aged 21, I woke to find the room I was sleeping in on fire. I suffered burns to 62% of my body and spent 11 months in hospital. This experience changed my life forever. I an Aroha Andrew. This is my story. www.able.co.nz Copyright Able 2019 All I can remember is, basically, the entire room engulfed in flames. You hear that really loud... the movement ` it's the movement of the flames; it's the crackle ` everything. I can remember feeling like they were going to come on top of me. (TAPE REWINDS) (CURIOUS MUSIC) I was born and raised in Timaru, mainly by my mother. I have two older sisters, so I'm the baby of the family. I absolutely loved music growing up, and I still very much so love music. She's got a beautiful voice. In fact,... all the school concerts when she was little, I'd go to, and I'd always cry when the voice came out on stage (CHUCKLES) and started. # God defend New Zealand. # It got to the point where sometimes her friends would say, 'Is your mum going to cry again?' (LAUGHS) I absolutely loved high school. You know, probably strutted around with my wee posse of girls, thinking we were cool. I was very worried about the way my hair looked, the clothes I wore and the way people saw me. Yeah, definitely thought I was one of the cool ones. She would wash her hair every single day. She'd get up hours before she should just to make sure that her hair was perfect. Couldn't go out in the rain. Couldn't go out in the mist. Used to carry a wee comb round in my blazer with me. Like, very, very pedantic about my hair. I think it was` my image was my hair. So, from high school, I actually went straight out to the freezing works. My partner's sister had just applied for a job out there and got a job and told me how great the pay was, and I was like, 'That's me.' My granddad, he was a lifer at the freezing works, and he said, 'The one place that you do not want to start in is the offal room.' Turns out I got a position in the offal room. (LAUGHS) I remember when Aroha got the job at the freezing works. I thought, 'Oh gosh. That's a hard job to do.' I was quite a tough girl going in there. I got quite good on the knife, so a bit of trimming. You know, I could keep my knife sharp any way ` sharp enough to trim gross stuff off bits. Somebody once said as she strode down the board, you know, 'She walks like a trucker with the smile of an angel,' and that would be precisely her. Aroha and I both come from whanau that don't have a lot. You know, we always had enough, but we don't have a lot, so then she came into the workforce and she had a lot. It was parties in Timaru every weekend, then you work through the week, and then you party, and then you work through the week and repeat. I was worried about her. I knew that she wasn't happy. She wasn't happy with the way that she was spending her money, so that's where my concern came in is that she wanted more for herself, cos she knew she had the potential. On the night of my accident, I had organised with one of my workmates that we were going to go out and have a couple of drinks and just have a good time. So I'd already had a couple of drinks, probably a few. It took me a really long time to get ready, cos, remember, I'm straightening my hair. (LAUGHS) There was no plans ` no plans. Literally just go out, have a good night, have a boogie, have a dance and see where the night takes us. I think I got quite intoxicated, at the point where I was pulling my shoes off and rolling around on the ground outside. I probably should've gone home, but I ended up going out and wanting to stay out with my friends. And I'd met up with Cyrus, who is someone who I'd known for quite a wee while now. We obviously were yarning and chatting and having a good time, and I wanted to go back to his place. I actually don't have huge recollect` uh, recollection of the night` that night before. But I can remember coming back to Cyrus' place. We decided to get a taxi back... to where I was living,... which was in a sleep-out. I remember, yeah, turning the heater on, just as I had... every other night. You know? It was the middle of winter, and it was just normal. I remember me lying in bed, the light being on, the heater being on, and then... (FLAMES WHOOSH) ...all I can remember is me waking up alone and feeling this overwhelming heat. Basically, the entire room engulfed in flames. They were travelling up the wall, like, over the door, so they were at the height of the door. You hear that really loud... The movement ` it's the movement of the flames; it's the air around the flames that creates that movement, the crackle ` everything. I can remember feeling like they were going to come on top of me. I think I woke first. After, um,... kicking the doors open,... I remember not being able to see, and I remember, um,... hearing her,... um, start to scream. (SCREAMING) I can slow it all down in my brain now, but for me, it was literally a split second. Woke up. What's that? Blankets down. Pushed myself up to the corner of the room, and I saw the door. Or what I thought was the door. I remember yelling at her to come this way, and I was standing on the deck. She ran... the other way. I didn't` wasn't really familiar with the room that I was in. I panicked and headed to the wall to try find a door, cos what I remember is trying to get out that wall, and the wall that I thought the door, the flames were going over. But it was obviously a dresser or another dresser or something that resembled that. But the only reason why... I get to look the way that I do now is because I protected my face running out. The conditions in the room at that time when the fire was discovered can't be overstated. It was very, very dangerous for anyone that was in there. It... The temperature around the ceiling height would've been at 600-odd degrees. At that point, the gases in that layer just below the ceiling ignite. That's called flame over or roll over. That normally precedes flash over. Flash over is when all the fuels in the room ignite all at once, and then it's full-room involvement that's totally unsurvivable. So must've found my way to the French doors and pushed my way out. I have no words to really describe the kind of pain it is. It is, um, something indescribable. (SCREAMING) MAN: We were both woken by what I'd call a commotion. As soon as I opened the curtain, you could just see the bright glow of a fire. The second thing I saw and heard was the screaming. (SCREAMING) I can remember how cold the back lawn felt. It was so freezing, and it just did nothing. It did nothing. It felt` I felt like I was on fire. She couldn't walk; she was in pain, so the immediate thing was I just lifted her and picked her up and ran her down the drive, carrying her. I quickly rang 111 and asked for an ambulance. The paramedics ran up the drive, just picked Aroha up and came straight into our house. (SCREAMING) They took her straight into the shower to, I suppose` Assess her. ...put more water on to her to make sure that she... and assessed the burns and what was going on. I can remember the cold water falling on me. (SNIFFLES) It's, um... The pain is like... (INHALES DEEPLY) oh, it's like a thousand pins. Like, a thousand trillion little pins, like, stabbing you all. Like, ting, ting, ting, ting, ting, ting, ting, ting, ting, ting, ting all over your body. You couldn't physically sit in our house cos of the screaming. The guy that was in the fire came stood with me at the gate for a minute, and he just broke down. He just had a` He had a few burns on his hands. ...burns on his hands, yeah. And, again, I think, like most of us, just in a bewilderment about what was going on. I remember looking at myself and seeing how frightened I was. VOICE BREAKS: And all I can remember is actually just looking at everyone. I was just looking at everyone like, 'Help me. Help me. I don't know what to do.' (SNIFFLES) And then all I remember is the ambo guy... jabbing me in the leg, and that's it. I have no recollection of most of everything else until waking up in ICU in Auckland. * In the early hours of Sunday the 21st of August 2016, I woke in a room, surrounded by flames. By the time I got to Christchurch Hospital, the skin on my hands, arms and majority of my body was falling off. I got a text that said, 'Aroha's been in a fire, 'and she's on her way to Christchurch Hospital now in the helicopter.' So I went straight there. Aroha's mum, Jackie, was driving up from Timaru. When I walked around the corner and saw her, it was the single most traumatic thing that I've ever seen. I specifically recall at her wrist, it was as if she was wearing a rubber glove and this part here had split and it had fallen off. You could see shapes, I think, like... You know, you could see the skin there. Her eyelashes were all fused together as well, so she couldn't... you know, some of those were singed. She had a lot of grass on her. I remember there were big blisters on her legs and on her feet, and there were grass under them or grass in some of the open wounds. I promised her everything was gonna be OK ` didn't know that it was, but what else do you do in that situation? JACKIE: When I arrived at Christchurch Hospital, the surgeon came and spoke to me, and he let me know that... Aroha, in fact, had burns to about 65% of her body... and that most of it was full thickness. And he said, 'If she survives...' and then something... (STAMMERS) But what stuck in my mind was the 'If she survives...' I'm... What? 'What do you mean if she survives? What? Do you mean she might die?' To give me the best chance of survival, I was sent to Middlemore specialist burns unit. MAN: Major burns are about the most severe type of injury that anyone can sustain. And what 60% means is that as a percentage of your entire surface area of skin, more than half of that has been damaged. I remember asking the nurses, you know, 'You need to tell me if you think she's going to die,... 'so that I can get her sisters here to say goodbye.' (INHALES SHAKILY) I remember it running through my head, you know ` 'What do I do if she dies and I'm here by myself and I don't know what to do?' (SNIFFLES) The day after she arrived at Middlemore, they took her to theatre to... to have a good look. From a surgical point of view, what a patient like Aroha has in store is the removal of burnt skin, which is done by surgically cutting it off. The wound has to be sealed, and we often have to do that temporarily with skin from organ donors, which is used as a temporary cover, but it can't be permanent, because it's not compatible with our own tissue type. So, ultimately, it's rejected and has to be replaced by skin grafts from her own body. So she was gone for a few hours. When she came back and I was able to see her again in ICU, the nurse had this plastic bag with all her hair ` they had to shave her hair. In really big burns, we have to make use of unorthodox donor sites, and the scalp is an excellent donor site. I recall just thinking, 'Oh gosh. Aroha's gonna be so devastated about her hair.' It was her mane, her pride and joy. Jackie kept us updated, so close friends and family via text. And those first few days were extra hard, because that's when we were told that we might lose her. So, yeah, we got texts, updates. You know, we were told, 'She's got cadaver skin on her.' 'Today, they're doing a surgery on her fingers.' 'Today, they're doing this.' 'This is how we're going.' In those first few days in ICU in Middlemore, Aroha was mostly, for the` yeah, for the most part, unconscious. There was the odd moment where she would flutter her eyes and just awake with a start. We would just reassure her that she was in hospital; she'd been in an accident, but she's OK. And she'd go... (GASPS), and close her eyes again. After she had been in Middlemore and ICU for about a week,... they decided to start to reduce her level of sedation,... with the aim of getting her off the ventilator. My first memory in Middlemore was probably in ICU, and I can remember it's... So, because I was basically wrapped up like a mummy, all I remember is being really, really hot and Mum fanning me. I remember just a really terrible, terrible couple of days. She would wake, and she had these terrible hallucinations. I think she probably had flashbacks to being in the fire. I saw all these other people from... that were back in Timaru. So people who I used to work with were surrounding me and were trying to burn my feet on the oven, on the elements. I thought they were trying to burn me with the iron` like, irons. I thought that these people were holding me down to try and hurt me. So I was trying to trick them, like, trick them, say, 'I promise. I promise I won't escape. 'I promise I won't escape, but can I just go to the toilet?' She actually tried to get out of bed, tried to leap off and thrash around, and, oh, it was terrible. We had to try and stop her and, you know, almost restrain her from hurting herself. When I really became aware of what was happening to me and I was just trying to grasp what I had to go through every day waking up, I didn't want to see anyone. I basically became... a kid again, and all I wanted was my mum. I think Mum was the one who told me that all my hair was gone. I think all I could do was cry. I just cried and said, 'No.' VOICE BREAKS: No, I thought because of what had happened to me and me losing my hair, cos I thought my hair was the thing that made me beautiful (CHUCKLES) anyway. (SNIFFLES) I think when I found out` So, I was going through all this stuff. 'Oh God. This is happening to me.' And then finding out that my hair was gone ` I just thought that no one would ever love me ever again. About the fifth day, she had her first lot of grafts. They did her hands and I think part of one of her ankles. Mum described me as, um, looking like a skinned rabbit. The process of a skin graft is to shave off a layer of normal intact skin and place that on a wound bed that doesn't have any skin. So, in Aroha's case, she had severe burns affecting multiple locations, and we had to kind of prioritise what to do first and what to use her best available skin for, which is why we started with her hands. I used to feel a lot of pain coming out of surgery as well, because it tends to be the bit where they take the graft that hurts a lot, not the bit where they put the graft. Everything just hurt. I just wanted it to be over. I just did not want to go through it. I would say to myself, 'I would rather be dead.' VOICE BREAKS: I felt everything got taken away from me. I felt I got robbed of everything and who I was. (SNIFFLES) Long hair goals? New L'Oreal Paris Dream Lengths. With vegetal keratin, it helps strengthen lengths and reduce split ends to save your last three centimetres. Long hair. Do care. New Elvive Dream Lengths by L'Oreal Paris. You're worth it. * The Middlemore team had saved my life. My body was responding really well to my grafts, but it was also overwhelming at that time. I just still didn't know if I wanted to be alive. It was really painful where they took the graft sites. But it wasn't anything compared to when I actually had to move my body. It was when I had to move my body, which is where all the stress and the anxiety and, yeah, stuff came for me. It's all movement-based. I do remember that being able to get up on her own was really difficult. So` And we find that with lots of people that it's the bending and moving and sitting when you've got any burns around your back and legs that getting out of bed can be quite hard. It used to take a couple of hours to get me to the point where I could even sit up, move me round on the bed and get me in a chair to even get me to the toilet. As soon as we can, we like to get people out of their rooms. You get very confined to the same four walls if you've had a very big burn, and you just want to remind people that there's life outside their room. I think I might've almost passed out that first time I stood up. Because I still had wounds on my legs, because of the blood flow, it actually started` it made bleeds on my legs. There was actually a time where I had one of the nurses take me to the toilet, and after standing up from being in the wheelchair, I could feel something, like, dripping down my leg. I could feel it. And then I looked down, as I was standing up, and my leg was just, like, flowing like a waterfall with blood. Like, just expl` Like, pulsating out. Literally made, like, a... like, a lake of blood in the bathroom. It was quite cool. I even remember` It was quite frightening at the time, but I still thought it was cool at the time. I was like, 'Oh my God.' Like, 'How is this coming out of me?' Right from the beginning, I could always see the potential in Aroha to just get up and go, and you could see that she had this really bubbly personality that was trying to come through. And sometimes, it was definitely there, and she'd have great conversations with us. And sometimes, she was just really tired, and it was harder. When I was able to start to go on wee trips, like, out of my room, Mum used to get me all dressed up. She bought me these beautiful scarves, because I had no hair. They used to have markets at Middlemore. I've got this huge array of hippy pants that we've bought from the markets, (LAUGHS) cos it's something loose and something that Mum would get for me to say, 'Look, these are something that, when the time comes, you'll be able to, you know` 'you'll be able to get into clothes again.' Like, so she made` did little things like that to kind of help my mental state and help me be a little bit happier. I can actually remember the first time they took my bandages off my hands. JACKIE: I remember being really worried about her fingers and desperate to see them. It was quite scary. I can just remember them taking them all off and... them looking very... kind of like a dragon. Like, imagine a dragon, but, like, dry, scaly skin. Like, just` it looked very red. She did have fingers. Oh, thank goodness. Just that sense of relief, but... oh, you know, they were all bloody, and, yeah, it was just heartbreaking to see. All the doctors would come in, and they'd be, 'Wow! You're such an amazing healer.' You know, 'You're healing so well and doing well.' But we knew that she was really at much higher risk of infection. It was obvious that this was very serious and it was going to be a long-term thing. And I was trying to think what we could do for her. And, so, I kinda thought, 'Well, maybe we could send her up things 'every week to let her know how much we love her and we missed her.' There had been these little tins with Marilyn Monroe on them, and she really liked Marilyn Monroe. So I took them to work, and we gave them out, and lots of the girls grabbed them, and everybody filled them in their own way ` some sent messages; some sent little gifts ` and they were posted off to her every week. You have your good moments, so I wouldn't say full great days, but you have your good, happy moments where you have` I used to have wee giggles with Mum, and we... You know, little moments where, OK, life wouldn't seem so bad. I remember teasing her at one stage, because when they` when they did new grafts on her bottom, they used skin from her scalp, and, you know, we joked about whether the hair might grow back. (CHUCKLES) You know, would she have a ponytail? (LAUGHS) It was, like, this laughing joke between, like, the nurses and Mum. Like, and I believed her for so long. I'm so naive. And that was a source of great laughter for a time. (LAUGHS) You don't grow hair on your bum if they take your scalp hair. But I did think for a really long time that I was going to have a hairy bum. So, it was leading up to Aroha's 22nd birthday, and the doctors were talking about when they might do the final graft surgery on her back. I think her birthday may have been on the Saturday, and they had come up with this plan that they thought they might do it on the Friday, of which Aroha really wasn't happy about, (CHUCKLES) because it meant that she would have to lie still and not move for several days while the graft kinda stuck. (CHUCKLES) So she'd spoken to them and said, 'Please, please, please, 'could you do it on the Monday instead of the Friday? I' just want to have a nice birthday and not be sore.' So they agreed to that. When I woke up on my birthday, Mum had decorated by entire room, like, with 'Happy Birthday' banner, balloons everywhere and these, like, oh, heaps and heaps and heaps of these beautiful origami dresses all on string, just, like, hanging all around my room. All of the cards, all of the, you know, letters to make sure I knew that people, you know, loved me and that they were there. My nana and my auntie had flown up for my birthday, and I'd gotten a bit more comfortable with seeing family. I'd started to become able to eat, so my auntie had said, 'What kind of things do you want?' And I was like, 'Ooh, cheese and crackers. Maybe a lamington.' Like, a whole heap of different things. They bought all this food in for me, and then all of a sudden, I started to become quite` like, feeling quite sick, to the point where I was like, 'Oh, I think I need to lie down.' Hadn't touched any of my awesome food. Laid down, and actually just progressively got worse that afternoon and evening. And it turns out that I had got a blood infection. It just knocked her, and, you know, within the next couple of days,... potentially she was life-threateningly unwell again. She virtually slept for a full month. It wasn't until the end of November that they did my back, so I was basically back on the track that I was before my birthday. The team there just... the compassion that they showed and the empathy and understanding is just... it's beyond words. I have` I actu` I can't... VOICE BREAKS: I'm still alive because of everything that they did for me up there. So I'm very, very thankful for getting the care that I did there. * I had been at Middlemore Burns Unit for four months. After a series of setbacks, I was on the road to recovery. A few days before Christmas 2016, I was well enough to be transferred to Christchurch Hospital. The first time I saw her since the accident was quite an emotional time. I was really excited to see her, but I was also... I hadn't been back to the hospital since. There'd been a lot of rumours about what had happened and who was there and what the extent of the injuries were. Because of the level of medication I was on, I kind of was a bit spacey and used to hold my eyes open quite wide, so I was a bit like, 'Oh, hey.' So I was a bit nervous. The first thing she said to me was, 'Sorry about my eyes,' and I made out that nothing was wrong with them, but they were really weird. She was like, 'Nah, man. There's nothing wrong with your eyes.' Oh, it just seemed very normal. From the very moment that I walked in, we were laughing, and I know that she hadn't laughed in a long time. Like, five minutes after that, she was like, 'Yeah, bro. Your eyes are crazy. Bro.' And I'm like, 'I know! I know!' (LAUGHS) When I got to Christchurch, I was going really well. I was at a really good place in my recovery. I could put a pair of those gypsy pants on, and I could put a T-shirt on. It was incredible. It was one of the hugest achievements ` that I could put a T-shirt on, finally. And so it made me feel that sense of slight normality. I was visualising her off to the gym every day and physio and getting her pressure garments fitted and all those sorts of things. And within a few days, she got quite a nasty infection. Christchurch Hospital didn't have the same resources to wash and shower her under anaesthesia... the way they could in Auckland. And they found that the infection didn't respond to the dressings and the things they were doing. So while we had thought she wouldn't be there too long, she was actually in Christchurch Hospital several months, and it was, yeah, a real setback. Because my healing stopped, it made me more bedridden. I went back into quite a depressed state ` a state where I didn't want to try... for myself, a state where I just had no motivation, was just really unhappy again. She was in real pain and agony lots of the time. We had pain teams coming all the time and tried different things. But the pain was difficult to manage, particularly after dressing changes. Seeing someone you love in that much pain and there's nothing that you can do is terrible. I remember one weekend, Jackie had gone back to Timaru, so I was on babysitting duties for the weekend, and I came` I'd been there till late on the Saturday night ` I hadn't stayed over that time ` and I came back in on the Sunday morning, and there were screams, and I heard them before I even got to the ward. I followed the screams, and I walked into this room, and she's standing there, naked, half-bandaged ` you know, and these wounds were far from healed ` and just in absolutely distress. There were times where... she was in such a lot of pain... that she would say that she wanted to die. The dressing changes used to take a very long time ` like, three hours. So it was a really big ordeal to go through and scary to visually see what my body was. I would just be consumed by the feelings of... 'Look at everyone outside getting to be normal, and I have to be in here.' I had a lot of beautiful nurses as well ` a lot of young females in Christchurch ` and that I just struggled with sometimes, cos I saw these beautiful ladies who were looking after me, and they got to leave at the end of the day and, you know, have... get to live a normal life and have partners and everything. I was frustrated with the progress that I could see that she was making mentally. Things were healing for her ` you know, bandages came off her legs ` but she didn't have her spark. So I took my ukulele to the hospital one day, and I played for her, and she sung. She has a beautiful voice, and, you know, the ward heard her, and there were other patients on the ward that would come and ask us to play or see if we could move into the lounge bit, because she, you know` her voice really does, you know, bring joy to people. I know singing induces endorphins and all of that, but it was so much more for her; it was healing on a different level; it was, 'Here's some remnants of my old self, and I haven't actually changed that much on the inside.' When it got to the point where I could actually go on outings, that's where my healing started really happening for me again. The first time we left the hospital, we took the ketamine off-site, which was` we then found out was illegal. We got into a lot of trouble for that. Mak is that person who made me feel probably a lot more comfortable about myself. She'd always be, like, if someone looked at me or took a second glance or did a wee stare, she'd be like, 'Oh, got eyes for Christmas?' Or hiss at them or anything like that ` hiss at them. Just go... (HISSES) (LAUGHS) Like, just anything like that to make sure, you know, I knew that she was right there and that it's all good. That was massive for her to go out into the public and see that the world had continued. After five months in Christchurch Hospital, when the medical professions thought I was ready and I felt ready, I then got transferred down to Timaru Hospital. VOICEOVER: Hey, Auckland, which of the Youi 40 ways to save would work best for where you live? Grey Lynn, close to the city, is where Ava lives, so number 1 of 40 - "Don't drive to work" - could be best for her. Do a car insurance quote at youi.co.nz. * The first place I ever went to out of Timaru Hospital with my family out in public, I had a panic attack. I had huge anxiety around anything like even walking down the main street by myself. I was coping when I would go out in Christchurch. But I know everyone in Timaru. And everyone knew who I was before. And now I'm... a completely different person. Being isolated for so long, I didn't feel like I even knew how to talk to people any more. I lost completely confidence. I lost confidence in every area of my life. Because I basically ate my feelings away (LAUGHS) in Christchurch, I put on a lot of weight. I put on something crazy, like, 30kg. I knew she had` she was back in Timaru, and I didn't see her, and people said to me, you know, 'Oh, Aroha's around. Have you seen her?' And I said, 'No, no. She'll come, and I'll see her when she's ready. It is really important that people do things in their own time. I had this team put in place to help me get on the road to recovery. So we kind of came up with the plan that... to do things that got me out and do the things that make me really nervous, because I was sick of being this person who was hiding away, and I wanted to be... me again. I wanted to be me, or the best version of this me that I could be. Yoga, for me, was probably my saviour. It helped me not only get my strength back; it was really great for me, mentally. Being able to even be in a room surrounded by other people really helped me through that really hard journey of getting back into Timaru and settling back into my hometown. When I started to lose weight and my hair started growing back, took me a wee while to accept my big, unruly hair again, but as soon as I accepted that this was the way my hair was, I started to fall in love with it. I get to see those Maori curls. She lets her hair just be as it is. She doesn't wake up at silly o'clock to get it all straight, so I don't think it's as much about her finding a new identity as that this has always been her, and now she's comfortable enough to do that. We go op shopping, and she buys the most ridiculous clothes that I wouldn't be caught dead in, yet I joke that somebody probably was dead in them, because, you know, they are what I imagine people's grandparents to wear. How do you find these? I know. I've just got that knack. You know? I wear what makes me happy. It doesn't necessarily look great together, but it makes me smile. I am huge for... if it's gonna put a smile on my face, I'm going to wear it. The louder the better. Apparently. Yeah. Sold. Looking back,... I don't really like who old Aroha was and what she was doing and what she stood for. I think she tried to be something for other people. I definitely used to dress up for other people. But I got to a point where I needed to be happy with myself. It's changed her because it's enabled her to be her. So she isn't a new person; she's just... herself now, because she's been to hell and back. When you experience trauma to that extent, it puts everything into perspective. I kind of just decided this is who I am now, and I am either going to wallow in the pits for the rest of my life or I'm going to decide to be happy. I look at my body now and go, 'What a piece of artwork.' You know? I'm a patchwork quilt. And I'm not` I'm not grateful for the accident happening, but I'm so grateful for what I get to take and what I got to take from it. CYRUS: It's incredible, really. Like, her... She's taken something so... negative and turned it into a huge positive. Like, she's just got a... a whole new lease on life and an outlook on everything. I guess she just shows... she can't really let anything beat her. I was asked to... attend the incident to determine origin and cause. In this instance, there was a radiant bar heater that was in the centre of the room on the floor that had ignited the bedclothes. If there was a smoke alarm working in that room at that time, it would've woken the people inside; it would have given them a lot more time to get out. And we always use a term called a metre-heater rule. That involves keeping everything that's combustible a metre away from the heater or any radiant heat source at all. It's a very good practice to stick by. The other thing is just having an awareness of your surroundings and understanding your exit routes and, yeah. Could've` Could've... reduced a lot of harm. One day, I had a friend say, 'I'm going to come round for coffee.' And I said, 'Yeah, that's cool.' And I opened the front door, (LAUGHS) and behind her peeked this head, and Aroha was behind her, and there was that big, grinning smile just, you know, looking straight at me, and I just nearly died. I think I probably squealed and... did a dance and hugged her, and it was just so good to see her again. I had no idea that there was this huge community of burn survivors here in New Zealand. My mum actually stumbled across this woman's retreat here in New Zealand that they do every March. I was, like, 'Yes. Yes, yes, I want to do it.' I think in a lot of ways I did feel very alone through a lot of my journey, so getting to meet people that we could just sit down and talk about our stories, yeah, really just was one of the most special things I've ever been on. (MAKAYLA STRUMS UKULELE, AROHA HUMS) When I see how far she's come now, I feel ridiculous that I was concerned for her post accident, because I shouldn't have been. # Ka pioioi e tohu aroha haukainga. She is... resilient, and she has shown that no matter what you go through, you can come out the other side and even be better. BOTH SING: # E rotarota ana, e katakata ana mai ra. I'm just always in awe of... her enthusiasm and confidence. The journey has shifted her perspective. She wants to live a bigger life. I think she's still figuring out what that might look like, (CHUCKLES) but, um,... you know, she's, yeah` she survived this for a reason. (LAUGHS) She's got bigger and better things to do with her life. # ...roimata. Ka pioioi. # Ka pioioi he tohu aroha haukainga. I get to look at life and appreciate getting up every morning and putting my own socks on. I get to wake up and... I get to wake up and get up out of bed every day, and not everyone gets to do that. I get to go to the toilet by myself ` not everyone gets to do that. I get to go outside and feel the breeze on my face, and not everyone gets to do that. I just appreciate getting to be alive, and I just want to make the most of it. # ...haukainga. # You got a little bit better. I did get a little bit better there. I am Aroha Andrew, and I am a burns survivor. (SLOW PIANO MUSIC)