Fire victim overcomes recovery odds
Jamie Williams, who wasn't supposed to live, now counsels other burn patients and looks forward to coming home.
By JACOB H. FRIES
Published December 10, 2004
Jamie Williams wasn't supposed to live.
She was pulled from a house fire in late August, third- and fourth-degree burns covering 60 percent of her body. Her feet were scorched to the bone.
She was airlifted to the burn unit at Tampa General Hospital and moments after she arrived, doctors told her mother Tammy that the 17-year-old had an hour to live.
"I told them they were wrong," her mother said during a phone interview Thursday. "I told them she was a fighter and she was going to make it."
Jamie was sleeping at her boyfriend's house at 6299 143rd Ave. N when the home caught fire just before 3 a.m., Aug. 26.
Her boyfriend at the time, Chris Pate, 18, led her to the front door when he somehow lost hold of her. Pate tried to find her, but was forced from the home by extreme heat.
The fire could be seen reaching into the sky from blocks away. When Largo fire crews pulled up, they had to hose down flames to get inside. They found Jamie lying unconscious in a hallway.
Investigators said the fire may have flashed over, causing Jamie to panic and become disoriented. It took firefighters 15 minutes to bring the blaze under control and by then the house was destroyed.
The cause of the fire remains under investigation, although it is not considered suspicious, said Ron Bassett of the Largo Fire Department.
Jamie's journey was only beginning.
It was touch-and-go for the first three days, Tammy Williams recalls. Doctors said if Jamie lived that long, she would have a chance.
She did survive and was immediately flown to Shriner's Hospital for Children in Cincinnati, where she has been living with her mother since.
Jamie has undergone 19 surgeries, the most recent one on Tuesday, in which doctors harvested bone from her hip and implanted it in her ankles. She has lost all of her toes and parts of each foot. A chin strap keeps her jaw up, an effort to limit scarring on her neck and face.
Her life changed in an instant, and Jamie does not take a moment for granted.
"I don't think about the future," Jamie said Thursday from a phone in her hospital room. "I only think about one day at a time because you never know, tomorrow could change everything."
Tammy Williams shares the room and, in a way, has begun raising her daughter all over again. She has taught Jamie how to eat and how to bathe.
"I look at it as a chance to start over from scratch," she said.
She said she tries to keep her daughter laughing. They watch funny movies and have their inside jokes. They call her feet "toe sockets" and smile at how her ears poke out from the chin strap.
On Nov. 10, Jamie left the hospital for the first time. She ate Italian food and shopped at Wal-Mart. It was a test, to see how Jamie would handle the reaction she might receive, her mother said.
Jaime did well. No one looked at her feet like she feared, her mother said. Her next outing is a visit to the Cincinnati Zoo & Botanical Garden.
"She was so doped up in the beginning that she is only starting now to realize what is going on," Tammy Williams said. "That has been hard for her."
In this hospital, she celebrated a birthday, her 18th, on Nov. 21. She marked Thanksgiving with a turkey sandwich. She will pass Christmas and New Year's there, too. She has gone from 212 pounds to 178.
She hopes to leave soon. She misses the Florida sunshine, her dog and two cats, her new boyfriend, James, who called Thursday to say he had sent Jamie a promise ring.
Doctors tell her she can return to Florida as soon as she can put pressure on her feet and walk.
In the meantime, Jamie has begun to counsel children at the hospital, especially a girl her own age whose burns are even worse.
"I just keep telling her it's going to be okay," Jamie said.