After 6 months in hospital, badly burned man goes home

Doctors gave him less than a 4 percent chance of
surviving.

MECHANICSBURG, Pa. (AP) — For the first time in more than six months, Tyler Milesco slept in his own bed.

That might not seem like a big deal, but to Milesco and his family, it borders on miraculous.

Milesco, 20, wasn’t expected to live when he arrived at the Lehigh Valley Hospital burn center in July. He had burns over 97 percent of his body, 88 percent of them third-degree, from the explosion of a hydraulic cylinder that he was cutting apart at work.

A fireball of nitrogen gas and hydraulic fluid engulfed Milesco, burning off most of his clothes and scorching the ceiling 25 to 30 feet above his workspace at the Schirillo Inc. warehouse on Industrial Road in Harrisburg. Doctors told his family that the Mechanicsburg man had less than a 4 percent chance of surviving.

But on Jan. 18, he came home.

“It’s just amazing,” said Milesco’s mother, Denise Myers. “Nobody should have survived that.”

The federal Occupational Health and Safety Administration investigated the accident and cited Schirillo for failing to control hazardous energy and failing to properly communicate the hazards of materials being handled. The company was fined $2,100.

Milesco credits one of the company’s owners, Mike Hamilton, with helping to save his life.

“Mike put out the fire with a fire extinguisher and got what was left of my burning clothes off of me. He burned his own hands badly doing so,” Milesco said.

Hamilton’s tearing his clothes off is one of the last memories Milesco has of his ordeal. For four months — from about the time an ambulance crew gave him morphine for the pain until a week before he left the burn center in November — his mind is blank. He has been recovering in a rehabilitation center since his release from the hospital.

Doctors gave him an “amnesia drug” to suppress his memory of 25 surgeries. They grafted the little healthy skin he had left to cover his wounds.

“Thank God for that drug,” Myers said. “He doesn’t remember any of the torture they had to put him through to save his life.”

Doctors used cadaver skin and a high-tech breathable plastic material to cover his wounds and prevent infection while they waited for his skin to heal enough to be harvested for grafts.

“The staff at the Lehigh burn center is amazing,” Milesco said.

So is Milesco’s recovery.

Doctors told Myers they know of no patients nationwide who survived burns as severe in 2007.

Milesco’s recovery is not complete. He needs a walker and an aide to get around and has some open wounds. He will wear a pressure suit for at least two years to reduce scarring and help his new skin learn to fold naturally around his joints.

Parts of his fingers on both hands were so badly burned they had to be removed, but already Milesco is playing Xbox as well as he did before the accident, and he is making plans to open a motorcycle repair shop.

“The doctors expect me to make a full recovery,” he said. “My hands are not going to work as good as they used to. I am just going to have to find new ways to do things.”