Burn care is tough, long work, with moments of joy

They arrive after accidents. Tipped pots of boiling water. Spilled caustic chemicals. House fires and car crashes.

They show up from assaults. Babies put in microwaves and children intentionally splashed with scalding water.

They are the patients of burn units, a small group of specialized treatment centers that take on one of the most severe traumas.

Two Colorado Springs children, 9-year-old Dontrell Gardner and 3-year-old Amarjahan Joseph, have gone to one of the nation’s top pediatric burn centers, Shriners Hospital in Galveston, after their mother allegedly doused them with gasoline and lit them on fire.

Dr. Cleon W. Goodwin is director of Western States Burn Center at North Colorado Medical Center and a past president of the American Burn Association. He said burn units evolved because the numbers of burn victims are small compared with other types of patients such as cancer victims, yet their care is costly and specialized.

They are one of the toughest places to work in the medical profession, he said. Staff psychologists and psychiatrists spend as much time counseling staff members as patients.

“The hardest replacement to recruit, I think, is to recruit somebody to work in a burn center,” he said.

The work is exhaustive and long. The stories are usually tragic. Patients can spend up to a year in the hospital, meaning staffers experience their emotional ups and downs. And there’s the emotional challenge of coping with the physical appearance of the trauma.

A ruptured appendix, he said, is not on display, but “you can see the eyes that are burned staring right at you.”

Even so, there is hope and healing in these halls. Staff and patients share small victories. A child comes off a respirator or a patient sits in a chair again for the first time.

At Shriners, the atmosphere can be downright “jovial,” said Dr. Ralph E. Hathaway. The hospital strives to bring in clowns and celebrate healing, and children in pain find a reason to smile. “You walk in there and you say, ‘My God, I can’t believe this. These kids are so positive.’”

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