It's What I Do: A Photographer's Life of Love and War

For three days Paul struggled to get a visa to Pakistan. Under normal circumstances, that could take weeks for a journalist. To make matters worse, the accident happened on a Friday afternoon. He somehow persuaded the ambassador to open the consulate over the weekend to issue him a visa. In the interim Dexter and Ivan rotated shifts in my room. The Pakistani staff was thoroughly confused by their presence—women in Pakistan didn’t usually have men who weren’t husbands or family members in their room—so I told everyone that Dexter and Ivan were my brothers.

 

There were other problems. The first night, a handful of male nurses arrived at my bedside at about one in the morning, ready to take me for an MRI or a CT scan. In lieu of a rolling stretcher they grabbed the edges of the sheet from my hospital bed and picked me up in the sheet, jamming together the shattered bones of my collarbone and chafing the open wounds on my back where I had lost layers of skin. I screamed bloody murder while Dex yelled at them to be careful, as they shifted me from the sheet to a rolling stretcher. They ushered me down the hall onto an elevator and down to a basement room, where I was placed on a table at the entrance to a monstrous, tunnel-like machine. I drifted in and out of consciousness as I waited for the mysterious scan to begin. Nothing. What seemed like hours passed, with no progress, when I turned to Dex to ask what was happening. He turned to the male nurses and said, “Dudes, what is taking so long?”

 

The men stood over me awkwardly, and one cocked his head as he offered up: “Madam has metal.”

 

Dex was confused. He turned to me: “Dude, do you have metal on you?”

 

I still had my underwire bra on. No one had dared to remove my clothes since I had arrived at the hospital. My rust-colored salwar kameez was still stuck to the open wounds on my back, and my bra was still fastened around my chest.

 

“Dex, I have a bra on.”

 

“Well, take it off.”

 

“I can’t take it off. I can’t move my arms. You take it off.”

 

The Pakistani nurses were completely riveted.

 

“I can’t take your bra off. Paul will kill me.”

 

“Dex. You are fifty years old. You have seen tits before. Take my bra off!”

 

The poor nurses were confused again.

 

“It’s a simple bra with a front clasp,” I explained to Dex.

 

He nodded, and I passed out again.

 

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THE SCANS FROM SHIFA Hospital revealed no internal bleeding and no damage to my head. I had a smashed collarbone; loss of skin on my back, arms, and hands; two sprained ankles and possibly sprained ribs. I felt as if I had been thrown into a washing machine on the spin cycle. Every three hours a nurse would come into my room and administer morphine directly into my veins. With each injection my body felt as if it were sinking into a warm bath and then rising up to float through the room, weightless and painless.

 

In a rare window of lucidity, I started looking through my e-mails and asked Dex to bring in my computer so I could download and look through my pictures from the refugee camps. I wanted to file a selection of images from my hospital bed and get them published in the paper, as if somehow this horrific day would have been justified by our work. Or maybe I was so accustomed to filing at the end of a long, exhausting day on a breaking-news story; I had once filed under fire in Fallujah from beneath the protection of a Humvee. The instinct to file the images from the camps before they got outdated was automatic.

 

Paul arrived in my hospital room on a Monday morning, clipboard in hand, in the midst of one of my doped-up hazes. I remember seeing him and his concerned but reassuring face and knowing everything would be OK. And I knew the nurses would be relieved to finally see my fiancé by my bedside to replace my questionable “brothers.”

 

 

 

 

 

The day before I left the hospital, the Turkish ambassador arrived at my bedside with a posse of diplomats and offered Paul and me a place to stay in the Turkish Embassy in Islamabad once I was released. The nurses continued watching the flurry of activity in and out of my room with curiosity. Almost immediately after the ambassador left, another set of visitors arrived: Haleem, my sympathetic-to-the-Taliban interpreter from the “Talibanistan” story the year before, along with one of his cousins. I was mortified that my hair was uncovered and I was wearing a hospital gown with skin exposed in front of two deeply religious men. Each visitor had a very long beard and wore an ankle-length kurta, a loose-fitting collarless shirt. Haleem toted a bag of hand-picked oranges, and Paul invited him and his cousin to sit down.

 

I thanked them for coming. “How are you, Haleem?” I asked.

 

“Well. We are fine,” he said, “though my cousin’s house was hit by a drone yesterday . . .”

 

Life in Pakistan went on.

 

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