Beyond the Flames

by Heather Smith Thomas

A SUMMER OF FIRE; A TIME OF TESTING Just before midnight on July 5, 2000, Heather and Lynne Thomas received the phone call that every parent dreads, the call that tells them one of their own has come to harm. "Andrea has been burned," their neighbor said. "She's being brought to the hospital by ambulance." The Thomases rushed from their ranch via Idaho's Highway 93 South toward the hospital in Salmon, twelve miles away, not knowing the extent of their daughter's injuries. Inside the emergency room, their daughter lay unconscious, her face covered with an oxygen mask, her legs ravaged by burns. EMTs were too engrossed in lifesaving tasks to detail the extent of Andrea's injuries for her parents, but Lynne and Heather Thomas didn't need medical terminology or statistics to tell them that their daughter's life hung by the thinnest of threads. Moments later, Andrea was transferred to the waiting ambulance and whisked off to meet the life-fight helicopter and transport to the Burn Trauma ICU at University Hospital in Salt Lake City as her family looked on, unaware they were beginning a journey which would leave them, their family, friends and community forever changed.

356 pages, Hardcover

First published September 1, 2004

About the author

Heather Smith Thomas grew up on a ranch near Salmon, Idaho. She is the author of 20 books and thousands of articles on animal health care. She began writing stories for children’s magazines while still in high school and wrote articles for horse and farm publications to help pay her way through college. She wrote her first book, "A Horse in Your Life: A Guide for the New Owner," during the summer between her sophomore and junior year of college. She and her husband Lynn Thomas have been raising beef cattle and a few horses on their ranch in central Idaho since 1967. Most of her books and articles deal with horse or cattle health care, breeding, or handling. Her goal has been to learn all she can about the care of horses and cattle, and to share this with her readers. One of her books, however, discusses an entirely different subject. "Beyond the Flames" tells about her daughter’s severe burn injury and how this changed their lives.