I am Tamara – Skin Deep

Transcript

My little sister was playing with matches and I got outta bed and she put it on my pyjamas and it went up in flames. I just remember screaming down the hallway and I still have dreams about that all the time. It's not very good. At the first hospital Wagga base, they had to take a lot of pictures and they said that I was the first child they'd seen smile even though they're in a lot of pain while they were taking pictures.

Mum got me a teddy bear. This one, Frankie, he's been through like everything with me. He used to get like bandaged up and went in the operations and mum used to have to take him out, but I didn't know that. I used to wake up with him right next to me.

I couldn't walk when I got outta my operation cause I couldn't like, get up and do anything. I'd just lay in bed all day or in a wheelchair every day. I tried to get up and walk and this one day I actually stood up and I was yelling out to mum. I was like, mum, I can walk again! I can walk! And I was so happy. It was like the best day.

And then as I got older, because I'm growing, I grow, the skin doesn't grow with me. I think I was in Grade 3. I had an operation. On my arm and my neck. I had a big machine on me, which wasn't very good. People just like looked at me all the time because I had whipped my arm up in a sling and I had a neck thing on, and it was pretty uncomfortable, especially when people were just looking at you and you don't know what to do, like you're really embarrassed because you're not normal or you think you're not normal, but everyone is so curious about what you look like and what's happened. And when you're young, you just think, oh, well, people judging me, they don't like me because I'm different.

In Grade 7, I had another operation on my neck and I went back to school with a thing down my neck because I got a Zed-plasty. We ended up running out of stuff to put on my neck, so I decided to go to school with nothing on it, and it was a pretty hard day. Nasty things were said to me. And I got really upset when I got home. I just, it was really hard, but I worked up the confidence and I kept having nothing on it, and it was good.

I had to stay positive. Like I did have friends there for me, but I didn't know whether they, what they were thinking of it, because I didn't like it myself. People are going to judge you, but you judge yourself the most. Now, I'm not scared to show my arm off. Like, I don't care that people can see my arm. It's more so the neck that I don't like people seeing, but you get used to it.

I'm very interested in becoming a professor, specialising in burn scarring because I know what the kids are going through. I want to be able to do that. I want to operate on children, and then I want to tell them my experiences.

I just think of myself as a normal person. But then sometimes you tell yourself, well, am I normal? Like I want a normal body. But then dad says, you've got a normal body. You just have scars that tell a story.

Sometimes I hate them, but in a way, I love them too because they make me, me. And I really couldn't imagine myself without them. For me, I just don't like having them all the time because I want to go out and be a girl and go to the beach in my bikinis, without people looking at me and stuff.

It didn't hold me back playing football. Didn't hold me back at school, hasn't held me back through anything else. I just did it. You have those times where you're like, I can't do it. I can't do it. Like going through school thinking, I can't pass this subject. But then you think, well, look what you've been through. You thought you couldn't go through all that pain. You thought it was over, but you did. You got through it. You just have to keep thinking positive.