3 weeks and 4 surgeries later, Everett firefighter anxious to get back to work

EVERETT, Mass. — An Everett firefighter struggles to recover three weeks after he was burned on the job, working to rescue a woman trapped on the second floor of a house.

“Coming in, there was the report of a house fire and people were trapped,” Scott Dalrymple explained to Boston 25 News.

It was Friday the 13th, but Dalrymple wasn't thinking superstition when the call came in about a woman trapped in a nearby house fire.

He was thinking duty.

“I remember pulling down the street and seeing smoke coming from the house,” he said. “I remember somebody pounding on the door of the ladder truck and saying hurry up there's somebody trapped on the second floor.”

With more than twenty years under his belt, Dalrymple had never experienced a medical problem on the job involving fire.

As he and a partner went inside the house, that was about to change.

“We noticed there was fire coming out of the floor vents, so I turned to yell at the deputy who had just arrived on scene the fire was in the basement,” he said.

That should have made the second-floor rescue relatively easy.

“As I was walking up the stairs, I could feel it getting warmer,” said Dalrymple.

The heat was a warning sign -- a whiff of impending disaster. Fortunately, for both men, Dalrymple smelled it.

“All of a sudden, I started feeling really, really hot and uncomfortable and I turned to Josh and said, ‘we’ve got to go,’” he said. “When it got to a certain temperature, what they call a flashpoint, basically the whole hallway it just burst into flames.”

And that is why, three weeks and four surgeries later, doctors are still unsure what function remains in Dalrymple's left hand, which has third and fourth degree burns.

He was also badly burned on his right hand, his abdomen and across his head.

And yet he is talking about the day “when” he'll return to work.

“It's going to change my career, but it's not going to end it,” he said.

In the past few weeks, Scott Dalrymple has known despair.

“There's been days when I've literally cried, screamed; asked them to take off my hand just to get rid of the pain,” he said.

But he has also known compassion.

“It opens your eyes. There's still decent people out there even with all the crap going on in the world,” Dalrymple said.

MORE: 'His foresight saved 2 people': How Everett firefighters saved each other

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