Now, I’m not 100% sure when exactly this particular flashback occured. I believe I was 1 and a half years old. Do 1 and half year olds walk and run around? Maybe I was 2.
It was in the bedroom where my brother, my grandmother, and I slept. It was at the end of the hall, on the left side. When you walk out of the bedroom, the left was the washroom, and if you walk down the hall, to your right, you’ll pass my parents room, and then you’ll meet the living room. Then it was the kitchen, which was divided from the living room by a wall, which you could go around, and enter the kitchen/living room from either side. If you wanted, you could run around in circles, into the living room, into the kitchen, and back into the living room, which I probably did often.
I was laughing and playing with my brother. He was chasing me around and tickling me, and I had run around to the left side of the bed. Oh no. I was trapped. You see, the left side of the bed was lined up to the wall. I did the equivalent of running upstairs when an axe murderer enters your home.
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This is where my memory ends. All memories after this point were not my own, but a compilation of what my parents and my brother have told me.
This is a signicant memory, not really because it is my earliest memory, but rather, because of how the rest of the memory (compiled from my family) unfolds.
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I manage to get away from my brother, and his tickles. I’m sprinting down the hallway, past my parent’s room, past the living room and I turn the corner into the kitchen. In the kitchen my grandmother is making tofu, despite my mother’s request for her to not make it, because of all the work and mess it entails.
The process of making tofu, or bean curd, requires large amounts of hot water. Enough water, that you would use a kimchi bowl to contain said water. A kimchi bowl is used to make kimchi. It is stainless steel and about twice the size of the average baby bathtub.
So I turn the corner into the kitchen, where my grandmother is making tofu. On the floor is a kimchi bowl. In it, near-boiling water which my grandmother had been preparing in multiple pots on the stove.
Severe burns on my stomach, and thighs. 6 months at Sick Children’s hospital.
I can’t imagine the horror my mother felt has she hauled me to the washroom to douse me in salt to sooth my wounds. My mom tells me about how much she cried and cried. She stills gets watery eyes when she talks about it. And she tells me she feels guilty for spiting my grandma for having made tofu that night. My grandmother spent many nights apparently, sleeping next to me in the hospital room. I can’t imagine how guilty she could’ve felt. Emotions that extreme are unimaginable. Incomprehensible.
I can’t imagine the horror my brother felt as he watched me fall in. He tells me he kneeled in the living room and prayed. He also told me how he’d come to the hospital, but wasn’t allowed into the room to see me. But he’d wait at the door looking in through the window trying to get my attention. And when he, did he’d make funny faces to try to make me laugh. He told me that when he did that, some nurses laughed, and he got a little embrassed.
When I finally did get home, at night, when I slept, I had to wear tight clothes to prevent me from scratching the wounds which would get itchy. My brother apparently would wake up, and rub my tummy to soothe my itchiness when I was awoken by it, to help me fall back asleep.
Up until I was 13 or so, I had to make trips back to the hospital so they could monitor my healing. First it was every week, than 2 weeks, then month, 2 months, 6 months, a year, 2 years, till eventually I didn’t have to go anymore. I remmeber the very last time I went, when I was 13 or so, I caught a glimpse of some photos of me from 10 (or so) years earlier.
I was so small. I was sitting on a bed or something. I can’t remember if I was naked. There was an IV in my ankle. I was so small, they couldn’t put the IV drip in my wrist. I have frankenstein-like stitch marks on my inner left ankle still. My wounds were a bright, piercing, red. In one photo, I have my hands above my head so they could, I presume, get a better angle of the wounds.
My mom tells me she was embarassed about what the doctor’s might’ve thought about her as a mother. To have let something horrible like that happen to her child. I can’t imagine what the photographer might have felt.
To this day, when my mom makes Kimchi, she asks me to go downstairs to get the Kimchi-bowl from the cold room. I was always walk up the stairs with it, holding it sideways and tapping it like a gong. My Dad always tells me to stop. It doesn’t usually cross my mind that I nearly died in that bowl.
According to my Mom, the doctor said that had my belly button or penis been scalded, I would’nt have lived. Thank goodness for plastic diapers in all their waterproof glory.
February 20th, 2006 | Flashback | 4 comments