Earlier this month, the Camp Fire wildfire wreaked havoc on the state of California. Now, a nurse from Paradise is opening up to share harrowing details of the moment she and her fellow staffers had to evacuate their patients to help them escape the blaze.

Tamara Ferguson, a labor and delivery nurse at Adventist Health Feather River, took to Facebook to discuss how she saw an “orange glow outside” when she got to work one morning. She was nervous when she saw the glow, but she was told initially that the wildfire wasn’t “super close.”

“Within an hour or less, I was going room to room telling moms and dads to get up, wrap their babies and we had to go,” Tamara recalled. “Wrap their babies up and we had to go..no time to grab personal belongings …we raced towards the ER and lined up.”

Tamara explained that she had to evacuate patients that included a mother who had just given birth via C-section, elderly men and women and other “critical” patients. She could see the flames start to destroy the hospital as she got patients into ambulances.

Tamara said that as they finally started to drive the patients to Enloe Medical Center in Chico, they realized one of the ambulances was on fire.

“We turned down a road into a driveway and stopped,” she wrote. “We all got out of the ambulance, and moved patients to the garage of the only house not burning, layed (sic) them down and tried to reassure their scared faces, while hiding ours.”

Though she felt “scared, hopeless, and desperate,” Tamara did everything she could to clear out the smaller flames.

“We need to save our patients and ourselves, if we were going to die today we would at least do it protecting others and do everything we can to live and we did!” the nurse said.

Tamara was so sure that she was going to die that she started calling her friends and family to say her last goodbyes. Her boyfriend, a police officer, tried to get her to remain calm.

“He was calm and told me to breathe and that I wasn’t going to die,” she remembered. “I told him over and over as I was surrounded by fire, ‘Babe, there’s no way I’m going to survive this.’”

Thankfully, Tamara did survive. Her ambulance was able to make it back to the hospital in Paradise, where they were met by rescue workers who helped them to evacuate.

“We were an Awesome team of mostly strangers doing whatever we could as HAD to and we did phenomenal! … I honestly couldn’t believe I was alive, that I would see my family, kids, and boyfriend again. I called them and told them I made it,” Tamara concluded, adding that she “will forever be changed by” that day.

Please keep all those affected by this wildfire in your thoughts and prayers. Find out more about Tamara’s story in the video below.