In the Face of Fire (Your Health Magazine)

Spencer Beach's life was changed in the blink of an eye when the house he was working in turned into a cauldron – with him sealed inside.

Spencer Beach didn't want to go to work on April 24, 2003. A floor layer, he was to spend the day using a chemical to remove linoleum from the floor of a new house in a new subdivision in south Edmonton. He didn't feel comfortable with the process but he was third in command for the company and he didn't want to let anyone down.

By 4 p.m. Beach was nearly finished with the job. Another tradesman, who had been working on a different part of the house, left for the day. When the door closed behind him, Beach heard a whistle and a bang. Then the house went up in flames.

Much later Beach would be told the temperature had peaked at 1,500°C, 800 degrees higher than an average house fire. At the time all he knew was that the front door handle was so hot he had to force himself to hold it. But the door wouldn't open. He went to the laundry room in the back of the house, but the door there, which opened to the garage, was also sealed shut. "I could hear my hair burning, and feel my hair burning, and smell my hair burning," he recalls on a late winter afternoon, sitting in a coffee shop not far from his West Edmonton home.

An Edmonton Eskimos baseball cap covers what's left of his hair. His eyes are red-rimmed and watery, his face mottled with scars common to those who have suffered serious burns and the countless skin graft surgeries that follow. So much of the skin around Beach's nose was burned that his nostrils look unusually large.

And yet there is a marked lack of self-consciousness in the way he carries himself. When he says he doesn't notice or care if people are staring at him, it's clear he's being sincere, not wishful. His goal in telling his story is to inform, not to invite pity.

Beach remembers trying to open both doors one more time before accepting that he was trapped in the house. "By now my clothes were burning and melting to my body, and I could feel my skin melting and tightening," he says. "I gave up. I fell to my knees and interlocked my fingers over the back of my head and tucked my face as close to the floor as possible and gave up."

Beach felt the sort of calm he imagines is typical of people who know that death is imminent. "Time slowed down," he says. "Everything became peaceful. I think the fear was gone."

He thought of his wife, who was four months pregnant. He thought of his unborn child. A spiritual man even before the fire, he says what happened in the next few seconds convinced him he wasn't alone. "I got the courage to get up and get to my feet and try that garage door one more time. I pulled as hard as I could. I had help. I gave it all I had and it opened."

Beach jumped five feet into the garage, landing on a pile of construction garbage. Atop the pile was the chemical-covered linoleum he had spent the day removing. Already on fire, his body now started a new blaze in the garage. He fled, running two-thirds of the way down the unpaved driveway before collapsing on his back in the dirt in front of a small crowd of tradesmen and neighbours who had gathered at the sound of the explosion. The man who had just moved in next door tossed a jug of water on Beach, then ran home for a hose.

Beach was bald, naked, and burning. His lips felt swollen, as if bees had stung them thousands of times, but he couldn't stop screaming that his life was over. As another neighbour, an off-duty nurse, settled him down, he asked, frantically, whether he still had his ears, his nose, his penis. She assured him that he did. "I could have looked myself but I was too scared," he says.

An ambulance rushed Beach to Capital Health's University of Alberta Hospital, which has an extensive burn unit. Dr. Edward Tredget, a plastic surgeon in the unit, had been notified and was waiting.

"Initially I was asked to see Spencer because people thought he should be allowed to die because his injury was so big it was thought to be impossible to salvage," says Dr. Tredget, who has seen few cases as extensive and difficult as Beach's. Dr. Sarvesh Logsetty, a general surgeon in the unit, was also involved in Beach's care.

Burn patients require skin grafts from their own bodies. The smaller the burn surface, the greater the area from which skin grafts can be taken. The typical stay for a burn patient is one day for every per cent of total body surface burn. As a burn gets up over 70% to 80%, the length of stay increases because the donor site is that much smaller and takes longer to heal before more grafts can be taken.

But the ability to save a patient isn't the only criteria the Burn Unit staff consider. "It's a balance," Dr. Tredget says. "It's not about whether you survive or not, it's about whether the quality of your life is going to be reasonable if you do survive."

Beach suffered third- and fourth-degree burns over 90% of his body. The only skin that survived was what had been protected by his leather kneepads, leather belt, leather work pouch, and leather shoes.

The fire destroyed his nipples, nearly all the hair on his head, several fingers on each hand, his fingernails, oil glands, body hair, facial hair, and most of his eyebrows and eyelashes. The intense heat scarred his lungs, an injury that took months to heal. The left side of his diaphragm is paralyzed. He can't completely close his left eye, his eyes water constantly, and he's so sensitive to sunlight he can't go outside without sunglasses, even when it's cloudy.

Nerves return slowly to grafted skin. As a result, Beach's sense of heat and cold is greatly diminished. Because he lost his sweat glands, he has trouble cooling down in warm weather. His feet are partially paralyzed and always swollen. His hands are so disfigured he can no longer make fists.

He still has another 10 to 15 surgeries, including operations to restore his nose. As for his ears, he may be a candidate for prosthetics. There was no way Dr. Tredget could know all that when he first encountered Beach at the hospital. But he did his best to convey what it would take to recover, along with giving Beach and his wife the option for compassionate care – to let the 28-year-old floor layer die.

Beach's response: "I don't care. Do whatever it takes."

Beach credits his wife with giving him the strength to survive. So does Dr. Tredget, who calls her "the hero in the story." She came into the room where her husband lay on a stretcher and asked the medical staff if she could touch him. Beach was terrified.

"I thought her touch would peel away my skin like the burnt skin of a roasted marshmallow," he says. "The doctors said she could touch me. I know now she did it to tell me everything would be OK. She was very brave and strong.

She came out of that emergency room and told everybody I'd be OK. She knows I'm a fighter."

The fight was more difficult than he could have imagined. For six weeks, he remained in a medically induced coma. In his nightmares, he was helpless, alone, and scared. In one recurrent nightmare, he was fitted for clothes and after the material had been draped over his body, the tailors would stick pins through the fabric and into him. He figures those dreams were his way of processing one of the early, painful procedures, when the doctors removed up to threequarters of an inch of dead skin from nearly every part of his body. In its place, they pinned on cadaver skin.

Lying on his back for nine months, having his skin removed, being fed a 4,500-calorie-aday diet, the six-foot-three Beach wasted from 175 to 112 pounds. He couldn't roll over, sit, or walk. He couldn't lift his arms, bend his knees or wiggle his toes. The only function he had was in his neck. Surgical steel pins were inserted in his fingers to prevent his hands from curling into claws. His eyes were scarred open. He couldn't blink. Plastic wrap was placed over his eyes to create some moisture.

Beach became the first patient in Canada to use skin that is engineered in a lab. Dr. Tredget took biopsies of the small areas that weren't burned and sent them to a lab in Cincinnati, which grew them into three-inch disks of tissue. Throughout the summer, Beach underwent surgeries to graft on the new skin.

The desire to live that had sustained him the day of the accident was replaced by despair, barely numbed by the drugs coursing through his body, among them methadone, Tylenol 3, Atavan, and morphine.

"I was depressed, very angry and suicidal," he recalls. But because he was immobilized, all he could do was entertain himself with thoughts of how, if he could move, he would take his own life.

His attitude changed on Sept. 28, the day his daughter was born. On Sept. 29, his wife brought the baby to the hospital, wrapped her in a sterile pillowcase and placed her in the crook of Beach's arm.

"I realized that here was this healthy baby with all her hair and her nose and her ears and her fingers and toes," he recalls. "Everything I lost she had. That day my daughter and I made a trade. With the help of my wife, we gave her life, but my wife and daughter together gave me hope, which gave me my life back."

Beach weaned himself off the antidepressants he'd been taking. On Boxing Day the hospital allowed him to go home for an afternoon. It took an ambulance, two paramedics, and two burn nurses and he was confined to a stretcher, but it was worth it.

Less than three weeks later, he left the U of A burn unit for the Glenrose Rehabilitation Hospital for therapy to regain his strength and learn to walk again, an experience that brought him far more pain than he'd expected.

"Everything hurt," he says. "Standing was sheer torture." Walking was nearly unbearable. The bottoms of Beach's feet were hypersensitive after being used as skin graft donor sites multiple times. The slightest touch sent rippling pain through his body, but he had to be touched, because every joint had to be stretched to get it moving properly, to literally rip through the scar tissue that had built up in the months following the accident.

The medical professionals who had worked with Beach told him he'd experience chronic pain for the rest of his life and that he'd never work again. By the time he was released from the Glenrose on June 24, 14 months after the accident, he was ready and eager to defy them. Beach was 29, too young, he believed, to give up on himself. He'd survived a near-fatal fire for a reason – to help prevent others from making similar mistakes.

He began carving out a career as a public speaker. He joined Toastmaster's, a speaking club, to help hone his skills. A year later he was elected vice-president in charge of education for his local club. He also became certified as a construction safety officer. In April he enrolled in the Occupational Health and Safety course at the University of Alberta.

Today he gives motivational and safety awareness presentations to a variety of groups. He tailors his speeches depending on his audience. To oilfield or construction workers, he'll talk about the importance of developing workplace safety plans. To health care professionals he'll speak about motivating long-term care patients and living with disabilities. To schoolchildren he'll speak about fire safety. He also visits burn unit patients, to let them see that while life changes after a horrific accident, it doesn't have to end.

When he thinks back to the day of the accident, he has no bitterness. "As far as I'm concerned, everyone made mistakes that day, myself included," he says.

Beach has since learned that the chemical he was using the day of the accident is nearly as volatile as gasoline. As he worked, it evaporated, filling the air with explosive vapours. When the furnace turned on automatically, the vapours were sucked down the cold air return and ignited.

Had he been more familiar with his rights as an employee and less concerned with "chasing the almighty dollar" and setting an example for the workers he supervised, Beach says, he would have refused to do the task that day.

"I know so much more," he says. "I'm a completely different person. I'm no longer invincible. I'm smart."

What inspired Beach through the painful months in the hospital were his family and his church. Upon his release, his desire to set a good example for his daughter gave him the courage to venture out in public alone and face the inevitable stares. "I came to understand that if I lived my life as a victim, my daughter would live the same life," he says.

Despite all he lost in the fire, Beach is more concerned with what he gained and what he has to offer. "I have the ability to change lives, to save lives, to prevent injuries, to make people aware, to open eyes, to spread inspiration and encouragement, to make people listen and stop someone else from doing this," he says. "It's a blessing to get out there and tell my story."

- Debby Waldman

Your Health Magazine - May/June 2006 Issue

Copyright & Disclaimer
Reviewed by Alberta clinical experts. Brought to you by HealthLink Alberta. Copyright.
This material is designed for information purposes only. It should not be used in place of medical advice, instruction and/or treatment. For more health advice call Capital Health Link at 780-408-LINK (5465) 24 hours a day, seven days a week. In Alberta, call Toll-free: 1-866-408-LINK (5465)