Photographer Bill Serne says Tampa General's burn unit saved his life. After 30 years, he returns and learns that his suffering changed the lives of others.
By LANE DeGREGORY
Published May 16, 2004
[Times photo: Bill Serne]
Ilia Perdomo gently holds a patient’s hand at Tampa General’s burn center. More photos
TAMPA - It's harder than he thought, coming back.
Bill told himself he could be a professional, focus on the job. But when he looks through the lens he sees the past.
Sitting in the hospital lobby, looking at those double doors, reliving the pain, Bill realizes: He can't be just a photographer here. This place is part of him, like the raised T-shirt outline branded on his skin.
* * *
In May 1974, Bill Serne was 23. Brown bangs framed his cocky, lopsided smile. He had just won his first national award as a photographer, for the Tampa Tribune. He had just moved in with his girlfriend, a senior at the University of South Florida.
Bill and Debbie were renting a new apartment in Tampa, off Hanley Road. They had picked it because of the pool, which snaked through the complex like a river.
On the evening of May 10, Bill and Debbie planned to grill hamburgers with their neighbors and go swimming. They met the other couple in the courtyard. On the way to the pool, they all stopped to check out the new workout room.
Bill doesn't remember who flipped the switch on the exercise machine.
He can still feel the flash, the boom, chunks of ceiling and walls shearing off, pummelling his face, arms and back. A spark from the switch had ignited a propane leak. He can still see the heat. Shimmering flames, lapping at their skin. He can still taste the gas.
Instinctively, they went for the water.
The paramedics arrived to find four charred figures clinging to the side of the pool. Bill, Debbie and their friends were treated first at St. Joseph's Hospital, but the doctors couldn't do much for them.
The next day, they sent them to Tampa General.
* * *
Every morning, when Bill soaps his scarred shins in the shower; every afternoon, when the sun sears his hairless arms; every evening, when his fingers ache and his eyelids burn; every time someone stares at his shiny hands, he remembers that night: the lights, the screams, the whispers, the smells.
Bill, 53, is now a photographer for the St. Petersburg Times. He hasphotographed Super Bowls and presidents, music teachers and teenage drag racers. He vacations in the Keys. He drinks wine and goes to George Thorogood concerts. He flies planes, scuba dives and fishes with his friends.
But when he goes outside, he has to smear on SPF 45 sunblock and wear long pants. Around his neck, on a silver chain, he keeps a small medal of St. Jude: the patron saint of hopeless causes.
Bill doesn't complain about the pain. He tries to hide his scars. He seldom talks about what happened; some of his newsroom friends are hearing his story here for the first time. For years, he avoided Tampa General.
This year, as the anniversary of the accident approached, Bill started thinking maybe he should go back.
His story needed an ending.
"That place gave me another life," he says. "I've been feeling, lately, like maybe I need to give back."
So on a drizzly spring morning, 30 years after the explosion, Bill has returned to Tampa General, a faded copy of his medical records tucked into his camera bag. He wants the doctors to know he's an alumnus.
He's going to repay this place the only way he knows how: with his pictures.
The story of Bill and the burn unit are so intertwined, they have to be told together.
* * *
White tubes of light streamed along the ceiling of the hospital lobby. Bright lamps shone from every wall. Flat on his back on a stretcher, Bill was rolled into Tampa General the morning of May 11, 1974.
The paramedic parked him beside another patient: his neighbor John. The two men lay there, swathed in sheets, blinking in the glare. The hospital was crowded. All four beds for burn victims were already full. Bill, sedated but still conscious, remembers waiting and waiting for nurses to find them rooms.
Then he saw his dad, who had just flown in from Cleveland. He hadn't seen Bill yet.
Bill watched his dad walk through the double doors and across the lobby. He watched him stop beside the other stretcher. For the first time in his life, he heard his dad cry. Then he saw his dad bend over John and whisper: "Oh, Bill!"
He couldn't tell which blistered face was his son's.
* * *
Now, as Bill sits in a leather chair in the lobby, waiting for a hospital PR staffer to take him to the burn unit, the memory of that day overwhelms him.
He springs from the chair, races to the men's room, his camera bag bouncing against his jeans. He bows his head so the security guard won't see his wet face.
* * *
For most of that May and June, Bill writhed in his hospital bed. Nurses had to tie his arms to the rails so he wouldn't tear off the dressings. They had to roll him from side to side and back to front to prevent bedsores.
A couple of times a week, they wheeled him to the debridement room and dunked him into a stainless-steel tank. They raked his raw flesh with wire brushes, scaling away the dead skin. Then they soaked him again, until more skin sheared off in long strips, like linguine.
Bill can still feel the nurses slathering cool, sticky cream across his back afterward. He remembers thick gauze being wound round and round his arms. Those padded blue sheets crinkling beneath his shoulders. The touch of gloved hands against the soles of his bare feet. A masked nurse squeezing his hand, whispering that everything was going to be all right.
He had been burned over 60 percent of his body. His hair was torched away. Yellow-white blisters pocked his face, arms and legs. He couldn't walk or stand. He could barely sit. He didn't have enough healthy skin to use for grafts, so doctors had to blanket his hands with pieces of pig skin.
For weeks, Bill needed a feeding tube. Later, his dad helped him sip protein shakes through straws.
Bill learned to steel his mind against his body. He learned the rhythms of the hospital, subtle shifts from day to night. The methodical doctors rotating rounds. The patient nurses swabbing his cracked lips with cool sponges.
In the dark, he listened to monitors beeping, ventilators gurgling, machines tracking the thin threads of life. He heard other patients pleading, praying, screaming. In the next room, he listened to his girlfriend's labored breaths.
The night Debbie Shea died, Bill heard the code called over the intercom.
He was still in the hospital when her parents buried her.
Her mom came to visit Bill and hung a silver St. Jude medal over the bars of his bed.
* * *
The Tampa Bay Regional Burn Center is on the sixth floor now, at the end of a long hall. Bill watches a nurse punch a code into the electronic pad beside the thick doors. He shoulders his camera bag and follows her down the dim corridor.
The smell hits him just outside Intensive Care.
Thick, rich and too sweet, like minty sour cream. "Silvadene," Bill says, scrunching his nose. Antiseptic salve, the color and consistency of Crisco. Twice a day, nurses spread it over oozing burns. Bill can't believe they still use the stuff.
When he was a patient here, Tampa General had room for four burn victims in a corner of the west wing. Now Bill passes six beds in the burn unit's intensive care, then five more recovery rooms. He walks past an operating theater, offices and meeting areas, a gym and recreation room. Next to the nurses' station is a more modern version of the debridement tank.
Patients are no longer dunked. Now shower heads spray water to peel away skin.
"We're a staff of 35 nurses, plus surgeons, psychiatrists, dietitians and therapists. We take care of about 360 burn patients every year," nurse Nelly Schleich says. The ward serves people from 20 Florida counties and some from the Caribbean and South America. Last year, it became the state's only verified burn center, one of 41 in the country. "Which means we give the highest level of service," Schleich says.
The unit treats teenagers who tumble into bonfires and old women whose cooking oil flares in their faces. Little boys after boiling soup is spilled down their backs. Race-car drivers whose engines explode. Welders and electricians and firefighters.
Some only stay a few days. Some remain for weeks or months. Many have to come back years later for reconstructive surgery. Psychologists assigned to the burn unit help patients deal with emotional scars. Ministers help with spiritual healing. Therapists teach patients to feed themselves, brush their teeth, hold a pencil again.
"When I was here, there was nothing like this," Bill tells Schleich. "They didn't even have enough room for us. They had to put all this special plastic over the vents and stuff to try to regulate the temperature. When did you all move up here?"
The unit was already here when Schleich arrived nine years ago. But there's an older nurse who has been here forever, she tells Bill.
"I'll go find her," Schleich says. "Maybe she'll remember."
* * *
When Bill was stuck in the west wing, most of the nurses treated him tenderly. They gave him extra pain medicine and sat by his bed in the dark.
They reassured him with their eyes; soft looks above fabric masks. When they spoke, they whispered.
All except one.
One short, square woman always thundered into the room, rousing even the most sedated patients, demanding they react, interact, try to sit up. She made them feed themselves and rotate their stiff ankles. She made people work through their pain.
Bill never knew her real name. Like the rest of the patients, he called her Sarge.
* * *
Every Monday about 10 a.m., Dr. C. Wayne Cruse and his staff suit up for their morning rounds. They pull paper booties over their shoes, tie on blue plastic gowns, spread cloth masks across their mouths and noses, don rubber globes and paper bonnets.
Cruse, a plastic surgeon, oversees the burn unit. He and his team of a dozen specialists care for some of the sickest patients in Tampa General. Because burn victims stay in the hospital longer than other patients, the team gets to know them well.
Bill, his camera bag bulging beneath his scrubs, follows Cruse and his team into Intensive Care, where all the beds are full. A husband and wife occupy side-by-side rooms. The propane tank in their RV blew up, someone whispers. The husband is on life support, his gauzed body too sore to bear the weight of sheets. Cruse had to shave the wife's scalp for a skin graft. Like Bill and Debbie, the couple can hear each other's cries from opposite sides of the wall. But they can't communicate. Neither knows how bad off the other one is.
Bill listens to the monitors: short, steady beats.
In another room, a sparkling waterfall cascades across the television screen: The soothing sounds of hospital Channel 34. But the old man in the bed is moaning so loudly he's drowning out the tinkling stream.
The man's chest is a patchwork quilt of cadaver skin: brown, pink and gray. A trash fire got away from him, a nurse says.
Cadaver skin, like pig skin, lasts only a couple of weeks. Eventually, the patient has to grow his own.
Doctors use patients' healthy skin for grafts. They use a tool like a cheese slicer to carve wide swaths from inside the thigh, under the arm, even across the skull. A special machine stretches the flap of skin and pokes holes in it, so the wound can seep. Doctors staple the skin, about the thickness of a Band-Aid, around the deepest wounds. Patients say donor sites hurt worse than the burns.
When burn victims don't have enough healthy skin left to provide grafts, doctors can germinate the patients' skin cells in Petri dishes and cultivate gardens of new flesh.
Bill takes pictures of surgeons doing skin grafts, nurses changing dressings and swabbing mouths. Machines bleep, ventilators gurgle like Darth Vader and the old man moans. Bill feels the rubber gloves hugging his fingers. He smells the Silvadene.
For a few minutes, lost in the rhythms of the burn unit, he forgets to click his camera.
* * *
Bill spent six weeks in Tampa General in 1974. That June, his dad took him back to Cleveland. He lost touch with the other couple burned in the accident, but spoke with Debbie's parents from time to time. They still exchange Christmas cards.
All that first summer, Bill's dad drove him to rehab. To learn to walk again, Bill rode a bike. To strengthen his hands, he took up bowling.
Every morning, he wriggled into a wetsuitlike outfit: thick pressure garments stretching from head to toe. The suit was supposed to compress his skin to cut down on scarring. It was tight, hard to move in and insufferably hot. Bill had to wear it for more than a year. When he finally returned to Florida, and to photography, he practically melted while shooting sports in the sun. He looked like a sweaty sea monster with a scabby face. Kids were scared of him.
Back in the world, he felt more alone than he had in the hospital.
How could any girl love him like that?
* * *
After rounds, in the sixth-floor meeting room, Bill shows Cruse his faded file. The doctor flips through the medical records. Nurse Kim Boshers studies the side of his face.
"You're a walking miracle," she tells him.
Cruse asks Bill to lift his shirt. He traces the maze of scars. "They did a good job," the surgeon says.
Not many alums visit the burn unit. Once they get out, people don't ever want to come back. The staff seems excited to see a patient 30 years after surgery. They all work for a success story like Bill.
Unless you see Bill in shorts, or without a shirt, unless you catch the shine of the tight skin on his hands, you can't tell he was burned. Unless he says so, you won't know he hurts. His brown bangs grew back to blanket the scars on his skull.
Eventually, he didn't feel so alone. He got married a couple of years after the accident, but that didn't last long. In 1985, Bill married a photographer named Robin. They have a 14-year-old son, William, and an 11-year-old daughter, Stella. Two turtles, a few goldfish, an old black Lab and a yellow puppy. A house with a pool.
All the dreams that blew up that night have been pieced back together.
"You all gave me 30 extra years," Bill tells the doctors and nurses on the burn unit. "I've come back to thank you."
* * *
The old nurse shuffles in through the back door of the meeting room. She plants her sturdy legs shoulder-width apart and squares her shoulders. She's wearing sensible shoes. Her hair is hennaed.
In a sandpapery voice, she says her name is Molly Cummings. She has been caring for burn patients since 1971. "Folks call me Sarge," she says.
"You were here when I was here," Bill tells her. "I remember you."
"When was that?" the nurse asks, X-raying him with her sharp eyes.
"1974."
Sarge tips her chin up. "Wasn't really a unit then," she says. "Back then, we were just a few beds on the fourth floor." Bill nods.
"Then one night, there was some sort of explosion," Sarge says. "We were used to getting one or two cases through here at a time. But that night, we had an influx of four young people all at once. They'd been burned pretty badly."
Bill's eyes widen. "Th-th-that was me," he stammers. "I was one of the four."
A smile curls the corners of Sarge's mouth. "I remember you," she says. The hospital didn't have enough beds. She'd had to roll in extra oxygen tanks, rig tents around the air ducts to try to regulate the temperature.
"After that, the hospital realized they needed a separate burn unit," Sarge says. She shakes Bill's shiny hand. "You're the reason we're here."
Bill puts down his camera bag. He pumps her arm.
"Well," he says, grinning. "You're the reason I'm here."
