“I was sent here in case you guys needed an extra pair of hands,” I said, looking at the two coworkers who were confused by my presence. Then I smiled sheepishly and held up my hands as I added, “Well, one and a half.”
The comment was meant to be a joke, since my left hand has only three toe fingers, but my coworker, Sandy, wasn’t laughing. “Stop it,” she ordered, giving me a firm look.
I understood what Sandy was saying, but, really, joking about my bad hand was a defense mechanism. It was just one way of recognizing that my hand was different from others. At thirty-something, and after having this hand for over twenty years, my attitude towards this burned and “mutated” hand was just my way of dealing with the way my body is built, just without the drama.
But it wasn’t always this way. There used to be the drama. A lot of it.
My left hand suffered the worst injury from the car accident I had survived as a baby. I was twenty months old when a van hit my mother, who was carrying me, and I was thrown from her arms and left under the burning van. This burning van is how I ended up with the third-degree burns covering my left arm, my left side, and the left side of my head. This burning van’s fire severely damaged the fingers on my left hand. It also burned up my left ear and I permanently lost some hair on my head.
I lost my ear in that accident and my mother lost her left lower leg.
Thankfully, firefighters saved me from the flames, something I am grateful for to this day.
It took a long time for me to appreciate their efforts, though.
Growing up with burn scars wasn’t easy. I had to endure the typical bullying that a lot of kids went through in elementary school, but being burned made it worse. Kids called me a freak and, because I had suffered a head injury that had me in a coma for three months after the accident, many assumed I was stupid. I did have to learn how to do everything all over again after I came out of the coma – like learning to walk, being potty trained and learning how to feed myself – but at that point, when I was in school, I didn’t see myself as stupid. I got a lot of “As” and won awards. Still, kids treated me badly, and it hurt a lot.
The trauma of being bullied stuck with me for years. Then I had to endure it again online after I became a writer and some troll decided to take issue with the face that was in my picture.
I did eventually get over the trauma and learned to accept myself not as a burn victim, but as a burn survivor. Thanks to a lot of love and acceptance from my parents and most of my siblings, along with therapy, I started to accept my burned body and love myself for being the survivor that I was. The flames had tried to end my life and they did not succeed. I realized it was something to be proud of.
With my hand, however, it was a different story.
The fingers on my left hand were so severely damaged from the fire that they had to be amputated. All I had left was a tiny piece of thumb the surgeon mercifully left alone. Many years later, my doctor, Harry J. Buncke, performed a toe-to-thumb transplant on my left hand. This placed one toe from my right foot where my thumb had been. Later on, he added two more toes from my left foot on the opposite side of this thumb. I had to go through years of physical therapy to learn how to use my new hand.
At the time that my parents discussed this surgery with me, they wanted to know if I was certain that I wanted to go through with it. I told them that I was. I wanted to have this new kind of hand, and not some robotic hand replacement or an artificial hand. I wanted to have my real hand, and if I couldn’t have real fingers again, I was satisfied to at least have toe fingers.
Unlike the burn scars on my body, this new hand was easier for me to accept. I liked it because it was different, and not everybody had a hand like mine.
Unfortunately, an incident several years later almost ruined how I perceived my unusual left hand.
This incident took place when my firstborn was in elementary school. He got into a fight with another kid who taunted him, “Your mother chopped her fingers off of her hand.” While most parents would scold their kids for getting into fights at school, I was actually proud of him for standing up for me.
Still, I was also disheartened. It pained me to know that my unusual hand was something kids would use against my own kids to tease and ridicule them.
Thankfully, though, that was the only time it happened. The school immediately jumped into action, holding sensitivity talks with students and discussing the matter with the boy and his family. The boy even wrote a letter to me apologizing for what he said, which brought tears of gratitude and appreciation to my eyes. Because of these actions, I no longer worried that kids at schools would use my hand as a way to hurt my kids.
My unusual left hand was something I took pride in, as difficult as it made my attempts to do things like type or, these days, text on my smartphone. But I am still glad I have it and I have never regretted the decision to have that surgery.
Because of the surgery, it wasn’t just my left hand that was different; my feet were now also different! Toes had been removed from both feet and it was because of these toe removals that the remaining little toes on my left foot turned sideways.
That’s right: I have two small toes on my left foot that are completely turned sideways.
I was self-conscious about this for a long time, though. Being a kid who wanted to be accepted by others, I didn’t want other kids to see my feet. I was worried it would only add to the teasing.
After many years, though, it didn’t bother me anymore. I started to feel proud of having different feet. I called them my “alien feet” and I always laugh anytime someone looks at my strange feet with only seven toes in shock. (I have eight fingers and seven toes!)
As to what happened after losing my ear? The brilliant surgeons at the Grossman Burn Center had a plan: Use cartilage from my rib to create a replacement! They did their best to shape that cartilage into an ear and placed it where I had lost my real one. It, too, is an ear unlike everybody else’s and, unlike my feet, I had no problem showing it to everyone. Of course, this meant I got my fair share of looks of disgust (even from college classmates!) and kids saying I looked gross. I would always just shrug that off, though I had to admit that it hurt when a college crush got a good look at the left side of my head and responded with, “Ew.”
I guess that set me on a downward spiral of hating my burned and broken body. Quietly, I accepted my strange feet and strange hand, but all of those years of being bullied, facing disgusted looks, being rejected by boys I had a crush on and wary reactions from adults about my appearance caused me to fall into a deep depression over how the burn scars set me apart from everybody else. There were so many times I wished I had two normal hands like everybody else and a normal face like everybody else. I didn’t have these things and I felt like such an outcast because of how negatively my burn scars impacted how people treated me.
I had burns on my body. It was the one big sadness that I lived with for a long time. Just as losing my hearing at age 13 threw me into a deep depression, being burned also left me severely depressed for many years. It was the hardest when I was a kid; I cried over how kids called me a freak. It was harder as a young adult being rejected by so many and dealing with people reacting negatively to my face.
When I was nineteen and feeling extremely discouraged over being rejected yet again, I tried to end my life, thinking no one would ever love me for who I was.
Someone did come into my life not long after that, someone who did love me despite my burn scars. He is still with me over twenty years later.
Unfortunately, I developed a drinking problem, and I think it created a rift between us. It even got to the point where he was no longer intimate with me. Of course, I blamed the burns.
My drinking problem escalated as the years passed on. More hurts came into my life and the more they piled up, the more I started hating myself. I hated being this person who was burned and deaf. There were many times I often thought I was just a waste of space. I pretty much figured that maybe I should not have survived that accident after all.
Then, one evening, I experienced severe chest and back pains. My oldest, who was almost at the time, called 911. I was carted off in an ambulance and at the hospital, I was diagnosed with alcohol-induced pancreatitis. I was put on a 72-hour fast and kept in the hospital for observation.
I like to say that I came out of that hospital a brand new person, and it’s true. I did a lot of soul-searching while I was in the hospital. I received counseling, was seen by social services, and I had a lot of love and support from my family. All of this helped me to realize that maybe I should stick around. Maybe being alive was better than being dead. I had a lot of guilt over what I had done to my kids – with the youngest being almost 10 – and this guilt made me realize how much I had hurt them. I made a promise to never put them through that again.
And today, nearly six years later, I have kept that promise. Not only did that experience help me to finally get sober for good, but it really opened my eyes to see that I was someone worth saving.
More than that, I was someone worth loving. Not just receiving love from others, but loving myself most of all.
This self-love grew stronger as I recovered from the illness. I was very weak both mentally and physically. I had to build my strength back up, and that included my strength in fighting against the temptation to drink again. It was in all the work that I put in in changing my lifestyle, my mindset and habits that allowed me to experience just how valuable of a person I truly am.
In taking care of myself and healing myself, I learned how to love myself and keep that love strong no matter what. Part of that self-love meant staying away from self-destructive habits like drinking alcohol, self-loathing, negativity and living in the past – all variables that kept me prisoner to my addiction.
In loving myself, I accepted myself, even if other people did not love or accept me. I no longer needed their love or acceptance, because now I already had that for myself. And that is all that matters.
I finally realized that I was not defined by how I looked, but how I lived, and how I treated others. Just because I looked bad on the outside, it didn’t mean that I was bad on the inside. I had to prove that with my actions and by the life that I chose to live.
Finally, after over thirty years of living with these burn scars, I started to love myself for who I was and not how I looked.
Of course, I have friends who love me and accept me even though I am burned. They never judged me for it, and they were always so incredibly supportive. Their friendship meant everything to me, and to this day I am grateful for it.
But what I needed in order to love myself was to see myself for the good person that I could be, even if a lot of people saw me as “bad.” I no longer worry about the people who don’t accept me because of how I look; I think it’s more important to just focus on the people who do.
That love I found for myself remains strong. Even now, as kids stare in alarm or other people move away from me with a look of disgust on their face, I am happy to just be me. I am happy to be alive and to be able to do things for others. Perhaps the biggest service I can do for others is to help other burn survivors out there know that they are beautiful and loved. Hopefully, it will happen.
I have learned that having burn scars on your face should not mean hiding away from the world, but actually to be an even bigger part of it. Let everyone see your beautiful face! Let everyone know that, yes, you survived the flames. You LIVED! And because of this, we, the burned, have a bigger reason to show our faces to the world. Whether the world accepts us or not, we owe it to ourselves to live life and do for others. Just like everybody else.
As for my left hand, I eventually started to notice that it was not as unusual as I had originally thought. I recently saw someone else who had three fingers on their left hand like I do, and I wanted to cheer because perhaps the more of us there are, the stronger the possibility that more people will accept us. Our three-fingered hands won’t be seen as objects of disgust or teasing. Hopefully, it can be seen as what makes us even more unique.
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Dawn Colclasure is a Deaf burn survivor living in Oregon. She has authored many books, among them the semi-autobiographical poetry collection, Touched by Fire. She is currently writing a book about her experiences in trying to find her place in the working world. She is also a freelance writer, ghostwriter and book reviewer. Her websites are at https://dawnsbooks.com/ and https://www.dmcwriter.com/ Her Twitter: @dawncolclasure
© 2023, Dawn Colclasure
Halfway Down the Stairs 
What a powerful story!
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