Experience: I suffered terrible burns as a child – then became a firefighter

I was sick and tired of the world treating me like a victim, so I decided to flip the narrative. At 25, I tried out for my local volunteer fire academy When I was six years old, my entire body went up in flames. It was 1992, in my home town of Hawthorne, Nevada. My older brothers were out playing and I went to call them for dinner. I followed their voices, just a few houses down from ours, to find them playing with a bowl of kerosene they’d found and a lighter. When they flicked the lighter, ...

By Terry McCarty