The Gift of Fire Read Free Page A

the doctor let on. I only discovered the truth about my condition very recently and quite by accident while I was traveling. By some odd chance of nature or design of God, I happened to bump into one of the doctors who had treated me soon after the fire.
    “You died,” he said bluntly, “and not just once. You died three times on the operating table, and I was able to bring you back three times after your heart stopped.”
    My life—that of the endearing young boy with an uncomplicated, normal existence mapped out before him like so many others who lived in our pleasant little neighborhood—ended on a pretty March afternoon in 1982 in an emergency operating room. There is no doubt: That boy died, and I was born. The third time I came back from the dead, I’d come to stay. I was holding on and wasn’t letting go. Somehow I unconsciously knew that no matter how much fighting, suffering, and adversity my coming years might be filled with, it was the life I was destined to lead … the life I am leading now.
    Of course, before I could start leading that new life, I had to survive the first night after being burned. At the time, that possibility seemed exceptionally remote.
    It’s hard for me to imagine what my parents were experiencing as those critical hours crept by. Whatever physical misery I was clearly suffering was equally as agonizing as the heartrending turmoil they endured, as they waited to hear if I would live or die. And if by some miracle I did survive, the prospect of all the obstacles that lay ahead of me undoubtedly gnawed at their hearts. At least I was sedated; their suffering, however, was as raw and palpable as it was inescapable.
    I can never know exactly what my mother went through that day—her pain was so great that she has never once, even to this day, spoken to me about the accident. My father, on the other hand, has talked to me many times about the wild emotional ride that began for the Caro family the night of the gas explosion. As I mentioned earlier, Dad even managed to write his own account of how the fire affected us all, and many of the details I share now come by way of his tortured memories.
    A FTER THE ER DOCTOR HAD THAT DIFFICULT TALK with my parents, a nurse arrived in the waiting room and whisked them into the corridor. She told them that I was out of surgery and the trauma team had done all they could for me at the moment—I was now to be transferred to intensive care in the burn unit. If my parents hurried, they could see me for just a few minutes before I was wheeled away.
    Moments later, my mother and father were standing in a dimly lit hallway, looking down at a gurney holding the unconscious body of a little boy so badly mutilated that they didn’t even recognize him.
    That little boy was me.
    But it’s not surprising that my parents couldn’t tell it was me. More than three-quarters of my skin had been burned off, my hair had been incinerated, and what was left of my face was obscured behind a plastic oxygen mask that was keeping me alive. Had the mask not been there, Mom and Dad would have seen that my lips and nose were gone. The doctor had also sliced open my arms and legs with a scalpel from my fingertips to my toes to allow body fluids to rise up and weep from the wounds rather than burst through the charred, parchment-thin remains of what had so recently been the flawlessly smooth flesh of a toddler.
    My devastated parents grew physically faint at the sight of my ruined body and exposed tendons. They clung to each other, as much to remain standing as for the obvious emotional support. And then they could only watch silently as I was wheeled away toward the burn unit, leaving them alone in the hospital hallway to begin coping with the reality that their lives had been forever altered. They returned to the waiting room and kept vigil.
    Arrangements were made for my brothers to be looked after as my parents realized that they wouldn’t be going anywhere for a while.