Something Was Wrong. My Nightgown Was in Flames

The cold water hit like a narcotic; my terror tilted into galactic well-being. I ordered myself to stay conscious.The cold water hit like a narcotic; my terror tilted into galactic well-being.After some number of cold-warm, bliss-agony cycles, I uncertainly called for Richard. Richard carried me to the bed where he put a cold cloth on the burns. For the rest of the day, icy cloths were my morphine, and I called out for them like a fiend.In “Hyena,” an essay published in The New Yorker in 1996, the chimpanzee researcher Joanna Greenfield describes having been bitten by a hyena in Israel. A burned body can lose fluid as it struggles to right its equilibrium with blisters to cushion healing skin and weeping wounds to clean it; blood pressure can drop sharply. To gauge need for fluids and hospital time, battlefield medics and EMTs evaluate burns very roughly, using the Wallace rule of nines, which separates the body into parts, assigning them each a different percentage: head, chest, abdomen, back, groin, and four limbs. As a half of my right thigh was burned, I put my Wallace measurement at about 4.5 percent of my body. He suffered far, far worse than I did: third-degree burns on 70 percent of his body. He also couldn’t stop staring; like Greenfield, he had become a “whole new me.” Surely, for Ariely, that sensation came from the distortion of so much of his flesh, including his face, by deep wounds and scars. All of my body’s programming convulsed with this burn. Reviewing my racing thoughts on that first day, I find burn delirium, in evidence as I talked compulsively to Richard, half-hoping the patter would keep me conscious and lucid, and even create a record.