‘I was burnt by bioethanol heater’ .
Carine is rebuilding her life after she was badly burnt by a bioethanol heater – and she wants to warn others to be careful
WHEN she opened her eyes there were pipes and tubes all over her body – they’d kept her alive for three weeks while she’d been in a coma. Slowly it all came back to her: the explosion, the flames, the panic and the unbearable heat engulfing her body.
As Carine van Staden took in the extent of her injuries her first thought was about her son, who was nine at the time.
“Is he still going to love his mother? Is he going to be afraid of me? Is he going to think I’m gross?” she wondered as it hit home how badly she’d been disfigured in the accident.
“My biggest fear was the moment I’d see him again,” Carine (49) says.
Just 19 days earlier the single mom from Cape Town had survived a fiery hell when a bioethanol heater exploded.
She was so badly injured that doctors initially refused to allow her son to visit her. Before he could be reunited with her he had to receive psychological counselling to prepare him for the shock of seeing just how badly burnt his mom was.
For the sake of her son, who’s now 11, Carine has waited until now to speak about her ordeal, which started two and a half years ago. To protect his identity she doesn’t want him named.
It’s been a long road to recovery and it’s not over – more skin treatments and surgeries lie ahead. But even though her face is badly disfigured, Carine’s biggest struggle is getting enough oxygen to breathe because her airways and vocal chords were badly damaged by the flames she inhaled.
Even though her injuries were initially traumatic for her son, it was his loving support that helped to get her through everything, says Carine, who’s a personal assistant to an investment broker in the Mother City. When she was getting so little oxygen to her lungs that she needed to sleep sitting upright, he’d sleep next to her and as soon as she coughed he’d ask, “Mommy, are you okay?”
ON THAT terrible Saturday in July 2014 she was at a friend’s birthday celebration at a speciality wine shop in Cape Town. It was a cold, wet winter day and the guests sat around a bioethanol heater.
At one point someone asked whether everyone was going to stay a while longer and if they should refill the heater.
“I just heard one huge WHAP! sound and felt a blow,” Carine recalls.
The heater had exploded, sending out a huge fireball straight towards her.
“One of my first sensations afterwards was the shock and terror on the faces of the people around me, whom I could see through the blue flames around my head.” She felt her hair burning and heard a loud roar similar to the sound you hear when holding a seashell to your ear.
“And then I felt my eyelashes melt together.”
She and the guests tried to kill the flames.
“One jumped on top of me with a jacket, another tried throwing water on me.”
But the flames weren’t easily extinguished. Her clothes also quickly caught fire. The burning gel of the heater had splashed onto her and where it landed it burnt holes.
She pulled off her clothes and she and the guests finally managed to douse the flames after what felt like an eternity. They moved outside where it was still
‘Everything has become difficult and exhausting’
raining and waited for an ambulance.
The Cape Gate Mediclinic in Brackenfell was the closest hospital and luckily they didn’t have to wait too long.
“At that stage I wasn’t feeling much pain but I was already struggling to breathe because I’d inhaled so much of the flames.”
HER condition was so bad that doctors put her in a medically induced coma for 19 days. When Carine came out of it she couldn’t speak and had burns all over her face as well as her neck, chest, arms and legs. At some points along her lower jaw she’d been burnt to the bone.
But her biggest problem was the internal damage.
Simply put, she suffers ongoing scarring, especially on her vocal cords at the narrowest part of her airways – to the point where the oxygen flow to her lungs is reduced to only 30 percent of what it should be.
A doctor compared it to the feeling of closing your nose and breathing through a straw. She can do little in the way of exercise.
Because of the insufficient oxygen flow “everything has become difficult and exhausting”. She can’t even vacuum her carpets.
Obstructive growths on her vocal cords have to be removed every three to six months using a complicated laser procedure. There’s a risk she might lose her voice.
So far she’s had about 15 surgical and other procedures, including laser surgery and microneedling to her skin. In future she’ll need regular laser surgery to keep her airways open.
Carine estimates that to date her medical costs stand at about R1 million. Of this, her medical aid has paid 90 percent.
When she was discharged from hospital she couldn’t work for more than a month while her elderly parents helped take care of her.
Although she regards herself as a strong person, she says she’s glad she started seeing a psychologist right from the start. This helped her to cope with the trauma.
The tragedy has transformed her life completely. She used to love going camping and hiking but now she has to avoid exposing her skin to the elements.
Yet Carine’s main concern is making others aware of the dangers of highly flammable ethanol and the heaters that are a common fixture in many homes and restaurants.
Last year Lize van der Walt, daughter of veteran actress Wilna Snyman, was badly burnt while filling her heater with the fuel (YOU, 4 August 2016). And it was also an ethanol firelighter gel that exploded in the hands of young burn victim Pippie Kruger’s dad, Erwin, with terrible consequences for the little girl.
Carine is now suing the person who put the bioethanol into the heater as well as the wine store and distributors of the appliance. She can’t fathom how these ethanol heaters can still be distributed in South Africa. They’ve been widely banned overseas, including in Europe, says her lawyer, Cornelia van Heerden of Heyns & Partners.
Carine is frank about the fact that the road she’s walked has been extremely difficult. “There’s no way to describe it and I know there are still years and years of surgery ahead of me.”
But she adds that her mindset already changed some time ago – from victim to survivor. “I want to give full expression to my ‘new normal’.”
Email Carine at 4u2bfiresafe@gmail.com.