ESCONDIDO -- After Allyson Roach's 12th surgery, her parents John and Lori finally felt a spark of the emotion they have been seeking since their daughter was burned over 85 percent of her body in the Oct. 26 Paradise fire.

Last week, they felt hope.

A doctor called the house to report that the next-to-last skin-grafting surgery had been successful.

"Even the doctor said he can't believe how much she is healing," Lori Roach said after getting off the phone, her face brightening as she reported the rare bit of happy news. "This is the first time I have heard the tone of his voice sound happy. He actually sounded a little light-hearted today and that is a first."

Allyson Roach is recovering at UCSD Medical Center's Burn Unit after suffering second- and third-degree burns when she, her brother and sister fled their Valley Center home during the worst wildfires in San Diego history. Her brother Jason, 22, escaped with minor injuries, but her sister Ashleigh, 16, perished in the flames.

Since then, Allyson has been confined to a hospital bed, battling pneumonia and infections, enduring endless physical and occupational therapy sessions, and operations in which doctors harvest skin from her upper back to patch up her face, arms, legs and stomach.

But her family is strengthened by Allyson's unflagging assertion that she is not in pain and by her determination to heal, they said.

"She has physical therapy twice a day and occupational therapy twice a day," her father John said. "And after they're gone, the nurses will look in on her and she is still moving her legs and moving her arms and exercising herself … She knows the more she works herself, the faster she can get out of there."

Their daughter is scheduled for one final skin-grafting surgery next week and then will face a year of being tightly bandaged from head to toe 23 hours every day to help the skin grafting take hold, her mother said.

The family doesn't know when Allyson might be released from the hospital, but they do know she will have to endure a series of plastic surgery operations in the coming years, Lori Roach said.

"I've talked to her about the fact that her skin is scarred," her mother said. "The skin is grafted skin. It is not like our skin looks. I just kept reassuring her this is not the finished product. We have a lot of work to do."

And her family is determined to get her back to some sort of normalcy.

"She knows that we are going to be with her every step of the way," her mother said. "She is not going to go through this by herself. We will do whatever it takes to get her to where she is comfortable with herself and that she just feels a little inconvenienced, but not disabled."

The Roaches acknowledge that rehabilitation is not the only hurdle. Allyson Roach is still prone to infections and deadly blood poisoning, so each day is a fight for her life.

The family of three won't breathe easily until Allyson is out of the hospital and with them in their rented southern Escondido home.

"A lot of things have changed for my family," said son Jason, in between breaks from school and work. "Once we get my sister home, we can make a new start."

Until then, the Christian family is just trying to survive a holiday season that was once full of tradition. The Christmas tree, which in the past was decorated by the five members with sentimental ornaments, stayed outside until friends set it up and a local elementary school donated the ornaments.

"I didn't have the heart to decorate it," Lori Roach said as she studied the tree, as if seeing it for the first time. "But Jason's friends put up the lights and Allyson's friends put on the ornaments. Everyone has done so much."

The Roaches did do some Christmas shopping, filling up a stocking for Jason because they're determined to give him some normalcy.

"Jason needs to have Christmas," Lori said. "What would that say to him, if we just gave up? That we loved Ashleigh and Allyson more? Even if the message was only subconscious, for his sake, we have to keep going."

Meanwhile, Jason is focusing on his career, redoubling his efforts to become a paramedic-firefighter in a year. Although he went through a nightmarish fire when the car he was driving was engulfed in flames, Ashleigh was lost and he had to drag his burning sister Allyson to safety, he has decided to continue on the path.

"I thought about giving it up, but my friends refused to let me quit," he said. "Now I realized they are right. I can't let what happened get in my way."

Contact staff writer Erin Massey at (760) 740-5416 or emassey@nctimes.com.