“My Worst Fear”

My name is Michael Long. I’ve been a firefighter for a little over 26 years now.

My worst fear happened on July 25, 2010, when we were dispatched to a neutral aid assist fire run with a neighboring department. When we arrived on the scene, we had a large amount of fire and they were having trouble accessing the fire.

The fire had actually started in the basement due to the homeowner using a chemical and some different things trying to treat their basement floor.

Once we arrived, we approached the commander. He explained to us exactly what was going on, where they were having trouble and why they couldn’t get access into the basement.

My deputy chief and I made a suggestion of utilizing a special tool called a cellar nozzle where we would go into the front of the house, cut a hole in the floor and deploy the nozzle into the basement area to try to help knock down the fire.

The operation was agreed upon by the commander. We got all of our equipment together and proceeded to start to go into the structure. Just prior to entering the structure, there were three other firefighters in the foyer area.

I had to evacuate them from the building so that we could proceed with our operation. Once I got them out of the way, myself and the rest of my crew started up to the porch and I asked my deputy chief, “Do you have the lead or do you want me to take it?”

He said, “You take the lead. I’ve got your back.”

So I started in the door. I sounded the floor which is common that we do on every structure fire to make sure we have a good stable base to go in on. I sounded the floor – everything felt good and sounded good. I started to crawl in. I got maybe six feet inside the door when I felt the floor buckle.

Once the floor buckled, I knew what was getting ready to happen. I started to turn, I came up on one leg and turned and was trying to yell “get out!” I wasn’t sure where the rest of my crew was. Before I could finish saying get out, the floor literally, totally came out from underneath me. The foyer, living room, dining room, the kitchen and bathroom all collapsed at one time.

The majority of the fire was in the basement so when the floor collapsed, I was down in the middle of the fire.  I immediately started to burn.

As hot as it was in that basement, our fire gear will only withstand temperatures to a certain amount, especially during direct flame contact. I was getting burns to my lower legs and they were starting on my upper legs, where fire was actually burning up between my pants and my boots.

Not knowing the type of collapse that had happened, I was trying to reach for things to be able to pull myself out of the basement…but unfortunately there was nothing there to be able to climb back out on. I could hear screaming and commotion from up above. They were trying to get as many things together as they could to help get me out of the basement. Unfortunately, there just wasn’t a lot there.

By a stroke of luck, another department that was on the scene had just used a roof ladder and it was laying in the front yard. My deputy chief instructed two other members of the crew to grab that ladder and shove it down in the hole into the basement so I could try to climb out.

While I was trying to feel my way around in the basement and trying to climb out, I managed to make myself up by the front wall where I at least had an idea of where I was. When the ladder came into the basement, it actually pinned me between the ladder and the front wall. They couldn’t see me and I couldn’t see them.

Once I got myself freed up from being pinned by it, I worked my way around and I started to climb out. I got to the second rung and I went to reach for the third rung. By then I was just so tired – physically drained – that I lost my grip, lost my balance and I fell backwards into the basement, landing flat on my back down in the fire.

This is the time when I pretty much made my peace with God that I was done…that this was gonna be the last fire that I’d ever fight, and that I’d never see my family again. A lot of things crossed my mind, like my brother-in-law who was on the front porch, and is also the deputy chief. How is he gonna come back and tell his sister and his nephews that he had to watch her husband and their father die? Someway, somehow – I managed to get myself back up, I started back up the ladder again. Once I got to the fourth rung, I was now feeling hands grab hold of me to help pull me out of the basement.

“Out of the Fire”

Once I got onto the front porch, I was literally on fire. My crew directed a hose line on to me to try to put me out. EMS immediately came up and tried to start treating me. My fire gear was so hot they could not touch me. The firefighters had to start taking my fire gear off of me just because of the heat that was contained inside.

Once they were able to get my gear off of me, I got on the stretcher. As they were pulling my bunker pants off, the skin on my legs was coming apart with the bunker pants. We had a long walk down the street to the ambulance. At this point I was in a lot of pain and had no idea how bad my burns were. All I knew I was hurting.

My wife was actually on scene – she works for Louisville Metro EMS. Fortunately for both of us, they had just received another patient that had gone down due to the extreme heat of the day. The heat that day was at about 95 degrees, with heat indexes of 105-110.

She was treating this other patient when I went down. Luckily they had just left the scene when the ambulance crew taking care of me took me back to the ambulance. En route to the hospital, EMS contacted my wife and her partner to advise them that it was me who was injured and to just wait at University of Louisville Hospital for me to arrive.

Once we arrived at the hospital, my wife was waiting for me at the door. I was breathing on my own and I was somewhat sitting up in the stretcher. Again being in so much pain, I saw the way my legs looked but I really did not know the extent of how bad the injuries were. All I knew is that I was breathing and that was a plus.

As I walked through the Emergency room door, I kind of shot her a high-five real quick because I didn’t know if I would see her again until after a lot of things were over and done.

“Room 9”

We went straight into Room 9, which is where trauma patients are taken at University Hospital. I was greeted by an unknown amount of doctors, nurses and other hospital staff. My wife was able to come into Room 9 with me.

Once in there, they started doing all kinds of tests on me – blood draws and sticks, and chemical checks and everything else on me to see the extent of my injuries. They continued to try to cool the injuries. They started trying to do some rough debridement of the sites. Debridement is the medical removal of a patient’s dead, damaged, or infected tissue to improve the healing potential of the remaining healthy tissue. Again, at the time, they still had no idea how bad and how deep the burns were.

After spending several hours in Room 9, they were able to get a room cleared up in the ICU Burn Unit, to which I was transferred later that night. I was in the Burn Unit for eight days undergoing just regular dressing changes, pain therapy, trying to just manage what I had until the time for surgery.

After those eight days, I went to surgery to clean out the wounds. The burns were much deeper than what they had originally thought. The doctor came out and spoke with my wife and advised her that, while I was already under and while they were this far along, that it would be better to go ahead and do the skin grafts to try to take care of the problem. She agreed and, of course, the grafts were done.

Just prior to this, when we were in surgery, there were some incidents that happened there that I don’t think myself or the doctors were prepared for.

Since falling on my back into that basement, I had not been able to lay flat on my back without thinking of being trapped in that fire. When I went into the operating room, the first thing they do is lay you on the table. They tell you to lay flat and they start strapping you down.

I got on the operating table fine but, once I started to lie down, the fight was on. I couldn’t lay flat. The doctor at the time didn’t really understand why and I explained the situation to him. They were very willing to work with me. They propped me up, started administering the anesthesia, once I was kinda calmed down and a little bit out of it, then they laid me back down and strapped me down.

“The Road to Recovery”

I was told that I would probably not be back to work until sometime after the first of 2011. I kept going back to the doctor every week – they kept seeing signs of improvement. My rehabilitation kinda kicked in. They asked me to start doing more exercise, but at the same time keep my legs elevated and do what I needed to do when I was in down time.

After several weeks, they were so pleased with the amount of healing that had taken place, they extended my visits from every week to every two weeks, and increased the amount of physical rehab that I could do on my own.

“What I Love to Do”

I went back to work as of November 1, 2010 – more than two months ahead of their schedule.  All the external wounds have healed. I still have some internal healing to do. I still have some flexibility issues and some strength issues that I’m working with, but I have no restrictions. And, I’m back to work at my firefighting job – doing what I love to do.

I have to say that the nursing staff and the physician staff in the burn unit – I wouldn’t replace them for anything. The job that they do up there, with the patients that they have to care for, is just incredible. It takes a very special person to be involved in a burn unit. There’s a lot different in the pain management, how you have to handle your patients, and the things that you have to do with them.

They accommodated my family very well. My wife and my three boys stayed with me at the hospital most of the time. The staff just worked around them and accommodated them, made sure that we had plenty of places to sit. If we needed ice, water or soft drinks, we could just use the refrigeration. Whatever we needed, they took care of us.

Michelle Broers is my physical therapist. She is a godsend. I can’t say enough good things about her. I‘ve told her time and time again that I trust what she says. She has done this so long, and worked with so many people, that she is very familiar with what needs to happen and what needs to go on.

There were many times that I did not see the same doctor on a week-to-week basis, but I saw Michelle every time I went. She stayed right on top of my care, she talked to the doctors and she filled them in on what had happened up to that point. She knew everything about me. She is definitely a major reason why I came back to work as early as I did and was able to recover as fast as I did.

All the staff at University of Louisville Hospital worked well with me to ensure that I was able to come back to work. When I was first injured, I wasn’t sure if I was going to be able to come back to work. They not only cared for me physically, they did whatever they could to care for me mentally. More so, they gave me the tools that I needed to recover and get back to doing what I love to do.

The Burn Unit is part of the University of Louisville Trauma Center:

• First Trauma Center in the nation
• Area’s only Level I Trauma Center providing the most advanced trauma care
• Region’s only adult burn unit, treating between 250-300 people a year
• Dedicated statewide outreach through trauma and burn education programs
• Provides care for 3,500 people a year
• Treats 1,500 people a year who live outside Jefferson County