Free After the Fire: A True Story of Love and Survival by Robin Gaby Fisher

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