Chapter 3: She wakes

The first full day Stephanie can remember is Halloween. There were nurses in costumes, a date written on a whiteboard in her room.

Mostly there was pain, the kind of pain that made everything blurry. The new skin on her arms and legs was so tight that it felt like her limbs had been dipped in plaster. Her body felt like it was burning still. A tube in her throat kept her from talking. She couldn't move her neck or her hands.

She woke and wished she hadn't.

In her room, her sister Page and her mother held up an emotion chart - long rows of faces: happy, sad, angry, confused.

"Pick the ones that you are feeling," said Page. Ten years older, she had always watched over Stephanie.

Stephanie blinked when Page pointed to frustration and pain.

Her mother and Page told Stephanie that they loved her. They told her Christian was OK, recovering at physical therapy. They told her about Doug.

From Aug. 16 to Oct. 31, Stephanie remembered only the moment that the doctors cut off her hair. It had taken years to grow past her shoulders. Even deep in a coma, she could hear the razor buzzing.

The hours faded in and out. Still heavily medicated, Stephanie dreamed of a Halloween party, of chocolate doughnuts on the ceiling. She woke and found Christian next to her, his eyes locked on her own.

Her eyes were the only familiar things about her.

For days, Stephanie stared down at her legs, confused, wondering why the nurses dressed her in weird tights swirled with purple, black and pink. She thought it was strange that they had her wear the tights even in the bath.

One day she realized that she was looking at her new skin. Even her arms were a swirl of purples and angry pink, patterned like snakeskin where scars grew up between perforated skin grafts.

"If my arms and legs look like that, then what does my face look like?" she wondered.

She didn't want the answer.

She wouldn't let anyone tell her.

Doctors removed the tube in her throat so she could talk. She didn't know what to say.

"I feel so stupid," she said over and over again.

Her family tried to talk about her children instead.

Page told her about Claire's birthday, how the kids climbed up the mountain to the Y. The trees were red and gold.

"We had a big party," Page said. "The kids are going to your old school. They walk to class with their cousins. They love it."

Her children sounded happy.

"They don't need me," Stephanie thought. "I could go and it would be just fine."

Late at night, when her family had gone, guilt came in.

"Why did I do that?" she wondered. "Why did I think that Christian and I could just hop on an airplane and leave the most important things behind, just for a fun time?"

She missed Claire's seventh birthday, Nicholas' second, missed the kids dressed up on Halloween.

The thought of seeing them again brought panic.

"I don't want them to know me like this," she thought.

She didn't want to explain how long it would take to get better, or if she ever would. She didn't know any of the answers. She didn't have comfort to give.

She wished she hadn't lived. On the most painful days, the wish turned into prayers she said out loud.

"Please, Heavenly Father, please just let me die."

The only thing she could do, Stephanie thought, was keep the children far from all of this.

Her sisters left the children in Utah and came to visit alone.

Courtney told Stephanie about the fundraising, the well-wishing, the mail. More than 40,000 people were visiting Courtney's blog every day to read about Stephanie.

Stephanie shook her head in disbelief.

Lucy had news, too.

She bent and whispered in Stephanie's ear.

"I'm pregnant," Lucy said.

Stephanie tried to show joy. She knew how Lucy yearned for children.

But that word - pregnant - made Stephanie feel hollow.

She wanted more babies, too. Her mother had nine, and Christian was one of 11. They always said they'd meet in the middle: 10 kids.

Stephanie was afraid to ask the doctors if the fire had taken that from her, too.

Her sisters changed the subject.

Stephanie wanted only to talk about going home to Provo, to her family.

She had asked to be transferred to a Utah hospital, and doctors prepared her to go. There was more surgery and therapy and her first shaky steps, leaning hard on nurses and a walker, Page's hand on hers.

Just before Thanksgiving, the transfer came through: a room was ready at the University of Utah Hospital in Salt Lake City, about an hour's drive from her family in Provo.

Nurses wheeled Stephanie's hospital bed to the airplane, and the crew loaded her onboard. Christian and Page got in with her. Stephanie braced for the sounds of the plane's engine, for the slow climb to the sky.

She had been in surgery 15 times. Her medical bills topped $7.5 million

And yet, during the flight, she and Christian talked hopefully about someday.

Christian told her about a man, burned like Stephanie, who water-skied on the first anniversary of his accident, a sort of defiance against what had happened. Christian wondered aloud what Stephanie might do.

Walking felt impossible enough, she thought.

The plane broke through the clouds above Salt Lake City.

Out her window, Stephanie could see the Wasatch Range of the Rocky Mountains cradling the city below. The peaks met the clouds. The purple-gray slopes were frosted with snow, hinting at the winter to come.

* * *

Gravel crunches in a steady rhythm beneath Stephanie's feet - 15 minutes of hiking and no stopping.

Grasshoppers leap across the trail.

Oliver walks back toward Stephanie.

He wants to be carried.

"Daddy's gonna have to get you," Stephanie tells her son.

It hurts her to turn him away.

Read Stephanie Nielson - Chapter 4: In the mirror >>