After the Fire: A True Story of Love and Survival (6 page)

Chapter 9

T
he ambulance, sirens blaring, rolled up to the gilded gates outside Seton Hall, and Shawn could hardly believe what he saw.

There must have been a thousand people waiting, and they were chanting his name.
Shawn . . . Shawn . . . Shawn.

The ambulance stopped and he quickly slid out from the passenger seat. The crowd roared. As soon as his feet hit the grass, a marching band struck up a rendition of “When the Saints Go Marching In.” It was one of his favorite tunes. Shawn felt like the king of a pageant. It was good to be back, he thought, surveying the lush, green campus.

There was Monsignor Robert Sheeran, wearing a huge grin. And the Seton Hall cheerleaders, dressed in the school colors, blue and white, turned cartwheels as they shouted out the letters of his name.

s-h-a-w-n. What does it spell?

shawn!
the crowd screamed.

Boland Hall sat majestically at the top of a grassy knoll. Like the Pied Piper, Shawn led the throng to the front of the building.

There sat a brand-new red Mustang with gleaming silver wheels. It was the most beautiful car he had ever seen, and it was for him.

Shawn felt warm from the inside out.

Only it was all a morphine dream.

The familiar rhythm of the respirator had come to be a comfort to Christine. There was something peculiarly soothing about it, predictable — a sound she could count on to fill the terrible silence.

For fourteen days and nights, Christine had sat at Shawn’s bedside, looking for a sign that he was still there, under all the tubes and wires and whirring machines. A twitch, a sniff, anything would do. Sometimes she thought she saw him blink, but then she realized her eyes were deceiving her. If only she knew what he was thinking now. Was he afraid? Did he know what was happening to him? Was he hurting?

The truth was, she was suffering along with Shawn. Sometimes she stared at his face until her back ached, hoping for a sign. Her sweet son — the boy who put the joy in her life — lay there in a continuous sleep, a web of IV lines pushing food, liquids, and narcotics into his bloodstream. His eyes were swollen shut and his arms were tied to the bed so that he didn’t unconsciously try to pull out his breathing tube. Day after day, she had nothing to do but watch — and fret about what to do if nothing ever changed.

Shawn had already survived one fire in his young life. He was a month old when their place in Newark burned to the ground. A fire had begun on a stove in the apartment below theirs. Christine had taken Nicole to school and arrived home just in time to see Kenny fleeing from the burning building with their Shawn cradled in his arms. Now she prayed that Shawn’s luck hadn’t run out.

Every time her mind wandered to such dark places —
What if he never wakes up? What if I never hear his silvery voice? What if I never get to tell him I love him again?
— Christine listened for the whisper of his breathing machine. As the respirator pumped life into her son’s oxygen-starved lungs, it soothed her nerves and washed her mind of all thoughts. For a moment, at least.

Shawn felt as if he were being flung around in a plane as it crashed into the ocean. His face stung from spraying water. Then the blast abruptly stopped.

He opened his eyes to a blurry world. All Shawn could make out were the vague forms of strangers, pushing and pulling at him. Someone shouted, “Breathe! Breathe!”

Shawn was in the tank room, and he was awake, three weeks and one day since the fire. Even the staff were surprised when he suddenly awoke from his coma. There, as they had been cleaning him, Shawn had raised himself up, trying to climb out of his fog. Now he opened his arms and someone embraced him. He heard people crying and applauding. He didn’t hear his mother. He wished she were there.

Christine and Kenny had arrived in the burn unit two hours later. Andy Horvath intercepted them as they headed for Shawn’s room.

“Hey, Andy,” Christine said.

“Shawn’s awake,” Horvath announced. “He woke up in the tank room.”

Christine steadied herself.

“Oh my God,” she said.

“He’s alert but he’s bewildered,” Horvath said. “He can’t talk because of the respirator, but he wants to communicate.”

Christine had been critical of Kenny and his concerns, but while her ex-husband might have been clumsy in conversation and negligent as a parent, underneath it all was a heartfelt recognition of the stakes. Kenny had lost two of his children from his first marriage, and he had prayed every day that God save his son.

“My prayers have been answered,” he cried.

Shawn’s eyes widened when his mother walked into the room. She knew what he was telling her:
I’m so glad you’re here.

“Baby boy, I have been waiting weeks for this moment,” Christine said, tears flooding her eyes.

As relieved as she was, she felt helpless. Mothers were supposed to make their children feel better. She had always been able to do that. But now she saw such pain and fear in Shawn’s eyes, and there was nothing she could do except trust in God and the doctors.

Tears trickled down Shawn’s badly burned cheeks as he looked from his mother to his father. He tried to speak but couldn’t.

“The respirator,” Kenny explained. “You won’t be able to talk until you’re taken off it.”

Shawn blinked his eyes hard.

“Your glasses,” Christine said. “You can’t see very well, can you?”

She took the wire-rimmed glasses from the table beside Shawn’s bed and placed them on his face.

He wiggled his bandaged hands.

“As long as you can move them, that’s good,” his father said.

He raised his hand to his head. His curls. Where were they? “It’s okay,” Christine reassured him. “They’ll come back.”

Shawn looked pleadingly into her eyes. He seemed desperate to say something.

Horvath left the room and returned a moment later carrying a large sheet of paper with the alphabet printed on it. Shawn’s eyes brightened.

Christine placed the paper in front of Shawn, and slowly but deliberately, he pointed out letters.

W-h-e-r-e h-a-v-e y-o-u b-e-e-n?

“Right here, every day,” Christine replied.

Shawn had another question.

H-o-w i-s A-l?

Chapter 10

D
aisy Llanos was a devout woman. She spent hours reading the Bible and praying over her son, and she had decorated his hospital room with rainbow-colored rosary beads. When she wasn’t in the burn unit, she was at the altar in Saint Joseph’s Roman Catholic Church near her home in Paterson. “Please, Jesus, if you love me and you love my son and you love my family, please help us through this,” she prayed in Spanish. “Please leave my son with me, no matter how burned he is.”

Daisy’s prayers had been answered two years earlier when she begged for her husband to survive his life-threatening stroke. She needed another favor now. Alvaro’s injuries were grave. His body was mutilated and he was barely alive. He would suffocate if oxygen weren’t being continually pumped into his lungs. His eyelids were sewn shut to protect the soft tissue of his burned corneas from hardening. If God let her son live, she would take care of him the way she had taken care of her husband. She would give up everything to help him get better.

Mi niño bello, nadie jamás te hará daño.
My beautiful boy, no one will ever hurt you again. She would make sure of it.

As Alvaro waged his lonely fight to stay alive, friends and family members confessed their fears and frustrations in letters that were tacked to his hospital room wall. “Waiting for your response to our presence, but not a single movement has occurred,” his sixteen-year-old sister Shany wrote. “Out of everyone in the family, you are the last person we expect to give up . . . I know that when we are in the room with you, you can hear us and I know you’re trying to respond.” Angie wasn’t so sure. “When I lie down I try to hug myself so I can feel your body close to mine,” she wrote. “But somehow no matter what I do I can’t find you. No matter how hard I try I can’t see you.”

It was Angie who delivered the news to the Llanoses that Shawn was awake. Daisy tried to be happy. Privately she wondered why it couldn’t have been Alvaro who was getting better, and then she prayed to be forgiven for her selfish thoughts.

The Simonses and the Llanoses had bonded in the weeks since the fire. Except for vigils at their sons’ bedsides, the families had spent every day together in the burn unit waiting room. They watched
Jerry Springer, Divorce Court,
and
Oprah Winfrey.
They shared trays of fried chicken and macaroni and cheese brought in by a local church. And they talked endlessly about their sons, somehow managing to surmount the language barrier to share their stories. Their boys had been burned together as they crawled their way through the fire and the smoke at Boland Hall, and the families believed they would heal together as well.

Angie had dropped some of her classes to be with Alvaro. When she wasn’t sitting beside her comatose boyfriend, saying, “Keep fighting, baby,” to encourage him, or chattering about what she had done in school that day, she sat beside Daisy, patting her back or holding her hand. Angie was brave, but Christine was everyone’s rock. What she hadn’t been able to tell Shawn when he asked about his roommate was that the doctors had given Alvaro only a 40 percent chance of surviving.

On the same day that Shawn woke up, signaling the beginning of his recovery, the nurses in the burn unit debated whether it would be better if Alvaro died. They were sitting around a table in the break room, sharing a pizza for dinner, when the subject came up.

“Al — he gets to you,” one of the nurses said. “Have you seen his pictures?” She was referring to the photographs Alvaro’s family had taped to the wall in his room. “He was so handsome, a gorgeous kid.”

“His father told me he wanted to be a professional baseball player and he was really good,” another said.

“His mother keeps asking, ‘Will he look the same? Have you seen other people this bad?’ I tell her Alvaro is very, very sick. It’s day to day. Hour to hour. The next day she asks the same questions all over again.”

“From what I know about him, I don’t think he’ll be able to adjust,” said Laura Thompson, a nurse who had worked in the burn unit for fifteen years.

“I’m afraid his parents are too fragile to cope with what’s ahead,” said Andy Horvath. “I can’t even look at them anymore,” he added. “They keep asking me when he’ll wake up, and I don’t want to give them false hope.”

Shawn had turned the corner. His life was no longer in danger. Now it was a matter of healing, which could take months. But if Alvaro lived, he would be defined by his burns for the rest of his life. It’s time to start separating the families, Chris Ruhren, the director of the burn unit nurses, told the staff. “This can no longer be treated like one case.”

Chapter 11

T
he burn nurses had quickly become attached to Shawn and Alvaro. They celebrated Shawn’s victories and they agonized over Alvaro’s setbacks. “You’re all angels,” Christine Simons would say at least once a day to the nurses. One former patient had lapel buttons made up for the staff that read, “There is a special place in heaven saved for those who treat burns.”

Burn nurses were a special breed. At Saint Barnabas, they were an eclectic bunch of men and women. They were fifty-five acutely different personalities with one thing in common: the burn unit was in their blood. They were closer to one another than any other group of nurses in the hospital, and because of the impossible stress of their jobs, they were a little bit wilder than any other group as well.

With all the time they spent together in the unit, they knew everything about one another. They knew about Kathy Hetcko’s new boyfriend and they knew that Sharon Iossa ate a bowl of mashed potatoes for lunch every day. They gossiped about one another, and they bickered sometimes. They laughed at one another’s raunchy jokes and cried on one another’s shoulders. One night, on a whim, a group of them finished a tough shift and jumped in a car and drove seven hours to Jamestown, New York, the hometown of their idol, Lucille Ball. They took in all the sights when they got there: the Lucille Ball Little Theatre, the Lucille Ball Memorial Park, the Lucille Ball: Not the Girl Next Door display at the Fenton History Center. Before driving the four hundred miles back, they conspired to collect a souvenir to add to the other Lucy memorabilia sprinkled around the burn unit: the street sign from Lucy Way, which ended up hidden in a storage closet.

All of them had an extreme fear of fire: Sue Manzo had her landlord light her gas grill whenever she wanted to barbecue. Kathe Conlon installed smoke detectors in her garage. None of the nurses put cloths on their tables — that way children couldn’t pull on them, overturning hot food or lit candles. And children were simply not allowed in the kitchen when something was cooking. For what they witnessed on an average day, they should have been paid a king’s ransom. Instead, they earned between $40,000 and $65,000. But no one was in it for the money.

Mansour said the members of his team could have worked anywhere in the hospital. They were the smartest and most dedicated people in their professions. Like him, they had chosen burns, and most chose to stay. Mansour was part of the reason. It wasn’t just that he treated his staff as equals; Hani actually thought of them as equals. There were three things nurses wanted from their job: good pay, flexible hours, and the respect of the doctors they worked with. Most struggled to get the first two; the third was a gift. Rarely did a cardiologist commiserate about a treatment plan with a nurse, or spend time in the nurses’ lunchroom, telling jokes or trading diet tips, the way Mansour did.

Within Saint Barnabas, there was a mystery about the burn nurses. They tended to stick together, and they rarely ventured very far from the unit. The average critically ill patient in an intensive care unit received fourteen hours of bedside care per day. Critical burn patients required a nurse at the bedside for twenty-one out of every twenty-four hours. The job was as physically demanding as it was emotionally trying. Not everyone fit in. “You don’t get here if you’re not good,” said Manzo, an eight-year veteran of the burn unit. “If you don’t pull your weight, we’ll weed you out because you don’t belong here.” “If you can’t become part of the team, you don’t last,” Kathe Conlon added. In the course of a day, burn nurses could deal with child abuse, elder abuse, or a whole family wiped out by fire. They saw babies scorched into near skeletons and young mothers who were burned beyond recognition trying to save their children. “There are times when this place is so very, very awful, you never want to come back,” Manzo confessed. And yet they did.

One morning, as nurses were preparing Alvaro for the tank room, a call came into the unit that a child, burned on more than half his body, was being brought up from the emergency room. Burned children were the worst punishment. Most of the staff had families. For many of them, this case would hit too close to home.

Eight-year-old Jabrill Walker was wheeled into the tank room at 8:15 a.m. Mansour and a team of eight nurses and technicians were waiting. The boy had been playing with matches in his bedroom before school, and his shirt caught fire. Like most freshly burned patients, he was awake and alert, and very frightened. Mansour could see that his burns were grave. “They are almost identical to the Llanos boy’s,” he concluded, assessing the child’s injury. Like Alvaro, little Jabrill would require an escharotomy — cuts down his arms and across his chest to keep the swelling from cutting off his circulation. Manzo was named the charge nurse for the case. She was the single mother of a nine-year-old boy, Anthony, and she talked about him all the time. When she looked down at Jabrill, her hands shook and her face flushed. She saw her own boy’s face on the child’s burned body.

Jabrill would have to be washed so the doctors could better assess his burns. Manzo pushed Jabrill under the water jets as the others prepared to begin his tanking. “I’m going to tell my mommy what you’re doing to me,” the child cried. Manzo blinked back tears. “Okay, Jabrill, honey,” she said, trying to keep her composure. “We’re going to give you a bath now. A big bubble bath.” As the hoses dropped from the ceiling, Manzo, her face glistening with perspiration, turned to one of her colleagues. “You coming with that morphine?” she snapped. Then, turning back to the boy, she broke into her son’s favorite bathtub song.

Oh, Alice, where are you going?

Upstairs to take a bath.

Alice, with legs like toothpicks,

And a neck like a giraffe.

As the nurses scrubbed, the little boy wailed. Manzo continued to sing.

Alice got in the bathtub.

Alice pulled out the plug.

Jabrill was screaming.

Oh, my gracious! Oh, my soul!

There goes Alice down the hole.

Alice, where are you going?

Blub! Blub! Blub!

With the tanking finally over, Manzo stood in the unit kitchenette, holding a cold soda to her forehead. “I’m on my last thread,” she said. Then she broke down in tears.

Most nurses took pride in being stoic. Not in the burn unit. There, no one was afraid to show emotion, and when they did, the others always rallied to support them. Jabrill’s case was hardly unusual. In the burn unit, there were hundreds of war stories: the badly burned little girl they nursed back to health, only to read in the newspaper a year later that she had been beaten to death by her parents; the two-year-old boy whose mother had held his face to a steaming radiator; the businesswoman who spent three months recovering from severe burns, then died two years later in a house fire. Burn nurses were asked all the time, “How can you do it? Why do you do it?” The truth was that most of them wouldn’t have been happy anywhere else. “The bottom line is, this is where a lot of us belong,” Manzo said. In an era when nursing had become more about handing out pills and hooking up IVs, Mansour’s nurses clung to the ideal of making a difference. They did the dirty work, and people considered them heroic. They were not unlike soldiers who volunteered for combat: driven by the need to feel worthy and to be a part of something.

So they stayed for one another. They stayed because for every tragedy, there was a success story. They stayed because no one else would.