Pam’s son, Fletcher Price, said he had to hold his mother down to keep her from rising from the bed and hurting herself or the delicate medical machinery helping her recover from severe smoke inhalation.
Tom had only recently had tubes removed from his throat and a feeding tube taken out before he was wheeled into her hospital room at Eskenazi Health in Indianapolis.
“I feel they both had that secret fear that we were lying to them [about each other’s condition],” Fletcher said. “It was nice, that reaffirmation that they are here, that they are just a couple doors away.”
He said the moment was a role reversal for the couple: this time it was Tom’s turn to take the role of comforter, assuring Pam that everything would be fine in a way that only your life-long partner can provide.
Pam’s joy came just four days after she made a call to 911 around 1 a.m. Friday night saying their house was on fire.
The first set of firefighters arrived at the Country Village home just six minutes after the call, said Hamilton Township Volunteer Fire Department Chief, Tim Baty, while 911 dispatchers spoke to Pam, trying to keep her calm and asking her to pinpoint her position in the house.
Eventually, firefighters found the two trapped in an upstairs bedroom, but not before they had passed out due to smoke inhalation.
Brian Hayes, instructor and director of workshops in journalism, lives just a street down from the Prices’ home and was awakened by the sound of firetrucks screaming through the neighborhood.
“[The sirens] sounded crazy close,” he said. “You look out the window and you saw this orange glow over the trees.”
He went outside to catch a better view of the fire, and to see how close it was.
“I walked down the street in-between a couple of the yards and had a good view of the back of the house, which at the time I had no idea was [the Prices’] house,” he said. “Then another neighbor of mine came out and we walked to the front and that’s when I realized, ‘Oh my God, it’s Tom’s house.’”
By the time Hayes made it to the front of the house, Tom and Pam Price were already on their way to the hospital. It took around 20 minutes for firefighters to extinguish the blaze, enough time for fire to claim the couple’s two cars and turn a majority of their home to ash and charred wood.
A couple days ago, Fletcher Price went to see the remains of the house he had spent the better part of his childhood in, and to see what, if anything, could be salvaged.
“It was not what I expected,” Fletcher Price said. “I don’t know what I expected, but what I saw wasn’t what I expected.”
He said he was shocked when he saw how relatively intact his parent’s bedroom was compared to the rest of the house.
“Yeah, that was powerful. That most of the house is destroyed and you see my dad’s clothes in the closet — undamaged by fire — like no fire in the room. That was incredible,” Fletcher Price said.
Although on first glance it didn’t look like anything in any other rooms of the house would be salvageable, Fletcher Price was able to find a few things untouched by fire.
He found a book titled “60 reasons Pam is Loved” in the living room. The book was one he and his sisters, Sarah Price and Kate Price, had made for Pam Price’s 60th birthday that was full of memories, pictures and stories collected from friends.
“It was blackened on the top and I went over and opened it up,” he said. “All of the inside pages were completely fine, so was the back cover. That was a big release for everyone.”
Beyond those 60 people in the book, 92 others have found another way to show Pam Price, and the rest of the family, that they are loved.
Jordan Huffer, a former student of Tom Price’s, created a Go Fund Me page to raise money for the family, which has raised $5,215 at time of publication with 92 individual donations. Muncie’s Women in Business Unlimited group, of which Pam Price is the president, also established a clothing drive to help the family after they get out of the hospital.
The flurry of support for his parents doesn’t shock Fletcher Price in the least.
“Hundreds of people have reached out to us, it’s incredible, but not surprising,” he said. “When I was driving with my wife down to the hospital we were compiling a list of all the groups of people we needed to talk to to inform them, and it felt like that list was going on forever.”
For now the family is in a holding pattern, Fletcher Price said, waiting for hospital staff to clear Tom and Pam Price to leave. That’s when the recovery can truly begin.
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