Sixteen Years I Didn’t Speak to My Mother. Then I Went Missing, and From Her Sickbed She Said “Go Find Her”

Years before, in a community sealed off after a hurricane, with the wounded piling up and the supplies gone, I had watched Dr.

Okafor use an old, legitimate medical technique — one that hospitals do use, under careful and controlled conditions, with specially prepared, medical-grade material, to clean dead tissue out of certain wounds when nothing else is available.

I had watched, and I had understood the principle, and I had filed it away the way you file everything in that work, never dreaming it was a thing I would one day consider using on my own body in a truck sinking into a swamp.

I am not going to describe what I did.