Page 53 - Dark Matter:Women Witnessing Issue #3 - December 2015

Dark Matter: Women Witnessing - December, 2015 Issue #3 - EXTINCTION / DEVOTION

Her Body is Burning

Mary Sutton*

It is 1991, and my body is burning.

Doctors mark my skin in ink, drawing borders around areas that are hot to the touch. Like

wildfire, infection advances across these boundaries in a matter of hours, sometimes faster. I

am possessed by fever extremes of hot and cold that refuse to be regulated. A river of

antibiotics floods my system, killing good bacteria along with the bad. The boundaries we draw

stop nothing. My tissue swells with poison and turns black as it dies. This is the nature of

necrotizing fasciitis, also known as the flesh-eating bacteria.

Saving my life requires medical experts in infectious diseases, gynecology, plastic surgery and

other specialties.

The only way to stop the infection is to cut it out. Across the entire width of my abdomen, down

through my pelvic region and part of my left leg, metal tools carve into my skin, through the

subcutaneous issue, and remove everything above the fascia, forever changing the landscape

of my body.

***

Two decades later, in 2011, I was doing well at work as a corporate communications

professional, had a loving spouse, and was living a comfortable life. Yet I had the nagging

sense of participating in a sham. My skin felt too tight. I was agitated and uncomfortable. I

wanted to break out of what I was in and enter into... I didn’t know what. I felt there must be

something else, something more.

!"

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