FOR six weeks after the Oklahoma City bombing, Susan Urbach couldn’t clean the dried blood off her face.
The doctors warned her that soap and water would aggravate the sensitive wounds caused by particles of flying glass.
In church, children pointed and contorted their faces in horror. On the street, adults averted their eyes.
“I’m not terribly vain,” said Urbach, 44. “But, my goodness, that was tough.”
Today the scars on her face and back remain – but she considers them “badges of honor.”
“In order to have a scar, you have to have been wounded – but also healed,” she said.
On the morning of April 19, 1995, Urbach was in her office directly across the street from the Alfred P. Murrah building. She’d just stepped away from her desk, which faced the windows, and was chatting with co-workers.
Suddenly a massive blast of air shattered the windows. Razor-sharp shards shredded her blouse, slicing her back, arms and face. A light fixture fell on her head, along with several pounds of plaster.
“I ended up with four feet of stitches in my body after they sewed me up,” Urbach said. “But I wouldn’t have made it at all if I’d been sitting at my desk.”
Urbach felt her way to the emergency exit and stumbled from the building. She recently saw a video of herself from that day, with blood-soaked clothes and an unrecognizable face.
“Now I know how people felt when they looked at me,” she said. “It was a morbid fascination.”
Today, some tendons in Urbach’s elbow don’t work and her fingers have lost mobility. But for Urbach, the main trauma was that everything familiar to her had been decimated.
“I was head of an office, then all of a sudden the office was gone,” she said.