Aussie burns survivor: ‘I’ve never been happier’

AUSSIE BURNS SURVIVOR’S COURAGE CAROL WAS A YOUNG MUM WHEN A FIRE RIPPED THROUGH HER HOME AND LIFE AS SHE KNEW IT CHANGED FOREVER

February 3, 2000 was the most significant day in Carol Mayer’s life. But while she remembers the tuna patties she ate for dinner that night and the singlet she dressed her nearly two-yearold son Zac in for bed, she has no memories of the event that changed everything.

‘I’ve asked so many people why I can’t remember,’ Carol tells New Idea. ‘I think shock takes over.’

Around 10pm that night, Carol’s Cairns home was engulfed in flames and Carol suffered horrific burns.

But 17 years on, she still has no idea what started the fire. She can’t remember what woke her or how she got out, but a neighbour saw her on her front lawn having just escaped from the inferno. He was the one who hosed her burning body down.

‘Apparently I shouted: “Zac. Front room. Front room,”’ Carol explains.

It was those five words, before she fell unconscious, that saved her baby boy.

Another neighbour, Todd, was able to push in the window screen and grab Zac, unharmed, from the house.

The next days and weeks were touch and go for Carol, who was just 33 at the time.

‘I had burns to 85 per cent of my body,’ Carol explains. ‘The doctors didn’t expect me to make it through the night, and even then only gave me a 50/50 chance of survival. I was in a coma in intensive care for six weeks – I can only imagine what my poor family went through.’

But incredibly, Carol, who describes herself as a ‘fighter’, made it. That’s when the realisation of what she faced ahead hit her.

‘It was four months before I saw my face,’ she remembers. ‘I was absolutely devastated. Then my dad had to tell me they’d taken most of my fingers too. They were all bandaged, so I didn’t know. I couldn’t do anything for myself, I could hardly speak and I kept thinking: “If I can’t look after myself, how can I be a mum to Zac?”’

Even being reunited with her son again was incredibly hard.

‘I still remember it now,’ she says. ‘It was about three months after the accident. He was wearing a little blue tracksuit. He looked at me, then back at my mum and then he went to Mum. It felt like I’d lost him too. It was all so horrific.’

Carol says despite all this, she was positive from the start.

‘It was what it was,’ she shrugs. ‘I was upset by photos of me before the fire, but I had to come to terms with it and I just did.’

This same strength got her through around 100 painful operations during her recovery.

‘I had hardly any skin, so they were growing skin and grafting any skin they could find,’ she reveals.

‘The worst bit was when they grafted around my eyes. They had to stitch my eyes shut for a week so the skin stayed absolutely still. It was very scary.’

In August 2001, just 18 months after the fire, Carol was out of hospital and moving in to a house her community had built for her and Zac.

‘I wanted to start moving forward again,’ she says.

‘I took a Lifeline counselling course, which really helped my self-confidence. I started going to the shopping centre without my face garment. Of course people stared, but I learnt to turn it into humour. “Spiderwoman’s here!” I laughed with the little kids, and they loved it!’

She also realised the dream of working in Zac’s school tuckshop, like her mum had done when she was little.

‘Kids asked me where my fingers were and their parents told them to be quiet,’ she says. ‘I always explained though – kids are just curious.’

It was around this time Carol found the burns survivor community, and in 2005 she attended her first meet-up.

‘Before this I thought I was the only survivor ever!’ she says.

‘It was the start of something great. I started speaking about my story at events and later became an ambassador for the Julian Burton Burns Trust. It was so rewarding and I felt so proud of myself. There’s no way I would have been able to speak in front of 350 plus people so well before I was burnt.’