HOUSTON –Parris Charles Flowers owes his life to the Houston firefighters who crawled through the toxic smoke that filled his burning apartment November 1st of last year. But he also owes a debt to a rarely talked-about medicine that had an equally strong hand in turning him from victim to survivor.
Flowers was unconscious, knocked out by the intense smoke. With the electrical fire raging in the front bedroom he collapsed against a back wall in the other bedroom of his assisted living apartment on Wilmington Street in southeast Houston. Firefighters crawled through the apartment until they found his lifeless body.
“When they brought him out it didn't look good. It didn't look good,” said neighbor Juanita Spencer. “I didn't think he was gonna make it."
"Next thing I remember...it was three weeks later,” Parris Flowers told us on January 14th surrounded by the firefighters from Stations 46 and 55 who saved his life.
The Houston Fire Department arranged the reunion to celebrate Mr. Flowers’ survival, the heroic efforts of several firefighters, and to promote an antidote now carried in every vehicle driven by an HFD chief or supervisor.
The antidote, called Cyanokit, is an emergency treatment administered intravenously to flush and remove inhaled, ingested, or dermal exposure to cyanide. Burning plastics and furniture can emit dangerous levels of the poison that prevent cells from using oxygen. Cyanokit, manufactured by King Pharmaceuticals, is an antidote that bonds with the poison and alters it to cyanocobalamin (a form of vitamin B-12), which is flushed out of victim’s body through their urine.
