Eight pages later, the bomb explodes: "In that moment, the world slammed backward into black."
And, so, her struggle to survive begins.
A former BBC radio correspondent and freelance contributor from Egypt for The Sun and The Washington Post, the Wellesley College graduate writes in the spare style of the personal journal or diary. The taut sentences and concrete language lend an air of clinical objectivity to her account of the wounds and emotions that she struggles to overcome.
"LANDSTUHL REGIONAL MEDICAL CENTER, GERMANY, JUNE 1 OR 2, 2006," she writes one page after the blast.
"Pinpricks all over my legs like little needles.
"Fluorescent light.
"Machines beeping.
"Trying to speak. Can't. ... "
Immediately after the blast, Dozier's heart stopped twice, and doctors thought they were going to have to amputate her legs, which had received the brunt of the explosion. Some thought she would never walk again.
During the next month at Landstuhl, the National Naval Medical Center in Bethesda and the Maryland Shock Trauma Center in Baltimore, she would have more than 25 operations. They included brain surgery to remove shrapnel, a procedure to restore hearing by grafting a new eardrum into her ear, and orthopedic surgery to rebuild her legs around two titanium rods.
Between the pain and nonstop narcotics, she started hallucinating at night, seeing demons in the sprinkler heads over her hospital bed. Not until her move in July to Baltimore's Kernan Hospital would she start to wean herself from the powerful opiates she had been on since May 28 - yet another mountain to climb for someone who was only starting to learn how to walk again.
The struggle goes on
Baltimore plays a large role in Dozier's life and her journal of recovery. Her parents, Dorothy and Ben Dozier, in their 80s and living in Timonium, were at her bedside through most of the darkest hours.
Her mother was born in Baltimore, and though her father was born in Norfolk, Va., he was raised in the city and studied engineering at the Johns Hopkins University. He fought in World War II as a Marine and was wounded in the Battle of Iwo Jima.
Describing her own won't-quit attitude and the role it played in her recovery, Dozier writes, "Looking at my mom and dad, you can see where my attitude comes from. It's perhaps best described as down-home-Baltimore `You only deserve what you've earned the hard way' pride."
