Now he is on the road to a full recovery and planning a family trip overseas.
“It was quite emotional really,” said Kevin Burney of the day he was able to return home.
“I didn’t think I was ever going to; it didn’t look like the mending process was moving fast.”
The 60-year-old suffered burns to 70 per cent of his body, when a metal drum he was using a grinder on in his Darfield driveway exploded in flames on April 2. He was rushed to Christchurch in a critical condition, and airlifted to Middlemore Hospital in Auckland.
The first four weeks were in intensive care, where doctors said they had not seen burns as severe since those they treated from the deadly White Island eruption. They did not know whether Kevin would survive as he battled for his life. One of his lungs collapsed, he suffered an infection, his heart stopped during surgery.
Kevin’s family were overjoyed when he made enough progress to be taken out of intensive care, moving to the hospital’s specialist burns unit on April 30.
Once in the burns unit, where he spent eight weeks, he began to focus on taking one day at a time.
“I didn’t think I was going to die, the nurses and doctors were very encouraging and very supportive. But you didn’t want to think too far ahead, because I knew I was going to be there for four months or something, you don’t want to pin your hopes.”
Sometimes those hopes would get dashed – it could feel like one step forward and two steps back. Skin graft surgeries would get postponed as doctors deemed he wasn’t quite ready, or other patients took priority.
Kevin is not sure exactly how many skin graft surgeries he had, he just knows it’s more than five. The surgeries were nine-hour marathons involving three surgeons, where skin was taken from unburned areas of his tummy and buttocks, to be grafted onto the burned areas of his torso, arms, hands, and the front and back of his thighs.
One time one of the hospital staff “casually” asked if he had a history of any heart trouble, which he hadn’t, and told him his heart had stopped during surgery. They added reassuringly: “Don’t worry about it though, we have everyone there to help.”
It was always tuned into the Magic station, playing classic hits of decades gone by, some of which would motivate him to move his hands and “boogie” along to.
“Night times were so long, because you had been napping all day, you would find yourself at one, two, three o’clock in the morning just watching the clock.”
One of his first goals had been to talk again, especially to wife Amanda, who was by his side each day. A breathing tube initially made speech impossible, and when this was removed, at first he could only talk in a whisper.
“I was really desperate to tell her I love her, because she was telling me she loved me the whole way through.”
Amanda remembers the moment this was finally achieved.
“He did manage to say it, I couldn’t understand him. I thought about it – ‘Did you say you love me very much?’ He nodded his head,” Amanda said.
“All of a sudden, at that point, I felt free. I could get up and go to the toilet, and move around,” Kevin said.
On June 28, he was transferred back to Christchurch, and was able to finally return home mid-July.
Today he remembers little of the accident itself. In trying to mark the drum into three sections for garden plant frames, he accidentally cut through it. The drum had been used to store a cleaning chemical called isopropyl at his workplace, and it appears sparks from the grinder ignited fumes.
“I don’t remember a lot about the day, just the drum going ‘boom,’ seeing a flash of light.”
He also recalls trying to get his shorts and T-shirt off as they melted and stuck to his skin.
All the drama that followed – of Amanda, son Marcus and neighbours rushing to the scene, using a garden hose to cool his burns as he stood dazed and naked on the decking along side the driveway, talking to his rescuers – are blissfully absent from his memory.
He said he does not recall feeling any pain, something common with victims of deep burns as nerve endings are destroyed.
He said he felt “pretty stupid” about the accident itself, believing in retrospect that he should have known better than to use a grinder on the drum, while its lid was on.
Today Kevin wears a compression suit and compression gloves, as his burns and skin grafts continue to heal. A physiotherapist visits three times a week, focusing on getting movement back, a district nurse visits twice a week to reapply dressings, while Kevin visits hospital specialists once a week.
Kevin and Amanda are planning to fly to Perth in November, with Marcus and daughter Ange, to see their other son Eden and meet their two grandchildren.
Kevin said while he had been excited about the trip when it was booked, which happened to be the night before the accident, he had since given up hope of going. But now that excitement had returned, as doctors expected his skin would be undergoing significant healing in the next three months.
Kevin is also looking forward to be getting back to his passion of jogging by Christmas, even if it is just around the block, back to his job as a printer next year, and ultimately making a full recovery.
