Breathing the Fire by Kimberly Dozier

Incredible, lucid account of a reporter's torturous recovery after being nearly obliterated by a car bomb in Iraq during a fairly routine embed. This must have been big in the news a few years ago... she was with CBS, although I don't remember it at all. Her cameraman and soundman, only steps ahead of her, and the captain leading them around, all died there in the street. These horrible events happen all the time over there, but we're all so jaded by reading about car bombs and suicide attacks in the news to even care anymore. I read the blurbs and wince at the numbers and then click on a Batman review and immediately forget. terrible.

"I'd lost more than half my blood at the bomb scene, and it kept leaking out. The doctors pumped in 30 to 40 units -- that's more than one adult's worth. Between Farrar, Reed, and me, we'd literally bled the blood bank dry." (53)

"The jagged, burning chunks of shrapnel had done major damage to my quadriceps, the four major muscles that power my upper leg. So many muscles were shredded that by the time the dead tissue was painstakingly removed from the living, my broken femur bone was exposed. In later surgery at Bethesda Naval Hospital, the remaining muscle had to be rearranged to cover it. And then doctors could only hope the grafts they put on the massive burn, a foot and a half by 8 inches, would take. If they couldn't cover the femur again, they'd have to consider taking the leg off. [...]

In order for my muscles to heal and for those later grafts to take, the surgeons at Landstuhl knew they had to clean the area of the damaged flesh, dirt, and bacteria that the blast had blown in. Otherwise the area would contaminate any future grafts and slow or stop healing. So, according to my mom, every day at Landstuhl, surgeons would powerwash the dirt and dead, burned tissue from my legs. Picture strapping a patient to the operating table and turning a fire hose on her at full blast. It was Nancy's bandage change on overdrive. These "washouts" were so painful they had to be done under full anasthesia and each one counted as surgery. by the time I was discharged from the last hospital weeks later, the surgeons had lost count of how many procedures I'd undergone. The guesstimate was 'at least two dozen.'" (77-78)

(Des Moines: Meredith Books, 2008)