After the Fire: A True Story of Love and Survival Read Online Free PDF Page A

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