By Kimberly Sherman

On the morning of June 5, 2009, as Kristy Torres kissed each of her eight children goodbye and headed into work, she couldn’t have fathomed the nightmare that would begin with a phone call later that day.

“I was at work when a 911 dispatcher called and asked if I had a 2 year old,” said Torres. “She told me Jadan had been badly burned and was going to be airlifted to Children’s Hospital.”

Torres recalled the immediate fog of heartache. “I dropped the phone; I had to get to where she was. I tripped while running to the car; I couldn’t remember where I had parked.” The dazed parent was thrown off balance by compounding emotions—she felt lost, confused, traumatized, and helpless. “As I was trying to find the car, a Visalia police officer stopped me and asked if I was Kristy. Thank God. He took me to (Jadan).”

Minutes earlier, Kristy’s daycare provider and her 13-year-old daughter had been watching Jadan and her 4-year-old sister in the bathroom of the in-home day care. A bath was being drawn for the girls when circumstances beckoned everyone out of the bathroom. All except for Jadan, who, moments later, began screaming from inside the bathtub.

“They heard her cry, ran in the bathroom, got her out of the water, and wrapped her in a sheet,” said Torres. “They applied a burn cream but her skin kept coming off. They told the kids to call 911 and took her out to the front lawn.”

Help was poised mere seconds down the street. Jeff Macumber was the lead paramedic on Truck 51 from Station 51 and the first on the scene.

“My first thought was that it was all third degree burns because her skin was sloughing off,” said Macumber. “She was literally dumped into my arms. I looked at her for a second and thought, ‘What happened?’”

Jadan was having seizures, but aside from tending to the uncontrollably seizing toddler, Macumber’s duty was to control the chaos, a typical task for first responders. His request? Sheets.

“When you show up to mass hysteria, there’s no control of family, parents, kids, or bystanders. Taking care of the child is not the only thing we have to do. We have to send people on tasks so that they don’t become a patient as well. I told them all to get clean sheets so my full focus was on the child, providing the best care I could,” he said.

Truck 51’s crew continued to dress the child to prevent infection from settling, as Michelle Donnelly, paramedic for American Ambulance, showed up to the scene and administered two doses of medication to stop young Jadan from seizing.

Quickly ushered into the ambulance, Jadan and the crew headed to the airport with plans to be airlifted to Fresno’s burn unit at Regional Medical Center. Donnelly recalls that Jadan vomited along the way. Then, as the crew reached the airport exit, Jadan went into cardiac arrest and stopped breathing. Airlifting was suddenly scratched out as an immediate option.

Three long minutes passed. Jadan had no pulse. No oxygen. No breath. The crew continued their tireless efforts, re-established her pulse and stabilized the young girl just as the ambulance pulled into Kaweah Delta Hospital.

“When I got to Kaweah Delta, I saw fourteen or fifteen people in the room working on her,” Torres said. “I could only see from her knees down. She was lobster red. I just thought, ‘My God.’”

Within minutes, Jadan was rushed to Fresno, where she underwent two surgeries. Grafts from her back and the bottom of her torso were used as new skin for her legs and to reconstruct the bottom of her feet and her toes. In total, over 40% of Jadan’s body was burned, including her arms, lower back, bottom, legs, feet, and hands.

Cascade of Complications

The consequences of severe burns tumble into other complications, and Jadan’s case was no different. The shock of the burns caused the young toddler to have seizures and vomit, and a chunk of hamburger consumed earlier that day found its way into Jadan’s left lung, which collapsed.

“I was scared because I didn’t know anything at this point other than she had stopped breathing and she was really burned,” recalled Torres. “The reality hit me when the doctor came in. He said the worst case was that she could die. At that point, I lost it.”

Torres lived with her daughter in the hospital for two full weeks, never straying from Jadan, who remained on an oxygen machine and underwent six blood transfusions. “My biggest fear was that she would wake up and not know who I was. She’d get upset when she was intubated. She’d cry and squirm her head, and I didn’t know why. One thing that freaked me out, aside from scarring, was wondering if she would suffer any brain damage.”

“What can you do when you can’t do anything at all?” she lamented.

The third and final week of Jadan’s hospital stay, Kristy commuted from Visalia to Children’s Hospital in Madera every night, trekking home daily to spend time with each of her seven other children, the youngest of whom was four months old at the time of the incident.

Amazingly, the ramifications from the horrific incident were few. Having suffered no brain damage despite being deprived of oxygen for three minutes, Jadan’s new wardrobe for the next eighteen months is a pressure suit. Torres explained, “When the skin grows back it gets thick, so the pressure suit keeps the skin that grows back normal. I take her into the burn unit every two to three weeks to be refit for pressure suit; it also helps keep her skin from outgrowing her normal skin.”

While first responders never expect their victims to return, having the closure of seeing a former patient return unscathed is always appreciated, said both Macumber and Donnelly. Torres offered all the first responders involved that much-needed sense of closure from a day that neither paramedic will ever forget.

Said Macumber, “I tried to visit her in the hospital but, because I wasn’t family, they wouldn’t let me in. Seeing her again was indescribable. She went from being dead to walking on her own.”

“These instances that we can make a difference are so few and far between. I was blessed to have been on this call,” said Donnelly. “She came to the fire station, and I couldn’t stop staring at her. She’s amazing. She’s perfect.”

Bathtub Safety Sidebar

USA.safekids.org provides these staggering statistics and suggestions for helping prevent water-related scalding:

• Approximately 116,600 children are treated for fire/burn injuries annually.

• Scald burns—involving hot liquid or steam—make up 65% of the burn-related injuries in children under 4 who are treated in the hospital.
• Hot tap water scald burns cause a larger number of deaths and hospitalizations than other types of hot liquid burns. They cause almost one in four of all child scald burns.
• Tap water burns most often occur in the bathroom and tend to be more severe and cover a larger portion of the body than other scald burns.
• Children under 4 and disabled children pose the greatest risk of burn-related death and injury.
• Hot tap water scalds can be prevented by lowering the setting on water heater thermostats to 120 degrees Fahrenheit or below and by installing anti-scald devices in water faucets and shower heads.
• In order to reduce the number of hot tap water scald burns, building codes have been implemented in several areas, which require that new construction projects install anti-scald plumbing. The laws have proved effective in lowering the death rate among children.

No comments