Full of Heart: My Story of Survival, Strength, and Spirit

by J. R. Martinez

  Some of the other surgeries I underwent in the months after the explosion were bizarre in their own right. I had developed something called heterotopic ossification in my right forearm. This strange condition happens when bone tissue forms outside the skeleton. It’s predominantly seen in patients who experience multiple traumatic injuries at one time or burn injuries. I’d had both. The way to fix it is to go in and cut it out.

  When burned skin begins to heal, whether on its own or with a graft, it tends to become tighter than it was originally. It’s what the medical professionals call contracture, and it has the effect of pulling on surrounding tissue. To correct it, they do a “contracture release” to reduce that tightness. I had this done on my upper and lower eyelids so that I could close my eyes properly.

  Because my hands were so badly burned, doctors had implanted a Kirschner wire, or K-wire, which is a stainless steel pin used to immobilize a joint. In my case, they put it in the first joints of my fingers to keep my fingers fixed in full extension to reduce the contracture as my skin healed.

  I’d also suffered a very bad fracture in my right ulna, or elbow bone, so the doctors had installed a plate with screws to hold it together. I was starting to see the parallels between modern medicine and carpentry.

  But as unpleasant as the therapies and surgeries and exercises were, the boredom was what really got to me. Young men aren’t designed to sit around all day. The only people I knew were the hospital staff and the people who worked at the guesthouse where I was staying. I grew bored with the hours of TV—especially the soaps that seemed to saturate the scheduling. I desperately needed to do something productive outside of the daily appointments, eating, and watching TV. All the days blended together.

  The front-desk receptionist at 4E was a gregarious Puerto Rican woman named Christina. I found myself talking to her a lot because she was fun. Her husband was a drill sergeant in the Air Force. One weekend she and her husband picked me up from the hospital and took me to their house for dinner. While Christina cooked, her husband and I sat and chatted about all sorts of things. We ate and fell into a semi-coma. Then we talked about how much we’d eaten and how we should have saved ourselves from discomfort by refusing that last bite. Toward the end of the evening, they took me back to my lonely and boring hotel room.

  The following Monday morning, I was back at the 4E nurses’ station, looking for distraction. And then someone asked me to run a few errands in the hospital. From that point on, I was the guy who ran errands. I loved it because it made me feel important and gave me something to do with my time.

  It was also in September that I had my first romantic encounter with a girl since my accident. (Well, technically it wasn’t my first—I’d hung out in Dalton with my old girlfriend Daniela, but that didn’t really count because I figured she had probably just been stuck on the old J.R. anyway.) This girl’s name was Amelia. She was the eighteen-year-old daughter of a woman who worked at the guesthouse, and we’d met when she’d visited her mom at work. We hung out a couple of times and I enjoyed her company.

  One afternoon, her mom dropped her off at my room for a visit. We snuggled up on the couch to watch a movie, and we started to make out. One thing led to another, and she gently tried to tug off my shirt. I resisted. What would she think about these scars?

  “Don’t worry about it,” she said in my ear, and off came the shirt. She touched the scars on my arm and then on my chest and stomach. I anxiously watched her face for signs that she was turned off, but I saw none.

  This was another major turning point for me in my recovery.

  I had another turning point of a completely different sort that month. One day after I’d run the usual few errands around the hospital and had my therapy appointment, one of the nurses asked me a question: “Would you be willing to talk with a patient I’m treating?”

  I didn’t understand what she wanted me to do.

  “He isn’t doing very well and is really down on himself,” she said. “His injuries aren’t that severe, and I’ve been trying to explain to him that it will get better, but he’s not responding.”

  I thought about it for a while, wondering what, if anything, I could bring to this person. “Sure,” I said. “I’ll do it.”

  Still, the idea of visiting a complete stranger made me nervous. What if I said something wrong that negatively impacted him? Swallowing my unease, I made my way to his room. I put on the sterile garb just outside his door, the same head-to-toe outfit visitors had worn in my room during those first weeks. I took a breath and walked in.

  The room was dark. The blinds were closed, and the lights were off. And it was completely silent. It was as if the patient had already exited this world.

  I approached his bed and introduced myself as a burn patient. And then I just started talking. I told him about my injury and how I’d made it to San Antonio. I told him about my weeks in the ICU and the feelings of despair I’d had there. I told him about my reaction when I first saw my face.

  Since I couldn’t see him, I asked him if his face was burned.

  “Yeah,” he said, “but not a lot.” He was mostly burned on his body—his limbs.

  I used that as a stepping-stone. “Well, you got it made, man,” I told him. “You’ll be able to cover up your burns with long sleeves. My face is hard to cover.” I wasn’t trying to minimize his pain, but I wanted to emphasize the fact that even if you think your situation is severe, there’s always going to be someone who’s got it worse.

  Case in point: About a month after I saw my face, I was looking out into the hallway of 4E. A young man hobbled by my door. His face was almost completely gone. I was stunned. I whirled around and told my mom: “I’ll never complain again.”

  The young man I was visiting had “only” second-degree burns on his arm and face. “You’re going to be fine,” I told him. “Listen, I know your body has changed, too, but the truth is you’re going to heal great. The pinkness will fade away in time, and your scars will heal if you pay attention to the advice the medical team here is giving you. I know this because I’ve already seen improvements in my own appearance.”

  He didn’t say much, so I just kept yammering away. After a while I switched direction, talking about the military, my life growing up, and girls. I told him about my recent visit home and how that trip had made me realize that my life had changed and I had to go with it.

  “You and me, we’re standing in one spot and watching the world move around us. If we don’t want to get left behind, we have to move with it.” For me, that meant I needed to make the best of it until I found a way to make sense of my new body.

  We visited for about forty-five minutes that day. “Can I bring you anything tomorrow?” I asked as I was leaving. “I’ll take a couple of magazines so I can read up on what’s going on in the world,” he said.

  “I’m on it, man,” I replied, and practically skipped to the door.

  As I removed my sterile gear in the hallway, I looked back and saw that he’d turned on the lights above his bed and opened the curtain to his big picture window.

  “Be sure to enjoy the view. You’ve been given a new set of eyes to see it from,” I said.

  I reached for the hand sanitizer, a big smile on my face. I felt great—empowered even.

  When I reported back to the nurse who’d asked me to spend some time with this patient, she said, “See, J.R., I knew you could help him.”

  I walked straight out of the hospital and back to my room in the guesthouse, grabbed the phone, and called my mom.

  “Remember, Mom, how I asked you and everyone else why this had happened to us?”

  Yes, she replied, she remembered.

  “I think I have the answer to the question now. I think I was kept here to help other people with their own difficult experiences.”

  My mom let out a knowing giggle. “I think you’re right, mijo.”

  We hung up and I went right back over to the hospital. I put in a request to speak t
o the head of the burn ward. I thought it was important to obtain clearance from the top.

  “I want to help,” I told him.

  From then on, my daily routine had a new purpose. Every morning, I grabbed breakfast at the hospital and went straight to the fourth floor to eat. Then I’d head out to my morning therapy sessions. After lunch, I’d walk the halls, looking in on patients and asking the nurses who could benefit from a visit.

  My mom told me about an older gentleman, David Jayne, whom she had met during those weeks when she was at my bedside in ICU. Jayne himself had been burned in an Army helicopter fire in 1959 and had spent more than three years recovering in BAMC before returning to duty and then embarking on a second career as an attorney. In 1994 he and his wife, Jane, cofounded the Texas Burn Survivor Society. Once a month, Mr. Jayne walked the halls of BAMC, speaking to burn patients.

  The Jaynes also scheduled a monthly counseling session within the walls of BAMC to which they’d invite ambulatory patients and their families. My mother told me about one of the meetings she’d attended. She told me that Mr. Jayne’s face was severely scarred from his burns, but that I needed to see him with my own eyes and hear his message with my own ears to really get it.

  One night I was allowed to leave my 4E room, and it happened to be a night when the Jaynes were holding their support session. My mom and I attended the group meeting. I took my turn to speak about what had happened to me and the challenges I faced.

  I had felt validated to be able to tell my story and look out at the circle of nodding heads. That experience showed me the power in sharing feelings. If I could go into patients’ rooms and bring this experience to them, catching them early in their recovery, maybe I could reach people at the juncture of optimism and depression and help them choose hope.

  The days flew by. At seven or eight in the evening, I’d begin my walk back to the guesthouse, first stopping by the chow hall in the hospital basement to grab dinner. I got to know many of the cashiers—I ate for free but they still had to tally up my selections—and enjoyed messing with them. I always headed straight for the heart-attack food—grilled-cheese sandwiches, buffalo wings, hamburgers, fries. I suppose that partially explains why I gained so much weight in the hospital. Once in a while I ran into a staff member I knew, and we’d eat together in the cafeteria, but most nights I took my mountains of food and a giant soda back to my room to eat in front of the TV.

  My room was usually freezing cold from the air-conditioning, but that was good for me. The walk from the hospital often caused me to work up a major sweat. Sweat glands are destroyed with deep partial-thickness or full-thickness burns, and they’re not restored once the skin heals. I would always have issues in controlling body temperature, and the Texas heat and humidity added to my discomfort.

  My new undertaking of visiting patients around my own recovery proved to be exhausting. Every evening when I left the hospital and returned to my room, I felt like I’d put in a full day’s work at the plant. But this new routine offered me a purpose and demanded a commitment.

  I liked to get up close to patients, so I could look them in the eyes and they could see my wounds for themselves. Although my facial burns weren’t the worst they could be, the fact remained that I wasn’t able to hide them from the world. I had to display them every single day. I wanted to show these other patients the details of my scars, say to them, in essence, “I’m not afraid to show my face every day, and if I can do it with such visible wounds, you can, too.”

  “Listen,” I’d say to them. “Yeah, we have it hard and it’s tough, but it’s who we are and it’s our job to show the world that we’re not different inside, even though we may look different on the outside.”

  We’d talk about the issues surrounding their daily recovery and anything else going on in their world. They’d asked me questions about my recovery. If they were due for a surgery, they’d ask me about my experience with that procedure. Since I’d had so many, I often was able to speak to them from true experience.

  Visiting patients made me feel good, like I was giving something back. It also served as a great distraction from the grueling and repetitive nature of my day-to-day life in recovery.

  And then I found another way to give back.

  The BAMC public affairs staff asked me to sit for an interview with a local media outlet. The media were clamoring for feel-good stories about the war. The fact that I was visiting other wounded troops qualified me.

  I’d only done a couple of very brief interviews before, and I laugh now to think of my responses to the reporter’s questions: vague and monosyllabic answers, punctuated by lots of “ummmms” and “uhhhhhs.”

  By November, when the CBS newsmagazine 60 Minutes came to town, I was more polished. Public affairs had prepped me for this one, giving me guidelines and talking points. I assured them that I wouldn’t say anything inappropriate. My aim was to stay as positive as I could, and I think I hit the target.

  When Pentagon correspondent David Martin asked me if I noticed people looking at my scars, I said, “Yes, it’s happened a lot. I just say to myself, ‘I know why I look like this, and you don’t.’”

  My face was still red, raw, and puffy, and my head was covered by a blue baseball cap. I’d already been through many surgeries, and I didn’t know what the end result would be. But, I told Martin, “I’ve seen pictures of what things can turn out to be, and to me, it’s amazing. I’m like, ‘Wow, I can be back to what I used to be.’”

  Just after the 60 Minutes interview, and six months after my accident, the Army transferred me back to Fort Campbell. Regardless of my injuries I was still an active-duty soldier, so I was ordered to report to my unit to perform whatever chores I was assigned. The Army believed that the doctors at Blanchfield Army Community Hospital could ably continue my care. They also arranged for me to visit the burn surgeons at Vanderbilt University Medical Center in nearby Nashville so they could perform any plastic surgeries I still needed.

  My responsibilities at the unit usually consisted of answering phones and delivering paperwork. It annoyed me to take orders from people who’d never deployed. I had no one to hang out with because all my friends were still in Iraq. The base was basically deserted, and the few people remaining there were strangers. Every day was a huge bore. I couldn’t wait to hit civilian soil at the end of each day, and luckily I was able to do just that.

  My former sergeant, Chris Valdez—one of the soldiers who had pulled me from the burning Humvee—had a home outside the base. Although he was still overseas with our unit, he and his ex-wife, Hope, invited me to stay at their house with Hope and their young son while I was at Fort Campbell. I was grateful for the offer. Hope made home-cooked meals, I played hard with little Chris, and the three of us went out to eat and to the movies.

  And I was able to go home to Dalton to spend Thanksgiving and Christmas with my mom.

  In the new year, I made it over to Vanderbilt, but the doctors there ultimately decided they couldn’t offer me the care I required. They suggested that it would be medically best for me to return to BAMC to continue treatment with the providers who’d cared for me from the beginning. As my friends in New York would say: Oy vey. I called my social worker at BAMC and told her; within weeks I had orders in hand back to BAMC.

  Before I left to go back to San Antonio in February 2004, my unit returned home to Fort Campbell, nearly a year after we’d boarded the airliner east to Kuwait. It was a day I’d played over in my mind again and again, each time with a common theme: My buddies would all rush toward me with tears in their eyes. There would be lots of man-hugs and backslaps, followed by hours of beers and camaraderie.

  That’s not how it went.

  Although I did hug a few of the guys, tears running down my face, I felt strangely disconnected. My close friends were happy to see me, but they were also greeting their wives and children, parents, girlfriends, and other friends. After a few words with each, I was left standing alone. I managed to feel
, again, that I wasn’t part of the brotherhood. I hadn’t experienced what they’d been through over the last months, and none of them seemed very interested in the details of my recovery.

  I told a group of guys that I’d been awarded the Purple Heart. “Why did you get that?” asked one guy who was a real ass even in the best of times. “Your Humvee didn’t run over a mine. You were hit by friendly fire.”

  I knew that was bullshit, but it still stung that this “brother” would say such a thing to me.

  “A Purple Heart doesn’t matter,” I said. “My story is about what happened to me and how I survived, not about how it happened to me.”

  I walked away from him, ready to get off base, away from these people.

  Even one of my best friends, PJ, didn’t really have time for me; his girlfriend from Nebraska had come to Fort Campbell to welcome him home. I understood—really, I did—but it still hurt.

  PJ and his girlfriend drove me to the Nashville airport for my flight to San Antonio. Once I got through security to my gate and sat to collect my thoughts, I wondered why I’d even gone to the homecoming. It hadn’t done anything for me to see the guys return, and it didn’t do them any good to see me, either. I hadn’t been with them long enough to build a strong bond, and as long as they didn’t have to count me as a KIA, they moved on.

  Back at BAMC, I noticed that other patients received visits from the guys they’d served with. No one visited me. After finally having been sold on the brotherhood, I felt that they had forgotten about me.

  I never once took a step back to consider how the events of April 5, 2003, might also have changed the lives of those young soldiers. In fact, the soldiers who had been directly involved had been recognized for their bravery and sacrifice with Purple Hearts and Army Commendations; O’Shea had received the Soldier’s Medal. In those years after the explosion, though, it was only about me, and it would take a long time for me to see things differently.