When a news story hits too close to home

My mobile phone had been ringing incessantly and beeping a series of text messages when I first learned that my husband was hurt in the blast at the Australian Embassy on Thursday.

I was ignoring it as I was in the middle of an interview during an assignment to East Nusa Tenggara, nearly 2,000 km from Jakarta.

The messages from various people alerted me: "explosion at the Australian Embassy".

My initial reaction was typical of a journalist -- I wondered how big the damage was and how many people died. I thought I would have to pull out sooner than my plan on Saturday.

Then it hit me: My husband works in a building across the street from the embassy.

Frantically I began calling him. My heart was sinking when the calls did not go through, until I finally heard his voice at the other end of the line.

"My office has been bombed," he said. His voice was still shaken and nearly drowned out by the hectic-sounding background.

"I'm hit in the head," he said. "I'm fine, I'm bleeding but I'm fine."

He was walking to the MMC hospital about 10 minutes away from the blast site.

I later learned that as he spoke to me, he was holding his wound at the top right side of his head to stop it from bleeding profusely. I let him go, while promising to call his father to say he was OK.

I could not hide my emotion from the people I had just interviewed. We had only been married for a month and two days as of Thursday, and it was too much to take for me.

My husband was sitting at his desk in his room on the fifth floor on that ill-fated morning, about half an hour before I called.

He heard a loud boom that shocked his entire being. The glass windows shattered, the room turned dark and it rained dust from the ceiling, he recalled to me over the phone later.

It took him about 10 seconds before he realized what had just happened.

He stumbled outside of his room, and saw a scene of chaos, with people screaming and running.

His shirt was drenched in blood because of the gaping wound -- "a minor glass cut," he told me -- on his head.

A pregnant co-worker was in a state of panic, and together with other men he helped carry the woman.

Outside it was clear there had been a major bombing attack. Ruined cars with bloody drivers and passengers were clogging the streets, and everyone looked shocked and confused.

At the hospital, the flood of patients was divided into the severely wounded and the lightly wounded.

He sat with about 20 other people outside. A nurse came and dressed their wounds while they waited for proper medical treatment. Blankets were spread on the floor for some of the victims.

"I soon left because there were other people in far worse condition than me and the hospital was overwhelmed," he said.

He hitched a ride with a friend who happened to be passing by on a motorcycle, and later went to a different hospital to get his wound stitched.

In Kupang, I had managed to secure the last flight out with the help of my news source's political clout.

I had not been able to reach my husband again since our first phone call. I knew I had to go home to see for myself that he was OK.

I've had more than one brush with death but nothing prepared me for the feeling of almost losing my husband in a tragedy like a bombing. It dawned on me that we are as vulnerable as the people we write about.

In a profession as emotionally taxing as journalism, you condition yourself for a mental block, a shield in order to have a clear perspective. It helps you move along and write your story.

For me, this was still as hard as moments like the Bali bombings, when, at the end of the day, I sobbed in my hotel room as images of innocent victims, whose charred bodies were piled in the swamped morgue, hit me.

A bombing attack is one of the most heinous crimes because of its indiscriminative nature and the massive destruction it wreaks.

Unsuspecting people fall victims just for being at the wrong place at the wrong time. Victims become numbers -- the more they are, the bigger the impact.

To think that my husband could have been one of them has unsettled me. But still, I am thankful that he was a lot more fortunate than many others in the blast.

-- Devi Asmarani/The Straits Times