A FEW DAYS LATER Paul and I flew back to Istanbul, and on May 19, 2009, I had a titanium plate put in my shoulder. I was completely unprepared for the post-op misery. I only wanted to be healthy again, to be able to walk down the aisle at our wedding in six weeks.
Night after night I woke up screaming and weeping with daggerlike pains shooting through my shoulder and chest. For the first time in my life I was injured; I could not take care of myself, and I realized how long I had taken my independence for granted. The simplest tasks became impossible without the use of my left shoulder and arm: I couldn’t bathe, I couldn’t put on my own bra, and I couldn’t fully dress myself. In the weeks leading up to our wedding, Paul spent every morning before work walking me to the shower, washing my body, toweling me off, putting on my underwear, clasping my bra, dressing me, and preparing whatever I needed for the day while he was off at work. I knew that seeing me so fragile and vulnerable was taking a toll on him emotionally, wearing him down. He was taking care of me, running a hectic news bureau, and planning our entire wedding—alone. I had never relied on someone so completely before, and I felt guilty for being so helpless. Paul’s determination to nurse me back to health was humbling.
Only once did he allow his own suffering to show. He was sitting at the desk in our living room, looking at his laptop, and suddenly he started to cry. He had received an e-mail from Bill Keller, the executive editor of the New York Times, who wrote to say how relieved he was that I was OK. Keller’s simple words broke something in Paul. I could hardly bear to see it.
I spent the end of May and the beginning of June lying on my back, sleeping, or watching the cargo ships float along the Bosporus outside my window until Paul came home from work. My attention span wasn’t focused enough to help him with our wedding planning, to read a book, or to watch a movie. I tried working at my computer, but the pain was often so excruciating that I couldn’t sit up. I couldn’t work or go on assignment, and I couldn’t earn money. It was the first time I couldn’t rely on determination, physical endurance—or myself—to do anything.
Some weeks later I was well enough to have lunch with my Istanbul friends Jason and Suzy. Jason looked concerned. “When are you going to just stop all this war zone stuff?” he finally said. “Why not get pregnant?”
It was a valid question but a deeply private and anxiety-inducing one. I didn’t want to discuss it over lunch with friends when I was still physically and emotionally fragile. The suggestion that my work had become too dangerous, or that somehow getting pregnant was an adequate replacement for photography, struck chords deep down in me about my work, my life, and how I chose to balance the two—especially as I approached my wedding date. The car accident in Pakistan was just one more example of me walking away from a near-death incident relatively unscathed, and each time I survived I knew my luck wouldn’t last forever. Paul, like my parents and sisters, never asked me to stop working; he never asked me to tone down my life or shy away from risk. He knew better than to ask me to change, or to compromise what I believed in. But every traumatic incident inspired inner dialogue that I wasn’t necessarily ready to confront, and in this case it was especially easy to chalk the accident up to chance: It was just a car accident! That could happen anywhere! I talked things through with Paul, updated my will, and moved forward.
But I got angry when my friends challenged a resolve that was already often painful to maintain. As I moved out of my twenties and into my thirties, my friends’ advice evolved from “stop running around war zones” to “stop running around war zones and get pregnant.” It was even more infuriating. In my early twenties my response was simple: “I don’t have a man. And I prefer to be doing exactly what I am doing.” Since Paul and I had gotten engaged, however, he had talked repeatedly about his desire for a family. I knew I wanted a family eventually, but I was finally at the height of my career, shooting all the assignments I had dreamed of shooting, for some of the best publications in the world. The last thing I wanted was to interrupt that momentum for a baby that I wasn’t yearning for at that point in my life. Unlike many of my female friends in their midthirties, I was definitely not sensing my biological clock ticking; in fact, I often wondered if I had been born without one.
And I couldn’t just have a baby and go back to Afghanistan. If I took a month off, I was likely to be replaced by one of the other, say, two hundred freelancers vying to get my assignments. If I took six months off to have a baby, I believed I would be written off by my editors. I was in a man’s profession. I couldn’t think of a single female photojournalist who was married or had a child. If Jason didn’t think I struggled with all this, he was wrong.