Short of being dead.

I know from my mother, who arrived with my dad just after they wheeled me off to surgery (and found Chip in the waiting room looking “devastated—absolutely devastated”) that the surgery took about two hours and they screwed rods to either side of my lumbar vertebrae to stabilize my spine.

I was stable enough the next day to go back in for a second surgery to skin-graft the burns. I heard all about this later from my mom as well. Ever the overachieving student, she took copious notes in her tidy cursive, and used them not only to tell me the story of my life but to teach me many new vocabulary words, as well.

She explained that I was lucky, in a way, that the burns were so bad. Third-degree burns don’t hurt because all the nerves have burned away. She explained that the spinal surgeon met the plastic surgeon in the OR to arrange me on the table so they could get at the burns on my neck without more damage to my spine. She explained, too, how he shaved off the black, crispy, burned skin with a “weck blade” (I imagined it like a carrot peeler), and then harvested skin from two donor sites just under my collarbones (the “superclavicular” area) for “full-thickness skin grafts” on my neck. They sewed the new skin down with “Prolene sutures” in crisscrosses, like quilting.

I was in recovery for both surgeries in the ICU for seven days, and the entire time, I had a dressing over my neck attached to a suction tube sucking the moisture from the skin grafts as they waited to see if they would take. My mom took a picture with her iPhone before deciding it was in bad taste. She let me see it many weeks later before erasing it entirely. I looked like I was being attacked by a giant albino lamprey.

Apparently, the first person I asked for after both surgeries was Chip. He came in after the first (though I have no memory of it), but after the second, he’d gone home to sleep, and they sent my mom in instead.

Other things I know but don’t remember: I had an “indwelling Foley catheter” draining into a bag, and my bowels apparently had to be “manually evacuated” by some hospital tech with a very unfortunate job. What was left of my hair kept getting caught in my dressing, and so someone had trimmed it, unceremoniously and without asking—possibly while I was asleep. I took more drugs in one week than I’d taken in my whole life put together—massive doses of acetaminophen, Valium, Cipro, nizatidine, OxyContin, Clonis, Maalox, and a blissful little substance that makes you forget everything called Versed. Visitors were only allowed in for ten minutes at a time. Mostly, I was alone, surrounded by machines—and herds of strangers.

One of the painkillers made me throw up a lot. That I do remember.

I also remember flashes of faces. My mother, leaning down, her face puffy from crying. My father, pursing his lips to be tough and holding out a little thumbs-up gesture at me over and over, like he was giving a toast. Chip, still as a statue, right by the bed but seeming miles away. The weirdest memory I have is of various physical therapists in navy-blue scrubs coming by at all hours to move my legs and feet around for me—bending them, stretching them, turning them. I could see what they were doing, but I couldn’t feel it.

It was just like a long, strange dream. With vomiting.

Four

IT WASN’T UNTIL I moved out of the ICU that I started to wake up. And it wasn’t until I started waking up that I began to realize how bad things really were.

On the day they moved me out of the ICU, it took all morning to get me into the wheelchair, for example. A nurse called Nina arrived to crank the bed up in slow increments to get me sitting. I’d been lying down for so long, my blood pressure was at risk for crashing, which could cause me to faint or even have a heart attack. You lose muscle mass amazingly fast when you are immobilized and unconscious, and I had lost twenty pounds in one week. I was like a tiny, frail old lady.

I remember worrying about how shocked Chip would be to see me—and feeling kind of glad he wasn’t there. Like if I had a few days, that might be enough time to pull myself together.

But that didn’t stop me from asking where he was. “Where’s Chip?” I asked my mother at least three times before she answered.

“He’s not feeling well today, honey,” she said.

“Not feeling well?” I asked.

“A touch of the Irish flu,” my dad said.

“Cliff!” My mother slapped him on the shoulder.

Nina could easily have lifted me and placed me in the chair, but that’s not how they roll at inpatient rehab. It’s all about getting you to do things—impossible things—by yourself and before you’re ready. So there I was, not even out of the ICU, enduring a three-hour teachable moment, one slow inch at a time.

“Can’t you just lift me?” I asked.

“I can help you lift yourself,” she said, making her “no” sound a little bit like a “yes.”

My parents were nearby, standing shoulder to shoulder, tilting in toward me in sympathy. Cliff and Linda. I’d seen them shoulder to shoulder many times, but never perched so anxiously. They were itching to step in and give me a hand, but Nina body-blocked them. She had a board, and I had to edge my way onto it in my gown—still catheterized, by the way. With all the tubes and bandages and light-headedness, it was a miracle I even sat up at all.

And my legs? I still couldn’t feel them—or move them. They were like mutant Japanese udon noodles hanging dead from my knees. Nina edged them over the side of the bed. I watched them dangle.

“How long till the feeling in my legs comes back?” I asked.

“That’s a question for the doctor,” Nina said.

By the time I was in the chair, and Nina had pulled the little foot flaps down and propped my feet up on them, I was as out of breath as if I’d sprinted a mile.

“Attagirl!” my dad shouted, when I made it—the same shout he’d always used when I crossed the line first at track meets.

I didn’t look over.

Nina took my chair handles and wheeled me out, trailing after. We traveled miles through the labyrinth of hallways of the building to find my new room two wings over. It was a double room, but both beds were empty, which meant I got to pick—except my mother really wound up picking, which is kind of her signature move. She asks you what you want to do, waits for your answer, tells you why that won’t work, and then makes you do what she wanted all along.

I picked the bed nearest the bathroom, but then my mother said she’d read an article in Reader’s Digest that looking at nature was “very healing” and didn’t I think it might be good to stay near the window?

As usual: I chose one and wound up in the other.

At my new bed, we did the whole wheelchair rigmarole in reverse to get me in. It took an hour, and I was panting and nauseated by the end. My parents stood at the foot of the bed the whole time like statues, watching.

“Where’s Chip, again?” I asked.

“Sleeping off his hangover,” my father said. This time, my mother let it be.

I turned to Nina. “How long until I get this catheter out?” I asked, as she pulled up the sheets at last, and I leaned back against the crackly hospital pillow.

“That’s another question for the doctor.”

I got the feeling she said that a lot.

As soon as Nina was gone, my father went for coffee downstairs, and my mother started decorating the room. This was part of her job. She and my dad ran a contracting business together, and he generally handled the construction end of things, and she did the design. So it was both her professional and personal responsibility in almost any situation to make things look better.

She’d brought a blue-and-white-checked quilt from home and a fuzzy throw blanket. She’d been collecting get-well cards all week from friends and relatives, and she’d brought some Scotch tape to affix them to the walls. She’d bought magazines, which she arranged in a fan shape on the side table, and she’d found my favorite stuffed animal from childhood in the attic (a fuzzy bunny named Fuzzy Bunny) and brought it with her. When she ran out of things to do, she took a seat on the reclining side chair and criticized the décor.

“I don’t know what they’re thinking with this God-awful mauve on the walls. It’s like the 1980s threw up in here.”

I’d just survived a plane crash, so of course this was what we talked about. Nothing pissed Linda Jacobsen off like bad décor.

“Mauve and gray,” she went on. “It’s toxic. They’re poisoning you visually.”

“It’s not that bad,” I said, like, Come on. “It’s a hospital room.”

But she lifted her chin. “The person who decorated this hospital,” she announced, like a woman claiming her dignity in the face of unspeakable horror, “should be in jail.”

I took a slow breath.

“You could open the curtains,” I suggested at last.