Mark D. MD McDonough - Forged through Fire: A Reconstructive Surgeons Story of Survival, Faith, and Healing

I woke perspiring as an intense wall of heat rolled across the room. A glance at the clock revealed less than an hour since I had turned in for the night. Loud cracking noises pulled me from sleep. In the orange glow, my eyes started to water and burn like theyd been too long in an over-chlorinated pool, yet I had not been swimming.

I sat up groggily as thoughts skittered through my sleep-hazed mind: Im in my own bed. Dad is out of town: San Francisco.

Youre the man of the house now, chum, he had told me before leaving. Use your head and help your mom with your brothers.

Then, like a searchlight blasting through the fog, came the awful realization: The house is on fire! I have to get everyone out!

Jumping out of bed I noticed a rolling, dense smoke as it cast a thick blanket up from the first floor and into the second story of our colonial home. It was compact, nearly impervious to light except for the scarlet hue and intermittent flash of spiking flames darting up through the stairwell like a serpents tongue striking randomly. I was rooted in place by the unbearable heat; the slightest movement only intensified the pain. I was trapped with nowhere to run. If I had pictured hell in my mind, this would have been it. A burning wall of immense heat was literally degloving my skin.

My breaths were shallow and rapid, each one searing my throat like shards of glass, tearing its lining. The sensation was heightened by the vibrations from my screams of terror and warning.

Tim, first on the evacuation list as he and I shared the room, was close at hand. He heard me before anyone else and was knocking the screen from his window. At fourteen, he was eighteen months younger than I and slept across from me. Our room overlooked the front and side of the house on North Park Drive in peaceful Fairview Park, a suburb on the west side of Cleveland, Ohio.

Fire! I shouted as loudly as I could. Fire! Everybody, get out!

For another moment I was immobilized. The heat intensified, stinging my skin as I stood in just a pair of swimming trunks. As an enthusiastic competitive swimmer, this was standard wear in the summer so I could be ready to strip down and dive into a pool at a moments notice. Id been too lazy to change before hitting the sack.

I am trapped , I thought. Must find my way out! But I had to help the others. Get the family out!

Somewhere in my periphery, I sensed Tim moving fast nearby, climbing through the window over his bed and dropping down onto the side yard some fifteen feet below.

Shouting Fire! Fire! as loudly as I could, though my cries felt strangled, I bolted from our room through the open door, out onto the main landing. Screaming again, I was aware of my younger brothers Danny and Packy scrambling in the room they shared next to ours, each one at different bedroom windows facing the back and side of the house. Like Tim, they pushed their way out through their windows. Danny landed on the garage roof first; Packy chose a fall from the higher side window.

Becoming more and more aware that flames were engulfing our home, I knew that I should escape from a window too. But first I had to be sure that Mom and Toby, my six-year-old youngest brother, got out safely. Their rooms were on the other side of the stairwell, which by now was acting as a chimney through which blazing tongues flickered, attaching themselves to the high-pitched ceiling above.

The flames greedily sucked all oxygen from the core of our house, consuming me with terror and trepidation. The sounds were horrifying, like the bellowing of tornadoes. The walls were being stripped of their paper and my body of its skin. My screams continued, strident and strangled by the suffocating smoke as my blood curdled, coagulating on the surface of my extremities.

The flames continued to tower upward, reaching toward their intended victims. I heard sounds, my own howling with moans of agony, the loud cracks of splintering wood like felled trees. Everything was happening quickly though each moment seemed to last forever.

Desperate for air, I punched my right hand through the glass window in the bathroom, thinking I might first suck down some precious oxygen before hopefully climbing out to safety and reaching Mom via the sundeck attached to her room.

My fist left shards of double-paned glass at my feet and blood-tinged grains embedded in my skin, but I didnt notice the pain. My heart sank as I realized that by slamming on the window I had knocked it off its rails. The sash, with its jagged fragments of glass, now sat diagonally askew, hopelessly jammed.

The smoke continued to get thicker, obstructing all vision and burning my eyes, which were smeared with tears from the fumes. There was still a lurid orange-red glow somewhere beyond the soot-gray cloud around me.

There was no way I could get across the stairwell to the other side of the house and the rooms where Mom and Toby slept. My only option, the only hope, was to somehow get up to the balcony from the back of the house. However, the wooden balconys railing and its bordering turpentine-filled evergreen trees were already fueling the raging fire. Dad and I had planted those pines years before when I was just a sapling myself.

I stumbled down the stairs and leapt to the front doorbut closer to the source of the flames. Crashing down onto the marble foyer, I reached for the handle of the door. It was locked but was designed to unlock and turn easily from the inside. I turned it and pulled, but it didnt move despite my adrenaline-surged might. The door would not budge; firefighters would later determine that the intense heat had caused the metal door to expand, effectively sealing me inside. The thick, heavy smoke, compounded with the burning inferno and oxygen deprivation, was smothering any kind of rational thinking. Somehow, I had the presence of mind to know that wasting more precious seconds trying to open the door was suicidal.