When Thy'lek woke up in the hospital, it was to confusion, fear and pain. He guessed he was in a hospital. He'd been in Emergency in the city hospital at home a few times but knew he wasn't there now. He didn't know where he was. What was worse was that he didn't know where his family was. He couldn't even sense them. He tried to sit up to get a better look around but discovered that a force field around the bed prevented him from moving much. It was then that he noticed that his forearms and hands were heavily bandaged. He couldn't see his legs. They were in some kind of box, that is, if they were still there at all. He tried to move them but couldn't. His panic grew. There were bags of blood and what looked like water with thin tubing leading to areas of his body over the chambers of his heart. He had never experienced this before, but he hated hyposprays and decided that the embedded needles were even worse. Now he was afraid to move. What if one came out? How would they put it back in (although he was sure he wouldn't like it)? If it came out, would it tear his heart out too? He began to cry, but nobody seemed to care. He called for his mom and dad, and even his brother Tren, but they didn't answer. Finally, a woman he knew was a nurse because of the hat she wore, told him he was being a bad boy and needed to be quiet. Still sobbing, but quietly because he didn't know what they would do to a bad boy, he thought over and over, "Mom! Dad! Please don't be mad. I'm sorry. I didn't mean to be bad. I won't do it again. I'll be good. Please don't yell at Tren. It's not his fault. Please come get me. Please take me home. It hurts so bad! I'm so scared!" But no one came, and he couldn't sense them.
The next weeks were a waking nightmare for the little Andorian. All the dead and dying tissue in his burns had to be removed before the doctors could begin to use the instruments that would regenerate blood vessels, nerves, muscle, bone and skin. Day after day, often more than once a day, doctors came to work on one part of his body or another or to change the bandages. They never said who they were. They almost never said what they were going to do or why, even though, at first, he always asked. When he asked if it was going to hurt, the few who bothered to answer him always lied. Soon, he didn't ask anymore. There was no point. Worst of all, they never respected him enough to ask him if they could look at him (he wasn't wearing any clothes), touch him or do whatever it was they were going to do to him with all those cold, hard, sharp, glittering instruments.
He hated having lost control over his own body. He didn't know until years later that he had been in a teaching hospital affiliated with the Imperial Academy of Medicine. When the groups of interns, residents or fellows came around and looked at him, poked him and prodded him while the attending physician talked about him like he wasn't even there and used big words he didn't understand, he felt like he was an animal in the zoo. He had always loved going to the zoo, especially the parts were he could pet or feed the animals, but now he knew he would never willingly go back. He had thought that the animals were having as much fun as he was, but now he knew better. He knew that they probably really wanted to escape just as much as he did, but there was no way to escape. It hadn't taken long for him to learn that resistance was futile. At first, when he realized that just about anything they were going to do to him was going to hurt, he had tried to fight to keep them from doing it or to make them stop, but he was too small and too weak. Big adult hands grabbed him and pinned him to the treatment table or his bed so that he couldn't wiggle even a little bit to try to get comfortable. No matter how he screamed, cried, begged or pleaded, they wouldn't stop or let go of him until they were done, and then they warned him that he was being a bad boy and that it would all be so much easier if he just cooperated. Did they really not understand how much it hurt and how scared he was or did they just not care? He promised himself that if he ever did get well and got out of there, then he would never, ever allow people to treat him that way again. He would never let himself become so weak and defenseless ever again.
He came to hate his own body, and not just because he was small and weak. Because he'd lost so much skin and was so small, they'd mostly had to use grafts of synthetic skin to cover his wounds. The dermal regenerators would only help the grafts to take and to hide the many scars. For some reason, even as an adult he didn't understand why, the synthetic skin had been white like an Aenar's and only gradually became blue as the graft took. For over a year, the skin on his arms and legs would be a patchwork of shades from white to his normal cerulean blue. He thought he looked like some sort of monster made out of spare parts. As if that wasn't bad enough, he had to apply a thick, pink lotion that would smell like peppermint to humans and that moisturized the skin and helped keep it supple until it fully healed. Once he was out and about and back in school, the other children, being cruel in a way that only children can be, delighted in calling him "pinkskin." It became the worst "bad name" he could think of. But that would be in the future. For now, whenever he was left alone or at night before he fell asleep, he would stare at the ceiling and concentrate as hard as he could, "Mom? Dad? Tren? Are you there? Can you hear me? Please help me. It hurts so bad! I'm so scared and lonely! I promise to be good. You can ground me forever, but please just come and get me and take me home." But still no one came, and he still couldn't sense them.
Little Thy'lek eventually came to believe that his family had abandoned him. The nasty story his big sister loved to tell him must have been true after all. She had always said that mom and dad had bought him at the baby store in the hospital and would take him back and trade him in for somebody better if he didn't behave. He knew this could be done because he had come along once when his dad had returned a broken music player to a store and had gotten a new one. Why wouldn't dad do the same with him? Not only had he misbehaved, he was also clearly broken. One look at his mottled skin and all the splints on his arms and legs so the bones would grow back straight and the muscles wouldn't contract into weird positions was proof of that. He didn't believe he could ever be fixed well enough to grow up to be big and strong like Tren. Why wouldn't mom and dad trade him in for a little boy who could? Why wouldn't they want to get a good boy they could be proud of?