The ever - shifting ground beneath my feet

I'm not quite sure how you 'get used' to the smell of recently charred flesh, recently debrided flesh melding with disinfectant, but eventually you do.  After six weeks of multiple daily visits to the burn unit, I no longer feel my stomach clench and heave. I know the orderlies and cleaning staff, the nurses and the techs, the doctors and their entourage. I recognize which person is part of which lunchtime clique. I know the information desk people and what days the better barista works.

 I am not sure how I feel about this transition, this normalization.  It is certainly not something I had ever anticipated. It is also worrying because I institutionalize very easily. 

I am also not sure what to do with the expanse of time that I am NOT on the ICU floor. 

Outside of laundry and housekeeping the two room flat we are staying in, I wander through bookshops, occasionally stop in at a shop to examine clothing options for my burgeoning belly before realizing that THIS pregnancy, I may actually be actually not be in maternity clothes by week 16. A revelation. 

I conduct esoteric searches on MedLine and on the Department of Health ' s website.

 I write bland updates about my mother: she is the same: sedated, in pain, severely burned.  I do not say 'her right arm resembles actually be skinned lamb shank hanging in an Athens an meat market.' I save my dark humour for a few friends and sometimes it surprises me the pee I've turned towards. 

I have become the opposite of what I thought I would be; apparently, I clear the decks for action. Somewhere in my recently chastened persona is the shit kicker,  the woman who didn't lose her marbles after basic training, the one sho didn't drink to excess and lock herself in closets or lie down in the middle of roads because she somehow was careless enough to be 19 and get date raped in college or because she dated a series of unsuitable men before making the occasionally feable but -always heartfelt - attempts to pull herself together. Apparently, all that cognitive  therapy and actually liking ones' self actually works, because - although this situation is horrid and painful and wretched and I cry every bloody day - I still think the world is a pretty flipping breathtaking place, kinetic, utterly baffling and just...The world.

I research different prosthetic limb options and tease my dad about the 1st time I discovered people could catch on fire: a mixed tape of the Eagles and Richard Pryor ' s stand up: "They should make running on fire and Olympic event. Because man, when you are on fire, people will get out of your waaay.'

I eye up people with excess skin ('you have such lovely tonality; are you using that extra skin' she intones, a short circuited Step ford Wife) and read up on cadaver skin banks. Life is so peculiar and there is never a dull moment in my kooky so - called life.