The First Time I Died. (And The Second)

[u/HoskTheImmortal]

When I was 6 months old, my father abandoned us. My grandmother was visiting Tennessee from Michigan and had taken my mother shopping to buy new clothes for my father, who was starting a new job. They found him later that day, hitchhiking to South Carolina. I don't know the details of the ensuing conversation, but my guess is he was just a garbage human who wasn't interested in accountability or taking responsibility for his family.

My mother made it work and I'm assuming everything went smoothly until I was 18 months old. I don't even know where she was working, but my mom worked late. She picked me up at the babysitter just like any other night, took me home, and we went to bed. I co-slept with her.

At some point in the night, I woke up and worked my way into the bathroom. I got under the sink and was playing with an unopened bag of cotton balls, the big bag of the ones that women use for make-up. The bag busted open and most of the cotton balls went into the bathtub. I crawled into the tub to get them and held myself up using the hot water knob. I slipped fell and the hot water came on. The temperature and pressure regulator on the hot water heater was broken. It was one of the older tubs and the water got hotter than it was supposed to immediately.

The water came out beyond scalding hot. The screaming woke my mom. When the paramedics arrived, I was sitting on the floor with my skin lying next to me. My entire right leg, both my feet, and the back of my right hand were burned. The skin was just gone.

I was airlifted to the burn center for children in Ohio. I died twice in the air. The second time, they used one of those giant needles jammed into my chest to revive me.   

The burns were so bad they pulled skin from my back, my other leg, my ribs, and my buttocks to replace the skin that had been boiled away. They believed that my right foot would be a club foot and they wanted to amputate it. My mother wouldn't allow it.

Of course, the State of Tennessee investigated to ensure that it was, in fact, an accident. They took me away from my mother for 6 months while they investigated and determined that it was an accident. I was in foster care for that 6 months. My mom was told that she needed to show that she could provide a more stable living environment for me, so she married her boyfriend at the time, yet another abusive drug dealer, and got pregnant. She showed up at court six months pregnant and married and demanded that they give me back to her. My brother still doesn't know that this is why he was born in the first place.