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What It Feels Like...

(page 3 of 17)

“The Grossest Thing That Had Ever Happened to Me.”

While I was being treated, after I got my morphine, they had this suction device that they use to suck out teeth, blood that drips into your throat and anything they can find. It had broken, or the battery had run out on it. So I was trying to cough off to the side, and they were telling me not to because they didn’t want me to accidentally swallow something. And I said, “Well, you’ve got to do something to get this out of here.” So one of the guys grabbed his medic’s bag, and he said, “This is going to be kind of weird, but just bear with me for a second.” He pulled out a tampon hanging from a string and just dipped it in my mouth to soak the blood up, and he just kept doing that for me every five or 10 minutes. I was thinking that it was probably the grossest thing that had ever happened to me.

The same guy was the one who drove me to the flight lines, so the helicopter could come and pick me up and fly me to another surgical unit. It was January in Iraq, and it got pretty cold in the mornings and at night. Plus they were putting me on a helicopter, which is freezing. So I asked him, “Can you do something for me?” He reached in his bag and pulled out hot packs and put them underneath my armpits. Then he said, “Hang on. This is going to be weird, too,” and he actually had to put one in my groin for me because that’s very vascular. I was like, “Don’t tell anybody about this.” Now I’m telling people.
In another part of Iraq, I got a surgeon who was a retired plastic surgeon here in the states, and he had decided he wanted to do some time in Iraq. I got lucky enough that he was the surgeon on duty when I was there, and he actually did all my sutures and everything for me, so I didn’t have a whole lot of really bad scarring.

“Hey, Mom. I Got Blown Up.”

Right before I got that first surgery, I told everybody who was treating me that I didn’t want anyone to notify my parents until I got to talk to them. They actually listened to me, so after surgery I got on the phone and called my mom. I said, “Hey, Mom. I’m in the hospital. I got blown up.” And she was like, “Shut up. This isn’t funny.” I said, “No, seriously. That’s why I’m talking funny. I had 10 teeth blown out, and I’m okay.” And she said, “Shut up.” Finally she listened to me, and she may have threatened to fly to Iraq. Then she just said that she wanted to hear from me when I got back to Germany because I told her I probably wouldn’t be able to call her anymore until I got there.

My mom’s a nurse, so she understood all the injuries and everything. If she would have heard the news from someone else, she would have been calling every general in the Army trying to figure out what had happened to me. So I was really worried someone was going to get a hold of her before me. You don’t want anybody calling a general.

“I Think I Just Didn’t Want to See It.”

It took me three days to get from Iraq to Landstuhl Regional Medical Center in Germany. Everywhere I went in between, I had a little bit of something done. After 12 hours in Landstuhl, I asked them to release me in the care of my friend Travis Gambee, who had a house in Germany with his wife. I was actually stationed in Germany at the time, and they said it was fine as long as I’d make it to my appointments. I was tired of hospitals after that.

While we were in Kuwait, they would play movies for us while we were sitting in our beds, and the first movie that I saw when I woke up was Vanilla Sky, the one where Tom Cruise has the messed-up face. I didn’t look at myself in the mirror for probably four or five days because I didn’t want to know what it looked like that soon, so to see Vanilla Sky right away was like—I hope I don’t end up looking like that. But then I was making jokes. I made jokes throughout the whole ordeal. I was like, “Seriously? This is the movie you pick?” It got laughs, but I was also on a lot of morphine then.

When I finally did look in the mirror, I was actually a little relieved but also a little angry because they didn’t really bother to wash my face off. There were so many sutures and stuff, and they didn’t want to ruin the sutures, so they kind of just cleaned up as much as they could. I looked at it, and there was still a lot of stuff left on my face. I don’t know if it was just dried blood or what. I thought, “This is really gross.” But other than that, I was really happy because I had actually thought that I had lost part of my jaw.

Nobody had talked to me about it because I had asked them not to explain anything to me. I knew when I was ready, I’d look at it. I think I just didn’t want to see it or know anything about it at the time. I had that medical background, so I knew what it was already just by listening to people talk. I didn’t want anyone to really talk to me about it because then I’d have to actually discuss it with somebody, and I was more or less just wanting to pretend it
didn’t happen.