Warning: Following paragraph contains some graphic descriptions.
1) At a New Years Eve party I met this guy who got exploded on. He was fixing a tractor mower or something in a garage, and it blew up. He had third degree burns on the left side of his body that was exposed—arm, neck, face. (And maybe a leg) He went inside and dove into a bucket of icy water while his friends called an ambulance. When he got to the hospital they said they would have to do skin grafts, but since it was a holiday weekend, they couldn’t get a doctor to do it until Tuesday. When the doctors came in to see him on Tuesday, they said, “We don’t know how, but your body is healing, we don’t need to graft.” They told him though, that his ear was so traumatized it would probably FALL OFF. He went home, and for weeks, each day he had to scrape gooey skin from his body, which could take hours.
But when I saw him at the party. You couldn’t tell it had every happened! The light was not really bright, but I could only barely see a couple of whitish scars that might have been cooking burns. (And both ears looked fine.)
He said, “They told me I’m in the top one percent of healers in the world.”
“Wow, like Wolverine?” I asked.
“I guess so.”
Shit, that’s so weird and cool. I didn’t think to ask him at the moment, and maybe it wasn’t really appropriate party conversation, but I wonder what those first three days were like, before the doctors came in. You’d be (or I would be) miserable, in pain, probably drugged up but still freaked out about skin grafts and deformity. But then you live through it, and get a little bit of good news, and then you live through more stuff, and then you’re all okay again, drinking champagne with your friends at a nice house, with your wife there and your kids asleep in the back room. Life is really amazing.
Someone clone that guy.
ReplyDelete