A Boy’s Story of Survival: Burned on Nearly 100 Percent of His Body

00:00:10 Speaker 1: And we returned to our American Stories. Up next, a miraculous story of survival, faith, and friendship from John O’Leary. John is the author of the best-selling book, On Fire, Seven Choices to Ignite a Radically Inspired Life. Let’s get into the story. Take it away, John.

00:00:28 Speaker 2: If you had to draw a picture of Americana back in the eighties, I think it would be a picture of our backyard. We had a picket fence. We had a golden retriever. My Mom taught third-grade history, and in her spare time, she raised six kids. I’m the fourth one of those six. My father did not sleep. As far as I know, I never saw the man in bed. I never once saw the man sick. I never saw the man angry. I saw a man who was hardworking, industrious, faithful, loving, and tender. He served in the U.S. Army, was a small business owner, and an example of true, beautiful masculine love to not only his sons, but to his daughters. He came home for dinner every time, sat around the dinner table, held hands while we prayed. Mom made dinner almost every single night, except on Fridays when we went out together as a family for pizza. Both set to grandparents were alive, and maybe the biggest argument we had growing up, the two grandpas would fight about who had it worse, the grandpa who fought in Europe or the grand who fought in the Pacific. We had a wonderful, faith-filled, idealistic upbringing: prayers before bed, prayers before meals, church on Sundays, pancakes afterwards. I remember—this is a story I’ve never shared—our take-home exercise at school, I went to a little Christian school, was to draw a picture of Jesus. And I drew this picture of this boat being rocked by the waves, and then this one apostle stepping out of that boat toward Jesus. And as I was coloring this picture, I knew back then as a little boy, if I ever got called out of that boat, I could walk on water too. My Mom and Dad gave us that type of faith as kids, really candidly, before we needed it. That’ll just be honest. I mean, the sun shines very brightly over the O’Leary house for a long, long, long time. I don’t know if we understood how fortunate we were, but in my life and in the lives of my five siblings, there would come a day for all of us when all of us would need that type of faith. Back in the eighties, we wouldn’t have technology. Man, we spent our lives outside, kind of getting in trouble in creek beds and people’s backyards. So these kids were playing with fire and gasoline in their backyard. They would drizzle a little bit of gasoline, stand back a couple feet, throw the match on top, and this little gasoline puddle would dance to life. And these were boys I looked up to. They were about eleven, and I figured if they could do it, so could I. So the following weekend, my mother was out with two of my sisters. My father was at work. It was seven point thirty bent over a five-gallon can of gasoline. What I remember is it was too heavy to even budge, filled to the brim. So I lit a piece of cardboard on fire. I set it down on the concrete floor, and then very carefully bent down, poured a little bit of gasoline on top. And, man, it was so heavy I couldn’t even move the thing at first. So I bare-hugged this thing, tilted it, and as I waited for the liquid to come out, the fumes must have pulled the flame into the can. It created this massive explosion, split the metal can into it, picked up the nine-year-old boar—that’s me—launched me twenty feet against the forest side of the garage. I remember coming to. Everything around me was either pitch black or on fire. And when you’re little, you’re taught to stop, drop, and roll. But when you’re the one on fire, you know that’s not what you naturally do. You run. And so I’m pan extrucked, I’m in pain, I’m burning, although I’m not even sure if I know it at the time. So I just run on fire, through the smoke, through the flames, back toward my Mom and Dad’s house. I opened up this little garage door, came into the front hall, stood on top of this rug. Man! My Mom and Dad had this oriental rug in the front hall, and I remember standing on this rug just screaming for a hero. God, I’ll take anybody, I’ll take anybody! And I see my brother Jim coming from the upper steps, and still distinctly remember as I’m seeing Jim coming toward me, I remember thinking, ‘Oh my gosh, anybody else, man, not him! I need a hero. I need a parent, I need a firefighter, I need a neighbor. I need someone who can do something here for me.’ Jim was the kind of brother who my mother would ask, ‘Hey, make everybody peanut butter and jelly sandwiches,’ and Jim would—and he would add Tabasco sauce to all the sandwiches. And yet, on that morning—it was January seventeenth—Brother Jim picks up a rug, the kind you’re supposed to wipe your feet on. He runs over to me. He begins beating down the flames. After swinging down a couple times, he dropped the rug because he started catching. And then I remember, Jim sees me, and he picks up the rug, and he comes in, and he beats me down a fourth time and a fifth time, and now he’s burning, and he beats me a sixth time and a seventh time. For two minutes, this seventeen-year-old brother of mine, burning himself in the process, beats down the flames of my body, wraps me in that rug, carries me outside, throws me on the ground. Once we get out there, jumps on top of me. We roll around in the front yard. He then says, ‘Stay awake! I’ll be right back.’ He runs back inside, gets my two other sisters out of the house, gets our golden retriever out of the house, calls nine to one one. Nineteen eighty-seven, the Lifesaver of the Year for the state of Missouri was not a firefighter. It was not a first responder, was not a police officer or a veteran. It was a seventeen-year-old boy, a high school junior, named Jim. It was lightly snowing that day; it was cold outside. I’m in the front yard. My clothes had been burnt off, and my skin has been burnt off, and I’m naked in the front yard of a burning house. When my brother Jim went in and chased the two girls out of the house, out of the smoke, one of them walked over to me, and she just put her arms around me. Her name is Amy, and she says, ‘John, it’s okay. Have faith and fight. The best is she had to come.’ And I remember hearing her say that, and just, like, kind of in disbelief. I remember looking down, and when I looked down, when I saw my legs and my hands and my body all burnt. So I looked up, and when I looked up, I saw my house and their flames leaping through the roofline. There wasn’t a lightning strike that caused that fire; I’m the one that caused it. And I remember looking up at her and saying, ‘Amy, it’s not okay, not this time. Do me a favor. Go back into the house, get a knife, come back out of here, and just finish me off.’ This time. ‘It’s not all right.’ And this little girl pulls me even closer. She’s eleven, and she says, ‘John, shut up! What is wrong with you? Have faith and fight! The best is she had to come.’ Overhearing this dialogue is our younger sister, Susan. This is the little girl that my brother Jim would make peanut butter and jelly sandwich is with Tabasco sauce for me. I would hate him for, but I would learn from, and then I would make her peanut butter and jelly sandwich is with Tabasco sauce. I’ve just given her the green light to maybe do what she always wanted to do. She unbelievably goes back into a burning house. A few seconds later, she comes running back outside, and then she threw a cup of water right into my face. I’m simmering, I’m dying, I want out! And this little girl just went into a burning house for a cup of water, begging me to live. And after she threw that first cup of water in my face, she goes right back into a burning house a second time, comes back outside, throws a second cup of water in my face, and then she turns and she runs right back. In one of my favorite scriptural lines, is ‘no greater love with her than this than to be willing to lay it on one’s life for one’s friends.’ She doesn’t lay it on her life that day for me, but she was willing to. My entire body was burned on January seventeenth, nineteen eighty-seven. One hundred percent; eighty-seven percent of what was burned third-degree. That’s as bad as it gets. The part that was not burned third-degree was my face and my scalp, which is why I’m able to not only have my face still, my ears still, my nose still. What a blessing that is, but also the scalp is where they took every layer of skin to replace the parts of my body that had lost the skin, and the doctor’s, and was Vacchi Evaj. In credits, my sister’s love on the day I was burned with how he was able to salvage that donor site. So, not only did she embody selfless love, she may have given me back the opportunity of life beyond that day.

00:09:21 Speaker 1: And you’re listening to John O’Leary, author of the best-selling book, On Fire, share his story. He grew up in a good home, a joy-filled home, a prayer-filled home, and, well, on this one occasion, this one day, he’s playing with fire and with gasoline, too, and there’s an explosion. It launches him against the garage, and he’s on fire. When we come back, this remarkable story of faith and fighting. It continues here on our American Stories. John O’Leary’s story, when we come back. And we returned to our American Stories and John O’Leary’s horroring story of survival. When we last left off, John had just set himself and his family’s house on fire. Let’s return to the story.

00:10:22 Speaker 2: So I’m in the hospital room; I’m amongst strangers. I’d never been away from home. I’d never even been a summer camp; I’d never been sick, I’d never been in a hospital. And then I hear my father’s voice down the hall: ‘Where is my boy? Where is my boy?’ And my first thought was, ‘Oh my gosh, my old man has come to finish me off! He’s going to be so mad once he finds out what I did to the house; he’s going to kill me!’ He marches in military style—left, right, left, right—points down at me. So I shut my eyes. And then I hear my father say, ‘John, look at me when I’m talking to you.’ So I look up at my Dad, and then he says, ‘I have never been so proud of anyone in my entire life.’ And then he says, ‘I love you.’ Hearing this, thinking, ‘Oh my gosh, nobody told my Dad what happened.’ Clearly, he does not know the cause of this thing in his son’s life. And what I did not know back then as a kid was the power of grace, was true, unconditional love. As an adult now, looking back on the story, as a man, as a father myself—man, I get it now. I got a picture of the Prodigal Father hanging up in my office. I did not understand what it looks like to look over the hillside to see a son coming home and to go sprinting down the path toward him. I didn’t get that as a kid, but I felt it as a kid. I felt that I’m conditional love, and I’m telling you, changed me in the emergency room. It did not make the journey forward easy. Like, how do you recover quickly from burns your entire body? But I think my Dad’s love on day one, on moment one, made that journey possible. And that was a turning point. Right behind my Dad came my Mom. She takes my right hand. My fingers are amputated on both hands now, so you can imagine what they might have looked like on the morning off. But she just boldly walks, and she takes my right hand, pats my bald head, and she says, ‘I love you.’ So I look up and I say, ‘Mama, am I going to die?’ She looked me in the eyes and she said to me, ‘Baby, do you want to die? It’s your choice; it’s not mine.’ I don’t want to die. I want to live. And her response was, ‘Good. Take the hand of God, walk the journey with him, and you fight like you have never fought before. Your Daddy and I will be with you every step. You’re never going to be on your own, but you got to do your part.’ And on that morning, it was January seventeenth, nineteen eighty-seven, a lifetime ago—man, almost four decades ago now—a little boy shut his eyes and took God’s hand and just walked forward. I never heard of burn care, never heard of amputations, never heard of the breatment, never heard of donor sites, none of that. That has what made the journey not only endurable, but ultimately miraculous and possible. The math they used to run on patients as they arrived into emergency departments and ultimately in the burn centers: they would take the percentage of the body burned, they would add age, and that would give them mortality. So get your calculators out. One hundred percent if the body was burned; the child was nine, which means this little boy has one hundred and nine percent likelihood of dying. That’s just the cold, hard facts. My Mother doesn’t know this, so right after she visits me, she has an ‘opportunity meeting’ with the doctor for the first time. His name is Vacchi Evaj, and Doctor Evajen is explaining how badly her little boy is burned. And, starting to talk about what the first procedures might look like, and talking about the first night and what they’ve got to do right away to get this thing going. And finally, it’s beginning to sink in with my Mother how desperate this fight will be. And so she says to him, ‘Doctor, are you telling me that my baby’s got a fifty-fifty chance of surviving this thing?’ And the way my mother told me later on was he took off his glasses, looked her in the eyes, and said, ‘Mrs. O’Leary, you are completely misunderstanding me. I’m not a betting man, but if I had to put odds on your son’s chances to survival, I would say that he has less than one half of one percent chance of surviving this first night, and those odds will never improve every night; it will be less than one half of one percent chance of surviving that night.’ We know how the story ends, and the unbelievable thing about my parents’ faith. Gosh, I get emotional even sharing this. The day I was burned, my Dad left the hospital in a snow store because he hears there’s a prayer surface, you know, in Saint Louis, we don’t get that much snow, and when we do, basically they call the National Guard, man. ‘Stay indoors, don’t go outside!’ Well, that night, in seven inches of snow, my Dad goes up to the church, and it is sold out. They’re not selling tickets, but there’s nowhere to sit. The church is packed. No one goes to church when it’s snowy, not even on a Sunday. This is a Saturday night, it’s late. My Dad walks in. He kneels down in front of these guys he probably used to try to impress. He kneels in front of all of them, the hand of a microphone, and he just thanks them all for coming. He talks about the situation as it is right now, and then he says, ‘But I need to turn this over to God.’ So he sends up this prayer: ‘God, you gave us your son, John, to love in a race. We now give him back to you. We give him back to you. But our prayer—our expectant prayer—is that you will heal our boy.’ He asked this through Jesus Christ. He stands up; he walks out. The prayer service continues. My Dad goes back to work at the hospital, but that little prayer—’God, you gave us this boy to love and to raise’—It remained as prayer during that five and a half months in hospital. They realized what a surgeon may not be able to do, God can. God can. And so the prayers began to go out. You know, there was an old device that your grandparents once had in their home called the telephone. And the Dad was burned. My next-door neighbor, her name was Carol Bauer. She was a widow; she called a friend, who called a friend, who called a friend, and her game of phone tag ultimately led five relationships deep to a girl named Colleen. Colleen called her Dad. Her Dad was an old Cardinal player in the back in the teen he’s in sixties. His name was Red Schoendienst, and Colleen mentions that a little boy was burned in our community. He’s probably gonna keep him in your thoughts in prayers, though. Red Schoendienst then goes to a charity auction that night. He’s seated at a VIP table in Saint Louis, Missouri, and while sharing with the table of nine others, you know, celebrating baseball and the promise of spring, he also shares that a little boy in our community was burned terribly. Keep him in your thoughts in prayers. Well, at that table was a guy named Jack Buck. Jack Buck was in seven Halls of Fame: the Baseball Hall of Fame, the Football Hall of Fame, the Hockey Hall of Fame, the Broadcasters Hall of Fame, the Radio Hall of Fame. This man was everywhere. He was influential nationally but also locally; hugely powerful locally. And Jack Buck hears the little boy is gonna die. There’s a man from the Greatest Generation. He fought overseas, picked up a Purple Heart. He understood pain, but he also understood what happens when people show up for one another. He leaves the charity auction that night. Jack Buck is the voice of Saint Louis Cardinals baseball. In other words, he is the voice of my childhood. And I’m laying in the hospital bed dying. I’m tied down to this bed. My arms and legs are tied down, so I can’t move my arms from my legs. My lungs have been burned, so I can no longer breathe on my own. There’s a trick force an oxygen into my lungs. My eyes are swollen shut, so I can’t see, I can’t communicate. I’m cut off from the world, but I could listen, and I remember the night I was burned. The door opens up from the outside. I hear footsteps, I hear a chair, I get pulled across close. I hear a cough, and then I hear the voice of my childhood.