Stronger

by Jeff Bauman

  I had told them my name twenty times in the ambulance. They still wrote it down wrong when they admitted me.

  So it was five hours until my family finally arrived at Boston Medical Center and learned what had happened to me. Five hours of trying not to stare at that photograph. Five hours of hearing about me on the news, knowing I was gravely injured, and not being able to find out anything more. In other words, five hours of fear.

  A lot of people in the media were unsettled by the photo. They thought it violated my right to privacy, because I never consented to its use. They thought the uncropped version was too gruesome, even as a chronicle of a major event. After the initial rush, and often during it, most news sources used the cropped version, or they put a black bar over my lower left leg where the bone was exposed. Some, like the website for the Atlantic, showed the whole picture but pixilated my face so I wasn’t recognizable.

  But the graphic image was out there. It was the talk of Boston, and maybe beyond. For the rest of the day, whenever people huddled together to talk about the bombing, they talked about me: “Did you see the man in the wheelchair? The one without his legs?”

  That was the shorthand people used when they wanted to share their horror. In those first hours, that was the image that brought the tragedy home.

  The photograph doesn’t bother me. I wish my family hadn’t found out that way; I wish I was just another anonymous victim. The photo changed my life.

  But that’s the world we live in. A lot of people take pictures of a lot less interesting stuff. There are photos of me standing near the finish line before the bomb went off, and even photos of me on the ground. Charles Krupa, who took the iconic photo, worked for the Associated Press. I’m not upset with him. Why would I be mad at a journalist for doing his job? I’m mad that some kids set off a bomb. I’m mad that I lost my legs, and that a lot of people who have since become my friends lost their legs, too. I’m mad that three people were killed, including an eight-year-old boy.

  But the photograph? It just showed what happened. A bomb exploded. It was packed with nails and ball bearings, which ripped through bodies, tore apart muscles, and shattered bones. It was built for maximum violence, and it worked. People were hurt in ways so horrible that seeing it makes you sick. I’m fine that the world was shocked, because bombing a crowd of innocent people is shocking.

  But that’s not what the photo is about. Not really. It doesn’t show the bomb, and it doesn’t show me being injured. It shows what happened afterward: Brave people rushed in. They saved our lives. Three people died at the scene. But nobody died at the hospital, or on the way to the hospital. Nobody died from bomb wounds over the next few weeks. There were 260 of us injured, and thanks to the bravery of others, we all have a chance to go on: to love and laugh and inspire, just like before.

  That’s why the picture doesn’t bother me. Because it’s not a picture of heartbreak, even though it’s still too painful for me to see. It’s a picture of hope, because the kid without his legs? The one burned and cut and deathly pale? He lived.

  And he’s going to be fine.

  3.

  The one person who didn’t see the photograph, at least at first, was my girlfriend, Erin. When she hugged us on mile 18, she was on her expected pace of nine minutes a mile. That would have put her at the finish line just before the bombing.

  But she started feeling intense knee pain near the top of Heartbreak Hill. For a while she walked, feeling an ice-pick-like stabbing in her knee with every step. She got emotional, she says, at the thought of not finishing the race. She even cried a little. But she kept pushing, until the pain subsided enough for her to jog again.

  Then she ran into a wall at around mile 25, right before the overpass on Beacon Street. I don’t mean a wall of pain, but a wall of runners crammed so tightly together that no one could move forward. Erin thought at first there were just too many people trying to reach the finish line. She thought the race was poorly organized, and she worried about her finishing time. Then the rumors started to filter back from the front.

  The course was closed.

  There had been an explosion.

  No, there had been a bomb.

  The bomb was near the finish line.

  No, it was in the crowd at the finish line.

  Nobody knew how many people had been hurt. No one knew if people had been killed. There was nobody giving out information. Almost every runner had someone waiting for them, but hardly anyone had a cell phone. Who would carry a cell phone while running a marathon?

  Shock started to set in. People were breaking down. The woman beside Erin collapsed; Erin stayed to help her, until a nurse arrived. Then she started to walk. Everyone else did the same: they just walked off the course. She thought of Remy, Michele, and me at the finish line. Her younger sister, Jill, was supposed to meet us there. Erin didn’t know that Jill hadn’t found us.

  For some reason, Erin was especially worried about Remy, her best friend since middle school. She had a bad feeling something had happened to Remy. She didn’t realize she was crying until a nice couple stopped and asked if she was okay. They bought her a bottle of water and let her use their cell phone. She tried Remy, then Michele, then me. No answers.

  She reached her older sister, Gail, who told her two bombs had gone off in the crowd. Her little sister had seen it, but she wasn’t hurt. She was across the street. She had heard Remy was hurt, but she didn’t know anything else.

  Erin started to panic. Something terrible had happened. People had died. Her friends were there—they were there to see her, she had asked them to be there—and at least one of them was hurt. But she couldn’t do anything for her. She had no money, no cell phone, and no way to get home.

  For a while, she wandered, unsure what to do. It was strangely quiet. She tried to walk to her gym, where we had agreed to meet if we missed each other in the crowd, but the road was closed. Cops were blocking the intersections leading downtown. She must have been shivering, because someone gave her a blanket. She walked for a while with a young man about her age, who couldn’t reach his friends, either.

  Someone saw her in her marathon number and yelled, “Congratulations. Way to go!” She realized that people going one way knew what had happened, and many of them were crying, but people coming from the other direction had no idea.

  She stopped outside the Christian Science Center on Massachusetts Avenue. The streets were full of people, but eerily subdued. She thought about walking home, but it was too far. Her office at Brigham and Women’s Hospital was only two miles away, though, and eventually she found herself walking that way. She didn’t get to her office until almost five o’clock, two hours after the bomb went off, and six hours after she started the marathon.

  The hospital was on lockdown, and she didn’t have her identification card. The guards wouldn’t let her in until a colleague finally noticed her. Then Jill arrived; she had walked from the finish line to the hospital, hoping to find Erin.

  They took a cab to Jill’s apartment and started making calls. Erin found out Michele was in emergency surgery, but Remy was stable. She couldn’t find out anything about me. For some reason, she wasn’t worried. She knew we must have been close to the bomb. But if Remy was only injured, she reasoned, I must be fine.

  Her friend Ashley called. “Jeff’s hurt,” she said. “His picture is on the home page of the NPR website right now.”

  Erin went to the website. It was the cropped photo that didn’t show my legs. I think Erin was in shock. Her mind wouldn’t accept that anything terrible had happened. He’s alert, she told herself. That means he’s okay.

  Then Courtney, a friend of Remy’s whom Erin barely knew, called her.

  “Remy’s okay,” Erin told her. “She was near the bomb, and she’s in the hospital, but she’s okay. Michele was hurt, too. I haven’t heard from Jeff, but I’m sure he’s all right.”

  “Jeff’s not all right,” Courtney said. “He lost his legs.”

 
When her sister Gail called a few minutes later, Erin was sobbing. She had seen the uncropped photograph. “They were there for me,” she said. “This is my fault.”

  “It’s not your fault.”

  “I wanted Jeff to be there. I told him it was important to me. Now he has no legs.”

  “It’s not your fault, Erin. Someone evil did this.”

  “You have to find him, Gail. If you find him, you have to call me.”

  Soon after, Big D called and told her I was at Boston Medical Center. Jill’s boyfriend, Alex, drove her to the hospital. Nobody was out. The streets were deserted, except for cops. Erin didn’t know it, but even the bombing site was quiet. The bodies were still on the street—they had to be examined—but everything immaterial was gone. The chief of police, Ed Davis, had learned that lesson at bombing sites in London and Israel: clean up fast. In Israel, buildings were often repaired within hours. It’s a message to the terrorists: You can’t stop us. We will go on.

  To Erin’s surprise, even Boston Medical Center was quiet. The surrounding block was closed; the guard directed her to a house across the street. There were social workers, a table of refreshments, and a checklist of victims. Someone on staff started to tell Erin what had happened to me. She told them to stop; she wanted to wait until my family arrived.

  They’re going to hate me, she thought. This is my fault.

  Eventually, they started calling names of victims. If you were there for that person, you would trek into a side room, where a doctor would explain their condition.

  There were about twenty people there for me, mostly family, when the doctors gave them the news. “He’s alive.”

  Thank God, Erin thought.

  “But we had to amputate both his legs.”

  The air went out of the room. People cried and hugged each other. They hugged Erin. Mom cried on her shoulder. “I’m sorry,” Erin whispered. Nobody else spoke. Not even Uncle Bob, whom you usually can’t pay to shut up. They had seen the photograph, and they’d known it was hopeless, but still they had been hoping.

  The nurses took everyone to the intensive care unit, where I was recovering from surgery. They let Mom and Dad into my room right away. They both have since told me how terrible I looked: black eyes, cuts on my face. Both my eardrums were ruptured, and blood was seeping out of my ears. I had second-degree burns over most of my back, and lesser burns around my right eye. The heat had been so intense that my eyelashes had burned off. I had a breathing tube and bandages, and fluids running into both of my arms. They hated looking at the blanket, where the shape of my body stopped too soon. It was the worst thing they could imagine.

  Until around midnight, when my blood pressure dropped and my body started to swell. The doctors said it was probably internal bleeding, that my organs must have been damaged by the blast. They rushed me into surgery. It was supposed to last an hour, but the procedure dragged, and everyone thought the worst. Why else would an hourlong surgery last two? And then three?

  He must be fighting for his life.

  But he isn’t dead. If he was dead, they would have told us by now.

  Jeff’s a fighter.

  Jeff’s going to make it.

  He would never quit on us.

  Suddenly, losing my legs didn’t seem so devastating. There was something much worse, and everyone was confronting it now.

  Eventually, the doctors gave them the good news: My organs were fine. There was no internal bleeding. My body had been retaining fluid as a result of the blunt force trauma of the bomb blast. They had successfully drained the fluid, and I was recovering. The worst was behind me, the doctors said. I was going to live.

  Everyone started to cry, even my cousin Derek. At least that was what I heard afterward, because I’ve never seen Derek with tears in his eyes, except when the Red Sox won the World Series in 2004. You cried for me, right, Big D?

  “We still have him,” Mom said, hugging the whole room. “We still have him.”

  I don’t know what happened after that, but it was four in the morning, so I assume everyone went to sleep.

  4.

  By Tuesday, Boston had settled into the subdued state it would maintain for the rest of the week. Traffic was light. Conversations were slow. It was as if the city was trying to both process what had happened and respect the magnitude of the event. The night of the bombing three Emerson College students had created blue T-shirts with bright yellow letters on the front: Boston Strong. Already, the idea was starting to spread, but on Tuesday it was still too soon. The bombers had escaped, and as the day wore on, it became increasingly clear the police didn’t know who they were. People weren’t afraid—not in this city—but they were looking over their shoulders and doing double takes at cardboard boxes. A makeshift shrine had started on Copley Square, two blocks from the bombing site. Across the street, people covered a metal fence with running shoes. They tied small strips of cloth to the fence outside Trinity Church as symbols of peace. Within hours, there were hundreds of white strips fluttering in the spring breeze. Three different people told me the same thing: “Nobody honked, Jeff, not the entire week.” In this city, that was a miracle.

  At Boston Medical Center, the mood was different. With no suspects to pursue, the press turned to the victims. There were satellite trucks parked outside and reporters lurking in the lobby. After my second surgery, Erin’s family had taken her back to her apartment to rest, but she had been unable to eat or sleep. She was home for only a few hours before leaving to spend the morning with Michele. The doctors had thought Michele would lose a leg, but they were optimistic emergency surgery had saved it.

  Then she visited Remy, who was being treated for a large shrapnel wound at Faulkner Hospital. By the time Erin arrived at Boston Medical Center, she couldn’t walk. She had run a marathon, walked an extra five miles, and gone a day and a half without eating or sleeping. She was stressed out, traumatized, and racked with guilt. Her body gave out. Her sister Gail and her mom had to carry her up the stairs in the parking garage.

  “Who are you?” the reporters shouted when they saw her limping toward the doors. “Who are you here to see? Can you give us a statement?”

  The intensive care area wasn’t much better. Dozens of victims had been transported to BMC, many in critical condition, and relatives were still arriving from cities outside New England. The ICU was like an airport where all the flights have been canceled, and people are angry and on edge, checking their cell phones, sleeping in corners, or sitting up in chairs. There was kindness and sympathy among the families, a feeling of love brought on by being in this together, but it was edged with suspicion. Although they were not allowed, reporters had infiltrated the lounge in the ICU, so the hospital had started using false names to stop media leaks. I was “X North.” I have no idea why. Most of the other victims were named after cars. Michele, who was at another hospital, was “Porsche.” Porsche!

  Now that’s a secret identity.

  But the leaks kept coming. By then, I had been identified as the “man in the wheelchair with no legs,” and everyone in my family was receiving calls. Even my friends and Erin’s family had been tracked down and asked for a statement.

  My family wasn’t sure what to do. Should they talk about me with the press? Should they talk with the press about themselves? The world had seen the photograph. Did that mean they were entitled to information? Would it be easier to make an official statement? Or had my family already shared enough? Everyone from the Lowell Sun, our local newspaper, to Matt Lauer and Anderson Cooper were calling. Everyone wanted to know how the legless man in the photograph was doing.

  And how was I doing, anyway?

  That was the most troubling question. I hadn’t been conscious since they anesthetized me on the operating table. I had called out for Erin once, in delirium, but otherwise I hadn’t said or done anything. The doctors didn’t know what to expect when I woke up, but they were pretty sure of one thing: I wouldn’t remember what had happened. The blast
had been so concussive, and the trauma to my body so devastating, that even if my memories survived, it would be weeks before my conscious mind could confront them and piece them back together.

  I wouldn’t know I had been in a bombing.

  Which meant I wouldn’t know I had lost my legs.

  Somebody would have to tell me, and neither Mom nor Dad were up for it. Mom was almost catatonic with grief. Whenever she went in my room, her whole body shook with crying. Erin told me she hardly spoke, except to occasionally ask, “How? How could this happen to us?”

  “I don’t know,” Erin would tell her. “But it did. So we have to face it.”

  My dad had swung the other way. He was almost manic: yelling at the nurses, angry at the doctors for not saving my legs. It wasn’t long before he was arguing with Aunt Jenn, who had taken on the role of Mom’s protector and voice, and both of them were expecting Erin to side with them.

  They argued about the media. My dad had granted a few interviews, not so much out of desire to be published, I think, but from an inability to stop talking. Mom wasn’t happy. “Who is he to talk about Jeff?” she said.

  Only my dad, Mom.

  “I think we should keep the drama to a minimum,” Erin said.

  They argued about the donations. Two strangers in Colorado had set up a Facebook page in my honor, and donations were rolling in. Two friends at Costco, Jon and Aubrie Park, had created “Bauman Strong” bracelets and were selling them for $1. They had expected to sell a few hundred, but thousands had already been sold.

  “It’s Jeff’s money,” Erin said, “so it’s his decision what to do with it.”

  They argued about where I would live after I got out of the hospital.

  “He’s not even conscious yet,” Erin said in exasperation. “We need to focus on what Jeff needs now, when he wakes up, not what he needs a month from now.”

  In the end, it was decided that Erin should tell me what had happened. She was the one person I had called out for. Everyone knew how much I cared for and trusted her. And besides, she was the only neutral party.