I was really organized last week. It was Tuesday, what is usually the longest and most frustrating day of my week, but I managed to win over all my classes and came home satisfied with a day well spent. I came home and made a list of things I needed to finish that week. Return materials to school in anticipation of the end of term. Find flights for the summer. Book vacation in Turkey with my mother. Prepare gardening project for the refugee camp on Saturday. Finish marking exams. Prepare a game for reading club on Wednesday.

Cranking tunes, I chopped veggies in my tiny, narrow kitchen, mentally preparing to apply for a few jobs that were closing at the end of the week. On my gas stove, I already had onions started, and filled up a pot to boil water. I turned the gas on the middle burner for the water, and lit the hob.

Gas fire always has that nice, hot look to it, doesn’t it? Orange and blue. I love how fast the heat comes. So much more efficient than an electric stove. I watched the burner circle catch flame. Then there was a whooshing noise. Fire rippled down the stove towards the front. Then there was a bigger whoosh and … that was it. Just orange and blue flame all around me. In front of me, beside me, on me. I could see, I couldn’t see. It was hot, it wasn’t. It was an abrupt, massive flash, and I was in it.

You never expect the kind of horrific accidents you hear about or read about all the time to happen to you. Hell, with all of my ridiculous stories, my ventures into mine fields, my narrow escapes from drug smugglers and gun-wielding hotel room invaders, from suicidal taxi drivers in multiple countries, from motorbike rides on Asian highways, I was pretty sure that when it was my turn to go, I would at least get a good story out of it for my obituary. I didn’t think it would be a freak gas explosion and a kitchen fire. Because I was pretty sure, in that moment, that that was it. I was done, I’d been this far, I’d be gone at 27 in the most common, and the most unlikely of ways.

My kitchen is too narrow to jump back. I turned, horrified, on fire, or something, I couldn’t tell, couldn’t sense, didn’t know. Ran the 10 feet to the end of the kitchen and into the larger living room. Fell to my knees yelling something, a pile of ash fell from my face.

Get up. Shower. Water. Stumbled to my feet, wondering if my face had melted, caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror before I got in the shower, I was still there, hair hanging in limp, charred chunks around my face, everything smelling of burning. Jumped in the shower, shaking, ripped off my shirt and a necklace, with the odd clarity of knowledge that happens to you in moments of extreme danger, knowing that I could not let my clothes stick to my burns. Everything seemed fine on my torso, but skin was hanging off my hands and wrists and forearms in alarming, pale lumps. My feet were burning burning burning at the bottom of my jeans, but nothing else seemed hurt. I put my face under the water, crying, knowing I needed more help. My phone was in my back pocket. I pulled it out with shaking hands, trying to call my friend because I don’t know what Kurdish 911 is. But I couldn’t do it, I was about to go into shock, I knew this, I was hysterical. I left my bathroom, stumbling to open my apartment door, pulling myself through, falling onto my knees because of the pain in my feet, sure that now that I was somehow, magically, still alive, I was absolutely going to be disfigured, possibly about to faint, screaming for someone to help me.

My neighbours, a family of doctors who speak perfect English, were serendipitously coming up the stairs. They rose magnificently to the occasion, taking me in, calming me down in the bathroom as I wept and screamed and shook, called 911, got in touch with the friends I had tried uselessly to call, and got me safely on a stretcher, carried down 3 flights of stairs because it wouldn’t fit in the elevator, and in an ambulance in about 15 minutes.

In moments like this, you kind of assume your body will let you check out. I desperately willed myself to lose consciousness, so it didn’t hurt anymore. I didn’t want to know or to remember any of this. But everything remained clear, focused, indescribably painful, even when I closed my eyes in the ambulance and was rolled into emergency.

The burns I sustained are superficial, which is basically a nice way of saying I didn’t need skin grafts. They are deep second-degree burns, and 11-days on, there is still painful, raw skin on my feet, though the rest have scabbed over and are now itchy as fuck. I am walking again, as of two days ago I don’t need to use a straw to drink anymore. I know exactly how lucky I am to be alive, to get through this with minimal scarring – I hardly lost any hair (though regrowing my bangs will look weird and take months), I recognize myself again, my face and neck somehow, impossibly, the least serious of my injuries, making me just look like I currently have a wicked sunburn and small, fresh new eyebrows.

The first question people have asked me, after how it happened, is why I’m staying in Kurdistan to recover. To me, the idea of leaving right now is sort of preposterous. Traveling home is too massive an undertaking to consider, I’ll return for my intended visit as I always planned in August. The other option was flying to Jordan or Turkey for treatment.

But here’s the thing – aside from having truly wonderful friends who cared for me my first week better than any hospital I could have paid for – Kurdistan is actually really good at treating burn survivors.

It is common knowledge here, and a quick Google search will turn up articles as recent as the past week on the BBC and Al-Monitor and an Economist report from March that an alarming number of women self-immolate in Iraqi Kurdistan.

Every day when I visit the burn unit for treatment, the majority of the other people recovering are women. And the majority have vastly worse injuries than I do. Today I walked into physio and saw one woman whose entire face, torso and arms were fully bandaged. The women have burned faces, burns that run up their arms to their shoulders, cover their thighs and bellies down to their feet. But while I rock up to the burn unit in wholly inappropriate tank tops and skirts because the idea of wearing more clothing when I feel this way is unbearable, they are always carefully and beautifully clothed in long dresses with hijab.

It is this clothing that creates such a great danger to these women. Often made out of cheaper fabrics and polyesters, a woman leaning over a lit burner on a stove has barely a chance before her dress catches and she is engulfed in flames. For the women for whom this is an accident, it is terrifying. For the women for whom this is on purpose, one assumes they hope it will be quick.

Self-immolation is, tragically, a popular way to commit suicide among Kurdish women. It indicates the deeply problematic home situations faced by many wives and mothers, for whom this is the only way out. Women are often confined to the home, and a death by fire can be easily excused as a cooking accident, ensuring she will not be stigmatized after she is gone. Those who survive will rarely admit their actions were taken on purpose – when I explained the stove explosion to my doctors, they acknowledged this with minimal surprise, so common is it an answer.

The Economist writes that self-immolation accounts for over half of all female suicide attempts in Kurdistan, and quotes Kurdish NGO WADI that the majority of families have experienced someone attempting it. Al Monitor notes that more than 1000 women in Kurdistan have died from self-immolation since the fall of Saddam Hussein. I have never visited a burn unit before I started going to the one here, but every day it is full, and far too many patients are women. Maybe I am naïve in thinking that this is not the case in other countries, but it just seems impossible. Every day with the regular ones who were burned in a similar time period to me, there are new faces, new desperate cries from the bathroom, from the bandaging room, whose injuries I catch glimpses of in a clinic that seems far too small for the number of people requiring its services. There are children, for sure, and men here and there. But for the first time since I have arrived in Kurdistan, I have found a place that is not a private home where the majority of people are women. And it’s the burn unit. It just seems so monstrously fucked up.

My own efforts towards rehabilitation have been long and slow and painful, but they are paying off. The dread and pain I faced in the first few days of being unwrapped and washed and re-bandaged have given way to a sort of eager examination, to see what new changes have happened to my burned skin overnight, how much I’ve been able to heal since yesterday. Every day everything gets a little bit easier; my physiotherapists are thrilled by my progress, and, I think, my commitment. So I cannot imagine going through the sort of accident I went through on purpose: self-immolating, dealing with that initial pain, then not dying, and then having to face the agonizing journey to a recovery you never wanted to have.

Reducing gender-based violence in Kurdish Iraq is something that requires further effort and commitment. And, despite my own experience being terrifying and awful and totally accidental, I feel, in some way, as though it has granted me insight to a part of the society I live in that I would never have had access to before.

As I heal, and see some of the same women every day in physio, we smile through burned faces and acknowledge each other, no matter how much or how little effort we’re putting into our recovery. Because whether or not our trials by fire were accidental or planned, at this stage, we’re all in it together to get through, to get out, and to face another day.