The Gift of Fire Read Online Free PDF Page B

he was pulled from the fiery wreckage, it was discovered that he’d lost both legs and an arm, and was blind in one eye. Like me, Austin landed in a hospital where miracles happen. When things looked bleakest for him, a scientist uttered these famous fictional words to the colonel’s medical team: “Gentlemen, we can rebuild him … better than he was before.”
    I’d like to think the doctors made me better than I was before. I’m certain they made me stronger and faster than I would’ve been without their creative genius. In fact, I became one of the fastest kids in the neighborhood after one particular surgery, which moved a tendon on my twisted left foot in an effort to pull the bone to the right. Within a couple of days of that operation, I was running wild. I had a huge boot on my leg (the kind you see on people who have had skiing accidents), and I used the momentum of the boot to propel me forward. I ran like I had wings on my feet—like little Forrest Gump and his braced legs. When the boot came off, I could run even faster … and once I started running, I never wanted to stop.
    Having all that energy made returning to the confines of the burn ward all the more restrictive during my stays there. As I grew older and stronger, I regularly struck out to explore the greater universe of the hospital. I quickly discovered where the gurneys were stored and began organizing races with other young burn patients. Sometimes we’d race each other by pushing our gurneys solo; other times we’d make it more like chariot races, with one kid pushing and another riding atop the gurney’s mattress.
    We liked to race along the underground corridor that connected Shriners Hospital with Massachusetts General Hospital across the street. The long tunnel had a natural dip in it, which was great for gathering speed and irresistible to fun-loving kids with a set of wheels. Unfortunately, not everyone appreciated our enthusiasm. After we accidentally clipped some doctors with a speeding gurney—and sent one of my competitors to surgery to have a dozen stitches closed up after a nasty pileup—the famous Shriners Gurney Races were shut down.
    But I continued to explore the hospital. Sometimes I’d do so by myself, but I often went with a local volunteer who visited the burn ward twice a week. I knew him simply as “Shriner Bob,” and what I remember most about him is that he was superfriendly to every patient he met. Shriner Bob would lead a group of us youngsters on tours of every floor of the hospital, even those restricted to medical staff, where we on the ward were forbidden to go.
    It was always an incredible adventure when Bob showed up and told us to prepare ourselves for an expedition. The group of us would trek across the entire length of the underground passageway, the former racetrack for our gurneys, to the other side into Mass General. There, Shriner Bob would take us into the gift shop to buy comic books, small toys, and sweets before returning us safely to the burn ward.
    Those trips may not seem like much, but for a kid whose world was confined to the space between the metal rails of a hospital bed, crossing a tunnel and coming out through the other side was like getting in a spaceship and leaving the solar system. Bob showed me that people were capable of random acts of kindness, and that there was a great unknown universe waiting for me once I got better and could leave the hospital.
    As I got older, my horizons would expand even further when a friend took me on a day trip to go whale watching on the New England coastline, or when someone who heard about my love of basketball invited me to a Boston Celtics game. But those early trips through the tunnel with Shriner Bob stand out in my mind.
    It was during my exploration of the hospital that I began to wrestle with deep philosophical issues five-year-olds have no business thinking about. Sometimes I’d pass through different wards in the hospital and see kids