Burn survivors reach out to give and receive support
For one survivor, helping others to cope works as his own therapeutic experience.
COLUMBUS (AP) — Hot oil blasted from a broken pipe and forever changed Travis Wolf.
He had gone into work early that day, in the summer of 2006, to his job making tortilla chips at the Kroger grocery store bakery. He slipped and hit his leg against the pipe, which burst, spraying oil. Everything went black until he heard someone screaming.
Then Wolf realized the sound was coming from him.
Wolf didn’t look at his legs for four days, not until surgeons had grafted skin over the raw flesh of his calves.
Last week, he walked into Ohio State University Medical Center’s Cramblett Hall cracking jokes and willing to roll up his pants legs to show strangers his wounds.
Wolf calls himself a survivor. He says victims are those who don’t make it.
And he’s determined to help the others who come after him, to offer companionship and empathy and, in the process, to reap the rewards of relationships with the only other people who can fully understand him.
A few weeks ago, Wolf became the first Ohio State burn patient to reach out to another through an effort called SOAR, short for Survivors Offering Assistance in Recovery.
After in-depth training in peer support, six people — some of them survivors, some loved ones — are to help those embarking on life after a severe burn.
Wolf’s first encounter was with David Rider.
Rider calls himself a woodsman. He lives alone in a mobile home in the woods of northern Delaware County.
He burns his trash and the trash he collects on his routine 4-mile patrol of ditches near his home. He recycles what he can. He abhors litter.
In mid-April, he heard a “whoosh” and watched as flames leapt from his 55-gallon burn barrel to his arms, chest and legs, mostly sparing his face and hands. He suspects the circuitry from an old television prompted the explosion.
After a month in Ohio State’s burn unit, he was released May 15. Last week, he returned for his first follow-up appointment and for a meeting with Wolf, who’d visited him twice during his hospitalization.
As Wolf walked into the room, Rider reached for his windbreaker.
“You’re probably going to feel that chill a lot more nowadays,” Wolf said, explaining that burned skin is sensitive to cold as well as heat.
Wolf’s voice is gruff and strong. He’s 50 and a capable, unflappable sort who prefers a good joke to excessive sentimentality.
He sat back, took Rider in.
“You look good today,” he said. The color, once drained by the rigors of recovery and a long hospital stay, had begun to return to Rider’s face.
Rider, who is 63, smiled, thanked him, and said that his legs had really stiffened up the day before.
Wolf asked whether he always sits in a chair, knees at a right angle. He explained that it’s called “guarded position” and will stiffen the skin.
They compared blood blisters, skin grafts and emotions.
Joy appeared on Rider’s face as he contemplated moving home from his sister’s house back to his beloved wooded property, where he lives in consort with the land.
Tears came to Wolf’s eyes as he talked about the value of reaching out to another burn survivor, of sharing the kind of conversation that happens only when two people have gone through the same misfortune.