Burned Out in Santa Fe
While on vacation in Santa Fe, New Mexico, I extinguished a homeless woman’s head engulfed by flames. I’m grateful I could help, but what I didn’t accomplish is truly disturbing.
We were meandering near Santa Fe’s Plaza at dusk. We came upon a person tightly wrapped in blankets, lying on an empty outdoor band stage. I could barely see a mouth and nose through a peephole, and something else — a cigarette lighter flame.
I assumed this street person was smoking drugs. At first ignoring the severe contrast with Santa Fe’s affluent arts community, we wandered on.
Thirty minutes later, we passed through the Plaza again. A streetwise young man frantically tended to the blanketed mummy. He told us that she had just set her blankets on fire and might soon set herself ablaze; then he dashed off.
As other spectators gathered, I grabbed my cell phone and called 911. The operator asked about the victim’s status, and I gave her a sketch of the situation. She asked for clarification: “Could she really set herself on fire?” At that moment, the homeless woman rose from her blanket nest as if Joan of Arc, her stocking cap and hair on fire.
“Yes! Come now!”
I rushed to center stage. She was whimpering and shaking violently as flames consumed her head. I grabbed a blanket and threw it over her upper torso to smother the fire.
Gobsmacked, I asked her if she was okay. She said she wanted to go back to sleep. I asked her again if she was hurt, and I gently peeled back a blanket to confront smoldering, smoking clothes and a sad, soot-covered face.
“You’re hurt,” I said, “and you cannot go back to sleep.” I heard distant sirens and told her that people would be here soon to help.
“I want to sleep,” she said. Before me cowered a woman under twenty-five, glassy-eyed, burned, alone, and unsupported. She covered her head again and tried to force reality away and retreat to her unreality.
“Why did you light yourself on fire?”
Her face peeked from beneath a charred blanket. I could see a third-degree burn on her right cheek. Her lips were charred. Her blue or black stocking cap had welded to the right side of her head. “To stay warm. I’m freezing; I want a shower.”
Two police officers then arrived. I told them what I knew, and one officer told me I could leave. Her dismissive attitude confused me because I probably had just saved this woman from horrible disfigurement, maybe death.
The officers coaxed her to sit up and answer questions. She didn’t understand even then the severity of her injuries.
Then a fire truck arrived and an ambulance shortly thereafter. Suddenly, eight emergency personnel attended the woman, and again someone in a uniform abruptly dismissed me.
“I feel responsible for her,” I said. “I need to know she’s going to be all right. How do I follow up?” Nobody gave me an answer.
I had done what others would have done had they come along instead of me. I learned from September 11th that Citizen Samaritans are everywhere. Yet, I felt hopeful for more than an official brush off.
Emergency personnel performed their services and I lingered. I could not leave. I wasn’t in their way, and I wanted to know whether her life might be in danger and if she would recover. I felt connected to her, and the rush of crisis adrenaline had not subsided.
Finally, an EMT appeared from the ambulance and perfunctorily handed me a slip of paper with a jotted telephone number for follow up. He wasn’t encouraging.
The next day, images of this burned and burned-out young woman preoccupied my thoughts. But so did the emergency personnel and their indifference toward me. I wondered why my role had been so easily dismissed.
I then called the admitting hospital. The director of emergency services told me that the injured woman had been stabilized, but the director refused to offer anything else.
Despite sensible HIPAA rules about patient privacy, I don’t understand why public servants would not tell me more about the homeless woman’s recovery. At the fateful moment when her hair burst into flames, I was her only family who cared enough to help.
