little, or the way I obsessively made them straighten up their rooms or clean their plates. And those messy love affairs! It kept adding details until I not only felt shamed by my own failings, but responsible not only for my grown children’s failings but for my grandchildren dropping out of school, drinking too much or not sticking with a job; even for my great-grandchildren’s temper-tantrums!

I started thinking everyone might be better off if I were dead. Night memory said, Well, at least their inheritances wouldn’t be spent on your long-term care and would solve some of their problems. When I did finally fall asleep, I dreamed of getting the kind of love I yearned for only to lose it. Or commonplace nightmares like being lost, finding my purse or car missing, or going unprepared and naked for an exam in a room I couldn’t find.

#

When grief comes to me, now I can feel held in the arms of this loving, caring, retirement community. Like-minded new friends have helped me accept and make peace with the conclusions I’ve reached in my life-long spiritual quest. I’ve found new ways to fulfill my yearning for love and acceptance in new closeness to my daughters and with new friends here. Recognition has come as well, especially from my poetry and other writings. It’s a long journey that has brought me to this peaceful place where morning sun often floods my rooms with brilliant sunlight.

CHAPTER 1

It’s Friday, the thirteenth of May, the morning newscaster announces. Friday-the-thirteenth! I shrug and smile, feeling superior to superstitious people. I remember from my graduate studies a Skinner-box pigeon dipping its wing before pecking the circle that released a seed down the food shoot, and I’m amused. So easy to explain superstitious behavior with learning theory! I pull on my white slacks and select my favorite blouse, a white, pink, and gold geometric print. It’s going to be a warm day for mid-May in Baltimore, but not yet too warm for long sleeves and a soft, white scarf at my throat. It’s spring in 1977 and I’m 52 years old.

Gay left for work earlier, reminding me as he left, Be there on time for the Radiological Society formal dinner in Annapolis tonight.

I will. I have a new dress. A sudden charge of excitement surges through me. I wonder if the laboratory cat felt this way when Rob, the lab teaching assistant, turned on the current to the electrode I had implanted in its brain. That experiment for my class in physiological psychology seems far removed and irrelevant today. Here I am, barely three years post-PhD, and I’m being appointed to be in charge of the largest Unit at Spring Grove State Mental Hospital, a Unit with 1460 beds, some 300 employees and a million dollar budget, the Baltimore City Unit! I’m the first woman and first psychologist in the state to be given such a responsibility. I can scarcely believe it. Only ten years ago I was only a housewife, a doctor’s wife, mother of three teenagers, secretary and servant to all of them, and caretaker for our big house and garden, feeling like a prop in the suburban scene. Only four years ago I started in the Baltimore County Unit of Spring Grove as a psychology intern, never imagining that I’d ever be the boss of any Unit, let alone the largest one.

I’m feeling incredibly lucky. I imagine my husband Gaylord telling his colleagues proudly about my promotion at the dinner this evening. Monday I’ll move into the big office and have my own secretary in the anteroom. My boss, Dr. John Hamilton, superintendent of the whole hospital, told me I must go to the farewell party this afternoon for the psychiatrist I’m replacing, so I want to look my best. I slip my feet into my pink, low-heeled pumps, then check myself in the full-length mirror. A high school boyfriend used to tease me, singing five foot two, eyes of blue, and my brother Don told me as a teen that I had a good figure. I think I haven’t changed that much. The gold print accents my blonde hair, already frosted with silver. Satisfied with how I look, I pick up my purse and empty coffee cup and head downstairs just as Diane pulls into the driveway in her brand-new blue Datsun 210, a handsome, sporty little car. As she watches me circle it, she pushes back her wavy, brown-gold hair, then, putting her hands on the steering wheel as I get in she asks, You like it? I really got a good deal on it. She’s wearing a pleased smile.

I do! It’s really great. I think again how pretty and practical she is. Diane is a social worker assigned to the Baltimore City Unit at Spring Grove. We’ve been carpooling for four years; we began our jobs there on the same day. She’s become my best friend, even though she’s nearer my daughter Margaret’s age, only 26. She’s married, but has no children.

Margaret lives nearby in a Washington, D.C. suburb with her husband Sam, two-year-old daughter Mariam and seven-month-old son Greg. She’s working as a technical editor for the Department of Agriculture while her Armenian husband is trying to learn English and studying for his dental license, which he has been doing since he got to the US two years ago. Margaret and I have a good relationship, often confiding in each other.

But I think of Diane as an equal, not a daughter. She’ll be one of my subordinates, but that hasn’t affected our friendship. She’s become my confidante and loyal admirer. Although sometimes quiet and reserved, she is a passionate feminist. It’s from her that I first heard the saying, A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle. During our hours of driving together she listens to me with genuine interest, then shares the gossip from the staff on the wards.

As we leave the hospital that afternoon—later than usual because of the farewell party— I say, I wish we could’ve skipped the party. I’m sorry you had to stay late too.

Diane says, I really didn’t mind.

I felt uncomfortable there because I’m so glad he’s going. People don’t know yet that I’ll be replacing him, so I had to be careful what I said. I wonder if he knows I’m getting his job.

Diane replies, I can’t wait for Monday when everyone finds out. They’ll be really glad. I don’t like Dr. Ibanez and I don’t think anyone else does. He’s been there ten years, and that’s already way too long!

We’re chatting excitedly, driving in heavy, rush hour traffic on the south Baltimore Beltway near the Linthicum exit. It’s a beautiful, warm, late afternoon. I look at my watch. I wonder why there’s so damn much traffic, I say. I’ll be late for the dinner!

It’s great beach weather. They’re probably all headed for Ocean City. See how nice my new car handles, as she brings it quickly to a stop where the traffic has piled up in front of us.

Oh, shoot, I say. It’s already 5:30. I need to be— There’s a sudden jolt. We’ve been rammed from behind, then a second jolt as we’re slammed into the car in front of us. How God-awful! Her new car! Oh, hell! This will make me even later for the dinner!

Oh, my god! Flames are leaping up all around the car! They’re darting into Diane’s open window. She screams. I say, We’ve gotta get out! but she doesn’t move. As I put my hand on the door handle on my side, I see a station wagon lodged firmly against my door. My emotions shut down. Diane, get out! She forgets her seat belt. I unfasten it for her, and give her a little shove, then move to climb across the driver’s seat after her, but forget my own seat belt. The buckles are already hot.

The station wagon has ripped off the gas tank underneath a van right behind us, maybe just filled up for a trip to the shore. The ruptured tank has skittered up the beltway spewing fire and come to rest just behind the driver’s side of our car. The flames are almost transparent, shimmering, white hot, with fluttering orange tips. My heart is pounding. I force myself to follow Diane and dash through the flames toward the median strip. Clear of the fire, I see no oncoming traffic, so I roll on the cement in case my clothes are on fire. Diane reaches the median strip, looks back, and starts back for me. I get up and make it to the median.

A crowd gathers. People who’ve stopped to help tell us to lie down in the grass, that the paramedics are on the way. Lying there I ask, Diane, why did you start back toward the fire?

I couldn’t see you through the flames. I was terrified! I thought you were still in the car! Then I saw you on the ground! I thought you’d fallen! So I started back. A man interrupts, offering to pour cold water on me, but I say no, afraid it might be dirty. As I lie in the stubble I see the skin on my left hand shrivel, leaving my palm raw and bleeding. I watch my nylon stockings curl up and disintegrate on my ankles below the hems of my slacks. I feel my hair and clothes. Not burned. I’m relieved that I’m not on fire, but I don’t know about flash burns and the intense heat of a gasoline inferno. A young man with a bloody nose bends over me, apologizing. Paramedics cover us with blankets. I ask if my eyelashes are singed, immediately regretting such a vain question, but people have admired my long, dark, curly eyelashes since I was a toddler with white-blond hair. He says, No, still there, ma’am. You’re burned no worse than a bad sunburn. I’m not in much pain, just hot, so I believe him. Someone takes off my favorite pink shoes. I never see them again (but for the rest of my life I see where they were by the scars on my feet). Someone asks, Is anyone left in the car? then writes down our names, ages and addresses, a medic or maybe a policeman, perhaps a reporter who happened to be in the traffic. I’ll never know.

We hear explosions from the four burning vehicles, probably tires, and then the pulsing roar of the medivac helicopter. They put me on a stretcher and load it onto a rack inside the chopper, then put Diane on another stretcher and place hers on a rack above mine. As we ascend and level out I see blisters forming on her bare arms. She has on a dark rose, short-sleeved sweater. I have on that blouse with long sleeves. I hope it’s protected my arms a little more. At least I don’t feel any burning sensations there. My back smarts and stings against the stretcher. I wonder where they’re taking us, but it’s too noisy to ask. I want to go to Baltimore City Hospitals where my physician husband is on the staff. The helicopter airlift means something serious has happened to us. I feel both scared and numb inside. I want my doctor husband!

We land with a bump. There are windows but I can’t see out. Only once we’re inside am I told that we’re where I assumed we’d be taken, the University of Maryland Hospital in Baltimore’s Shock Trauma Unit. They take us to separate rooms.

The doctors and other staff in their blue-green scrub suits begin to work over me, cutting off my clothes and my rings. My hands are swelling, they say. I worry about getting my rings back, and hate them cutting up my favorite clothes. But mostly I just want Gay there. They start an IV, then bandage my hands and feet. I don’t understand why they’re X-raying me, putting a tube in my nose with oxygen, and a catheter in my urethra. From previous experiences in hospitals I know they tend to do invasive things. When I ask why they are doing them this time, one of the men in an aqua outfit tells me again it’s just like a bad sunburn. Whatever they put in the IV must work very quickly, because I’m not feeling much pain, and again I believe the man. Then one of the doctors tells me, We’re only sending you to a burn unit for the burns on your hands. My emotions seem to be numbed along with the pain. I don’t question or protest. I have a long history of trusting the medical profession: my mother was a nurse, my husband a doctor.

During all this I keep begging the doctors, Call Dr. Gaylord Knox in Annapolis. I imagine him having another martini, perhaps fidgeting and grumbling that I’m so late. I keep fading in and out of consciousness, seemingly for hours.

By the time he finally gets there I’m so medicated that later I barely remember seeing him. Maybe he looks worried as he talks with the medical staff, but I can’t remember what he says to me, except, I saw Diane. They’ll take her by helicopter to the Washington Burn Center. They’re sending you by ambulance to the City Hospitals Burn Unit. I’ll follow the ambulance and meet you there. I’m relieved, but very drowsy, aware of darkness, lights in the Baltimore Harbor Tunnel, being at City Hospitals, where Gay is head of Radiology. It must already be eleven o’clock!

The Burn Unit team is waiting for me. They take off the fresh dressings, then re-bandage me. They say they have to evaluate the burns for themselves. Again Gay talks to the doctors. They tell him that burns cover 22% of my body. Then an orderly wheels my gurney to a bed in an isolation room where, the attendant says, Your burns are less likely to get infected in here. I can’t remember Gay leaving or saying goodbye.

During the night I dream my left foot is caught in the log cradle in my family room fireplace and is slowly burning with the logs. I can’t get it out. It hurts like hell! I wake up and try to squeeze the call button with my bandaged hand, but I can’t press hard enough. So I call out, over and over, Nurse! Nurse!

Finally a nurse comes. I say, I need something for the pain. It’s awful!

When she finally comes back with the medication she comments cheerfully, Isn’t it lucky your weren’t killed? Lucky? It’s the worst thing that ever happened to me! But I’m not thinking fast enough to say anything back to her. I just want the pain to stop.

There’s a glass partition between my room and the next one. Before the medication puts me out again, I see an orderly bring in a little boy who has been burned. The boy’s mother kneels and prays by his bed.

The next morning Gay comes to my hospital room in his white doctor coat. Standing by my bed he tells me, As I was driving from Annapolis last night I heard on my car radio that there was a huge column of smoke and a five mile backup on the beltway from your accident. Oh? I couldn’t see anything from the helicopter. Lucky you were coming from the other direction. It’s the first chance I have to talk to him alone, so I tell him how I begged them to call him, how much I wanted him there with me. I thought as soon as you came everything would be all right. The problems we’ve been having don’t matter now. I do love you. Really I do!

He looks down at me with his warm brown eyes, his short brown curls falling over his forehead; he is very quiet. Finally he looks away and says softly, You don’t love me. You just need me. That hurts. It hurts at least partly because I recognize a core of truth in what he says. I do need him, a lot, and always have. I hold back tears until he’s gone.

When I wake up the second morning after the accident I can’t see. I start to panic. The nurse tells me, Your eyes are swollen shut. The swelling should go down in a few days.

I ask her, How long will I be in the hospital?

She says, Probably a few weeks.

I’m stunned. I tell her, I’ve never been in a hospital longer than nine days.

Later that day my daughter Margaret comes to see me, very concerned. Although I can’t see her, I can picture her: a pretty 27-year-old with light brown hair with just a bit of curl. Her eyes are blue like mine. She’s an inch or two taller than I am, but her face is round like mine. She’s come here from Hyattsville, the Washington suburb where she lives with Sam and their two children.

I’m a small, slender woman. Margaret says, Mom, your face is so swollen that your head looks like you weigh 300 pounds. Just then Gay’s therapist, who was our marriage counselor earlier that spring, comes to see me. Margaret tells me after the woman goes, She burst into tears as soon as she saw you. Later that day when I tell Gay how Margaret said I looked, he says, You look like a raccoon in reverse, all white around the eyes, (which, mercifully, were protected by my large, thick-lensed glasses), but dark red everywhere else.

I was still blind when I went to my first tanking the next morning. A nurse gave me morphine, then an orderly moved me to a stretcher covered with a sheet of cold plastic that stuck to the more superficial, undressed burns on my back. They chained the stretcher to a lift with a motor and maneuvered it over a tank, then lowered me jerkily into the tank of warm water. The water stung, setting the burns on fire. As I lay there in the water naked, several attendants cut off the dressings and debrided the burns. I couldn’t see who, but hands scrubbed the burns with rough cloths, then took scissors and tweezers and cut and picked away charred flesh from my hands, feet, face, shoulders and back; torture. I heard a child in another tank nearby screaming, It hurts, it hurts, it HURTS! I thought it must be the little boy I saw that night brought into the room next to mine. I felt like screaming, too, but I didn’t as far as I’m aware.

I don’t know how long these sessions lasted. Maybe half an hour, but they seemed to go on forever. Finally, they raised me out and I lay on the cold, wet plastic, teeth chattering, my body trembling with cold and pain while a nurse and an aid dressed my wounds again. After a few days the swelling did go down, and I could see again, but they wouldn’t let me have a mirror or my glasses.

Gay’s professional colleagues at the hospital dropped by to see me, even hospital board members like Edwin Jackson, a handsome, light-skinned black man, an engineer. A chronic alcoholic patient I had worked with as his therapist at Spring Grove came. That seemed an odd role reversal. Colleagues came from Spring Grove including Dr. Hamilton, who came once a week.

I was so tired and sick during that first week or ten days that I often couldn’t stay awake to talk to my visitors. I lost all sense of time. I imagined that crowds of people were outside the door of my room, clamoring to see me, but not allowed in. I also believed I was being given Thorazine, an anti-psychotic medication. I don’t know if I was or not. Am I psychotic, I worried?

Earlier I had worked as a masters level psychology intern in the hospital’s psychiatry department and had stayed on for part-time paid work during my doctoral internship at Spring Grove, so staff from the psych. unit came to see me, too. Were they being sent to check on my psychological status? Perhaps.

I was kept in sterile isolation the first ten days to prevent infection. Everyone who came in wore a mask and gown. No one could touch me. Because of the burns on my feet I couldn’t stand or sit with my feet hanging down. Because of my burned, bandaged hands I couldn’t feed myself or hold a book or tune the TV. It was bedpans and being fed and covered and uncovered by someone else. I felt like a baby, but I couldn’t be held, rocked or comforted.

Because I couldn’t have fresh flowers friends brought candy, cheeses and fruit. I had no appetite, but one tall, stout, black nurse threatened force-feeding if I didn’t eat. But she was also friendly and pleasant and took time to explain to me why it was so important for me to eat and how I was losing nutrients from my open wounds. She spoke colloquial Southern English, unlike the foreign nurse who came one morning when I actually was hungry, to ask what I wanted to eat, but didn’t know the word oatmeal. I didn’t complain. I had accepted my roll as a patient and didn’t feel like Dr. Knox, psychologist, a person with some authority anymore.

Gay came by a couple times a day but didn’t say much or stay long. He’d ask how I was feeling, but told me nothing from his perspective as a doctor. I don’t remember him ever commenting on my condition nor how he felt about it or me. He never was a talker about feelings. He could lecture eloquently about all sorts of other things. Living with him, we didn’t need an encyclopedia. He knew a lot about almost everything. He was an omnivorous reader with a phenomenal memory for facts. He had a book called One Thousand Facts Not Worth Knowing, facts like how many calories in a glass of whale’s milk. I would tease him that it was his favorite book. He would tell me when Laura, our oldest child, had called from California and sometimes about others who had asked about me, or sent forbidden flowers. He photographed some of the flower arrangements and had the pictures framed and brought them to show me. This was how he showed me he cared, but his caring wasn’t the warm, sympathetic words that I craved.

Margaret worked full-time and was the sole support of her little family. She had been a Russian major at Oberlin, interested in languages, so had been working as an editor on soil surveys for the Department of Agriculture. She’d just started a new job with them, which she decided to risk by taking every Friday off while I was in the hospital to spend the day with me, washing my hair and taking care of me, including bedpans and fussing at the nurses, demanding that they take better care of me. She takes the commandment honor thy father and mother very seriously. I was deeply touched by her commitment. She was always the good middle child who minded her parents, read Charlotte’s Web and Dr. Seuss books to her little brother, Bob, six years younger, studied hard, made good grades and actually enjoyed practicing piano and violin.

#

As I began to heal I looked forward eagerly to Dr. Hamilton’s weekly visit. He was a very dark-skinned black man with a commanding presence, towering over my bed, smiling down at me, telling me I was missed, reassuring me that my new job was waiting for me. He told me he had asked Lillian, the Unit administrator, to cover for me. After you’re well enough to go to the phone in the hall, he suggested, you can call her. There was no phone in my room.

The tanking hell went on every day; it went on until the grafting started, about ten days after the accident. The doctors explained the grafting procedure. The first grafts would be temporary grafts of pigskin. Later they would remove the pigskin and graft what hadn’t healed using skin from elsewhere on my body.

The head of the Burn Unit called in Dr. Su from Johns Hopkins to treat me, a plastic surgeon who specialized in hand surgery. I later heard from a friend and former favorite teacher, Althea Wagman, that Dr. Su had done some reconstructive surgery on her shoulder and that he is the plastic surgeon who did breast implants for Blaze Star, a well-known Baltimore strip artist.

I liked Dr. Su. He was pleasant and fun, obviously of Asian heritage, with black, rather unruly hair. As he sat by my bed I told him about the nurse saying to me, aren’t you lucky to be alive. I went on to say that if she’d said, this must be the worst thing that ever happened to you, I might have answered, I guess I’m lucky to be alive. We then talked a bit about the psychology of treating burn patients. He said, After you’ve recovered why don’t we do a paper together for the cosmetology journal? I was flattered.

On one of Dr. Su’s visits to my bedside, with a twinkle in his eye, he said, You know you’ve had the equivalent of a chemical face lift. You’ll be more beautiful than you were before.

But you never saw me before, I said. I was never truly beautiful, and I actually did hope I might look better.

Once the temporary pigskin grafting began, the surgery team did the debriding and dressing changes while I was under anesthesia. That meant an end to tankings, thank God. But tankings were hardly worse than evening dressing changes. Without the soaking first, evening was more like being skinned alive. I couldn’t keep myself from screaming. A nurse told me that a visitor who had been waiting to see me heard my screams and vomited.

All three of my children were wonderfully loving through my whole ordeal. Laura, the oldest at 29, lived in Oakland, California and was just finally finishing college after many detours. She called often and sent me a pair of small pictures of birds exquisitely fashioned from feathers, beautiful!

Bob, my youngest, age 20, drove home to see me from Boy Scout Camp, where he was a summer counselor teaching ecology. He stood by my bed, dark blond curls escaping from his long ponytail. He didn’t say it in words, but I his face reflected his sorrow at my pain. I remembered one of his high school teachers telling me that Bob was so kind that he wouldn’t raise his hand to give an answer to a question that he knew quite well if he thought it would embarrass a classmate. Like his father, he wasn’t good at putting his feelings into words, but he said, "I’ll come back to see you as often as I can get away from my job at camp, and leaned over and kissed my cheek.

#

Margaret was displeased with the nursing care, but I knew from almost daily visits from the director of the burn unit, that when my accident happened the burn unit wasn’t accepting new admissions because there weren’t enough nurses to cover any more beds. They had to accept me because my husband was on staff, and opened a bed for me. The reason for the director’s frequent visits was to ask me about the care I was getting and for my comments and reactions to his burn unit. I was less seriously burned than most of the other patients and a lot more verbal. Gay told me that after I went home some major changes were made in the unit, partly on the basis of my critique. I don’t remember what they were or if I even knew.

I was moved from isolation to a private room after about 10 days. Despite precautions I then got cellulitis, a bacterial skin infection that can affect surface skin and underlying tissues, even spreading to lymph nodes and bloodstream. It can become life threatening. I ran a high fever and had more pain. With antibiotics and a blood transfusion the infection finally cleared enough so those temporary grafts could begin, about two weeks into my hospitalization.

I went to surgery at least four times in the following ten days or so, for the surgical debriding and pigskin grafts on my feet, hands, forehead, left cheek and nose, and the permanent grafts. The temporary grafts were more like dressings. As my burned skin began to heal they were removed under anesthesia. I then needed to have permanent grafts on areas where burns were so deep that the burned area wouldn’t continue to heal without being covered with skin transplanted from some other part of my body. Dr. Su suggested using skin from my left buttock for the grafts.