The Gift of Fire Read online

  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 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.

  AFTER 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. 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.

  AS MY PARENTS WANDERED THE DESOLATE HALLWAYS between the waiting room and the burn unit through t
he 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 we will do it. You have my word on that.”

  Naturally, my dad accepted Joe’s offer with gratitude. Our local chapter of the Shriners immediately got to work: they began checking with their hospitals to see which one had room for me, and they made arrangements with the doctors at Charity to transfer me. I was likely far too sick to travel, but I was also certain to die if I wasn’t moved.

  Late that afternoon, a bed had been found at the Shriners Hospital for Children in Boston, and a military medical jet had been booked to make the 1,300-mile flight. By eight o’clock that night—roughly 36 hours after the garage explosion—an ambulance rushed me to the military base in the New Orleans suburb of Belle Chasse, where a medevac jet was waiting on the tarmac. The seats had been stripped from the plane and replaced with medical equipment to make the aircraft a flying operating room. The medical team that had been keeping me alive at Charity Hospital also climbed on board with my parents to monitor my vital signs every second of the nearly four-hour flight.

  We touched down at Logan International Airport sometime before midnight. My parents, still dressed for the hot Louisiana weather, shivered on the cold Massachusetts runway as I was loaded into yet another ambulance destined for the hospital. After they were ushered into a waiting police car, our family convoy headed into downtown Boston.

  A team of doctors had already begun assessing me by the time my exhausted parents stumbled into the lobby of the hospital. There they were greeted by chief of staff Dr. John Remensnyder, who gave them the one thing they were desperately in need of—hope.

  “I’ve examined Dan, and he looks bad. He’s a very serious case. His chances are 50-50, but he has one thing going for him: he’s at the finest pediatric burns hospital in the world. This is where miracles happen.”

  Chapter Two

  Out of the Ashes

  They said I didn’t cry when I began to move what was left of my body the next morning. I suppose I slipped in and out of consciousness in my sanitary-yet-toxic new world of glassed-in isolation, skin grafts, and operations.

  The Shriners Hospital in Boston was my permanent home for four months after the fire, and in the years to follow, it became my home away from home. I had nearly 80 reconstructive surgeries before my 18th birthday, usually about four operations each year, and would spend a couple of weeks in the hospital for each procedure. Mom and I flew in and out of Boston so often that some of the pilots knew me by name. But when I woke up on that first morning, I was simply known as one of the most badly burned children the good folks at that hospital had ever seen.

  If you’ve spent any time at all on a burn ward, you know that no matter how fine a facility or competent and caring a staff, it’s not an easy place for a kid to be. The Shriners Hospital undoubtedly saved my life, but the hospital stay itself was incredibly difficult.

  You see, I was in an environment populated by children who were in unimaginable pain and horribly disfigured. Kids around me were frequently near death or worse—and they were awake and aware of their agony. Many had become overwhelmed by despair and had given up on life.

  As for me, I experienced moments of equally profound confusion, loneliness, and terror. But my stay at Shriners was also one of the greatest experiences of my life. Because I had so much time on my hands, I learned some life lessons as a child that most people don’t learn until adulthood, if they are lucky to ever learn them at all.

  In those sterile halls, I discovered that allowing yourself to be defined by how you look—or by what others say when they look at you—is the surest way to destroy your spirit. And yes, it was at Shriners that I discovered that we are spiritual beings who are just temporarily wrapped in flesh.

  At the time, of course, I was just a little kid and didn’t think about spirituality or life’s important lessons. In fact, whatever I did discover about life back then I quickly forgot; it took me years of soul-searching to “remember” that I already understood an essential truth of the universe: what matters is who we are on the inside, not what we look like on the outside.

  Even if it did take me another quarter century of living to rediscover that basic philosophy, the fact remains that the lessons I learned at Shiners were the most formative ones of my life. They shaped the person I would become and, in many ways, made me the person I am today.

  ON THE MORNING OF MARCH 19, 1982—48 hours after the gasoline explosion—I wasn’t having deep thoughts. Rather, I was a critically injured little boy teetering between life and death. I remember nothing of that morning; the combination of my young age, extreme trauma, and heavy doses of narcotic painkillers clouded my memories of my earliest days after the accident. Yet, remarkably, there are some moments and events from the very first week in Boston that I can recall with crystal clarity. Most of the gaps in my memory have been bridged through the recollections of others, such as my parents, whose first visits with me in that unfamiliar environment were as stressful as they were strange.

  As one would assume, Mom and Dad had slept very little the night before. After leaving me at the hospital in the wee hours of the morning, they walked to the hotel room the Shriners had booked for them and collapsed into their bed. Before they knew it, the sun had risen and they were back at the hospital, with only caffeine and adrenaline keeping them on their feet.

  They rode the elevator to the third floor, which was the one reserved for the most critically burned children. There were fewer than a dozen beds in the ward, each shrouded with heavy plastic tenting to stave off airborne infections. If a nurse hadn’t led my mother and father to my bed and told them it was their son beneath the plastic, they never would have known who I was. Every inch of my body was wrapped in white bandages, and my face was doubly obscured by an oxygen mask. I was surrounded by beeping machines and tubes and wires running in every direction, feeding me liquid and drugs while keeping track of my racing h
eartbeat and unsteady blood pressure.

  Eventually, my parents would be allowed to insert their gloved arms and hands through slits in the plastic curtains and gingerly stroke my bandaged body. Once again, doctors cautioned them that my fate was uncertain—if my lungs had been scorched, there wasn’t much they’d be able to do for me.

  Back at Charity Hospital in New Orleans, Mom and Dad had been told that the first 72 hours would determine if my lungs were okay and I had a shot at survival. Now they prayed for God to watch over me for another day, just 24 more hours. Once again, their prayers were answered.

  Somehow I beat the odds and managed to live beyond that crucial 72-hour threshold, and that’s when the struggle of being a survivor began. My parents found out how complex that struggle was going to be when they first saw me with no bandages at all. They’d been warned that it would be a hideous shock for them, and the warning was well founded.

  As my face appeared from beneath the bandages, Mom and Dad saw that most of it was gone: I had no nose, lips, or eyelids; and my ears were melted. Almost all of my hair had vanished, and the roots were obliterated as well. They already knew that my fingers had come away with that first bandage removal, as had the toes on my left foot. As far as they could see, the only place I hadn’t been burned was my groin and buttocks—it turns out that these areas had been protected from the fire by a soggy diaper.

  In that first full glimpse of my injuries, I’m sure I didn’t even appear human to my mother and father, much less look like their child.

  BECAUSE SO MUCH OF MY SKIN had been burned away, one of the first things the doctors had to do was graft new skin onto the raw muscle, meat, and tendon left exposed. Fortunately, those doctors would be able to use skin from the roughly 20 percent of my body that hadn’t been burned to graft onto the parts where the skin had come off entirely. That was a blessing, because by using the few patches of good skin I had on my stomach, the back of my head, and the diaper-protected area, they’d avoid the problems of tissue rejection that occur when an organ (and skin is the body’s largest organ) from one person is transplanted in another.