It began as an ordinary Monday. Then I accidentally set myself on fire

“Life changes in an instant. The ordinary instant,” wrote the late US writer Joan Didion in her 2005 memoir The Year of Magical Thinking following the sudden death of her husband and editor, John Gregory Dunne.

One moment, Didion writes, he’s sitting opposite her at the dining table nursing a single-malt scotch, very much alive, talking: “Then he wasn’t. Wasn’t talking.”

Life changes in an instant. The ordinary instant.

One minute I was making a cup of tea, and the next, I wasn’t. I was on fire.Credit: Getty Images

September 16, 2024: My husband has taken our youngest to school and our 17-year-old is in the shower. I’m working from home, and I get up from my desk to make a cup of tea.

Then I wasn’t. Wasn’t making a cup of tea.

In the days that followed, here’s how I recalled what happened next:

At 8.52am, I get up from my workstation and walk to the kitchen ... I … put the kettle on [the top of the stove] to make myself a cup of tea. I am wearing a flowing top and, as I turned towards the sink, my top catches a spark from the flame …

In the millisecond it takes me to clock the flame it’s already devoured my top (a favourite!), and the highly flammable one beneath it. It surges across my chest, up my neck and catches under my right arm. It claws at my eyelashes and sears the left side of my face. My hair is next. The more it takes, the more it wants. I exhale, and my world shrinks, warping behind a blinding, suffocating curtain of orange and red.

“What would you do if your clothes caught on fire?” pose the authors in the Country Fire Authority’s primary-school manual Home Fire Safety: Lessons for Year 1 and 2. “Would you run around to put out the flames? Would you blow on the flames? Would you stop, drop and roll?”

The correct answer, of course, is option three. (While it may not completely extinguish a fire, experts agree that it helps calm a fire down and smother it.)

I don’t stop, drop and roll. I try to put the fire out by sprinkling water from the tap onto myself. It doesn’t help. In fact, most likely, it helps only to fan the flame.

The other thing I don’t – can’t – do is scream the house down. The sound I make is raw, alien, unsettling – utterly other. Like an animal caught in an echo chamber.

My 17-year-old son came rushing out of the shower and started pulling the burning clothing off me …

My son, my son – is he naked? I can’t see him because he’s behind me, screaming: “Mum, what do I do?” I hiss – hiss! – back: “Get these f---ing clothes off me!” He claws at what’s left, pulls the fabric away from my skin and throws it to the floor. The cloth sizzles briefly before extinguishing.

Over the past couple of years, our firstborn has grown ever more alien to us. These days, he rarely leaves his room and only then to raid the fridge and pantry.

Yet here he is in the kitchen saving his mother and screaming for his father. In my head, I’m thinking: Don’t, darling. Your father isn’t here. But before that thought fully lands, my husband bursts into the kitchen (he’s back?!) grabs a tea towel, towels – anything he can find – and wraps me tightly.

The kitchen is also on fire, so my husband works quickly to put it out. At some point, I remember that I need to get under a cold shower – and fast.

At some point, I remember that I need to get under a cold shower – and fast.

In the bathroom, my son’s concern for me miraculously continues: “It’s not your fault,” he says. My husband is on the phone to the ambulance. Suddenly, I remember – my youngest isn’t here to see this. Relief. Then, the weight of what my 17-year-old has witnessed crashes over me. Oh, my heart.

I lift my face to the stream. Someone – me? – is screaming now: “My face. My face. My face.” I run my fingers through my hair. Clumps come away. I stop running my fingers through my hair.

Jen Vuk, who is still recovering from her ordeal, says she “[continues] to be a work in progress”.

Fifteen minutes in, the water has now turned my blood to ice. I’m shaking so violently that only my left forearm, pressed hard against the tiles, keeps me from collapsing. My bra and black jeans – untouched by fire – stick to me like a second skin. The ambos arrive. One asks how long I was under the shower. Someone says around 15 minutes. “Good,” she says. “Another five minutes.”

It’s still morning peak hour on one of Melbourne’s busiest arterials, yet we get to the hospital in record time. I’m juiced to my eyeballs and oscillate between crying my eyes out and grinning like an idiot.

“Memory stops. The frame freezes. You’ll find that’s something that happens.” Didion again.

In emergency. A white light. The pain suddenly spikes, hitting 11. Relief comes in the form of ketamine – but not for long. It takes me to the edge of sanity – first inexplicably catapulting me onto the set of the BBC children’s show Yo Gabba Gabba! (look it up), and then plunging me into a black hole. I rant and rage, before the nurses’ soft murmurings guide me back.

An initial assessment of 18 per cent affected total body surface area (TBSA) is reappraised: 7 per cent TBSA, mid-deep dermal burns to right chest, axilla, neck, arm; 0.5 per cent TBSA superficial burns to right forearm, face. Just 7 per cent? It hardly seems worth mentioning, yet this fire has written its story on me.

I have two operations. I wake up from one strapped into a harness and neck brace, telling whoever’s listening I’m claustrophobic. The nurse stays with me, and we breathe through my waves of panic.

The writings of the late Joan Didion helped Jen Vuk make sense of the “ordinariness” of near tragedy.Credit: Getty Images

On September 23, I write: It’s 7.15am. I’m getting prepped to have my bandages looked at, and hopefully the news will be good. My leg graft hurts. It’s all the blood rushing to it when I stand up in the morning, but pain management has been fine. Even being in this harness isn’t such a problem.

September 24: The doctors came around earlier and were all smiles … so the surgery on Monday was a success and there’s no indication that I need any more … Looks like I’ll be going home on the weekend.

I spend two weeks in hospital, receiving incredible care. It’s not for the first time I marvel at living in a country with such first-class specialist public healthcare. In the weeks that follow, pain shadows me at almost every move, but I’m becalmed and carried along by the support and steady stream of well-wishes from family, friends and colleagues.

Now, several months later, things have slowed to a new normal. I continue to be a work in progress. There are moments when I catch myself going over some odd detail. I suspect I’ll fear the naked flame for some time. I still have problems with accepting that I accidentally set myself on fire.

Yet it occurs more than we realise, often ending in tragedy. A 2022 National Coronial Information System fact sheet, Residential Fire-related Deaths in Australia, revealed that between 2001 and 2019, there were 992 fire-related deaths in Australia. This equated to an average of 52 per year – that is, one death every week.

One of the many triumphs of The Year of Magical Thinking is to challenge the persistent belief in individual control over outcomes. Confronting the unsettling reality that tragedy and trauma often emerge from the intersection of ordinary circumstances, Didion writes: “And it will happen to you. The details will be different, but it will happen to you.”

Surely, acknowledging the possibility of bad things happening also serves as a reminder to remain cautious and vigilant? Is that what I’m doing here – writing this? Maybe, because if this piece helps even one person remember to stop, drop and roll when their clothes catch fire, then job done.

But I also want to acknowledge something else. I know that things could have been so much worse if even one variable had shifted. On that otherwise ordinary Monday morning, there was definitely a moment when I thought, Well, this is it. This is how I go. I had no fight left in me – a realisation that still shocks me.

Our lives are shaken and shaped by countless ordinary moments. Sometimes we’re saved by the decisions we make, the ones we don’t, the state of our surroundings or by simple dumb luck. If we’re really lucky though we’re saved by the people who stand by us when we need them most.

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