By 이해나 Hannah Lee
Warning: Graphic content
i.
Making dumplings a day before the Fourth of July seems like the perfect respite from the Americana donned by every street corner and storefront in Philadelphia. You can wear sweatpants and a t-shirt to cook instead of worrying about how your arms or thighs will look on your night out in the city to watch fireworks.
The two-by-two stove is a little too small to boil and steam dumplings simultaneously, so I bear the weight of a boiling pot instead. The apartment is filled with boisterous conversations from friends of friends, my lecture hall companions and newly acquainted strangers. Meanwhile, my attention is captured by the dance of water meeting heaven—thick swirling steam rising in threads. Someone calls my name and when I turn, the pot drops. It was that simple, really. Scalding dumpling water splashing onto the ground as we scream. I’m escaping the heat, pressing my back against the wall. A little too late and it’s already on me; I grit my teeth and convince myself it’s no worse than a sunburn. My saviors strip me down and place me in the bathtub—why won’t it stop hurting? Why is there no cold bathwater? Are ambulance rides covered by Penn insurance?
“Um-ma, it’s been an hour and it still burns—”
“You’re not at the hospital?” We take an Uber to the ER and someone carries me in bridal-style. He’s barefoot, having rushed out from my sublet kitchen.
For a few years my morning alarm was Tchaikovsky Piano Concerto, Van Cliburn’s 1958 performance. When I arrive at the burn unit— Temple Burn—it has been three days since the dumplings and I’m too dehydrated to be given any pain medication.
“I’m so sorry; you’re going to be sober for this. Play music to keep yourself distracted,” says a nurse.
The piano concerto begins with a brass-versus-strings war cry. They take scissors and scalpels and begin tearing my dead skin off. The thing about second-third degree burns is that the root of your nerves isn’t damaged. You feel everything acutely. Exposed capillaries and ooze dripping down—they’ve reached the dermis. Air is a painful thing on raw tissue. Cliburn slams the keys and perfect octaves ring in the air. It’s taking too long—Korngold Violin Concerto? My fingers move on their own. One-open-two, one-three, two-two-one-four-three-four-two.
Every morning I get to count down for my turn in the shower. We’re wheeled in, one by one, going in crying, coming out screaming. I’m shifted onto a steel gurney and stare at the ceiling; I’m a corpse and this is my morgue. I make conversation with the nurse at my head so I don’t have to watch them scrub my raw tissue, eyes fixated on the painfully bright, sterile white light overhead. It doesn’t really matter—I can feel it, antiseptic scalding me and wire brushes scraping deeper and deeper. When I start sobbing instead of rambling about Kafka or Hilma af Klint, they give me more fentanyl. “More, more, I need more.” They inject me until the world is spinning and I can’t speak. My screams join the echo of others from earlier. I spend the next twenty four hours munching on chicken tenders and drinking Ensure then throwing everything back up because of the nauseating opioids pumping through my veins. It’s eight in the morning when the screams start again.
An epidural in the spine for my second operation. They have me fold over, legs splayed apart, a discarded rag doll. A deep puncture into the spine that feels absolutely wrong, every muscle in the body tense for a moment. I almost died during the operation itself. Someone says I coded, another says I had respiratory failure. Either way, it went horribly—emergency intubation, swift motions with the industrial potato peeler making skin grafts that leave a whole continent of bleeding wounds, timing mismatch with anesthesia. For me, it was a second of pure unconscious bliss followed by hours of agony as I writhed in my coffin of flesh. I was completely sober and cognizant, with tissue carved out of my live skin and crudely stapled onto my debrided burns, patched up with gauze, then stitched into my thighs to keep them from moving. Have you ever been in the kind of pain that defies language? Animalistic is the only word for those screams and wails. I think I begged someone to kill me, anyone.There’s a reason hell is believed to be fiery, and there’s a reason I don’t believe in the afterlife.
By week three in the ICU, my feet and ankles have swollen like balloons. I’ve lost muscle mass I didn’t know I had and only shower when they remember to wash my hair and not just the burns. The epidural pump works wonders, sending shivers down my spine, but they pull it out so I don’t get too attached. Sometimes I catch myself counting down the minutes until my pleas for more dilaudid and morphine are answered. A sin I’ll confess—I enjoyed it. Staring at the veins in my arm as they look for a new tract to bruise (you need three open IVs at all times in the ICU, and mine closed every other day), a sharp pinch in, a gorgeous scarlet spurting out. Deep green on the cannula means 18 gauge. A cold water flush to clear the tube, then opioids take their place. Stomach immediately turning, sickeningly addictive, I’m drowning from the inside, then peace. When I can bear the pain with oxycodone, they tell me to leave.
It’s still summer. I miss being able to stand up on my own. I used a walker to get to the end of the hall today. I couldn’t make it back.
What they don’t tell you about healing from a burn that covers over ten percent of your body is; (1) you need to keep the skin fully covered for a while; and (2) your body can’t regulate body temperature like before. It’s still summer, and I’m wearing the thickest black sweats I own. The perfect summer body would keep me cool in the heat. My back is drenched with sweat by the time I make it from the front door to the street, my home therapist urging me to go on. I don’t trust my own legs to hold me. I am terrified to shower when I’m home alone—maybe I’ll finally fall, left to slowly drown.
ii.
“You have a lot of fire in you.”
I’ve heard this a million times—from hanŭisa’s, numerologists, saju readers. Perhaps it’s why I’m so drawn to water. Aside from PTSD flashbacks of the burn ICU, the only lucid memory I carry from the opioid saturated haze of July to October of 2021 is the Schuylkill River. I remember gazing out at the untameable rush of gray, heading south, as my ride inched north, a 30 minute drive to the burn ER stretching into an hour. I need morphine and I need it now. I think there’s a staple in my ankle.
Freud describes fetishism as the placement of sexual desire to an object outside of visible sex organs to compensate for the trauma of realizing sexual difference—the fear of castration, the desire for a phallus. I think I am terrified of my body, picking it apart two inches away from a mirror and plucking away fuzz on my fingers, hoping I’ll get whatever fetishized ideal body I have in mind. For the first time, I’m fascinated by my body’s aberrations—my skin is a beef jerky-toned fishnet and I’m in love with every little pore and hair that fights its way through the grafts.
I am talking to Z.W. one night, a little drunk and two smokes in. “Did you end up suing Penn Med?” he asks.
I don’t remember what he’s talking about. He unknots my memories: “ER again … fucking staples in your grafts … like six.” Memories flood back—I had planned to sue Penn Med and Temple Burn for medical malpractice. Did you know burns progress in your skin even after you’re away from the heat? I laid alone in Penn Med ER for twelve hours after my burn, nothing but Tylenol floating in my bloodstream. I went into Temple ER every week because as the swelling went down, I kept finding staples embedded in my scars. They would serrate my grafts to rip them out without the mercy of local anesthesia, and I’d writhe through the visceral tug on barely-attached skin connected to thick, developing scars. Did you know that finding staples in your grafts is common—it’s you that lets them sink deeper into your tissue with every stabbing step until you find the sliver of silver poking through?
The dorms aren’t quite sanitary enough. Everything is infected, everything is infested. My wounds are a shade of red they shouldn’t be and my dressings stick to them, binded by a pungent yellow pus. Do I regret trying? Should I? I forget how many times I would feverishly search for a bench on campus, blinded by tears, unable to walk just a few blocks because it burns. Maybe to forget is a gift.
Mid-February in Philadelphia this year is cold but sunny. S.I. is on his way from Center City to remind me of what I’ve lost. “I think we went to Fiji…” I’m wearing sweatpants big enough for the layers of gauze I have taped onto my thighs, barely holding my skin grafts in place, high on morphine and oxycodone, walking into a frat. I’d forgotten those things—seeing football games, rehearsing Mendelssohn, celebrating friends’ birthdays, meeting new people, laughing. Most people I talk to remember my suffering but not my exuberance, if you can call it that. Trauma expects us to erase the worst memories—but sometimes also erases the best. It’s easier to remember the ER trips and tears and lock all the good away. Remembering the good is a blessing, but its cost is more grief.
iii.
Ironic that I thought coming home would be going back to land instead of drowning, though I spent most of my days traveling to the ocean. Chambers Bay is fifteen minutes from my house, the ferry from Seattle to Bainbridge Island, all the way down the Oregon coast. I’m not allowed in, not just yet, but I yearn to be underwater, consumed by the iridescent blue. Instead I lie down on the shore, looking for satisfaction in the steady crash of waves—a crescendo that reaches percussive points, then trickles away into static.
For months, my mother bandages my legs and massages them. The itch is so deep, and it burns. The doctors say it’s the nerves trying to find their way back into my skin. I’m in pain, my body just doesn’t know it. I scratch so hard in my sleep that the layers of gauze are intertwined with my sheets and there’s blood underneath my nails when I awake.
A year and a half into recovery, I find out I have permanent brain damage to my visual and auditory systems and hippocampus. I have a registered disability for memory issues. My left leg never fully recovered—from my toes to my knee I feel nothing. It’s September of 2023, and I’m on a rare roadtrip with my darlings in search of reprieve from the scorching summer sun. Not even the shock of cold waves when I wade into the ocean in sunny Atlantic City awakens the deadened nerves. It’s honestly a little fucked up, so thank God I have reminders of burn that I love. The scars are beautiful, miniature hills and coastlines surrounded by an ocean of fishnet.
My maps, I call them. Skin is like a kind of topography.
The Woodlands 