It was the third day of camp at the Lake of the Ozarks, and the teens were tubing. Laura was laughing and talking with friends in her inner tube when the cry came out across the lake.
“My leg!”
It was another camper, Arnold. He’d fallen out of his tube, and his prosthetic leg was bobbing in the water.
He laughed, though, as he climbed back into the tube, with help from his friends. Another boy dove in to retrieve the leg, and Arnold popped it back on. “Got it,” Arnold said. Without further fanfare, tubing continued.
No one was going to say that Arnold should head back to shore. Arnold was insistent that he wasn’t going to sit on the sidelines, and these campers agreed. They knew all about being singled out, left out, kicked out.
The Missouri Children’s Burn Camp looks like any other camp from afar. But up close, you begin to notice scars on the kids’ legs and faces. Some boys in swim trunks have no nipples and look like their chests are encased in melting plastic. Other kids have splotchy skin on their hands and arms, marks running up their legs, or hypertrophic scars across their faces.
Linda and Gary Hansen opened the camp 16 years ago. It hosts Missouri and Kansas residents under age 18 who’ve spent at least four days in a burn center or suffered a burn affecting the head, face, hands, or feet. Last August, more than 75 campers attended the weeklong camp.
All of the campers have been burned. Arnold was burned so badly, he lost a leg. Laura still has nightmares about how she got burned. She was forced into a tub of hot water at 18 months old, then burned again across her back and part of her arms at age 2. Both of Laura’s injuries were the result of child abuse. Kids made fun of her growing up. Laura felt like an outsider, though she was outgoing around her friends. She heard about the camp through the Burns Recovered Support Group, a local nonprofit that assists burn survivors, supports burn-treatment medical facilities, and educates the public.
Laura first attended the camp in 2002, when she was 16 years old. “There were so many other kids who had scars like I did, and a lot of them were far worse than I had,” says Laura, who’s been involved with the camp almost every year since. “But they were just so energetic and upbeat about everything.”
She met her first boyfriend at camp, after seeing adult burn survivors working there as camp counselors. “A lot of my teasing growing up was aimed at telling me that basically no one would ever love me because of my scars, and I would never get married and have a family because no one could stand the sight of me,” Laura says. “To see the adults who were burned and had, after their burns, met someone and gotten married was a really big deal for me.”
Though Gary calls the camp a support group for kids, there are no psychiatry sessions around the campfire. “They came to camp to have fun, not to be analyzed,” he says. “They’re not adults who can sit back on an intellectual level and say, ‘I’m struggling. I don’t feel comfortable doing this or that.’ Kids get [support] by staying active.”
Asked how a former real-estate agent got involved with burn survivors, Linda pauses.
“The hard way,” she says.
The fire was so loud that it woke a neighbor, who peered through her curtains to see an Oldsmobile engulfed in flames. She quickly called the fire department.
When firefighters first arrived in Maryland Heights to extinguish the blaze, they assumed the car was empty—but it wasn’t. They pulled out a man whose face and hands were a ragged mess of red and brown splotches. He wasn’t breathing. Police identified him as Gary Hansen, age 42.
EMTs loaded Gary into the ambulance, inserting an endotracheal tube in his throat and hanging a bag of saline to keep him from going into burn shock. As the ambulance wailed past the firefighters, the three men gave each other a thumbs down, thinking there was no way that the man would make it.
Two policemen went to Gary’s address, where his girlfriend, Linda, answered the door. As they told her about the accident, she sank to the floor. “I’ll get my keys,” she said, but the police suggested someone else drive her to the hospital because she was so upset. Linda roused a friend in the small hours of the morning. When she arrived at St. John’s Mercy Medical Center (now Mercy Hospital St. Louis) at 3:30 a.m., the doctor was still in with Gary. She would have to wait.
Six hours later, Dr. Vatche Ayvazian introduced himself. The general surgeon told her that Gary was in critical condition.
“When’s he coming home?” Linda asked.
Ayvazian tried again. He explained the extent of Gary’s injuries. At that moment, he said, they needed to focus on getting Gary through the next 24 hours.
“But when’s he coming home?” Linda asked.
Ayvazian gently took Linda’s hands and met her eyes. “Every hour I keep him alive,” he said, “you’ll be grateful.”
Today, Gary and Linda say the same thing about that day, May 9, 1991: It was the worst and best day of their lives.
“I was ready for a midlife correction and crisis,” Gary says. At the time, he was a boat junkie obsessed with who had the bigger car and better job. “They took me into the ER,” he says, “and nobody was asking what kind of job I had.”
Police never figured out the cause of the fire, though Gary takes the blame: His car was riding rough, but he just drove it faster. He had parked and was listening to a talk-radio program when the car burst into flames. His last memories of the incident are loud pops and the windshield cracking.
Gary recalls those first weeks in the hospital as fleeting moments: A doctor scribbling on a notepad outside his room in the intensive care unit. A nurse changing his bandages while listening to a Cardinals game. Linda sitting beside him.
On one of the better days, he got a day pass from the hospital, and Linda took him to shop for furniture for their new house. She still hadn’t seen his hands and face, because they were covered in bandages. In the elevator, he whispered to her: “If people have to stare, it’s their problem and not mine, because I’m still me.”
Gary’s road to recovery would involve a lot of staring. Scars on his face made it impossible to close his eyes. He developed a staph infection in his forehead. For a while, he had a breast implant inserted near his collarbone to stretch the skin so it could be harvested for a new nose. “I looked like the hunchback of Notre Dame,” he says.
Five months after the accident, after Gary was released from the hospital and the couple was married, Gary and Linda went to a meeting of the Burns Recovered Support Group. “The meeting was four guys, and they were all talking about lawn tractors, hunting, and fishing,” Gary recalls. He tried asking a question about burns, but they ignored him. Gary tried another meeting, hoping it had been a fluke. It wasn’t.
Three years later, the support group’s co-founder died of a heart attack. Gary and Linda knew the group had potential. When another member suggested Gary should be its president, he began organizing meetings. He eventually became president of the board of directors, and Linda became executive director. The Hansens also volunteered at the hospital, encouraging new burn survivors to attend meetings. Now dozens of people turn to the support group each month.
One morning in 1995, Linda read an article in People about a burn camp in Texas. She asked Gary about sending several adolescent survivors to a burn camp in Missouri. “Sure,” he replied. After making several calls, however, she discovered the state didn’t have one. She asked Gary about starting one. “Sure,” he said.
The following summer, the couple raised enough funds to send three kids to a burn camp in Colorado. That fall, Linda attended the annual meeting of the International Association of Burn Camps. At the time, there were only 15 such camps in the U.S. and Canada.
With just 17 children and seven volunteers, the Hansens opened the Missouri Children’s Burn Camp in 1997.
Since day one, the camp has been free.
“Burns discriminate—not by race, but by socioeconomics,” explains Linda. Burns can happen when a family is using space heaters and electric blankets to save on the heating bills. Burns can happen when a house has faulty wiring or no smoke detectors. Burns can happen when kids are unsupervised because Mom and Dad are working multiple jobs.
When one kid arrived at camp with shoes two sizes too small, the counselors bought him a $10 pair of sneakers from Walmart. “You mean I can have them?” he asked, giggling with excitement.
Another camper didn’t know how to eat with a fork or how to tie his shoes when he arrived. He sobbed at breakfast on the second day because other kids were making fun of him. By the time he left camp, he’d learned to do both things.
Linda has countless stories. Many of the child burn survivors had been abused. Some ran away from home, and she’s lost touch with them. She worries about those who slip through the cracks, but she celebrates others like Laura, who’s now married and has two kids of her own.
One week can be a small thing in the life of a child, though. As camp fades into the background, the Hansens sometimes wonder whether they’ve made an impact.
Then comes a reminder.
This spring, at the Easter Concours d’Elegance Car Show at The Muny, Linda wore the bright-yellow Missouri Children’s Burn Camp shirt while walking with Gary through the crowd.
“Hey!” someone shouted. “Hey, yellow shirt!”
The Hansens walked toward a frantically waving hand in the crowd. It was a pregnant young woman, someone they didn’t recognize. Then they saw the man standing next to her. It was a former camper, Kenny, who was there to show off his pickup truck. His wife had recognized Linda’s yellow T-shirt, because Kenny still had one just like it hanging in his closet.
“You still have your shirt?” Gary asked. “You’re a grown man now. You couldn’t fit into that stuff from camp.”
“I know,” Kenny said with a shrug. “I keep it to remind me. I don’t want to forget it.”
Want to know more about burns? Check out an interview with Michael Smock, director of the burn center at Mercy Hospital–St. Louis on Take Care STL.
