What brings you to Tulsa? Oh, you know...A fire.

32 days ago, I was lying in bed trying my damndest not to dry heave all over myself with morning sickness, a misnomer at 7pm if there ever was one. I had been home 6 weeks after a "gap year" in Lousiana.  I am 37, knocked up, and underemployed and I may have been having a 'oh, my life...woe is my life" party. It was under-attended. I think my husband may have just told me to "man up." I may have thrown a shoe at him.

I was tired, cranky,  and missing my parents.  And then the telephone rang. 

You hear about telephone calls that change a life trajectory.  I've had to make a few of those - when my brother was squashed by a garbage truck, when my son died just days after being born. And I've been on the receiving end: a dear friend dies, my grandpa slips away expectedly unexpected.

Sometimes you know immediately.  And I knew, just by the timbre in my dad's voice.

15 hours later, my trusty sidekick and I were on a plane bound for Houston,  final stop Tulsa, Oklahoma.  What I knew about Oklahoma, you could fit on a 3*5 index card.

What I knew about burn patients, burn survivors, you could fit on the tip of my index finger.

My mother - my vivacious, infuriating, brash, bullying, magnificent "bigger than life" mother - the one with no boundaries, spends her days and nights in a burn ICU bed at a hospital in Tulsa. She lays on an air bed, one leg imobilized, then other leg charred and pared down to just below the knee. She is heavily sedated MOST of the time, in that (I hope) blissful state of sedation I never quite completely recall since the aftermath of the labor with my first child, which resulted in a shattered, waterlogged placenta, a lot of blood loss, and a  cool, deep well of blackness I finally slipped into. I hope that her sedation is deep and smooth and gentle. I hope. I hope.

Her right arm and her torso are scraped raw. The word they use is "debrided." The right side of her face...well...We are a fair piece away from the melted look of "healed skin."

My vocabulary is rapidly being replaced. Phrases like "conservation efforts," "original order," and "PH neutral" are being shunted aside for "Bio-brane" "synthetic pigskin," and "fentanyl."  My days are surreal; they start out normally with a trip to the facilities to pee a quarter of my pregnant body weight. I feed the trusty sidekick and drive her to school, whilst we natter about all manner of silly things. Then a zinger "Do you think Grammy will be alive for a long time?"  Or "I don't want to go see her yet, Mummy. She's super hurt."

As an aside, bringing the Benovelent Dictator with me may not have been the smartest move I have ever made, but we're getting by. But there wasn't really a choice. My glamorous assistant works long hours in a highly competitive industry. My in-laws are ace people but they are fifteen years older than my mother.  A nanny, you say? I AM the nanny, especially since I threw in the towel on being an archvist earlier this year.

I know. I'm not sure I would hire me for full-time childcare, either.

Most of my days, I spend in a hospital waiting room or scrubbing up to visit my mom. I sit by her bed and watch telly with her, or read to her or to myself. I watch the monitors and the drips for signs - good or bad.  I wonder if she will be happy that we are forcing her to fight so hard to stay alive or if she will be so angry that she hates. I wonder  about the landscape of our family after this, about what life will be like. I wonder if, I wonder if, I wonder if...

I take walks outside, I wander around Tulsa - a city I have grown fond of. I don't "fake" normal. This is my "normal." Sometimes, I cry in line at the supermarket. I am not a pretty crier, there are no delicate tears. I am a snot dripping,  blotchy-faced crier from the first tear.

I go to doctors appointments and legal appointments, I dig through medical journals in that way that irritates medical personnel ("Ugh. Someone thinks they're a doctor today."). I am that slightly dazed, potentially dangerous person you encounter and hover around nervously, afraid, intrigued. Dare I, you wonder. Dare I poke the bear?

And today, a good day as mama breathes successfully but exhaustedly off her ventilator, today I see most of her burned body without its bandages. Not just a flash of marled skin here, a raw bit of flesh there, but swathes of raw, freshly laid territory, of charred fatty tissue.  I just want to be able to hug her tight. But you can't hug someone whose entire chest and back and most of their neck has savagely eaten by fire. Especially not when their pain medication is turned off.