After the Fire

It was a rude awakening. He felt as if he were being tossed from person to person. Someone was spraying water on his face. Where was he anyway? Shawn wished he has his glasses so he could see. The room seemed really big, and there were strangers in masks pushing and pulling at him. One of them was shouting: "Breathe! Breathe!"

Shawn was in the tank room, the place where patients' burned skin was scraped, scoured and dressed each day. He wasn't sure why he was there. Something about a fire. Was he burned? Shawn looked at his hands. They didn't look like his hands.

When the ambulance pulled up and Shawn stepped out, a marching band began playing and cheerleaders turned cartwheels as they spelled out his name. The best part was the brand-new red Mustang convertible parked in front of his freshman dormitory, Boland Hall. It was the most beautiful car Shawn had ever seen - and it was for him. Only it was all a dream.

His arms tied to the bed, his eyes swollen shut, his body wrapped in gauze from head to foot, Shawn, critically burned in a fierce fire that raged through Boland Hall 14 days earlier, was in a deep and morphine-induced sleep.

In his relatively short life, Shawn already had survived one fire.

He was a month old when the Newark house in which his family was living burned to the ground. A fire had begun in the apartment below theirs. Christine Simons, who had taken her daughter, Nicole, to school, arrived home just in time to see her husband, Ken, fleeing the flames with their baby boy, Shawn, cradled in his arms.

Christine Simons thought about that as she watched her 18-year-old son lying in his hospital bed, a respirator pumping air into his lungs and a web of tubes pushing food, liquids and narcotics into his bloodstream.

The restraints were especially upsetting, but they were crucial: Although unconscious, Shawn might try to pull out his breathing tube.

It would have been unbearable to lose her son 18 years ago. She didn't think she could survive losing him now.

In the two weeks since the Seton Hall University dormitory fire, Mrs. Simons had spent every waking hour in the Saint Barnabas burn unit. As she stood by Shawn's bedside she thought she saw him blink - or were her eyes playing tricks? Sometimes she would stare at her son until her back ached, hoping for a sign. Would he ever wake up? And what about his roommate, Alvaro Llanos?

The smallest thing - a twitch or a flutter, a cough or a fever - could make Mrs. Simons rejoice or despair. She knew the Llanoses felt the same way. She even saw it sometimes in the nurses and doctors who were treating the boys. Hani Mansour, the director of the burn unit at Saint Barnabas, had said that burn recovery was a roller coaster. But this felt different. You never knew when the next turn was coming or what lay beyond. Burn recovery wasn't a roller coaster, Mrs. Simons thought, it was a runaway train.

Mrs. Simons and Shawn were unusually close. She used to say they didn't really need to talk to each other because they could read each other's thoughts. If only she knew what he was thinking now. Was he afraid? Did he know what was happening to him? Was he hurting?

The truth was, she was suffering more than her son. While Mrs. Simons worried herself sick, Shawn was immersed in morphine dreams.

Mansour had told Mrs. Simons that Shawn was being weaned from the massive amounts of morphine that had ensured his long sleep. He had passed the initial crisis and he would get better sooner if he were participating in his own recovery. He could open his eyes any day. For her, that day couldn't come fast enough.

At 10:15 a.m. on Feb. 2 - more than two weeks after he had been drugged into sleep - Shawn woke up.

It was a rude awakening. He felt as if he were being tossed from person to person. Someone was spraying water in his face. Where was he anyway? Shawn wished he had his glasses so he could see. The room seemed really big, and there were strangers in masks pushing and pulling at him. One of them was shouting: "Breathe! Breathe!"

Shawn was in the tank room, the place where patients' burned skin was scraped, scoured and dressed each day. He wasn't sure why he was there. Something about a fire. Was he burned? Shawn looked at his hands. They didn't look like his hands.

He wished his mother were there. The woman standing closest to him had a kind face. But when he raised himself up to try to hug her, she recoiled - as if she thought he intended to strike her. When she did embrace him, everyone else started to clap and cry. What a strange place this was.

The moment the Simonses arrived in the burn unit, nurse Andy Horvath gave them the good news. Shawn had awakened that morning in the tank. He was now in his room, bewildered but alert. He was still attached to the respirator, so he couldn't speak. But he could communicate by pointing to letters of the alphabet on a sheet of paper a nurse had left by his bedside.

Ken Simons cried at the sight of his son. He had lost two of his children - from a previous marriage - to illness. He had been praying to God to save this one.

Christine Simons cried, too. As relieved as she was, she felt helpless. Mothers were supposed to make their children feel better. She had always been able to do that. Now she saw such pain and fear in Shawn's eyes, and there was nothing she could do except trust in God and the doctors.

Tears trickled down Shawn's red, raw cheeks. He tried to speak - he had so many questions - but he couldn't make any sound.

"The respirator," his father told him. "You won't be able to talk until you're taken off the respirator."

Shawn wiggled his bandaged fingers.

"As long as you can move them, that's good," his father said.

Shawn raised his hand to his bare head. His curls - where were they?

"It's okay. They'll come back," his mother reassured him.

Mrs. Simons held up the sheet of paper with the alphabet printed on it, and slowly Shawn spelled out what was on his mind.

"Where have you been?"

"Right here, every day," Mrs. Simons replied.

"How is Al?"

"Al is fine."

What she didn't say was that the doctors had given Alvaro only a 40 percent chance of surviving.

Three doors down, Daisy Llanos sat by her boy's bed, reading the Bible. Rosary beads hung from his bed, from the bulletin board, from a shelf.

Mrs. Llanos was a devout Catholic. When she wasn't watching over Alvaro, she was praying at St. Joseph's Roman Catholic Church or St. John the Baptist Cathedral in Paterson. "Please Jesus, if you love me and you love my son and you love my family, please help us through this," she prayed in Spanish. "Please leave my son with me, no matter how burned he is."

Her prayers had been answered two years earlier when she had begged for her husband's survival after a life-threatening stroke.

If God would let her son live now, she would take care of him for the rest of her life. Mi niño bello, nadie jamás te hará daño. No one would ever hurt her beautiful boy again.

While Mrs. Llanos prayed, others confessed their fears and frustrations in letters they tacked to Alvaro's hospital room wall.

"Waiting for your response of our presence, but not a single movement has occurred," 16-year-old Shany Llanos wrote to her brother. "Out of everyone in the family, you are the last person we expect to give up ... I know that when we are in the room with you, you can hear us & I know you're trying to respond."

Alvaro's girlfriend, Angie Gutierrez, wasn't so sure. "When I lie down I try to hug myself so I can feel your body close to mine," she wrote. "But somehow no matter what I do I can't find you. No matter how hard I try I can't see you."

It was Angie who delivered the news to the Llanoses that Shawn Simons was awake. They tried to be happy for his family. But somehow it made their situation seem worse.

The Simonses and the Llanoses had bonded in the weeks since the fire. Except for vigils at their sons' bedsides, the two families had spent every day together in the burn unit waiting room. They watched "Jerry Springer," "Divorce Court" and "Oprah Winfrey." They ate meals brought in by a local church. And they talked about their sons, somehow managing to surmount the language barrier to share their stories.

Shawn's older sister, Nicole, and Alvaro's two sisters, Shany and Shirley, passed the time in the waiting room talking about boyfriends, music and especially their injured brothers.

Angie, 18, just wanted to be near Alvaro. She had been through this once already, when she was in the eighth grade. In 1995, Angie's father had been trapped in a burning car. He spent three months in the Saint Barnabas burn unit under the care of Mansour - in the same room Alvaro was in now. No one would let 13-year-old Angie see her father. With Alvaro, though, nothing was going to keep her away. She dropped her English class to sit at her comatose boyfriend's bedside.

When she wasn't talking to Alvaro - encouraging him to keep fighting or chattering about what she had done in school that day -Angie tried to comfort his parents and everyone else.

Mrs. Simons would say they had all become like one big family. But it was a family that the burn nurses were about to split apart.

Only hours before Shawn awakened, the nurses, eating dinner in the burn unit's kitchenette, debated whether it would be better if Alvaro died. They knew that Alvaro had been a handsome boy, and that he had dreamed of becoming a professional baseball player. That spring he was going to try out for the Seton Hall baseball team.

If Alvaro did live, he would never be the beautiful boy he once was, and he would almost certainly be limited physically.

Laura Thompson, a nurse who has worked in the burn unit since 1986, wondered whether he'd be able to adjust, whether his family would be there to help him.

The Llanoses were fragile - maybe too fragile to cope with what was ahead.

Horvath, the nurse who felt so protective of Alvaro, couldn't look at them anymore. He was afraid he might give them hope when he shouldn't.

Shawn's injuries were considerably less severe than Alvaro's. Shawn was on a fast track to recovery. Two days after he woke up, his feeding tube was removed. The doctors had planned to wean him off the respirator and breathing tube that day, but Shawn yanked it out himself. By the next day he was chattering to his mother about his girlfriend, Tiha Holmes, and asking for grilled cheese sandwiches and macaroni and cheese. A week later he was taken off the critical list.

Shawn's hands and face were scarred. He still could lose some of his fingers and, even with months of painful therapy, would never regain the full use of his hands. But the doctors were optimistic about his recovery.

Alvaro's survival was still hour-to-hour.

It could be that way for weeks, even months. Extreme measures would have to be taken to protect him from the side effects of being on a respirator indefinitely. The doctors performed a tracheotomy, a surgical procedure in which they cut a hole in the front of Alvaro's neck to accommodate his breathing tube, and his eyelids were sewn shut to protect his corneas from drying out - a procedure called a tarsorhaphy that struck even some of the nurses as barbaric.

For Shawn, his injuries meant a two- or three-year setback. If Alvaro lived, he would be defined by his burns for the rest of his life.

It was time to start separating the families, said Chris Ruhren, director of the burn unit nurses. "This can no longer be treated like one case."

The Saint Barnabas burn nurses had become attached to both families. They celebrated each of Shawn's victories with the Simonses and they agonized over Alvaro's setbacks with the Llanoses.

"Angels," Christine Simons called them. People tended to describe them in ethereal ways. One patient had lapel buttons made up for the staff that read, "There is a special place in heaven saved for those who treat burns."

The nurses were an eclectic bunch. They were 55 acutely different personalities with one thing in common: Burns were in their blood. It's what made them a family. Burn nurses knew everything about each other. They knew about Kathy Hetcko's new boyfriend and they knew that Sharon Iossa ate only mashed potatoes for lunch every day.

They laughed at each other's raunchy jokes and cried on each other's shoulders. They gossiped about one another, bickered sometimes, and pulled crazy pranks when it all got to be too much.

Each of them had a fear of fire: Nurse Susan Manzo had her landlord light her gas grill when she wanted to barbecue. Kathe Conlon installed smoke detectors in her garage. None of them put cloths on their tables - that way their children couldn't pull on them, overturning hot food or lit candles. And no children were allowed in the kitchen when they were cooking.

For what they witnessed on an average day, they should have been paid a king's ransom. Burn nurses earned between $40,000 and $65,000. No one was in it for the money.

Burn nursing is unlike any other medical specialty. In a profession where the goal is to make patients feel better, their job inflicts pain. In a job where the payoff is to watch sick patients return to normal, theirs often don't. No one leaves the burn unit the way he or she was before. Nurse manager Patty Primmer would say, "Sometimes you look at a patient you have saved and you say, 'What have we done?' "

Mansour said the members of his team could work anywhere in the hospital. They were the smartest and most dedicated people in their professions. Like him, they chose burns. Then they chose to stay.

Part of that reason was Mansour, 53. It wasn't just that he treated his staff as equals, he thought of them that way. That was why nurses in other units in the hospital envied the burn staff.

There were three things nurses wanted from their jobs: good pay, flexible hours and the respect of the doctors they worked with. Most struggled to get the first two. Few got the third. In cardiac care, for instance, the doctors were the kings of their fiefdom. Rarely did a cardiologist commiserate about a treatment plan with the nursing staff or spend time in the nurses' lunchroom, joking, trading diet tips or making plans for the next staff picnic.

The doctors in the burn unit did that all the time.

Within Saint Barnabas there was a mystery about the burn nurses. They tended to stick together. They rarely ventured out of the unit; they ate most of their meals there in order to be close to their patients.

The average critically ill patient in an intensive care unit received 14 hours of bedside care per day. Critical burn patients required a nurse at the bedside for 21 out of every 24 hours.

The job was as physically demanding as it was emotionally difficult. On some days the nurses couldn't find time even for a bathroom break during their 13-hour shifts.

Not everyone fit in. "You don't get here if you're not good," said Manzo, an eight-year veteran of the burn unit. "If you don't pull your weight, we'll weed you out because you don't belong here."

"If you can't become part of the team, you don't last," Kathe Conlon added.

In the course of a day, burn nurses might deal with child abuse, elder abuse or a whole family wiped out by fire. They saw babies that looked like scorched skeletons and young mothers who were burned beyond recognition trying to save their children.

"There are times when this place is so very, very awful you never want to come back," Manzo said.

One morning as nurses were preparing Alvaro for the tank room, a call came into the burn unit that a child, burned on more than half his body, was being brought up from the emergency room.

As the burn team mobilized, the unit pulsated with anticipation and dread. Burned kids were the worst punishment. Most of the staff had families. For many of them, this case would hit too close to home.

Eight-year-old Jabrill Walker was wheeled into the tank room at 8:15 a.m. Mansour and a team of eight nurses and technicians were waiting. The boy had been playing with matches in his bedroom before school and his shirt caught fire. Like most freshly burned patients, he was awake and alert, and afraid.

Mansour could see that the burns were grave. Indeed, they were almost a duplicate of the Llanos boy in Room 4, the surgeon thought to himself. Like Alvaro, this child would require escharatomies - slits down his arms and across his chest to keep the swelling from cutting off his circulation.

Manzo was assigned to the case. She was the single mother of a 9-year-old boy, Anthony, and she talked about him all the time. When Manzo looked down at Jabrill, her hands shook and her face turned red. 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.

"I'm going to tell my mommy what you're doing to me," the child wailed. Manzo blinked back tears. Veteran burn nurse Eileen Gehringer could not. Burn technician Libby Davis fled the room rather than let the child see her sob. Manzo persevered.

"Okay, Jabrill, honey," she said in her most motherly voice. "We're going to give you a bath now. A big bubble bath."

As the hoses dropped from the ceiling over the boy on the gurney, 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," Manzo sang as she and the rest of the team scrubbed the boy's body.

Mansour was reflective as he left the tank room: "It's very sad. This boy is going to be here for a very long time. ... Another crisis. What can you do?"

After Jabrill had been taken to his room, Manzo stood in the unit kitchenette, holding a cold soda to her forehead. "I'm on my last thread," she told Davis, who attempted to comfort her.

"You okay?" Davis asked, rubbing Manzo's back, then taking the soda and popping it open for her.

"I'll be okay when it's 3:30 and I can call to make sure Anthony got off the bus and is safe at home."

Most nurses take pride in being stoic. Not in the burn unit. There, no one is afraid to show emotion, and when they do, the others always rally 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 5-week-old baby who lost his hand because his father held it under boiling water to stop him from crying; the businesswoman who spent three months recovering from severe burns, then died two years later in a house fire.

Burn nurses are asked time and time again, "How can you do it? Why do you do it?"

The truth is, most of them wouldn't be happy anywhere else.

"I left once and it's not fun," said Thompson, who began her nursing career in the unit 16 years ago, when she was 21. "When you leave here, the 'us' is gone from your life. It's like moving away from everything you love and hate. The bottom line is, this is where a lot of us belong."

They stayed for each other. They stayed because no one else would. They stayed because for every tragedy there were two success stories.

Shawn was one.

He was smart and stubborn and cocky.

Before the nurses even had the chance to get to know him, Shawn was telling them he would be out of there by the end of February. "Give me two weeks and a couple of days and I'll be home," he told Horvath a week after waking up.

Forget what the doctors had told his parents - that he would be in the hospital for at least three months. He was going home on Feb. 25. "I always set ambitious goals for myself," he said, "and I usually meet them."

Shawn would meet his goal this time, too. Indeed, he would better it by three days. He had not, however, counted on the turmoil in between.

The first blow came early on, when a nurse was helping Shawn take his first steps out of his room. Shaky and weak, he had to pour all of his concentration into just putting one foot in front of the other.

Shawn remembered hearing that his college roommate was three doors down. As he and the nurse made their way past Room 4, he glimpsed through the glass wall at his friend, and suddenly it hit him how seriously hurt Alvaro must be.

Everyone had told him that Alvaro was "fine." "Okay." "Getting better every day." But the vagueness of the responses troubled him. Only two nights earlier, he had asked his respiratory therapist, Mike Brick, to take him to see Alvaro. "You don't need to worry about him now," Brick told him. "You need to concentrate on yourself."

Now Shawn knew why everyone had been so evasive.

Shawn didn't let on to anyone that he'd seen Alvaro. He stopped asking about his friend, but for the next few days he glanced into Room 4 every time he walked by. Nothing changed.

Shawn never stopped thinking about Alvaro, though. "That's why I don't sleep," he finally confided to his mother. "I think I am blaming myself."

As it turned out, Boland Hall had an exit door 25 feet to the left of Shawn and Alvaro's room. Shawn had crawled out of their room and to the right. Alvaro followed. It was the route the boys always took to the elevator. But on the night of the fire the hallway was pitch black and smoky. Shawn had no way of knowing he was turning toward the fire.

Had he and Alvaro turned the other way, they might never have been burned at all. "I wish I went left," Shawn said, guilt and remorse in his voice.

"But then," he added, "I think this is all God's plan. There is a reason for what is happening to Al and to me. ... We just don't know what it is yet."

Soon, Shawn became absorbed in his own recovery. When he was moved from the burn intensive care unit to burn stepdown, on the other side of the hallway, he no longer walked past Alvaro's room. Not until the day he left Saint Barnabas to go home.

In stepdown, Shawn fought to keep his resolve, repeatedly proclaiming that everything was fine, that he was happy just to be alive. But sometimes he wondered how much more he could take.

Shawn whimpered like a baby on the morning he was taken into the operating room to have pins pushed into four of his fingers. The pins would immobilize his severely damaged joints and maybe save his fingers. Mansour usually used a local anesthetic when he performed the procedure, but Shawn made him promise he'd knock him out. Two hours later, Shawn was back in stepdown and his mother was feeding him pizza.

The next day Shawn fell into a funk. His hands were bandaged. Eating was awkward. He couldn't pick up the phone. The pins would stay in for six weeks. Overall, he was recuperating faster than anyone expected. But everything hurt.

A hand-made card from an elementary school student Shawn didn't know produced a brief respite from his misery. It came with a bunch of other messages, some drawn in crayon, others written in pencil on lined paper.

"Dear Friend," the greeting began, "My name is Evan and I go to Saint Denis in Manasquan, New Jersey. I am a big Michigan fan. I suppose you like Seton Hall. If you need a good laugh, I strongly suggest 'Dumb and Dumber.' Now that is a great movie."

Dozens of cards arrived for Shawn and Alvaro each day. Many were from complete strangers. Some were from out of state - as far away as California and Alaska. Shawn read every one. Mr. and Mrs. Llanos passed the time reading Alvaro's mail. Both boys' hospital rooms were papered with greeting cards.

Visitors helped lift Shawn's spirits, too. There was always someone in his room - a friend from the neighborhood or school or church. Priests from Seton Hall paid occasional visits. A local beauty queen stopped by and left an autographed picture.

Everyone was being so kind, but nothing could blunt the pain of Shawn's burns. His forehead stung. So did his hands, especially his pinned fingers. His skin-grafted hands looked so ugly, he thought. Would they ever look normal again?

The third week of February started off badly for Shawn, but it would end even worse.

Shawn's hands were stretched several times a day as part of his physical therapy. It kept them from constricting and shriveling, but the pain of bending and straightening his fingers was excruciating.

That Monday morning his skin was especially tight. At one point, therapist Melissa Kapner bent his fingers so far back Shawn thought he would go through the roof. "Ever have anyone kick you before?" Shawn asked through clenched teeth. "Because I'm about to kick you out of this room." His mother had never seen Shawn so mad. "Shawn!" she snapped. "I've never known you to be violent."

"I've never hurt like this before," he snapped back.

Shawn requested a bathroom break. When he asked for help with the door, Kapner told him he must at least try opening it himself. Mrs. Simons squirmed as Shawn struggled. When he finally did turn the doorknob, he shot Kapner a disgusted look before leaving the room.

"He'll like me eventually," Kapner said, unfazed. "Maybe in a year or so."

On Tuesday, in the weekly burn team meeting, where all aspects of burn treatment were discussed, Kapner delivered her report on Shawn. Kapner adored Shawn. Everyone did. He was a lovable kid. But he was a resistant patient, she told the assembled group of surgeons, nurses and therapists. "His hands are doing okay, but he's not doing as much as he should be. I went in there on the weekend and his girlfriend was feeding him."

Around the room, staffers gasped.

Successful burn therapy required earnestness on the part of the patient. The therapist worried that if Shawn didn't start exercising his hands more when he was alone in his room, the scar tissue would tighten up and he could lose the use of his hands. "We've told him this, but he's not taking it in," Kapner said.

Mansour revealed another problem in his report. "He's doing very well except his forehead is open," the surgeon said. "I am very tempted to propose skin grafting. I have to talk to his mother because he is very fragile."

The meeting took place three hours later in Shawn's room. Mansour stood at Shawn's bedside and spoke directly to him while Christine and Ken Simons looked on.

"Your forehead is still healing, but very, very slowly," Mansour said. "One option is skin grafting. As for scarring, you will have it no matter what we do. The surgery is an option. It is not an emergency. By Sunday, if there is no progress, we will do the surgery on Monday."

Shawn didn't say a word. He just glared at the surgeon.

"I hope this doesn't depress you more than you already are," Mansour said as he left the room.

Shawn bristled.

He knew that another surgery would push back his discharge date. Feb. 25 was little more than a week away.

"You want to think about it?" his mother asked him.

Shawn nodded yes.

Less than a minute passed. "I've thought about it," he said. "I don't want more surgery."

Burn nurse Debbie Vlack Stawski, one of Shawn's favorites, entered the room to take his blood pressure. "Don't bother," he grunted. "It's up."

By Wednesday it was Mansour's turn to gripe.

Mansour was angry over Shawn's decision. He thought it was hasty and foolhardy.

"His reaction is that of an adolescent," Mansour said before catching himself and chuckling with exasperation. "Of course, he is. But he's sitting in there like a little king. Everyone is in there doing everything for him. There's always someone feeding him. Reading to him. If the forehead doesn't heal, he'll have to have the graft anyway. But I'm not going to tell him that yet."

The friction between the surgeon and Shawn was about to escalate even further.

Snow was falling on Saint Barnabas on Friday. It was even chillier inside.

Shawn's forehead felt on fire. Having his head dressings changed in the tank room that morning was agony. When they first swabbed the Betadine on his open wounds, it was like holding a blowtorch to his forehead. Mansour had been in surgery and had not gotten the chance to examine Shawn's forehead before it was dressed again. He wanted to see it after lunch.

Shawn would have to go through the dressing change all over again. Twice in one day. The thought of it brought tears to his eyes.

At 2 p.m., Shawn was back in the tank. His head was undressed and he sat on an examining table, waiting for Mansour.

He was seething.

A moment later, Mansour breezed in. He examined Shawn's forehead for about a minute. He was pleased with the progress. "Looking better," he said, and walked out.

Shawn shook his head and said disgustedly, "He could have done that this morning."

The burn technicians redressed Shawn's head, and he clenched his teeth. "That stuff really burns," he told Nelly Delgado as she applied the Betadine.

"I know it's bad, honey," Delgado said. "I'm sorry."

His head rebandaged, Shawn returned to his room. He sat down on the bed and stared at the wall. "I guess I'm just getting tired of all this," he said, near tears.

Just then Stawski reappeared. Tall, slim and gentle, the nurse was there to comfort Shawn. She usually could. She leaned over Shawn, placed her hands on his knees and looked sympathetically into his eyes. Her offer of Benadryl to ease his discomfort was quickly accepted. "Whatever I can do to make it better, I will," she said.

Shawn seemed not to hear. He rose from his bed and walked to the window. The snow was dwindling to a stop and, for a moment, he stood there watching. Then, suddenly, he turned on his heel and walked out of the room.

Shawn couldn't escape, though.

In the hallway, Kapner headed him off and led him back toward his room for therapy. "Where were you going?" the lively young woman asked Shawn.

"I'm getting a plane out of here," Shawn told her.

"Me, too!" Kapner said.

"Oh yeah? What time does your plane leave?"

"Same time as yours - I'm going to be sitting right next to you."

"That's what you think," Shawn sneered, and Kapner began to bend his sorely burned fingers.

Down the hall, Mrs. Simons took refuge in the burn unit family room.

She was anxious. "I think I feel bad because he is so down."

But good news was at hand.

Mansour told Shawn that he would have to come back to the hospital every day for therapy but that he could go home the following Tuesday, Feb. 22.

Despite his headstrong nature, Shawn had progressed well. Mansour was confident he would improve even faster at home. How could he miss with the family support he had? His mother had been extraordinary.

Tuesday, Feb. 22, was a perfect, springlike day: 50 degrees and sunny. The snow from the week before had melted away. The freeze between Shawn and Mansour had thawed, too.

There was an air of excitement in the burn unit. This was what the team waited for with every patient. "Going home" meant that they had done well. Shawn was grateful to them.

Room 2125 in stepdown was bare now except for Shawn's packed bags. All of the cards and balloons had been taken down the night before by his mother and sister.

Shawn seemed unusually pensive, but he said he felt no sadness, just happiness, about leaving Saint Barnabas. His mother took pictures of Shawn with Mansour and each of the nurses. (The surgeon still has the snapshot on his office credenza.) "He's my guy," Stawski said. "You've got a great son," nurse Gehringer told Mrs. Simons.

By 11:30 a.m., Shawn was ready to leave, but there was something he felt he had to do first.

Flanked by his mother and father, he walked into the burn intensive care unit. As they walked through the double doors, a patient was being rolled into the tank room. For a split second, Shawn didn't realize it was his college roommate on the stretcher.

Alvaro was unconscious. Brownish fluids oozed through his bandages, from under his arms, his chest and his stomach. It was the first time Shawn had seen his friend since those early days when he was in intensive care, too, and would sneak glances at Alvaro as he walked past his room.

Shawn was stunned.

He stood at attention as the gurney with Alvaro passed, then he wandered distractedly, looking for a familiar face or anything else to take his mind off of what he had just seen.

The nurses, aware of what had just taken place, crowded around Shawn protectively to say their goodbyes. "You look so great." "You've done so well." "We'll miss you so much."

Shawn's back was to the tank room doors as Alvaro was rolled inside. Just before the doors shut, Alvaro's nurse Mike Conmy turned to his colleagues who were surrounding Shawn and rolled his eyes. Bad timing, his expression said. Very bad timing. Mr. Simons choked back tears.

After thanking the nurses for taking care of him, Shawn and his parents walked back to stepdown. Gehringer was ready with the discharge order: Percoset for pain, Benadryl for itch, Xanax for anxiety, eye salve and sleeping pills. Shawn would have to return indefinitely for daily outpatient therapy.

At noon, Shawn was officially cleared to go home, but he chose to linger until Alvaro came out of the tank room.

An hour later, Shawn and his mother returned to intensive care. Alvaro was settled back in his room. The nurses' furtive glances conveyed their shared concern. How would Shawn handle this? Could he handle it?

Shawn put on the required yellow smock, rubber gloves, head cap and face mask. He walked into Alvaro's room and stood beside him. Conmy was on the other side of the bed, taking Alvaro's blood pressure. While Mrs. Simons watched through the glass, Shawn studied his roommate's face.

"He can hear you if you talk to him," Conmy said. But Shawn had no words. He bowed his head in silent prayer, then, in utter grief, tore off his gown, mask, cap and gloves and rushed out of the room into his mother's arms. At long last his tears came.

It was the first time Shawn had cried about the fire. He felt like he was abandoning Alvaro.

"Let's go home, baby boy," said Mrs. Simons, leading her son away.

"If his eyes were open, he would have read my mind," Shawn said later. "He would have known that I was thinking, 'Al, you're going to pull through this. It will take a little longer, but you will pull through.'

"He would have known that I was thinking that even though I was going home, I wasn't really leaving him and that I would be there to see him through this. No matter how long it took."