Pet Wound

Six days later I was still combing blood out of my hair. I had hours to spend lying on hospital sheets, pulled tightly, but rolling off the corner of my blue rubber mattress, half- heartedly peeling chunks of brown matter, not quite scabs, from behind my ear. I would stare out at the concrete hospital parking structure, straining what was left of my neck upward to catch  sight of the mountains—grey in the morning, violet at evening. Had anyone watched me, the scene might have been reminiscent of a primate documentary: the subject’s attention elsewhere, but fingers rapidly moving around the crown, debris landing on shoulder.

I’d been sleeping heavily that day, aided by a generous dose of morphine, just recently having become comfortable with the deep and perfect sleep provided by opiates. Perhaps because I had tossed about a bit more than usual while dreaming of David Bowie—four versions beginning with Ziggy Stardust, from four eras—my bandages were particularly loose that afternoon as I walked into the bright light of the bathroom. The gauze dressing slipped down as I combed the blood out of my hair. And there I stood. I leaned into my reflection, inches ahead, skinless, a distortion of reality, but real. I was exposed to the muscle, ear to ear. Red, glossy. Raw meat above my shoulders, marbled with fat and veins: a breathing Gray’s Anatomy.

There flows a calm stream of thought even in times of doubt and fear, perhaps even as we face death. Summoned are the phrases and condolences we have called upon since childhood. In that moment the wise voice said, “Ah… it’s not so bad…” And so studying, still, this glistening crimson gap, this muscle, the slow twitch fibers below my mouth, I considered the voice, joyless, but true, “Ah, it’s not so bad,” and I nodded. This caused blood to flow in three separate streams slowly, southerly, to trickle to my feet and pool between my toes.

It was an alarming discovery—I studied my neck like the Earth’s layers, its stratum, seemingly stable but molten and changing, so subject to alteration, its seams a flash away from ripping. My head, I saw now, was balanced atop some crusty tectonic isthmus, and it had revealed its liquid inner core. My inside was outside. My outside was removed, what was left was a rift valley, a scarlet fissure that split my skull from my trunk.

I did not turn from my reflection. There would be no escape in looking away; I knew then that this is how I will forever appear, that I will never again see myself apart from the skin-peeled fresh cavity dripping open above my chest. I have seen clear inside my natural self, the skin will not return. The falling away of the gauze was simply an unmasking, this was the fact of my body as it had always existed.

Less than twenty-four hours after hiking and splashing in a stream, I learned the words: Flagyl. Unasyn. Clinda. All antibiotics, and all hopeless. The syllables floated above me, fat and clumsy, drained of meaning. High doses were unable to oppose this punch line, this urban legend come alive on my body. It was necessary to remove all of the affected skin, all three layers, down to muscle. Other doctors came to watch.

I remember a breathing tube, a cathedar, and a nurse who played jazz. I remember people arranging pillows or changing the sheets below me. My father standing above my bed. My mother. My sister crying and smiling bravely at my side, holding my hand, careful not to pull at tubes or wires. With a whiteboard and a blue marker, I refused chaplains and pastors. Two weeks later, the prognosis firmly rejected, I was upgraded to the regular ward and given solid food. Stabilized, I waited expectedly for the plan. There was talk of reconstruction that I half-heartedly took notice of. There were words like grafts, excision expansion, grotesque, disfigured, defect.

I was struggling with the dismantling and recomposition of my body, face, self. I tried to detach from the mirror image of myself, but I also wanted to re-enter it. Except—only if it was a better version. Over time, my appearance became a matter of craftsmanship; specialists and doctors poked at the stitches and nudged the surrounding skin, and with all of the manipulation, it became clear that no one was sure what I was meant to look like anymore. I was no longer precise, my cheeks sloped into what was left of my neck, my eyes drooped, as though I had melted.

For months my slippered feet dangled off the side of my bed as I assented to everything. I kept trying—along with the doctors—at recovery; so many surgeries trying to recompose what had gone missing; and every time, the night before, I would lie wondering what I would look like when I woke. It was akin to getting a new haircut, the anxiety and excitement of it. Magnified. In pre-op through my drowsiness, as my heart rate declined, I would project myself further into a world where my body was a shared responsibility. My former wish to be well, to be healed, had given way to a new desire: to wake, to persist, my life simply something to be participated in, along with everyone else, a game board to monitor. I need not take things in hand, or make any decisions, even on the most minor of details. With each procedure, my original determination eroded and became merely a series of tired negotiations to be had between naps. In the end, I handed the body over. Shared the trouble of it. Doctors chattered above me concerning my condition and its needs, and I melted into the jargon.

But after sixteen surgeries, the pulling and the tugging, the expanding and inserting, there was no cure. A scar remained; it is one that runs thickly across my neck. The raised purple scar draws down into my chest and across my shoulder and back up into my hairline. My earlobe is crooked; there is a line of hairlessness behind it where thick, black stitches once rested. More, the surgeries meant for correction added scars from incisions and pumps and skin grafts and IV tubes. And though it had never been a medical priority, I was saddened to find that the dimples from my elementary school pictures had disappeared.

“There ought,” wrote Sylvia Plath, “to be a ritual for being born twice—patched, retreaded, and approved for the road.” Instead, I received only a plastic “belongings bag” and a pillowcase full of gauze and pills. I at last left the hospital. My first night in civilian life, I ate cherries and watched fireworks. Someone said stupidly, “Look straight ahead!” as the colors exploded. This was all I could do—look straight ahead. There was no upward, no downward movement of my neck. Still, I thought, perhaps there are miracles: Free flying cold elements bond and arrange and warm. Air and water and calcium come to equal bone. Then bone is wrapped in muscle and skin; they connect and complete the circuit with this relentless tick tick tick machine that pumps in more air and water. And bone and muscle and skin learn to receive it, effortlessly. The body remains. The neck remains.

I’ve elected not to have further corrections though I am told that everything can be improved or altered. With enough medical resolve, a team can create for me a better version of myself. I have stopped wearing braces and bandages. I have stopped wearing turtleneck sweaters. Sometimes I am asked if I am a burn victim or a cancer survivor. I’ve been asked if I was attacked. It is a mysterious discovered place, this sick and scarred body. In the hospital, I had the comfort of knowing mine was a temporary, soon to shift situation. I had procedures to look forward to; I had surgeons to plot, to plan. But this consolation is no longer offered me. The triumph of survival proved bitter: my soul endured only to be trapped by the body.