CHAPTER 5

THE BARSKY UNIT, CHO RAY HOSPITAL, SAIGON

ALIVE, IF NOT COMPLETELY WELL

SUMMER AND MORE, 1972

It is said that even a tiny baby still housed in her ma’s womb can recognize and will respond to the sound of her ma’s voice. If true, this phenomenon may at least partially explain why, when nothing else could tug me out of unconsciousness and toward at least a semi-alert state, the sound of my ma’s reply to that woman did the trick. I remember hearing her say of Danh, “He died.” I remember her soft whispers, one grieving mother to another. I remember her professions of love for me as I lay there secretly wishing I could die like Danh.

I stirred then, to my ma’s sweet voice, a flower bending itself toward the sun, and with that subtle movement my ma’s hopes were revived. I was alive. Her My was alive!

In a matter of minutes, a series of events I now regard as “miraculous” then unfolded. My ma and my brother, realizing there was life left in me, scooped me up to carry me back into the hospital, which is when they literally ran into my dad. In rapid-fire sentences, Ma updated my dad on all that had unfolded and urged him, “Quickly! We must find help!”

My dad rushed back into the main hospital, intent on locating someone who might assist them with their almost-dead-but-not-dead-yet daughter, which is when he found a doctor who was ending his shift for the day and heading home. “Sir!” my father cried as he tugged on the doctor’s laboratory coat. “My daughter was placed in the morgue, but she is still alive. You must help us! She needs your assistance . . . please!”

As the doctor’s eyes met my father’s eyes, both men were taken aback. Momentarily disoriented by seeing each other here, in a hospital corridor, in the midst of this crisis involving a child, they strained to sort out how they knew each other. For several seconds they simply stared at each other, blinking recognition but incapable of naming the connection. “University!” the doctor finally said with a finger-snap, his broad smile celebrating his powers of recall. And so it was that my father and his classmate from twenty years prior were reunited in Saigon.

Within half an hour, an ambulance arrived at the front doors of First Children’s Hospital to transport me to Cho Ray’s Center for Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery in Saigon, known by locals as the Barsky Unit, in honor of the center’s founder, the late American doctor Arthur Barsky. There were fifty-four beds in the unit, and my parents and Dad’s doctor friend hoped that one would be available for me.

Staffed primarily by local doctors, the Barsky Unit had already effectively treated more than thirty-five hundred children who had been wounded in the war. My father’s friend had not called ahead, fearing that if he phoned the Barsky and asked permission to bring me over, the request would be denied. The unit did not “receive” new patients; it “invited in” new patients, and their backlog was nearly four hundred names long. Furthermore, nobody expected me to survive. Admitting me would mean assigning valuable resources to me, and the Barsky was already stretched thin.

When my ambulance arrived, staffers assumed they would turn it away, sending it on to some other hospital in Saigon that might have more resources, more room. But that is not at all what occurred. One of the on-call surgeons, Doctor Le My, looked at me and knew that if the Barsky could not help me, then nobody could. There simply was no other facility equipped to handle the needs I so clearly had. She saw me and saw my burns and saw the plea in my parents’ eyes. She swallowed hard the hospital’s regulations and official protocol. And she said quietly, “I will try to help.”

First, I needed blood. My parents did not know my blood type (or theirs), and finding viable blood in my burned body to test was nearly impossible. The doctor finally extracted a sample from my heart and determined I was type A. Further quick tests proved Ma was a match, and she was prepped to donate. Because nearly all of the veins in my upper body had collapsed, Doctor Le My made an incision in a vein near my right ankle. When the first drop of Ma’s blood entered that vein, my body responded and my vital signs improved. Everyone knew. I was going to survive. Still I had a long road ahead. Over the next few days, the initial treatments for my burns began, preparing me for the first of the sixteen surgeries I would undergo while a patient there. A seventeenth operation would take place in Germany many years later, when I was twenty-one years old. But here, now, at the Barsky, nobody knew I would ever see age twenty-one.

There is much I do not remember about my stay at the center—the people I met, the patients I shared space with, the surgeries I was made to endure—but a memory that will never leave me is that of my daily burn baths. The goal, according to what my parents were told, was threefold. Burn baths had been proven to improve the elasticity of burned skin. They were known to increase the patient’s range of motion and ability to engage with the demands of physical therapy. And they created a greater sense of comfort and well-being for the sufferer. (Hospital staff did not mention to my parents that before the “comfort” part of the equation showed up, the patient would have to endure outright torment first.)

Every morning just after sunrise, two or three nurses would appear at the foot of my painted-metal recovery bed with grim news on their lips. “Kiiiim,” one of them would all but whisper. “Good morning, little Kim. It is bath time, sweet Kim. Kiiiim, are you awake?”

In fact, I had been awake for many minutes by then, having heard their encroaching footsteps. I was not intending to deceive them by lying there motionless, eyes closed. Rather, some force deep inside me resisted all that was to unfold. I did not like the burn bath. I did not like the tormenting pain when the water contacted my wounds. I did not like any aspect of this treatment, and so I lay there aching for another way.

“Kiiiim? Hello, Kim?” the nurse was saying. “Kim, we will put you on gurney now.”

And so my day would begin, in the same way every day began, for weeks and weeks on end. My naked body would be hoisted from the hospital bed onto the transport bed, which never so much as creaked underneath my light weight. One of the nurses would slowly wheel me into a sterile bathroom, where a stainless steel tub waited. As we entered the room, I could hear the mechanical hum of heaters and the rumble of jets that sloshed healing solution through the bath; the sounds struck me as something of a death march. “You are about to suffer,” they said.

Once in the bath, a nurse would increase the agitation of the jets to full blast, and I would be submerged for a full thirty minutes’ time as the water softened my skin.

The sting of those baths was so unbearable to me that nearly every morning, I passed out moments after being placed into the tub. One of the nurses would have to hold my head aloft so that I did not slip underwater and drown. The body tends to develop a tolerance to pain medications over time, and so with the exception of the first bath—and the most horrific, given how much charred flesh needed to be softened and removed—there was nothing the nurses could offer me in order to numb my body’s pain receptors, save for reassuring smiles and tender hands. There was no morphine. No oxycodone. No nothing to subdue the full brunt of swirling water pounding unprotected nerve endings.

When my half-hour was up, nurses on either side of me would reach for my underarms, pulling me as gently as possible out of the tub and back onto the transport bed. Back in my room, different nurses holding sterile medical scissors cut away all the dead skin. In a rhythm I came to despise, as soon as enough rotted skin had been cleared, another skin-grafting operation would take place.

On several occasions, my father donned the hospital-issued sterile coverings and entered the bathroom with me, even as he was helpless in the face of my pain. Ma never once stood guard over the procedure, for the simple reason that our family needed income, and my burn bath always coincided with her busiest time in the noodle shop.

My oldest sister, Hai, did come to visit me at the hospital one morning, intending to support my burn-bath routine, but as soon as she saw me enter the waters, she herself fainted there on the spot. “We do not have adequate staff to care for your daughter and her visitors,” the head nurse admonished my father, a clear signal that guests of mine had better come equipped with nerves of steel. The squeamish-stomached were not allowed; had I been better able to communicate my own state of mind, I, too, would have been evicted from the place.

Still today, whenever my pain comes to me I flash back to those burn baths and think, Regardless of how terrible I feel in this moment, at least I do not feel as badly as I did then. Oh, if there is a more fitting demonstration of the phrase “hell on earth” than the burn bath, I do not want to know what it is. Those baths were worse than death itself. Dying is far worse than death.

During that first week, my ma would shuttle back and forth between Saigon and Trang Bang—about a ninety-minute trip by bus—doing her best to manage her noodle shop while at the same time supporting her struggling child. Daddy would sit at my bedside from morning to night, leaving only just before my bedtime, when hospital staff informed him that visiting hours were over. He would then shuffle out the hospital’s front doors to the stone bench he used for a bed, make himself as comfortable as possible for the few hours he was forced to be away from me, rest as best he could, and then, as soon as the hospital doors opened in the morning, make his way right back to my bedside.

For nearly forty days, I remained in critical condition at the Barsky, leaving doctors and nurses and my parents wondering if I would ever truly recover, if I would “come back to myself.” I received 100 percent of my food intravenously, I could not wear clothes, and while rehabilitation efforts eventually commenced, progress was painfully slow. I could not stand. I could not walk. My head could not swivel. My hands could not grip. I was an invalid, disabled in every conceivable way.

Whenever Ma and Dad were together, they carefully surveyed my situation. More than 30 percent of my body had been deeply singed; my organs were extremely vulnerable to infection; I had sluggish circulation throughout my torso and limbs, which meant my mobility was terribly compromised; and because my body was using all its resources to try to heal my skin, my strength day by day was sapped.

“If she will be so disabled all of her life,” my ma would whisper to my dad when they were beyond my ear’s range of hearing, “then I think it better that she die.”

Equally resolved that he did not want his child to suffer for the rest of her days, my adoring father would soberly nod his head in agreement. Yes, I agree. Who would wish such pain on his little girl?

And so it was, that across that span of tumultuous critical-care days, Ma begged the gods of CaoDai, “Please, take my daughter from this life.”