Surviving the Fire

It started as an unknown number calling me just after seven in the morning. I assumed it was a scam, but answered reflexively before thinking I should just ignore it. I was even more confused when a vaguely familiar voice started asking how my brother was doing. It was a woman my brother dated several months ago.

I knew nothing. My answer was that I spoke to him two days ago and he was fine.

She told me there was a huge fire at his apartment. His phone died while she was talking to him. But last he mentioned he was headed to the hospital.

The rest of the day was intense. I researched and watched a video of my brother's apartment being engulfed in flames. I called my mom. She was headed to the hospital to see him.

Later in the day, there were photos of everything that happened to him.

His hands sustained severe burns. Blisters covered his entire palms and fingers. The skin had peeled away from the back of his hands to reveal deep red patches of subcutaneous flesh. The thing only doctors and nurses see, and I was only familiar with in movies.

 

Eli’s Story: It Began with an Explosion

(*names that have not been made public by families or individuals have been changed until those people or families have made that decision.)

The loud boom and vibration of the explosion woke Eli in the middle of the night. He stumbled out of bed to see what roused him, but the neighborhood was crazy and hell broke loose all the time.

But tonight strangely he wanted to know more.

His door wasn’t hot when he touched it, but when it opened the smoke was so thick that he couldn’t see. A wall of heat blasted him in the face.

He slammed it shut and doubled back to his balcony for the fire escape. Flames licked up the wooden stairs that rested against the outside of the building, puffing thick gobs of black smoke into the sky.

That would be going through the fire, and they might collapse under him.

There was no smoke in his room yet. He took a deep breath of uncontaminated air and dashed to the front door.

Eli’s apartment offered new room to for the clustered smoke and it rushed in, giving him a small moment of visibility. His nieghbor’s door was still closed. He worried for a moment that they hadn’t heard the boom. He curled his hand into a fist and pounded on the door so hard pain shot into his wrist, then yelled, “FIRE!”

There was no response. Eli didn’t think he had time to wait.

He groped at the walls with his hands, searching for the railing on the stairs as a guide. The heat stung his eyes, but he kept them open looking for flames. The wood and drywall were so blazing with heat that it burned his flesh, but it was the only way he could guide himself through the building. He knew he needed to get down. He sat on the floor and slid down each step, counting them as he went. He needed to know when each flight ended so he could turn to go down the next, otherwise he could find himself in an open apartment or stuck against a burn walling.

Near the exit, the smoke cleared a little, but now there were flames outside the building, bursting, climbing, and curling against and around the glass, trying to get in.

In the fire light he saw John* collapsed on the floor.

Eli knelt down and yelled over the rage of the fire, “John, we gotta get out!” He draped John’s arm over his shoulder and hoisted him up, then the two staggered towards the door to the outside and the flames.

His fingers gripped the handle to the exit, and the metal burned more than anything else he had touched, but it was the only way out. He held the searing metal and shoved it open.

The two stumbled past the flames and into the night.

Eli called for help from two people walking down the street. They assisted John* and Eli to rest on a curb away from the burning building.

Breathing hard, Eli looked at his hands. The skin was swollen, puffy and white in someplaces. In others it was melting off and dripping down onto the ground. He looked at John. Skin all across his body and side was doing the same thing. John* had deep gouges bleeding down his face and knees. It didn’t look like it came from the fire.

Then it hit Eli. John* had a bad hip. It usually took him a long time to go up and down the stairs. He would rest between the flights. But tonight he had thrown himself down the stairs, crawled to the next threshold, then thrown himself down again. After battering himself for three floors, he collapsed unable to reach the handle to door outside.

Eli glanced over at John, smoke coming out of his mouth as he spoke, “We made it out John. We made it.”

Looking back down at his hands Eli noticed they were starting to look fuzzy. Everything was starting to look fuzzy. By the time he reached the hospital, everything was a blur. A doctor asked him to read a card, but Eli couldn’t see the difference between the card and the hand that held it.

When the doctor asked what Eli could see, he responded, “There is a big blur that I think is you, and a little blur that I think is your hand.”

The heat and chemicals in the fire had burned his face and eyes, adrenaline had kept them working long enough to get out, but now the damage was setting in.

After the nurses had scrubbed the dead flesh from his hands and Eli had a moment to think as he sat in the hospital room alone he wondered what life would be like without sight or hands.

 

 

Watching the video of my brother’s apartment burn I knew he was very lucky to be alive. I can see the flames raging exactly where he used to sleep, to eat, to live.

It’s gut-wrenching to know that when he left the hospital the only things he owned were the clothes on his back and what he had in his bank account.

Eli has built his career around working with his hands. He designs custom windows for homes where the standard cut won’t work. It’s a lot of carpentry work, and detailed work. In time his hands will heal, but for the moment he can’t work.

For the moment, he can’t do most things for himself.

I think about how I would handle losing everything in a single day. How would I handle starting over?

If I lost any one thing, my bed, my computer, all my clothes, my fridge I could replace one of those things, but I couldn’t replace everything all at once. Building up these things has taken my lifetime.

Recovery

The doctors say Eli’s eyes will heal and he will be able to see again. He meets with a burn specialist soon and until then he is having help changing the bandages regularly and applying burn cream.

The man he helped escape the building was a close friend of his, but despite Eli’s efforts the John* passed away on Tuesday evening from his injuries.

On Wednesday Eli received a text message from an unknown number. It read, “This is Henry* from apartment #12. I got your number from Rachel. I just wanted to say that knock woke me up. I got out. I’m okay…”

 

Help Eli survive the fire. help Eli rebuild from the fire

We are asking for any help to start rebuilding his life. The funds will be used to buy clothes, a bed, a new place to live, and all the things that he lost. We are asking to help give him hope for the future.