After the Fire: A True Story of Friendship and Survival

by Robin Gaby Fisher

  Christine was a diminutive woman with a gentle face and a voice that tinkled. Sometimes people initially mistook her pleasing presence for softness, but when she needed to be, she could be hard as a diamond.

  The hospital wasn’t giving out any information yet, the receptionist said, politely dismissing her.

  Christine knew Shawn was there; she didn’t know how she knew, but she could feel it, physically, and she knew he needed his mother.

  “My son needs me,” she said, persisting.

  “Just a minute,” the receptionist replied, disappearing behind the swinging doors that separated the waiting area from the ER.

  When it came to doses of reality, emergency room nurses and burn nurses had very different philosophies. ER nurses figured that if a patient was going to die, it was better for his relatives to know what to expect. Shawn, they concluded, had a one-in-three chance of dying. The ER nurses were inclined to let his parents in to see just how badly he’d been burned. But the burn nurses approached things more gently; they wanted to spare relatives the trauma of seeing their loved one at least until the carnage from his injuries was cleaned up. For now, the burn nurses held sway.

  A moment later, an ER nurse walked into the reception area.

  “Your son is inside,” she said, standing toe-to-toe with Christine. “He is being treated, and I promise I’ll come and get you as soon as we’re done.”

  An hour passed, with nothing for Christine to do but watch other frantic parents beg for information about their children. She felt a banging in her head. She thought it might explode if she had to sit there much longer, wondering about Shawn.

  Finally the nurse returned.

  “Come with me,” she said to Shawn’s parents.

  The nurse walked past the first curtain behind the swinging doors and pulled open the second. A boy lay there in a bloody bed.

  Christine and Kenny simultaneously gasped. The boy looked nothing like their child. His face was not coffee-colored and smooth, but red and leathery and grotesquely swollen to nearly twice its normal size. And his hands . . . Christine had always said Shawn had such handsome hands. But this boy’s hands were scorched a charcoal black and inflated like balloons.

  “Shawn?” Christine said, her voice weakened to a whisper. Shawn’s eyes were partly open, but he didn’t seem able to see. Christine waded through the canopy of tubes and lines connected to his body and touched his head. A clump of his black hair fell onto the white pillow. She clasped her hands to her face. Shawn’s curls were his pride and joy. He used to boast that he had the best hair at University High School in Newark — even better than most of the girls’. Now those ringlets lay in ruins around his burned, bloated face.

  Christine swooned and reached for the edge of the bed to steady herself. Kenny caught her before she fell to the floor. A nurse pushed a chair under her and then wrapped a blood pressure cuff around her upper arm. Christine’s blood pressure was dangerously high, 173 over 113. “She’s always had high blood pressure,” Kenny said. Suddenly, there was a team of people in green scrubs over Christine.

  Are you having any chest pain? Jaw pain? Pain in your arm? Is there tightness in your chest? Do you have shortness of breath? Nausea?

  “I’m feeling a little dizzy, and I have a terrible headache, but that’s all,” Christine said.

  “Put her to bed,” an emergency room doctor said.

  “No,” Christine cried. “My son needs me. I have to be there when he wakes up. If he wakes up and I’m not there, he’ll be afraid. He’ll think something’s happened to me if I’m not there.”

  “Right now you have to take care of you,” the doctor said, refusing to budge. “Your son could be asleep for a very long time.”

  Two floors up, in the burn intensive care unit, a group of nurses prepared the treatment room for the onslaught of injured students. The burn unit expected twelve new admissions from the ER — as many as there were beds in the burn ICU, which was already full to capacity. The staff called the treatment area the tank room; patients called it the torture chamber.

  The tank room was divided into two treatment areas separated only by an opaque plastic curtain. As usual, the thermostat was set at a muggy ninety degrees to protect patients, who no longer had healthy skin for protection, from getting a chill. Manzo was working on one side of the curtain when Alvaro was wheeled in on a stretcher to the other side. The smell of his burning flesh preceded him. Manzo winced. No matter how many patients you treated, that was something you never got used to. A team of doctors and nurses, all dressed in green scrubs and white masks, with only their different-colored clogs distinguishing them, converged on Alvaro. A booster shot of morphine was pushed into his bloodstream through an IV line, and Mansour and his team of surgeons went to work assessing his injuries. Mansour shook his head as he scanned the boy’s body with his eyes. This child had suffered grave burns. The odds of survival were against him: Mansour estimated that Alvaro had a 30 percent chance of living, and even if they pulled off a miracle, his life would be nothing like it had been.

  Catastrophic third-degree burns covered the upper half of Alvaro’s body, and he was slowly suffocating from not being able to pull air into his smoke-clogged lungs. His torso had puffed up so dramatically that his circulation was compromised. If something wasn’t done quickly to relieve the pressure, blood wouldn’t be able to flow to his hands and they would have to be amputated.

  The doctors performed a tracheotomy, cutting a hole in Alvaro’s windpipe, and hooked him up to a respirator to breathe. An emergency escharotomy — an incision from his shoulders to his wrists and a large H across his chest — would relieve the pressure of his ballooning body and help save his extremities.

  Even though he was unconscious and deeply sedated, Alvaro grimaced at the first cut of the scalpel.

  Collette Pritchard, a veteran burn nurse, watched and prayed. God give him the strength to get through this, she thought, whether it is to live or to die.

  Outside, at the nurses’ station, the telephones continued to ring incessantly with calls from worried parents wanting to know about their children. The staff couldn’t keep up. Even more troubling, some of those who had been waiting in the ER were now gathering outside the burn unit. Information was slow in coming, people were desperate for word, and frustrations were at the boiling point. One woman cried as she pleaded for answers. A distraught father repeatedly shouted his son’s name. The staff sympathized, but they couldn’t afford to have chaos in the unit. Manzo was young and strapping, and she could be as intimidating with strangers as she was nurturing to her patients. She marched out to the hall but stopped short, shocked at the size of the crowd that had amassed. There were at least a dozen people standing there. A mural of worried, tear-streaked faces stared back at her, some accusingly. Where the hell is security? she wondered.

  “Look,” she said, trying to sound earnest, “I know you’re anxious to know about your loved ones, and as soon as we can, we will come out to talk to all of you. Right now we are treating some very sick people and we need you to try to be patient.”

  A pack of boys, Seton Hall students, walked toward Manzo, threatening to push through the door.

  She took a step toward them.

  “Stop,” she said. “You can’t come in. Not even family members are allowed in. Now, pull yourselves together. We’re all on the same side here.”

  “Our friends are in there,” one of the students cried. “They need us. There’s nobody with them who cares about them.”

  “I care,” Manzo said.

  In the midst of the crowd, Daisy Llanos, Alvaro’s mother, watched helplessly as Manzo turned to walk back inside. For the two previous nights, Daisy, a superstitious woman, had had a premonition that misfortune was about to visit her only son. It had so unsettled her that to try to comfort herself, she had slept in her son’s old bed at home on both nights. When someone from the hospital called to say there had been a fire and Alvaro had been burned, Daisy was ov
ercome with a sense of doom. “How can this be?” she cried. “Alvaro is safe in school. I just saw him two days ago.”

  Daisy had jumped in the car and driven seventeen miles from Paterson to Saint Barnabas, expecting the worst. A native of Colombia, Daisy spoke very little English, and her husband spoke even less. Her son had always been her voice, her link to the English-speaking world. Now she struggled to be heard. “Permiso, señorita,” she said, gently pushing her way to the front of the crowd. Excuse me, miss.

  “My son is Alvaro Llanos,” she said, tears streaming down her cheeks. “Mi hijo es mi vida. ¿Puedes decirme, por favor? ¿Está él vivo?” My son is my life. Can you tell me, please? Is he alive?

  “Please try to be patient,” another nurse said. “The doctor will be out to speak to you as soon as he can.”

  Chapter 4

  With the worst of the burned students finally tucked into their rooms, Mansour was ready to talk to their families. He glanced at his watch. It wasn’t yet noon. He had already done a day’s work — and then some. He was physically and emotionally drained. In all his years treating burn patients, Mansour had never figured out how to handle his emotions when it came to children. It deeply pained him to see them suffer and always sent him into a profound funk.

  Walking out of the burn ICU and down the hall toward the waiting area, he wondered about the two most badly burned boys. The next few hours were critical for their survival. He wasn’t sure either would make it through the day. The Simons boy had a fighting chance, but his hands would probably have to be amputated. The Llanos kid would need a miracle to pull through. And if he did survive, Mansour wondered, would he be one of those victims who, after all was said and done, was angry that his life had been saved?

  The waiting area was jammed with people, crying, praying, glued to a suspended TV set. Mansour glanced up to see what they were watching. CNN was showing footage of the burning dormitory, but the sound was turned off. Mansour didn’t blame them. The news coming out of the university was heart wrenching. Three freshman boys were dead: John Giunta, a talented musician, had been trapped in his room and suffocated in the smoke. Two boys — Aaron Karol, a soccer player and scholar from Green Brook, a small township in central New Jersey, and Frank Caltabilota, whose high school football career had made him a hometown hero in Long Branch, a beach city on the Jersey shore — had burned to death in the third-floor lounge. One fire official said he thought Karol and Caltabilota had left their dorm rooms, become disoriented in the smoke, and run into the fire, which was believed to have started in the third-floor lounge.

  Caltabilota.

  The name sounded familiar to Mansour. Oh yes, he realized, the man who has been calling the burn unit all morning looking for his son. Each time he had called, someone had checked and double-checked the blackboard by the nurses’ station for the names of new patients, and each time they’d had to tell the poor man his son’s name was not on it. The man had been increasingly frantic with every call.

  Just a boy . . . And now he was gone forever. Mansour shook his head, hoping Mr. Caltabilota hadn’t learned of his son’s death on the television news.

  Dozens of students had suffered burns and smoke inhalation in the fast-moving fire, according to the news reports. Officials didn’t know what had caused it yet. One critically burned girl, a resident assistant named Dana Christmas, had been taken to University Hospital in Newark after heroically reentering the burning building several times to alert sleeping students. Most of the seriously injured, the news continued, had landed in the burn unit at Saint Barnabas. The less serious had been treated in the emergency room and released to their parents.

  Poignant stories had begun trickling out. One boy had jumped from the ledge outside his third-story window, breaking an arm and a leg. Another heaved a mattress out of his window and was about to jump when a fireman burst into his room and carried him to safety. A girl dialed 911 and was told by a fire dispatcher to stuff a comforter under her door and seal it tight with packing tape. The advice had saved her life. Students told stories of seeing fellow students on fire. One boy had started to flee from the building but found another student — he didn’t know his name — lying in a heap just outside his dorm room door. He pulled the gasping student inside, wrapped him in a sweatshirt, and stayed with him until help arrived. A female student, a distance runner on the college track team, nearly tripped over a burned boy as she ran from the fire. She picked him up and carried him outside.

  But many of the stories were not as inspiring. Parents spoke of being unable to find their children. One father said he had called his son’s cell phone, and his son’s roommate had answered. “I can’t talk,” the boy had exclaimed. “The firemen are trying to get us out.” “Where is my son?” the father had asked. “He may have gotten out the back,” the roommate said, and cut off the connection. The father still hadn’t found his son.

  Mansour looked around at the distraught parents, at their eyes, puffy from crying, and their mouths, pinched in grimaces, and his thoughts drifted to his own son. How many nights had he been preoccupied with that most terrible fear of losing your own child? How many prayers had he said, asking that Nicolas never be burned? That was why he had been so insistent that they practice the fire escape route at home, and why he had checked Nicolas’s dorm room in Washington for smoke detectors and sprinklers. He would definitely send Nicolas that ladder he and Claudette were talking about.

  Shawn Simons and Alvaro Llanos were Nicolas’s age. They had the same dreams, the same expectations, the same carefree “nothing can happen to me” attitude that boys their age deserved to have. Mansour shook his head. Now they were in drug-induced comas in the burn center’s intensive care section. Respirators were breathing for them. Swaddled in layers of gauze to protect their oozing, burned skin, they looked like mummies. A web of IV lines pumped massive amounts of narcotics and fluids into their bloodstreams to numb them to the unrelenting pain they would otherwise suffer and to prevent deadly burn shock.

  What would he tell their parents? That they would sleep that way for weeks? Perhaps months? That is, if they lived.

  Christine Simons was the first to introduce herself.

  Mansour had noticed her, sitting there, comforting the parents of the Llanos boy. He had heard through the hospital grapevine that she had spent most of the morning in the emergency room, making a fuss because the doctors down there had insisted she stay until her blood pressure normalized. She just wanted to be with her son. Mansour didn’t blame her; he admired her mettle.

  “What can you tell us, Doctor?” Christine asked when she saw Mansour standing there.

  “The next few months will be a roller-coaster ride,” Mansour replied. If their boys did survive, they would lose months and maybe even years of their lives to the healing process, and even then their scars — both physical and emotional — might be permanent.

  Alvaro’s sister Shirley translated the doctor’s words into Spanish for her parents. In any language they were unwelcome, and Daisy Llanos wiped away tears.

  Her son. Tall. Handsome. Her golden boy. He had willingly taken on the role of head of the family after her husband’s stroke two years earlier. He truly was the perfect child, and now she might lose him.

  “I want to know why I thought my son was sleeping in the dormitory, safe. Why someone wakes me up to tell me he’s in the hospital,” she cried. Mansour didn’t have an answer. He couldn’t say why the fire had happened, and he couldn’t say whether her son would survive.

  Alvaro senior leaned heavily on his cane for support.

  “Is my son afraid?” he asked.

  “No,” Mansour said. “He is sleeping, probably dreaming.” He paused for just a moment. “We hope,” Hani said, “they are good dreams.”

  Chapter 5

  Mansour had been at the hospital all day and half the night when he finally pulled on his overcoat and switched off the desk lamp in his windowless office. All he wanted was a shower and some sleep.<
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  It was already past ten o’clock and he had been on his feet for sixteen hours. He was due back in the burn unit at 7 a.m. He hoped the two most badly injured boys were still alive when he returned, but he had learned long ago just how cunning burns could be. Keeping a professional distance was the only way to stay sane. How many times had he seen hope turn to despair with the tick of the second hand on a clock? More times than he liked to admit. Such was the business of burns. Recovery was erratic, fraught with fleeting highs and long, dreadful lows.

  Walking down the hall through the burn ICU, Mansour passed room 4, where Alvaro Llanos lay motionless, his parents at his bedside. Mansour stopped and peered through the glass. The boy was covered with gauze from his head to his feet; only his toes poked through his suit of hospital armor. His arms, tied above his head to keep him from unconsciously yanking out his respirator hose, made him look like a ghoulish contortionist in the middle of a trick.

  Mansour hadn’t been able to say what the prognosis was for Shawn or for Alvaro, although the parents of both boys had asked the question over and over again that day. The truth was that either one of them could die at any time. Indeed, they were living on stolen moments. When the boys did wake up, they would most likely not remember the fire or the initial pain of their burns, Mansour had said.

  “But they will survive,” Christine had said, making a statement, not asking a question.

  “At this point, we just can’t say,” Mansour had replied. “This is a very delicate time. Right now, we just don’t know.”

  Alvaro’s condition was particularly precarious. Mansour was fairly certain that if Shawn survived, he would lose all of his fingers. But Alvaro would lose his identity. Neither he nor his life would resemble what it had been before the fire. How much he made of his life as a burned person would depend on his character, but that question was a long way off.

  “Pray,” had been the only answer Mansour was able to give the boy’s parents, earlier that day, when they asked what they could do to help their son. Now Hani watched as Alvaro’s mother and father stood over their unconscious son, praying in Spanish.