January 6th
I stood up today.
My doctor told me it was time to stop feeling sorry for myself and get my arse out of bed. It was frightening. Struggling to sit up in bed, hold myself up without help, and lay back down without hurting the burns on my back is itself a daunting task so I'll admit I've been trying to stay as still as possible, in fear of the additional pain that movement causes. But today, encouraged by the doctor's reassurances, I was determined to overcome it. He helped me swing my legs out the side of the bed and let me lean on his shoulder as I stood up. It hurt of course, but the pain was tempered by the overwhelming sense of achievement. It changes your whole perspective, looking at the world from a vertical six foot whatever I am, rather than from flat on your back at bed level. Today, for a few minutes, I was a person, not a patient.
January 7th
Where was I…
I surprised everyone by actually waking up from my morphine-induced sleep the next day. The doctors were amazed that I was still alive, telling me that survival with burns as extensive as mine was almost unheard of. The body simply cannot cope with the shock of what's happened to it and shuts down completely, faced with too much repair work for it's meagre resources. Many patients with head and neck burns suffocate - strangling as fluid rushes to the burn site swelling their necks and cutting off their air. That one fact rather justifies the decision to let Bill take me to hospital, I feel. Maybe, just maybe I could have dealt with everything else by myself, but choking to death would have been an unavoidable and deeply unpleasant way to die.
Anyway, the subtext of my prognosis seemed to be 'you're not out of the woods yet sonny' but they were willing to do what they could for me. The first doctor who saw me was amazed to find that I still had all my fingers, although my toes apparently hadn't fared quite so well. I was lucid – I could see, hear and had been speaking (well, screaming abuse I'm told) before they tubed me. He explained to me that the first three or four days after being burnt are the ones that count, the ones where the body is still in massive shock and desperately prone to infection – if I could make it through the next few days I'd probably survive.
They moved me from A&E into a small room in the burns unit, kept away from normal hospital traffic for my own good. With little skin to keep bad things out, a germ-filled emergency room was the last place I needed to be.
For those vital first few days they kept me as comfortable as possible. Lying on an air mattress, tube down my throat and all manner of drugs being pumped into me, I was pretty much a vegetable. On the third day I developed pneumonia and the simple act of breathing became terribly hard work, every breath requiring actual thought and effort. I thought that was the beginning of the end, but it started to improve the next day and on day five they took my breathing tube out, leaving me with a far more agreeable oxygen mask instead. Finally, I could speak.
Thus began my long journey back to physical 'normality'. All I know in my life is hospitalization, willing and unwilling. All I've ever felt is pain. I long to find out what 'normal' feels like.
January 8th
I wonder if, when I was three years old, I was as proud of myself for using the toilet unassisted as I was today.
I got out of bed, I walked slowly to the bathroom and I had a pee. Standing up, like a man. And then I walked back to my bed.
Rather determinedly, I'd pulled my catheter out a couple of hours earlier - a cunning plan to stop myself from chickening out from my chosen mission. Given a choice between pain and embarrassment, give me pain every time.
The bathroom isn't far, maybe 30 steps away. My room is at the far end of the ward, away from the open beds occupied by the less severely burned patients. I looked up the corridor toward them on my return journey, but will save that particular expedition for tomorrow.
Nurse Claire says that they'll start feeding me normally now that I'm moving about and, not to put too fine a point on it, able to get to the loo. Real food. She said not to get too excited, joking that hospital food isn't exactly gourmet cooking, but I don't care – it's bound to be a million times better than the slop they fed to us at Larkhill. Even the rats turned their noses up at that.
January 9th
Shouldn't have looked shouldn't have looked shouldn't have looked shouldn't have looked shouldn't have looked shouldn't have looked shouldn't have looked shouldn't have looked shouldn't have looked shouldn't have looked.
January 10th
"The face is the mirror of the mind, and eyes without speaking confess the secrets of the heart."
January 11th
Nurse Rachett told me off today for not eating. She says I'm too thin and they'll put me back on the drip if I don't start taking solids again.
Thin. As if that's the first thing people notice about me. I've been thinner, it didn't kill me then and it's not going to kill me now, more's the pity.
January 12th
In the burn unit, where wound care takes place in soundproof rooms, even the most brutally injured avert their eyes from the face patients.
"Burned beyond recognition." Who hasn't heard these words and shuddered?
A person with severe facial disfigurement is a long-running character in our collective subconscious. In literature he is the Phantom of the Opera, Johnny Got His Gun, the English Patient. In popular books and film, he is Freddy Krueger, and the Man Without a Face.
He is a projection of our darkest fears. But he is also, stripped of all vanity, our most essential self.
And now, he is me.
January 13th
A new psychologist came to see me today. Dr Abbot, I think her name was. She looked me in the eye but I suppose she's used to it, working around here. Like the nurses.
I got a sound telling off for my recent actions - apparently I was supposed to wait for some lackey to hold my hand while I regarded my reflection for the first time. I can't see that making any bloody difference, it wasn't going to make that thing staring back at me any easier to accept.
She talked at me about my current physical condition, taking me through the challenges I'm likely to face. A particularly poor choice of words, I thought.
She told me that when a face is altered or destroyed, the psychological consequences can be severe. For patients, fears of rejection and abandonment are common and realistic. Realistic. No sense in sugar-coating it, is there? If I can't bear to look at myself, if other patients in a burns ward are repelled by my appearance, what chance is there that normal people are going to be able to deal with me?
Moving on to my other issues, I could tell I was frustrating her. I don't remember much and most of what I do remember, I couldn't tell her. Too risky. I'm sure she thinks I'm making it all up, trying to hide who I am because I'm in some kind of trouble. She kept trying to catch me out, going over the same questions again and again from different angles, waiting for me to slip and confess that I'm really Jim Smith, a chartered accountant with a wife and two kids back in Chelsea. Well I'm sorry dear, ask all you like but you're not trying anything I haven't already tried myself. Trying to catch my own mind out with a questioning offensive has been an almost daily occurrence since that morning that I woke up and couldn't remember who I was. Past tense – whoever I was, I am not any more. Who I was is becoming less and less relevant as every day passes, who I will become is what concerns me more.
I've started to eat again. All I want to do now is get out of this place, and that's not going to happen until I'm fit enough to do so under my own power. Tomorrow I'm going to do ten laps of the ward, and any of the half-melted freaks along the corridor who don't like it can go fuck themselves.