{"id":1290,"date":"2016-10-04T10:14:51","date_gmt":"2016-10-04T14:14:51","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/libre\/?p=1290"},"modified":"2017-02-28T15:55:35","modified_gmt":"2017-02-28T20:55:35","slug":"lessons-and-recovery-burn-survivors-tell-their-stories","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/libre\/2016\/10\/04\/lessons-and-recovery-burn-survivors-tell-their-stories\/","title":{"rendered":"Lessons and Recovery: Burn Survivors Tell Their Stories – First Edition with Muji"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Muji<\/a><\/p>\n

Mujahid (\u201cMuji\u201d) Karim recently reached a milestone \u2013 the five-year anniversary of a car accident that has completely changed his life. On August 21, 2011 he was the passenger in a car that lost control and hit a tree. The car exploded on impact and it took four Jaws of Life to get Muji and his brother out of the car that night. He flat-lined three times after the accident and was in a medically induced coma for two weeks. His legs and the fingers on his left hand were amputated due to fourth-degree burns. Muji, who was a Division 1 football player at UNH, faced an unimaginable and arduous transition; he went from being strong, agile, and independent, to learning how to walk again. After six months in the hospital, he was happy to finally be discharged, but he was forced to return multiple times due to health complications. While Muji knew he was lucky to be alive, he was frustrated by the fluctuating nature of the recovery process. Muji observes, \u201cThe setbacks were extreme disappointments for me\u2026 when you see something improving or your body starts to feel a little better, you get confident, and then when you have a setback it sort of erases all the progress you have made both physically and mentally. The setbacks and infections that brought me back to the hospital were a huge detriment to my psyche at the time.\u201d Muji was used to his body being his rock – now his body wasn\u2019t healing as quickly as he wanted.<\/p>\n

The ebbs and flows of physical functioning coupled with the emotional and social ramifications of the injury make recovery after burn injury an extremely complex process.\u00a0 Prior to the accident, Muji recalls being a confident guy. He always believed in himself and did not pay attention to what others thought of him.\u00a0 That sense of self-confidence, however, was hard to maintain after the accident.\u00a0 As Muji notes, \u201cThe problem was that I wasn\u2019t that guy after this, that\u2019s what bothered me more than anything. I cared about the fact that I was limping around and I cared that people were staring at me. I was self-conscious of how my hand or arm looked to other people. And that just wasn\u2019t me at all, that\u2019s what bothered me more than anything.\u201d<\/p>\n

Loneliness and challenges with self-image are common feelings experienced after burn injury, but having a support system can help ease these feelings. \u00a0As Muji recalls, \u201cI kept having these dreams that I wouldn\u2019t have any friends or that nobody would like me or that I was a lost cause.\u201d But his friends stayed by him from the beginning. \u201cThey were asking the nurses all types of crazy questions,\u201d Muji remembers. \u201cIt was them genuinely caring but it was still sort of so foreign to everybody. I grew up playing football with all these guys, playing basketball and doing all these things and then I lost my legs so it was big for them to wrap their minds around. Initially it was whether I was going to live or die so those were the questions they were living with while I was in a coma for two and a half weeks\u2026and it\u2019s not that they didn\u2019t care that I lost half my hand and legs but it\u2019s like he\u2019s still alive and we\u2019ll figure it out from here. That\u2019s what I eventually got to but it took me awhile.\u201d In fact, his friends were almost overly protective of him at first. Muji recalls, \u201cI was always almost sheltered because of my friends. Anywhere we went I was with three or four of them, and these are big guys that I played ball with \u2013 big, big dudes \u2013 and they were always so protective of me.\u201d Muji laughs as he remembered his friends offering to throw him on their shoulders to help him get around. Over time, he regained his independence and was grateful when he realized he was able to do more on his own.<\/p>\n

Muji remembers feeling the love and support from people who had stood by him, but even more vividly he remembers the first time he smiled since the accident. George Pessotti, a burn survivor himself, and a facilitator at the Burn Survivors of New England support group, came to speak with Muji during his hospital stay. George is a warm and funny guy who brings out the best in people around him. He helped Muji believe that he would overcome the challenges he faced after his burn injury.\u00a0 Muji recalls, \u201cYou know, I wasn\u2019t cured by a long shot, but meeting George made me think maybe there\u2019s a chance for me to get through this. He was the first person that I met who was a burn survivor.\u00a0 I remember smiling a bunch when he was there and that was the first time I had smiled in weeks, and anyone who knows me knows that I\u2019m cheesing all the time, so that was a huge milestone for me. As things progressed I started to meet more burn survivors, and then people with amputations, and now most of my friends are either burn survivors or amputees. It\u2019s quite a group to be a part of.\u201d<\/p>\n

Muji was able to get back into his workout routine a few years after his injury. He first got a pair of running blades in September 2014, and he got his sprinting blades in April 2015. \u00a0Out of curiosity, he looked up the qualifying time he would need to try out for the Paralympics team. Less than two years after having his sprinting blades, he ran his first race and qualified for the Paralympics trials. Although he didn\u2019t make the team this year, being able to try out was a great accomplishment. However, this achievement didn\u2019t happen overnight. Muji points out, \u201cMy thing is that I had a lot of issues with being seen in public. I wouldn\u2019t wear shorts, I would cover everything up. It was 90 degrees outside and I got a sweatshirt on. It bothered me a lot that I couldn\u2019t move and do some of the things that I was so accustomed to doing. And then people judging and people looking at you\u2026that took a while for me to be ok with. I\u2019d actually say it took years to be completely ok with.\u201d<\/p>\n

While he recognizes that it is unrealistic to be positive all of the time, throughout his recovery his motto was to focus on the positive. He stays positive by reminding himself that the outcome of the accident could have been much worse.\u00a0 After all, his doctors had only given him a 10% chance of surviving and there were five possible ways he could have died. His equation for positivity is simple \u2013 be positive 51% of the time, or four days out of the week. Muji maintains, \u201cPeople throw it around and say \u2018oh just stay positive\u2019 and I think that helped me because I really started to think \u2018what do I have to be positive about?\u2019 Then the doctor explained to me that there were five ways that I could\u2019ve, and probably should\u2019ve, died that night. So that\u2019s what I held onto for a while. I think a good question to ask yourself is \u2018what do you have to be positive about\u2019 and then it\u2019ll snowball into more and more things.\u201d<\/p>\n

One of those things that keeps Muji positive is his growing family. His fianc\u00e9 gave birth to a little boy in July 2014. His son was born at Brigham & Women\u2019s hospital in Boston, the same place where Muji spent his first two months after the accident. Muji noted, \u201cIt brought everything completely full circle because I had been in that hospital three years earlier dying. I remember the night he was born, I went up to the 8th<\/sup> floor, the ICU unit, and sat and talked to some of the nurses and it brought everything back, just being grateful for the opportunities that I\u2019ve had since.\u201d<\/p>\n

Thank you Muji for contributing your story for the first edition of this series.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Mujahid (\u201cMuji\u201d) Karim recently reached a milestone \u2013 the five-year anniversary of a car accident that has completely changed his life. On August 21, 2011 he was the passenger in a car that lost control and hit a tree. The car exploded on impact and it took four Jaws of Life to get Muji and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10914,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/libre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1290"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/libre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/libre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/libre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/10914"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/libre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1290"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/libre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1290\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1378,"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/libre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1290\/revisions\/1378"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/libre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1290"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/libre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1290"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/libre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1290"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}