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Burns and scalds - Patients - United States,
Burns and scalds
polygraph then? Dunn asked.
Yeah, sure, Ryan promised, fleeing the room.
Dunn looked at Frucci and Andreychak. “That kid’s never coming back,” he said. And that, they thought, was interesting — maybe more than interesting.
There were a couple of reasons why Sean Ryan would not be back to take a polygraph. For one, two days earlier, at a meeting at the local Dunkin’ Donuts, he had made a pact with Joey LePore, his Boland Hall roommate, to say nothing to police about the night of the fire. Ryan and LePore had been best friends since kindergarten, and like all best friends, they had shared plenty of secrets.
Their biggest secret was the second reason Ryan would not be back.
Chapter 8
T he tank room was the heart of burn treatment. Antiseptic, windowless, and brightly lit with fluorescent lights, it looked like other hospital treatment rooms — except that it wasn’t. It was foul smelling and muggy. Between the heat and the sickening odors of burned flesh and open wounds, medical students were known to faint fairly frequently.
The tank room was what burn patients tended to remember most about their hospital stay — even years later. It was the place where they were taken every day to have their open wounds scrubbed with gauze that felt more like sandpaper or Brillo. Called debridement, the scouring was a fundamental step in burn treatment. Proteins leaked from the wounds and formed a film that looked like the cooked white of an egg. The film, which provided a haven for deadly infections, dried into a hard, waxy scab. When it was scrubbed away early in the treatment process, permanent scarring was minimized and the risk of infections was limited.
Most patients were heavily sedated in the burn unit, but they were injected with booster shots of morphine before they were delivered for their tank treatment. They still felt the pain.
Paul Mellini, the chief tank-room technician, had scheduled Alvaro early. His tank time was exhausting for the staff, both physically and emotionally, and they wanted to get through it as quickly as possible. A tanking usually took an hour or less; Alvaro’s took two hours every time. “Let’s go,” Mellini said as four others followed him into room 4, where the comatose boy lay. Two doors away a two-month-old baby, purposely scalded by his mother in a bathtub and admitted the night before, was screaming. An elderly woman burned in a cooking accident moaned in the room beyond that.
The mood in Alvaro’s room was tense. At five feet ten inches tall and two hundred pounds, Alvaro Llanos was not a small man. With seventy extra pounds of fluids in his body, and grisly, gaping sores branding his torso, he looked more like a decaying corpse than a living human being.
Alvaro was the largest patient in the burn unit, and the sickest. Unconscious, he was dead weight and difficult to handle. The team of nurses and technicians who arrived in his room to take him for his daily scouring in the tank room had had to gear themselves up for it.
On the count of three, Mellini and his team lifted Alvaro off his bed and onto a plastic-covered, stainless-steel shower trolley. They covered him with a blanket and then rolled the trolley twenty-five feet into the tank room and under a trio of shower hoses that hung from the ceiling. The trolley was tipped slightly and another hose was attached from the bottom of the gurney to a drain in the floor. That hose would accommodate the runoff of water, blood, and dead flesh. Mellini tried to keep the atmosphere light. “Save me a piece of birthday cake from the lunchroom,” he said to one of the burn technicians as he raised a pair of shiny silver scissors and began cutting away the bloodstained gauze from Alvaro’s arm.
“Livin’ La Vida Loca” played on a boom box in the room. “Living the crazy life, that’s us,” Alvaro’s nurse, Andy Horvath, declared. Everyone nervously laughed at his comment.
The team cut away the gauze covering every inch
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