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

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.

Chapter 12
    P lease take me to see my roommate.”
    Shawn had been awake for a week, and the morphine haze was finally clearing out of his head. He had been plotting to see Alvaro all day. Now it was late at night and his mother had finally gone home. Every time he had asked her about Alvaro, she had said he was fine, okay, getting better every day. The lights in the burn unit were dim, and the respiratory therapist was listening to his breathing. “My roommate is Alvaro Llanos,” Shawn said, persisting. “Can you take me to see him?”
    The therapist hesitated. He realized that Shawn wasn’t about to give up without getting an answer.
    “You don’t need to worry about him now,” the therapist said. “You need to concentrate on yourself.”
    Shawn had been taken off the critical list that day. His life was out of danger, but he still had a long recovery ahead of him. He promised himself that as soon as he could walk, he would find Al.
    The nurses had met few patients as determined as Shawn. Mansour had planned to wean him off the respirator on his third day awake, but Shawn yanked out his breathing tube before Mansour had the chance. On his second day, his feeding tube had been removed and he had asked his girlfriend, Tiha Holmes, for grilled cheese sandwiches. So much of a burn patient’s success depended on his psychological makeup. Shawn was smart and he was