EFFORTPOST My aftermath from oilfield explosion

I'm posting my Admittance + progress pics from 3 months I spent in the JMS burn center in Augusta, Ga after I was severely burned in a natural gas explosion. It happened June 6th 2007 while I was working on a workover rig like this.

We were bleeding natural gas pressure off the casing kinda like this except no crude oil.

We were bleeding the natural gas off into the air so we could put our blow out preventer on when another hand noticed I still had my tennis shoes on & told me to get my boots on. I was walking back to the truck where my boots were and something ( later thought to be the intake on the crew truck ) ignited the fumes and caused a flash fire to engulf the who job site. After being burned by the initial flash I was hit by the source pipe that had a 40' flame coming off it like a torch similar to this

It hit me in the back for around 2-3 seconds before I got out of it. I was on fire and never even though to “stop drop and roll” until the same guy that told me to change into my boots got to me and rolled me himself. It was a 35 min nightmare waiting for the ambulance after that & the pain was so bad along w/ thinking my face was severely disfigured I repeatedly asked my boss at the time to kill me with a sledge hammer that was close by. I just wanted it to stop and didn't care to wake back up. I was 70% burns 30% third degree and 40% second degree. I remember hearing the ambulance say that when he radioed it in also saying 3rd degree to back, arms, ears, & face, second degree to chest, stomach, and legs. I begged the medic to put me out & eventually passed out from the morphine. I was air lifted to JMS burn center in Augusta from McComb hospital in McComb Mississippi in critical condition. They let my mom on the leer jet in McComb because they weren't for sure I'd be alive by time she could drive the 9 hours to Georgia. The leer jet got us there in 45 min. I had over 100 IVs hooked to me before the flight mostly for saline drips before being loaded on the jet. I was told that after your burned that bad it's like taking a turkey out of the oven where it's still cooking for a while until it's able to cool down so the crazy number of IVs was to keep me hydrated and cool me from the inside out. They took the first pictures once I was intubated w/ a vent, placed in a medically induced coma, given a paralytic, & remained stable for two days.

The pics above they had placed pig skin & cadaver skin on some of my worst wounds to help prevent infection while they tried to get rid of pneumonia in both of my lungs. They were severely burned also from gasping or breathing in suddenly when the natural gas first ignited. I also had a feeding tube, catheter, BMS, two artery lines, a trachea vent, & several IV lines inserted in the first two days. From what I was told they would take me to a whirl pool every day and scrub the dead skin off of my wounds to promote healing of the 2nd degree burns and to keep all open wounds clean. After a week or so I started having skin graft surgeries pretty often.

The pics below show some of the “donor sites” & the cheese grater like tool they used to remove healthy skin for grafts.

They took as many of these as they could from my legs, glutes, & thighs before running out. I do have one sport on my chest that cadaver skin was placed & my body accepted it as a graft although that's not super common they were fine with it healing that way. To get the rest of the skin for grafts they took biopsies from inside of each of my thighs and sent them to Massachusetts where they were placed in a hyperbaric chamber and grown into several 2x2 inch squares & then sent back to Georgia to be grafted on. I went thru a total of 13-14 skin graft surgeries all together & spent 6 weeks in a medically induced coma. 3 months total in the hospital & 8 months of outpatient physical and occupational therapy before going back to work. I was told I'd be in therapy for at least 2 years a long with more surgeries to remove bands / scar tissue that healed in a way that restricted range of motion. I ended up getting into work hardening therapy 5 days a week 5 hours a day & let my OTP stretch my arms and hands daily & just dealt with the pain as long as I could. As a result I got my full range of motion back in 6 months & avoided going thru any more miserable surgeries. My back, left hand, arms, & ears were burned the worst.

They were telling my family that they wanted to cut my ears off because they weren't healing & only making it harder for my body to fight off the pneumonia in my lungs.

My mom kept pushing them to give it one more day and luckily they scabbed over one night so I got to keep them. My left hand was so bad it had tendons showing and had to be completely covered with grafts along with my back. My sides & arms had spots that could've been considered 4th degree where muscle tissue was exposed and those spots are the most noticeable today. The craziest part of the whole experience for me was waking up with a trachea and not knowing that I wasn't supposed to try to breathe on my own. I thought I was suffocating so I ripped it out of my throat. This little nurse climbed on top of me and pinned my hands down while they put it back in & sedated me. I woke up handcuffed w/ rags taped inside my hands after that and the nurse told my dad “he's gonna get out of that eventually” and I did that same day, but I realized after a while I wasn't dying cause the amount of time that went by. The only other traumatic event in the hospital was a nurse removing my bandages and putting a dry towel on my back then forgetting about it for 12 hours. The nurse that found it started crying so I knew getting it off was gonna suck. Two of them gave me fentanyl & used saline to peel it off as gently as they could, but it was rough. The pics below are from Sept. 25 2007 so 6/6/07-9/25/07. About 3.5 months. It's what they can do to fix our bodies & crazier how fast we can heal after.

It was a wild experience. I would rather be held under water than burned even close to that bad again, but the time in the hospital wasn't terrible at all. The coma dreams were crazy af almost like a constant psychedelic trip. The only thing I've ever been able to find that even resembles the vibe from those dreams was a video I watched being curious about wtf burning man was and the night time footage of the art there was super similar those dreams. I healed up after a total of 11 and a half months off & went back to work doing the same thing. I ended up working my way up and being a tool pusher for the past 11 years until may of this year. Some things I wanted to put out there. I was in a coma for 6 weeks, but I still knew my family was there and I even remembered hearing my girlfriend at the times voice a bunch. I found out when I woke up that she had flew in for a few days early in my stay. I wasn't aware of everything going on and had no idea how much time went by, but even in those dreams I knew when someone was there to see me. Also if you ever have a family member on a ventilator make sure whoever is there when they wake up tells them that the vent is breathing for them & that they're ok. No one told me and I legit thought I was suffocating to the point of ripping my trach out & a lot of people do that when they wake up on a vent. Also make sure they're told not to try and pee on their own, I kept trying & ended up making my catheter leak. I told the nurse and she took that as meaning I needed a bigger catheter so just trying to pee turned into a huge mistake 😩. People tend to talk to you like your a baby when you can't move or breath on your own and it's annoying af don't do that lol. If you got family or close friends in the hospital go see them! There were so many patients including small children in that burn center that nobody would show up to see and it wasn't helping them at all. If you read all this your a trooper! Here's some updated pics of how my scars look now.

( won't let me post them here rn so will try in comments)

Here's some bonus pics of random injury aftermath I've had at work and in bike crashes thru out life as a burn survivor lol

Above- thumb crushed by light plant at work. Broke in two places & split in several. Reconstructive surgery to suture bone back together and repair partially devolved thumb.

Above- pinky smashed by an iron clamp at work. Just babied it and kept it clean. Ended up losing a couple cm off the tip.

Above flipped my cbr street bike doing a wheelie at 60mph in march of 2021. Terrible road rash, severely dislocated my shoulder, tore meniscus in my right knee, did something to my ankle that made it blow up like a balloon, & some other minor injuries. I put my shoulder back on my own while I waited 50 minutes on an ambulance to drive 9 miles to the wreck site. They left me on a gurney in the ER for 7-8 hours bleeding because of Covid patients putting them at capacity. Finally called a ride got some chick to help me clean myself up & just had to thug thru it.

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