‘I had 51% burns on my body. They had to hoover my skin’

I remember someone saying, “what do we do?” and I said “roll”. After that I remember the girls ringing my husband Mike, the emergency services coming, being put into the helicopter and later on having my wedding rings cut off. Then I went into the induced coma.

Earlier that day I had been at my sister’s house for a barbecue. I went to light a tiny container, the size of an ashtray. The sun was shining so I didn’t see or feel any heat coming off it to tell that it had been lit, so when I put the methylated spirits on, it just flared up straight away.

That was May 30th, 2014. I woke up in the Burns Unit in St James’s Hospital six weeks later with 51 per cent burns, all down the front of my body to my knees. My face, my neck, my hands and my arms were burnt and I lost my hair.

Almost 99.9 per cent of the skin grafting was done while I was asleep so I didn’t really experience any pain. My lower legs and back weren’t burnt so a lot of the skin grafts came from there, and some artificial skin was used on my face.

Hoover

When I came home from James’s in October, I still had to go back every Thursday for a few months. They have a fantastic machine there which works a bit like a hoover, pulsing and sucking the skin; drawing blood into it and helping with the scarring.

I still have a little bit more surgery to be done in my neck. They took skin from my back to my neck and once that settles, Dr Shelly, an outstanding surgeon, will start thinning it down and contouring it.

Because I had been immobile for so long, when I came out of the coma, everything had seized up. I don’t know when exactly it was that I started walking, but the first day I tried I had two nurses, a care assistant and the physio with me.

I felt like I hadn’t a leg to stand on and I was very afraid I was going to fall.

There was a long corridor in James’s and the nurse said to me, “you’ll walk this before you go home”. I never thought I’d see the day. But bit by bit, you build it up, maybe from the bed to chair, to the door and back, later on half the corridor and finally the whole hallway.

I had a tube going into my trachea, and while I didn't miss food so much, I missed drinks too, and it was a hot summer. I remember watching Home and Away one day and a character took an orange juice out of the fridge and I was looking at it and thinking, "what I wouldn't give to be able to drink that".

It was constant rehab in the hospital. The speech and language therapist worked on opening my mouth, making sounds, swallowing and trying to build up those muscles that had been idle over the six weeks. The occupational therapist worked mainly on my fingers and arms, while the physio worked on my legs. You had the nurses working with you all the time as well, so it was quite tiring.

Home help

I spent 133 days in total at St James’s. The care was brilliant but I couldn’t wait to get home. The team even came down to

Limerick

and went through everything with the home help and physios here. I was still very weak when I got back and I needed help getting out of bed and getting dressed. I had the home help for about a year, and gradually built up my strength.

Going back out in public was a gradual process too. I had gone out on a daytrip once in Dublin while I was still in hospital but I was wearing a mask to help with the scarring at that stage, and I felt more anonymous up there anyway.

Christmas Eve Mass was my first real outing at home. I did stop at the door before I walked in, but then I just got on with it, the crowd was so big anyway that night, you were almost lost in it. At the start I wouldn’t go out in public unless Mike or one of the children was with me, but I don’t have any problem going into town now for the shopping or anything like that.

Two years on, I still have the physio three times a week, mainly on my fingers as the bend didn’t come back, and it’s unlikely that it will, but it’s important to keep them supple. They might not look great but they are very functional and can do most things, though tying buttons can sometimes get the better of me.

But you couldn’t be sorry about that. When we started, I was in bed and could hardly move, everything was 18 months to two years away: scars softening, getting back to walking and to living life. You think you’ll never get there.

Life now is pretty much back to the way it was before this happened. I’m back driving and doing bits around the house and hopefully by the end of this year I’ll be back to work as a community health manager on a part-time basis. We also started fundraising for the Burns Unit at the hospital and that just took on a life of its own in the community. The accident was a terrible thing, but from the moment it happened, the help and support from everybody has been huge, and there have been nothing but positives from it.

In conversation with Nora-Ide McAuliffe