Acid victim diarises her road to recovery
in acid while on a trip to Zanzibar, Katie chronicled her five-year road to recovery in a moving diary
IT WAS their last week of a dream trip to Zanzibar and the two teens were walking through the warm dusk air on their way to a restaurant, enjoying the quiet of empty streets as people observed the last night of Ramadaan. Suddenly a silver moped carrying two men appeared from nowhere. As they drove past, one of the men hurled a jerrycan full of liquid over them then sped away.
“I thought initially it was boiling hot coffee,” Katie Gee recalls. “But then the pain kept getting worse and worse.”
“We yelled, almost in unison, ‘What the f**k?’,” says her best friend, Kirsti Trup.
“We felt our flesh being seared. Our screams were so loud they could be heard by people at the hotel several minutes’ walk away. My entire upper body was burning, especially my right shoulder and torso.”
The girls had been doused in battery acid and life as they knew it changed forever. Katie and Kirsti (both 18 at the time) had been working as volunteers at a charity art programme on the popular tourist island off the east coast of Africa. The following week they were due to fly home to start university in the UK.
Instead a long, painful road to recovery began.
Kirsti had to have a skin graft on her arm, back and shoulder and wasn’t allowed to sit in the sun for a year. But it was Katie who bore the brunt of the assault, with burns covering the entire right side of her body and face.
She had to have 70 operations and countless skin grafts. Her right ear was so badly damaged she describes it as “looking like a lump of charcoal” and it had to be rebuilt using cartilage from her rib.
Yet her recovery over the past five years has been nothing short of miraculous. Now 23, she says she’s missed out on “basic joys such as being out in the sunshine, wearing make-up and going clubbing”, but is looking forward to the future.
“For me, normal is quite exciting,” she writes in her diary. “I’m feeling incredibly positive. I still have to look at my scars every day, but they’re a part of me now and I’ll never be ashamed of them.”
Katie lives in Hampstead, North London, with her parents and two brothers, and graduated from Nottingham University last year with a degree in sociology. She’s about to start a graduate traineeship in corporate property and “has a lot to look forward to”.
But it’s been a long, lonely path to get to this point.
FOR five years Katie has kept a diary chronicling her recovery. In one extract recently published by the UK’s Mail on Sunday she recalls life in hospital following the attack in August 2013.
“There are no mirrors in the fifth-floor burns unit at the Chelsea and WestDoused
minster Hospital [in London] because patients like me can get distressed,” she writes.
“I can’t see anything out of my right eye. But using my left, I’ve been looking at my face in the selfie mode of my phone and at my reflection in the metal trim of the shower.
“Consultant plastic surgeon Andy Williams is brutally honest: I have 35% burns and will need years of treatment. He says he won’t give up on me though. He’ll try to get me as close as possible to the person I was before.”
Doctors said she would have been blind if she hadn’t instinctively blinked when the acid was thrown.
Bystanders tried to help by throwing water on them and they were taken to a nearby hospital before flying back to London.
In a diary entry dated September 2013 Katie talks about leaving hospital for the first time.
“Mom is given a list of things to do if a wound opens or something starts bleeding. I’m surprised to find my bedroom filled like a florist’s shop, and there’s a card from Prime Minister David Cameron, saying, ‘We’re going to do everything we can’.”
A month later she was fitted for a plastic mask which she had to wear for two and a half years to help her scars “flatten”.
“Wearing it is as horrible as it sounds: it’s unnatural, so restrictive, and the pressure of the straps gives me migraines,” she writes.
She hated wearing it in public as it made her feel ugly and different. “I just want to smash it on the floor, but I don’t because it took a month to make . . . If I have to go out in it I wear a thick, woolly hat and scarf.”
In addition to having three physiotherapy sessions a day she had to wear a compression suit made from a neoprenelike material. “It comprises a tight black top, leggings and a glove, rather like a catsuit overall, so not a complete fashion disaster, but it’s so hot to wear, especially at night,” she writes.
In December 2014 she talks about her longed-for nose surgery – in which surgeons built up her nose using cartilage from her ribs – as well as an eyebrow graft.
“[The doctor] takes a chunk of skin from the back of my head and then With her best friend, Kirsti Trup, before the accident that irrevocably changed their lives. painstakingly applies each hair in a 10-hour operation. The hairs still grow, but plucking is a bad idea . . .”
A month later she describes her ear surgery, after refusing to have a prosthetic one. “I don’t like the idea of taking it off every day to clean it and it won’t help my hearing, which has been badly damaged.”
Instead over the course of three 12hour operations, plastic surgeon David Gault fashioned an ear made from cartilage from one of her ribs, which he was forced to break.
“Having a broken rib is excruciatingly painful and really affects my breathing. You can’t move without pain but I can make myself deal with it. It wasn’t as painful as the attack itself – nothing ever will be.”
KATIE says she’s still baffled by the motive for the assault, especially as she wasn’t wearing or carrying anything of value. Some have speculated the attackers, who were never caught, may be followers of Uamsho, an Islamist separatist group that wants Zanzibar to become independent of mainland Tanzania and impose stricter Muslim rules.
While her friends have rallied around her from the beginning, Katie says she only really felt normal again when she went to a friend’s 21st birthday party in July last year.
“That night I finally felt free to talk about my life outside the context of the acid attack. I was reliving some of the old times I’d shared with my friends during our teen years,” she says.
“It was a far cry from the feelings of anxiety and loneliness I’d grown used to.”
She now has her own YouTube channel where she talks about her journey and encourages viewers to ask her questions.
A big part of her recovery, she says, has been to refuse to allow her attackers to get the upper hand physically or psychologically.
“They couldn’t destroy my life. I just wouldn’t let them.”
‘For me, normal is quite exciting. I’m feeling incredibly positive’