5:26 p.m. ET, November 12, 2018
This nurse spent her birthday treating patients after barely escaping a burning car
Nichole Jolly spent her 34th birthday evacuating and treating patients as the Camp Fire consumed Paradise, California.
Jolly, a nurse who worked in Paradise, barely escaped her burning car.
"I called him (her husband) and I said, 'Nick, I'm going to die. I'm not going to make it out of here, there's just flames everywhere, and I don't know what to do.' And he said, 'Don't die, run. If you're going to die, die fighting. You have to run.'"
Jolly did run, and eventually made her way to a firetruck. The respite was short-lived; the firefighters called for air support, but were told it couldn't reach them. Smoke was filling the air, and they were running out of oxygen.
Finally, a bulldozer cleared the path, allowing the firetruck and other vehicles a straight path to the hospital.
"This dozer just came out of nowhere and cleared a path and he saved all of us. He saved everybody's lives. Those dozer operators are incredible. They deserve to be the heroes in this story," Jolly told CNN.
She spent her birthday on Friday helping others at the hospital.
"I just had to keep going, I had to keep working. When we got back to the hospital, I had to keep working. I had to stay busy. I'm trained to be a nurse and I'm trained to help people and that's what I do, and that's what Karen Davis (another nurse) does and all of our staff that was at the hospital. We worked and we just stayed busy. And we didn't think about ourselves and our possessions that we just lost and anything else. We just helped these people. You know, that's what nurses do."
Watch it here: