The Gift of Fire Read Online Free PDF

never cut Rocky any slack; the goose-bump-raising scene where a couple hundred schoolchildren join Rocky as he runs up the steps of the Philadelphia Museum of Art; and most of all, the rousing musical score by Bill Conti that still makes me want to climb into the ring whenever I hear it.
    Knowing my passion for this movie, Dad brought an audio recording of it with him during one of his visits. I don’t know what he expected, but as soon as he turned on the cassette player and I heard the theme song crackling out of the tiny speaker, my entire near-comatose body started to shake and twitch. Within minutes, my bandaged foot was tapping the air along with the beat of the music—and I was struggling to sit up in bed, crawl out of my tent, and start running across the floor of the burn ward.
    My parents were overjoyed by my reaction to the tape. They began to see that behind the plastic and beneath the bandages, the high-spirited little Danny they loved was alive and kicking. They’d just witnessed me taking my first tentative steps on the very long road of recovery. I think they realized that, like the character of Rocky whom I admired so much, I wasn’t going to let anyone throw in the towel or stop me from going the entire 15 rounds.
    Two weeks later, Dad returned to Boston with a pair of children’s boxing gloves packed in his luggage. During those two weeks, I’d rejected some of my newly grafted skin and developed a staph infection with an accompanying fever. By the time my father arrived on the ward with my new boxing gloves, however, I’d improved enough so that the surgeon let him carefully slip the gloves over my bandaged wrists. As soon as Dad laced them up, I began taking friendly jabs at the doctors and nurses.
    About two months after that first “boxing match” with the hospital staff in Boston, I was well enough to go home to Louisiana.
    I T WAS MID -J ULY, FOUR MONTHS AFTER THE ACCIDENT . While I was now technically an outpatient, I still flew back to Shriners every two or three months for reconstructive surgery on my face, head, feet, hands, and just about any other body part you can name. So much of my childhood was spent in that hospital that I feel I never really left.
    But as I mentioned earlier, I learned many life lessons in Boston. The first was that if you’re going to pick a role model to fashion yourself after, you could do a lot worse than Rocky Balboa. Even though a lot of people roll their eyes at me when I say how much I identify with that character, I wouldn’t be anywhere in life if I hadn’t started emulating the underdog’s never-say-die fighting spirit when I wasn’t yet three years old, trapped beneath a plastic tent, wrapped head to toe in bandages. Rocky helped make me a fighter—and if I hadn’t learned to fight, I’d be dead.
    I had to fight to get through the dozens upon dozens of reconstructive surgeries I was to endure. For most people, a change in season means a change in the weather; for me it meant another 1,300-mile trip to have a part of my body rebuilt.
    As you might imagine, the main reason I had so many operations was because my injuries were so severe. But you might not realize that another reason was that I was so young and still growing, which meant that the doctors had to redo their work as my bones got longer. Let me tell you, what they did was really amazing, cutting-edge stuff. Just for starters, they rebuilt my nose using part of my ribs, built my cheeks using a new type of synthetic material, used skin from the back of my head to design new eyelids, and created a thumb on my left hand where none existed.
    Secretly, I suspect that those surgeons thought of me as their personal version of Steve Austin, the “bionic man” from the TV show The Six Million Dollar Man. I’m not sure if you remember it, but Colonel Steve Austin (portrayed by Lee Majors) was an astronaut who was horribly injured when his experimental aircraft crashed during a test flight. When