Burns are one of the biggest medical problems in the developing world. Bigger than tuberculosis and HIV combined. Bigger than breast cancer. In the developing world, where billions still heat, light and cook with open fires, someone is horribly burned every five seconds.
BurnRescue
Many burn victims are so deformed and disfigured, that they face a lifetime of pain and suffering. A burn injury not only disfigures, but it can also destroy movement and function.
It can prevent a child from walking. It can turn a hand into a closed fist. It can fuse legs, arms, and fingers together forever. The consequences are devastating.
Severely burned children don’t attend school, get a job or marry. Often they’re kept hidden away in shame at home, a burden to their families. A child who has been severely burned in a developing country has no hope, no future, no chance.
Most children with severe burns suffer their entire lives because they can’t afford surgery. We created BurnRescue to help the millions of children in developing countries who have been severely burned and are too poor to afford the reconstructive surgery they need. There is a miracle surgery for severely burned children: it’s called a “release.” A plastic surgeon uses his scalpel to “release,” or separate, skin that has been fused together by a severe burn injury that has caused a contracture. A contracture is when a burn injury is left to heal by itself and it “contracts” which squeezes together and tightens the skin and/or separate parts of the body such as fingers, arms, legs, etc
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A “release” can lift a chin that has been fused to a chest. It can separate fingers that have been fused together. Free a foot that has been fused to a shin preventing a child from walking. Once the two areas are separated, the surgeon uses skin flaps and skin grafts to repair exposed areas. The improvement in function and movement is a life-saver for these children. Imagine how much it means to a child to be able to walk again. To regain the use of fingers and arms. To have your chin freed from being glued to your chest. This surgery is a godsend to the children who need it.
In just a few hours, and for just a few hundred dollars, it can save them from a lifetime of pain and suffering. Unfortunately, burn surgery rarely brings a perfect “after” photo. Often burns require many surgeries and sometimes years of care. But over time, surgeons and rebuild the faces of severely burned children. They can create new ears, noses, even eyebrows. And they can transform their bodies as well giving them back form and function that they desperately need to survive in a developing country.
I had the opportunity to visit many major burn hospitals in India, Bangladesh, Nepal and Africa. It was quite depressing to go bed to bed meeting patients and hearing their stories. Unlike birth defects like clefts or clubfoot where every patients has the same story, every burn comes with a different story.
Like the epileptic mom who had a seizure and fell face first into a pot of boiling water. A 12 year old girl whose curtain rod fell on her bed and when she tried to fix it it touched a live wire outside her room and electrocuted her. Two twin sisters who were sleeping together in the same bed when their straw hut caught fire. A teenage boy who was transporting large cans of kerosene which were leaking all over him. And his friends thought it would be funny to light him on fire. A 9 year old girl who went to a local kiosk to buy vegetables for her mom for dinner. The owner asked her to hold a candle while he changed gas tanks for his stove and it exploded leaving her with burns over 60% of her face and body.
And by far the saddest were all the women I met who were suffering from depression and had no resources or help or support because they were peasants and the poorest people on earth. They would walk into the middle of a field and douse them selves with kerosene and set themselves on fire. Ironically, after their suicide attempts now they wanted to live. But their lives were much much harder because of their burns and disfigurements.
By far the saddest story and most difficult case I heard at bedside was that of a 16-year old girl who had been kidnapped by a gang of men who gang-raped her for a week. Then they poured a vat of acid over her head leaving her blind and unable to speak because her vocal cords were burned and terribly disfigured. The doctors told me her story as we surrounded her bed with her mom weeping at the end of it. They were so proud at how they fought to save her life. Meanwhile, the girl is begging to die.
Burns are by far the saddest, most difficult, expensive and challenging surgeries of anything I have ever seen. The government spends little money on burn victims and in most cases just warehouses patients until they die or get better. Unless the patient can afford artificial skin and state-of-the-art dressings, treatments, etc. they don’t receive them.
I remember hearing the horrible story of this poor mother of four whose gas cookstove blew up in her face while she was making dinner. The doctor explained that she had burns over 60% of her face and body and that was not survivable without artificial skin and special dressings. The government had these available for patients to purchase. But this woman was poor, her husband was a day laborer making a dollar a day. That’s why this woman will be dead in a week or two the doctor explained to us right as we stood there staring at her. She didn’t know a word of English thank God. But it certainly didn’t feel right. One of many examples of how the vast majority of patients are dying not of their burns – but because they are poor.
That’s why I am really proud of the work we did with BurnRescue.
Altogether, BurnRescue helped provide 3,000 surgeries for severely burned children and adults who no one else would help.
Here’s a report for our donors that wrote of a trip to a burn screening camp in Varanasi, India.
In March 2013, DeLois and I traveled to Varanasi to meet with Dr. Subodh Singh and attend our first burn screening camp at G.S. Memorial Hospital on behalf of WonderWork. Subodh had told us to prepare ourselves for what we were about to witness, but we were confident that after our years traveling the world visiting cleft hospitals, we’d seen it all and could handle anything. We were wrong.
That day, we entered the familiar iron gates of G.S. Memorial to be confronted by close to 600 severely burned children. Each child had come with a parent, a sibling, a grandparent, and more than a thousand people in all, crowded into the hospital courtyard. When people saw Subodh in his white coat, they surged toward us, a great mass of burn victims, the skin on their faces and bodies blistered, scarred, raw.
We saw men, women, and children, all of them with injuries. When the burns were new, the flesh was bloody and exposed. When it had had time to heal, the scars that remained created harrowing disfigurements, skin that was rippled and fused, as if the flesh had literally melted and reformed, like lava cooling after an eruption. Parents were holding up their children, reaching out to us, pleading. A father held up a baby whose face had been burned away, with only exposed flesh remaining.
I glanced over at DeLois. Though she looked ashen, she was bravely smiling as always. I resolved to do the same, feeling fortunate to have my camera with me, so I could use it to shield my face whenever I couldn’t manage to fix a grin.
In the thick of the crowd, Subodh remained impressively calm. There were so many people clamoring to speak to him, yet the doctor wasn’t flustered and he didn’t rush. He stopped to talk gently to each family, putting a hand on a shoulder or arm, reassuring them, in his thoughtful and steady way, that he could help.
Subodh explained to us that these patients had come from some of the most remote and rural villages in India. “These families are so poor that when they arrive here, we have to show them everything, even how to use the latrines,” he explained. “They live in villages without electricity, without running water. When I bring them into my office for a consultation, I have to indicate that they should sit down in the chair— and not on the ground. They’re not even accustomed to furniture. Caring for these patients begins at the moment they arrive and continues for twenty-four hours a day until they leave.”
Whereas every cleft or clubfoot patient gets his or her deformity the same way—they are born with it -—every burn patient has a different story to tell. That day we heard about flame burns, scald burns, acid burns, and burns caused by high-voltage wires.
We met a ten-year-old boy whose mother had been going in to say goodnight to him when she accidentally tipped over a kerosene lamp. The kerosene engulfed their small hut in flames, and the boy’s parents both died, as did his sister. Incredibly, the boy had survived, but his disfigurements were severe, extending across his face, neck, and torso. His chin was fused to his chest, which had the effect of pulling down the skin on his face to the degree that it had almost completely closed his right eye. The accident had happened when he was three years old—this child had been suffering like this for seven years.
We met two sisters who had been sleeping on the same small cot when their hut caught on fire. They both had extensive scars, and one of the sister’s arms had become fused to the side of her body. Their father, who had brought them to the hospital, told us, “No one will marry them in this condition. Please, please help.”
We met a fifteen-year-old boy who had worked on a farm carrying tanks of kerosene all day. The tanks were leaky, so by the end of the day, his clothes were drenched with kerosene. His friend thought it would be a good joke to light a match and toss it at him.
“He needs many, many surgeries,” Subodh told us. “A lot of help.”
We met an older man who had been moving a tank of gas down from the shelf when it crashed on top of him and lit him on fire. His eyelids had burned off. This man hadn’t closed his eyes in five years.
We met a twenty-year-old who had been working at a factory when there was an explosion. His face, chest, and arms were severely burned. It was a miracle he survived the explosion. His employer gave his wife $100 and wished them luck.
We met a baby who had been left alone at home because both parents need to work in the fields, and he crawled right into a cooking fire. His parents told us that they rushed him to a hospital right after the accident, but because they had no money, the hospital turned them away. They wept while they told us this story.
We met all these people, wading through the massive crowd. In each case, Subodh stopped, listened, comforted, and assured.
“I can give her new eyebrows,” he told one mother.
“I can fix his hands and heal this scar,” he told another.
“I can separate his fingers and release the fused skin,” he said. “I can heal this scar. Please don’t worry. Everything is going to be okay. ”
Not for the first time, I thought: Subodh isn’t just a surgeon; he’s a magician.
We trailed the doctor through the crowd for the next two hours, talking to patients, and learning about their stories. By the end of the morning, DeLois and I were completely exhausted, both emotionally and physically—but Subodh seemed almost energized by the experience. For him, being here in this crowd, with these people, was his calling.
“You know, in my work, I do not earn a lot of money, but I earn a lot of love,” Subodh told me that day. “When you care for your patients, when you are concerned for them, that care and concern come back to you. The love you receive is a different kind of currency—it has a special value, more valuable than money. That is what I believe.”
During that visit, we learned that Subodh’s major challenge in treating burns was one of capacity. The more people learned about the availability of free surgeries for burn victims, the more people came, but with only 80 beds at G.S. Memorial, there was nowhere near enough space to treat everyone. Burn surgery can be especially labor-intensive for hospitals. Although individual surgeries cost as little as $300, patients may require multiple operations over a period of months. Often, burn victims arrive in a critical condition so need to be closely monitored over several weeks. In order to address such an overwhelming need, it was clear Subodh needed more space. We were helping him build a $7 million burn hospital with 225 beds in the poorest area of India, when WonderWork was forced into bankruptcy and out of business. That was the end of that hospital.
