The Gift of Fire Read Free Page B

Most likely, they’d be staying at the hospital for the next 72 hours—hours that the doctor said would determine my fate.
    Later that night, whatever hopes Mom and Dad may have been harboring deep inside that I wasn’t in as bad a shape as I looked were dashed when they witnessed one of my first bandage changes.
    My parents had kept asking to see me. Eventually, after dressing in sterile hospital scrubs and donning face masks and gloves, they were ushered into the burn unit, where they spent ten minutes beside my bed.
    During this early bedside visit, a nurse unraveled the mummy-like bandages wrapped around my tiny body. My father was watching closely and saw, to his horror, that when she removed the bandages from my hands, my fingers came away in the gauze. They simply fell off. All ten fingers had been cooked to the bone, and those little bones were so charred and brittle that they now dropped off my hands, leaving me with two stumps at the end of either arm. My feet did not fare much better. As the bandages were cautiously removed from my left foot, so too did my toes peel away—they were now ruined, eaten by fire.
    Dad was so distraught by the agony he believed I must be in that he begged the Lord to take me to heaven and end my pain. Yet, through her own tears, Mom prayed for me to be spared. She told Dad it didn’t matter to her how maimed my body might be because I would always be loved. She wanted her baby to live; she craved to hold her Danny in her arms again.
    From that moment on, my parents prayed in tandem. They both asked God for a miracle, and they got one.
    A S MY PARENTS WANDERED THE DESOLATE HALLWAYS between the waiting room and the burn unit through the night and into the next day, a steady stream of concerned relatives and friends arrived to show their support. Some prayed with them; others just sat with them silently; still others helped make arrangements for my brothers to get back and forth from home and school safely.
    My father confided to a few around him that night how worried he was that Charity Hospital couldn’t treat me once I was out of the ICU. He was panicked over money, having just quit a secure job at a large insurance firm to begin his own company. Dad was strapped financially at the time of my accident, and there was no way he could pay for a private hospital or the specialized long-term care and rehabilitation I was certainly going to require if I lived.
    Out of the blue, his cousin Jimmy said, “John, I know a guy who’s a Shriner. I think he said something to me once about the Shriners helping sick kids, especially ones who have been burned. Why don’t I give him a call?”
    Cousin Jimmy did just that, and within an hour, my dad was on a hospital pay phone with a Shriner named Joe Vita. Jimmy was right about the Shriners: they not only assisted with the care and treatment of sick kids, but they also had hospitals that specialized in pediatric burns.
    Joe cut right to the chase, telling Dad that he had to make some quick decisions, and there wasn’t a moment to lose. “Your boy is going to die in the bed he’s in right now, John,” Joe said. “Charity is a good hospital, but it’s not remotely equipped to deal with his kind of injuries. But we can deal with them. We’ve been treating kids no one else could help since we built the first Shriners Hospital for Children in 1922. Trust me, we can save your son’s life.”
    And then he made Dad an offer he couldn’t refuse.
    “Danny is going to need highly skilled, around-the-clock care for months, maybe years. The Shriners will do that for him; we’ll take care of him for as long as he needs to be taken care of, and it won’t cost you a dime. We’ll pay for all his medical expenses. That’s my offer to you, but you have to make up your mind. If your boy is going to live, he has to get to one of our hospitals right now. All you have to do is say the word, and we’ll move him today. I don’t know how we’ll do it, but