Special Care For R. I. Burn Victims
As investigators try to piece together the causes of last week's fire nightclub fire in Rhode Island, survivors are getting specialized burn care at area hospitals. Because of the response of medical teams, reports The Early Show national correspondent Jon Frankel, not one of the burn victims has died.
The fire at the Station in West Warwick, R.I., moved with devastating efficiency. Within minutes, 97 people were dead and more than 100 were injured, many with severe burns.
Dr. Candace Dyer was at Warwick's Kent Hospital minutes after the first victims were rushed in. "I just foresaw that they were going to have along struggle ahead. But my focus was to get them resuscitated and treated immediately," she says.
And she understood the horror of their wounds. Sixteen years ago, more than 65 percent of her body was burned in a boating accident.
"You have to be sure that their airway is intact and they are not going to subtly get so much swelling of their larynx that there going to asphyxiate themselves," she explains.
Dr. William Cioffi, a burn specialist and chief of surgery at Rhode Island Hospital, says doctors have gotten better at treating burn victims. "We've made some advances in the last 15 years. But I think the most seminal advances were in the 80s."
Dr. Cioffi says a major breakthrough was understanding the body's need to be hydrated. "And that helped prevent the kidney failure that was a very common cause of death in burn patients prior to that time," he explains.
Rhode Island Hospital chief nurse officer, Jane Metzger, says she believes the first phase of treatment is over, "which was to make sure there were no eye burns. Now, we're worried about pneumonia and lung status. And then after that, it's infection, keeping those wounds clean."
Dr. Cioffi notes people usually think that burns are just skin deep, "which couldn't be farther from the truth. The body responds to the injury so that every organ is affected one way or another."
Like Metzger, nurse Melissa Crompton of the hospital's Trauma Intensive Care Unit, has been with the patients since the beginning and says they all are well sedated. "They're very comfortable. They have no idea really what's going on. And that's the blessing of drugs."
Artificial skin is now used in the recovery process, but unlike many advances in medicine - this treatment benefits from hands-on experience rather than technology. Dr. Cioffi explains, "We need to make more improvement in how we close the burn wound, skin-graft techniques, skin substitutes."
Each patient has a team of nurses who tend to burns around the clock. The reason, Crompton says is because, "dressings are long, rooms are hot, it takes a long time, the families have limited time with their loved ones."
Yet in the end, he says, it is the most simple medicine that makes a difference - compassion.