Saturday was one of the scariest days of my life!!! What started as a somewhat comical event worthy of some crazy sitcom could have ended in tragedy for my family. My cousin called my mom's cell phone and asked where my grandma was, so my mom hands the cell to me and tells me to bring it to her... I walk down the hall, see the front door open, so I figure as usual my grandma decided to go sit on the porch. When I get outside, I see her sitting in a chair on the sidewalk in front of our house talking to some strange woman I didn't know. I decide to ignore this and just hand my grandma the phone and tell her that my cousin wanted to talk. It's then that I find out from the stranger that she was from across the street and my grandma had told her that some strangers had just pushed her out of a car and left her. When I explained the situation, she tell me that she had called the police and that my mom needed to come out. Then we spent another comical 10 minutes or so explaining to the officer that my grandma had moved all of the stuff from in front of our front door, snuck out, and forgot where she was. So we all had a good laugh, we calmed my grandma down, and called my cousin back to tell her what was going on. As it turns out, that earlier phone call is partially what precipitated all of these other events because she heard on her police radio that an elderly woman with my grandma's name said that she had been pushed out of someone's car. As the ruckus died down and we headed inside, things headed downhill. While my mom was outside she had left a pot of grease on to fry shrimp for dinner and it was starting to smoke. When I went out to relay what had happened to my family, the pot burst into flames. I partially blame myself for the rest of these happenings because I didn't turn the pot off, but at the moment I could only try to remember how to put out a grease fire. WATER IS NOT AN OPTION! So I handed my mom a pot top to smother the flames that had began to inch towards our ceiling. That didn't work. The flames were curling up around the side of the top. My mom then grabs a dish towel to try to knock out the excess flames. Then, in a moment when time seemed to simultaneously stop and go into overdrive, the pot fell off the stove and onto the floor. A huge fireball leaped up from the pot and scalding grease flew everywhere. At that moment I felt as if the world was burning to the ground. I ducked into the next room and feared for my mom's life because I could no longer see her through the flames. At this point I was coughing from the thick smoke that now blanketed our kitchen, thinking to myself that this is how those actors on TV would feel if they were in this situation for real instead of in another thrilling primetime slot. I ducked my head back in and was now relieved to see that my mom was ok and that while the flames had now spread to the rug (who puts rugs in kitchens), the flames had not engulfed the room and that my mom was still safe. As we continued to try to beat the flames into submission, my mom announced that it was futile and that the best we could do was try to drag the flaming rug out through the back door without setting the rest of the house on fire. So she grabbed the burning rug and I followed, smothering anything that was set alight as we made a calculated procession to the back door. Thankfully, we made it to the back steps without any further incident. It was at this time that my mom tells me that the grease hit her and her arm was painfully burning... She sent me to get something to put on it, the best thing being aloe vera. Being the wreck that I am, I had no idea she meant the plant by the back steps, instead I am shakily running through all of the room looking for a bottle of aloe. Literally shaking like a leaf, I put some aloe on her and beg her to go to the ER. At first she refuses, but after I buy her all sorts of OTC sprays and creams, she grudgingly agrees that we need a trip to the hospital. It is after midnight that we see an RN that somewhat indifferently tells us that it "sucks" that she got 1st and 2nd degree burns all over her right arm and hand, but that she would be fine. He then proceeds to tell me that he hates New Orleans and that I should join their ER staff because they all dislike people just like me...
Thank God we all survived mostly intact and with a home still, but I think it will be many years if ever that I can forget the emotions that this ordeal evoked, and the images of those flames are burned into my memory, just as the grease burned into my mother's skin.
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