The Gift of Fire Read Free

limp, smoldering body sprawled across the now-blackened cement floor. I was dying and she knew it; her screams of terror penetrated the otherwise sedate neighborhood, prompting several neighbors to call for help. She was still screaming when it arrived.
    Firefighters, sirens blaring, raced to us only minutes after the blast and immediately went to work, cutting the charred and melted clothes from my body. They lifted me into their arms and carried me out of the garage to the backyard, laid me down on the grass near the swimming pool, and tried to cool my boiling body and bring down my core temperature by pouring gallons of pool water over me. Ironically, the most “dangerous” part of our yard—the pool I had been fenced off from—became a major factor in my survival.
    The one clear memory I have from that day is watching a fireman repeatedly dipping one of my mother’s clay flowerpots into the pool and then carefully letting the water stream over me. I remember that the terra-cotta pot was emblazoned with a Native American design, and water flowed out of the drainage hole on the bottom as he rushed it toward me from the pool.
    Paramedics arrived soon after, and Mom rode with me in the back of the ambulance so we could quickly get to Charity Hospital in New Orleans. Charity, which had one of the best trauma teams in the country and was the closest hospital to my home with a burn unit, was probably the only medical facility in the region with even the slightest chance of saving a child who had been virtually burned alive.
    My father, who has written his own account of my accident (in his book How Can YOU Play Drums? ), later told me how he first heard about what happened: a worried neighbor called him at work shortly after he’d arrived at the office, telling him that there had been a mishap at home and I’d been burned. Dad immediately got in his car and headed back to our house but wasn’t overly concerned, thinking I’d suffered only a minor injury.
    When my father arrived home, he was greeted by firefighters who filled him in on what had just happened. They tried to spare him the gory details, but he was able to find those out for himself when he saw the remnants of my tiny shirt laying on the garage floor beside the melted Snoopy sneakers the paramedics had cut from my feet and tossed aside.
    Now fearing the worst, Dad had a neighbor drive him to Charity, where he found my mother sobbing inconsolably in the inner-city hospital’s old waiting room. She was crying out that she wanted to hold her child, her baby, and fell into my father’s arms when he came into the room. In stammers and starts, still unable to form complete sentences after the horror of what she’d witnessed, she tried to tell him what had happened.
    My mother and father just held on to each other and prayed quietly until the emergency-room doctor brought them news of my condition. Suffice it to say, it wasn’t good.
    “Danny is in extremely critical condition,” my parents were told. “He sustained third- and fourth-degree burns over nearly 80 percent of his body. His chances of surviving are very slim. Frankly, I don’t know how he has lived this long. People burned this severely usually don’t even survive the trip to the hospital.”
    The doctor gave them a list of things that could kill me in the coming hours, the most likely being infection or respiratory failure caused by lung damage from breath- ing in the burning, superheated air during the flash fire. I had literally eaten fire. All they could do, the doctor informed my parents, was to wait, and pray that I lived through the first critical 72 hours. And if I did manage to hang on to life, they had best make arrangements for treatment at another, more advanced medical facility because Charity Hospital couldn’t properly care for anyone as chronically ill as I was going to be.
    As grim a prognosis as it was, my parents didn’t know that at that moment things were much worse than