Healing The Scars
By: Colleen Kastl
Page 2
"Only one was staring," she said. "But she was old enough to know better.
BSTTWTranslations
Kastl tried to ignore it. However, when she walked past the group to dry her hands, the girl turned and continued to gawk. Kastl left and went to her car, but got to thinking about how she had a niece about the same age as that girl, and how she wouldn't want her doing that to someone. So she went back in and confronted the girl.
"I said, "You know, you're old enough to know better. You could have asked what happened to me, and I would have been glad to talk about it. But I'm not giving you that benefit now," she recalled. Dale Blum, M.D., medical director of emergency services for Munson Healthcare, said that most burns hospitals see aren't as serious as Kastl's.
"Every now and then you get a burn from a major event like a house fire or something exploding." said Blum.
Since Traverse City doesn’t have a burn center, such acute cases are often airlifted to Grand Rapids or Ann Arbor. Here, time is of the essence, he said, since burn patients have a tendency to go into shock and develop infections and breathing problems.
More commonly, burn cases involve incidents like a child being scalded by a bathtub faucet or pan of hot liquid on a stove. "That's probably the biggest thing," said Blum, either hot water or someone sets a cup of hot coffee down and the youngster will pull it down on them." Those scenarios are all too familiar to Dennis Partidge. The 28-year-old Saginaw man was burned by a bathtub faucet when he was just 10 months old. "I was being cared for by friend while my mother was in the hospital," he said. "I was in the bathtub when the doorbell rang and was left unattended while the door was answered. I tried to pull myself up with the hot water handle and the water came on."
More than 75 percent of his body was scalded. Partridge spent 38 days in the hospital and had five skin graft surgeries over the next five years, with skin being taken from his leg and placed on his right arm and face.
"I was told if my accident had occurred ten years earlier I would have died," he said. "The technology did not exist to save me then. Due to the grace of God, I have not. needed surgery since I was 5 -years old."
Then there is Andrea, who didn't want her full name used for this article. She was burned at age 6 while playing with matches.
"I was playing house with my sisters during the fall and we decided that we needed a real fire," she said. As Andrea bent to pick up some twigs the wind blew the flames the girls had ignited onto her skirt. "I panicked and just stood there crying and jumping up and down," she said. "Then I ran about 50 feet into the house. The flames were smothered by my uncle with a wet sheet and a rug."
Although Andrea's burns were severe, requiring numerous grafts and surgeries, Blum said that less severe burns will quite often heal on their own. "The biggest issue is preventing an infection and then also some of the resulting scarring," he said. "That's usually when the plastic surgeons gets involved."
Various plastic surgery procedures may improve the appearance or function of a Burn scar. But no scar can be removed completely.
"I have come to understand that I am who I am said Kastl. "lf people can’t understand that, then its' their problem, not mine."
Her experiences - and what she continues to endure - have taught Kastl another important lesson, "Be happy with the way you are," she said, "because it's what's on the inside that counts.
