Fire Victim Awakens Just in Time

When looking back over the past day, Dr. Linda Cameron says time seems to have passed in slow motion, and the frightening events of early this morning -- when she awoke some time after 3 a.m. to see a fire growing in her bedroom -- seem not to have happened at all.

"I wasn't hysterical," said Cameron, a psychologist whose home is on Mayhew Drive in Newstead. "I was very calm."

Cameron awoke to find that a candle she had left burning overnight had set fire to the room. Her first instinct was to call for her 12-year-old daughter, who was sleeping across the hall and is typically difficult to wake up. However, on this occasion she came quickly to the door and urged her mother to move downstairs quickly. Cameron says she felt disoriented, which a firefighter later told her is a common effect of smoke inhalation. "It's like you're sleepwalking," she said.

Mother and daughter went downstairs, and Cameron at some point secured their dog, a Sheltie, who strangely hadn't barked to wake them up. They opened the front door, and their cat immediately ran outside. Cameron was considering going back upstairs to find her cell phone to call for help, but "by then, the heat was extraordinary." At that point, her daughter reported seeing a fireman outside, who was in the neighborhood responding to a report of a smell of smoke a few streets away on West End Road.

The firefighter told Cameron that she had to exit the house right away, but, as a diabetic, she was concerned about walking barefoot outside and potentially cutting her feet. "He walked me down the steps and sat me on the back of one of the trucks," she recalled. Meanwhile, her daughter had run around the corner to a South Orange Middle School friend's house on West South Orange Avenue. The boy's mother came in slippers and offered Cameron's family a place to stay. "They really treated me like family," she said, noting that her hosts even produced dog food, though they don't have a dog.

The house is uninhabitable, as pronounced by the fire department, but the damage is mostly confined to the second floor and the master bedroom, and Cameron plans to restore it. She met with a Red Cross representative today and was given advice on next steps, as well as hotel vouchers. Though she's staying right around the corner, she mostly avoided her house Friday morning, since several public adjusters seeking to represent her were parked outside, but she's managed to reclaim some belongings.

She describes the chain of events Friday morning -- the West End Road resident bothering to report the smell of smoke and her waking up just when she did -- as "miraculous." "I'm a psychologist, and now I have an experience that will help people in this situation," she said.