How I Caught Fire

Ever have one of "those" days? You know, the kind of day when nothing seems to go right. Have you had one lately? Perhaps you're even thinking that today could be one of those days.

Like most people, I've had a few of "those" days. But one in particular forever changed my life. In fact, this "one of those days" set me on a new path that led me to writing this book.

It was late spring in Butte, Montana. I will remember the date forever: June 1, 2002. The sun was shining; the temperature was a pleasant 70 degrees. The blue sky hung effortlessly over the Montana Mountains. At the time I had achieved financial freedom. I had bought and was refurbishing a beautiful old home originally built in 1906. I had the day to myself, so I decided to knock a few things off my home improvements "to do" list. I decided to first tackle putting up a picket fence by the garden. It was a simple enough project: a few saw cuts, a few screws, a couple of cuss words, and the fence was up.

Now we all know the unwritten rule about picket fences, right? They must be painted ...? White, right? Exactly! So I made a quick trip to the lumberyard, bought some white paint, and came back and began painting. So I'm painting away, and as it often does so quickly in the mountains, the weather changed, and changed fast. Black clouds rolled in. All of a sudden, it didn't begin to just rain, it began to POUR, and I mean pour. So I called it a day. I gathered up all my paint supplies and threw them onto the back porch, then took the remainder of my tools down into my basement.

The basement to this house wasn't much; the floor was half cement, half dirt. It's the type of basement where you have to duck under the beams and pipes. I put my tools away, and then, because my shirt was soaked from the rain, I stripped it off. Sounds pretty mundane, right?

Here's where this story gets ... interesting. What I didn't know then (five words no one ever likes to hear, right?) was that for nearly two weeks, there had been natural gas leaking into my basement. Now, natural gas is invisible — you can't see it. But you can smell it, right? No, not when it has been filtered through dirt. So here I am, shirtless, standing in the basement that's filled with natural gas which I can neither see nor smell.

Now, I might not have had one of "those" days except for one thing: at the time, I was a smoker. So while standing at the bottom of the stairs, I took out a cigarette, placed it in my mouth, and flicked on my lighter.

Ka-

BOOM!

FLASH POINT

That which does not kill us makes us stronger. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche

Now you know why they call me the Burnt Guy.

When I hit that lighter, BOOM: I was standing in a ball of fire. The basement literally blew up, sending a gigantic fireball out and up through the house. Have you ever been in an accident or even a near miss accident? You know, the kind where time literally slows down and your mind speeds up. For the few seconds I am standing there in this fire ball, my life is literally passing before my eyes. I know I am toast (sorry, couldn't resist). I began saying good bye to everyone I love. I mean, in all due seriousness, when was the last time you heard someone tell a story about how they blew themselves up? It's not something you often hear from the person it happened to.

Seconds later the fire goes out. But now the pain begins to set in. Have you ever burnt yourself on something scalding hot, like an iron or a stove? It hurts like hell, doesn't it? At this point, I am realizing that I am hurt really, really, really badly. Why? Because the pain searing across my upper body hurts like *&^%$ and my skin is beginning to fall off.

Luckily, though, I'm still coherent enough to know that I've got to get out of the basement. But I'm in bad shape. You see, while putting my tools away, I had been breathing in the gasfilled air. When I ignited the gas in the basement, the fire also ignited the gas in my lungs, burning those as well. So now I am coughing and gasping for air, barely able to breathe. I stumble upstairs but can hardly see anything because the explosion also burnt the corneas of my eyes. Somehow I make it to the top of the stairs. There I grab the metal door knob, only to immediately discover it is scorching hot. As I quickly jerk my hand back, I leave the skin of my palm hanging from the handle. While up there I also discover the door had jammed shut from the force of the explosion. I am trapped.

Now it's decision time — get out, somehow, or stay and die.

I didn't blink. Despite the excruciating pain and barely being able to see or breathe, I staggered around the basement attempting to find something to pry open the door. As I touched some of the metal tools looking for an appropriate one, the now white-hot tools burnt the palms of my hands. Luckily I found some hedge trimmers with dense Styrofoam handles I could grip. I staggered back up the stairs and began frantically trying to pry the door open. Finally, when I hit it just right, the door popped opened. I grabbed the cordless phone, called nine-one-one, and crawled out the front door to collapse on the front lawn.

My Revelation

I was life-flighted to the University of Utah Burn Center in Salt Lake City, Utah, one of the world's premier burn facilities. There I spent the next six weeks in a coma. Roughly half my body (everything from the waist up) was completely burned. After I awoke from the coma, it took me nine more months of agonizingly slow and painful rehab to learn how to do all those "little" things each of us takes for granted each day, like talking, eating, walking, and literally learning how to be comfortable in my own skin. I'm not going to spend much time here on my rehab, other than to tell you about Terrell, and how that little guy helped me find my true mission in life.

During the time I spent in Salt Lake City, I focused completely on my health — like I said; learning how to walk, talk, and so on. There was one thing during this entire time that never crossed my mind ... MONEY.

Through business I had been able to semi-retire to Montana (a dream of mine). I had streams of income coming in regardless of whether I "worked" in my business or not. I had built these streams of income on purpose, with that design in mind. I just never thought it would be so life saving.

This wasn't true for anyone else I came in contact with at the Salt Lake facility. During the course of my stay in the burn unit, I not only got to meet some of the other patients, but...