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Monday, November 6, 1989 / University Daily Kansan
Health
with only a week left at the Gene and Barbara Burnett Burn Center, Justin Leeper of Rossville and his mother, Barbara, share an afternoon together.
Healing Burn unit team wraps patients in love, care
Story by Melanie Mathis
Photos by Steve Traynor
The nurse leaned protectively over her patient and joked with him about his hometown while another nurse gently applied fresh adhesive tape to tubes transporting fluids through a needle and into the patient's neck.
"You're from Topeka, Milton?" she asked, her brown eyes peering over a blue surgical mask. "You know, there's nothing fun to do in Topeka."
The man's hands and arms were bound by heavy white bandages that protected the second- and third-degree burns he suffered in an industrial explosion in Toeeka.
"The only fun thing to do in Topika is go to the zoo. Do you ever go to the zoo?"
"I thought Topeka was the zoo," Milton replied softly.
The nurse had to lean close to hear him through the oxygen mask and tubes that held him captive in the small, windowless hospital room. She laughed softly and brushed Milton's gray hair with her hand.
Milton Owens is a patient at the Gene and Barbara Burnett Burn Center in Kansas City, Kan. Thursday he underwent surgery in which 29 percent of his skin was treated for burns. The top layers of skin on his stomach were removed and grafted onto the burned portions of his arms.
The Center is part of the University of Kansas Medical Center and is one of the few burn centers located in the Midwest. There also are burn centers in Wichita, St. Louis and at Children's Mercy Hospital in Kansas City, Mo., said Mani Mani, professor of surgery at the Center.
The Center, which opened in 1973, is a product of the planning and fund raising of David W. Robinson, former head of plastic surgery at the Med Center. Its construction was financed completely with private donations, the largest of which was given by Gene and Barbara Burnett of Lawrence.
During the 1950s and 1960s, the Burnets, who sold medical instruments to doctors and hospitals, made a skin-grafting instrument that was tested by Robinson. Through this contact with the Med Center, the Burnets learned of the need of a burner center and donated most of the $200,000 spent on the Center's construction.
"We had been in the medicine business since 1980, and when we sold our business in 1970 we thought we should have a professional profession. George Burnett said."
Theresa Wheeler, outpatient coordinator, said Robinson designed the Center with only one private room so that the patients would be forced to
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If you've had an accident that alters your body image, you like to hide. But how long can you hide? Five, 10, 15 years? Here, you can't hide.'
- Mani Mani KU Medical Center
interact with each other in an open environment.
Mani said the private room was used only when a patient came in with a serious infection and needed to be isolated or when the Center was full.
"If you've had an accident that alters your body image, you like to hide." Mani said. "But how long can you live? We have 0, 15 years! Here, you can't hide! You're a neighbor every day, who is going through the same thing."
Mani compares the Center's staff to an orchestra.
"You can't make a band with the trumpets alone," he said. "The trumpet has to come in at the right time, and the trombone, and the drums."
Teamwork means knowing when to come in at the right time, Mani said, and the team is the Center's backbone.
"The key issue is not the burn center. Everyone says the physical plant is the key issue. It's not; it's the team," he said. "You should take care of someone under a tree if need be, and you have your team with you."
In the operating room, eight team members work together on one patient. Each team member performs an anesthesia task and manages anesthesia to skin grafting.
He said he 'had been at the Center about four weeks but was going home this week. Leeper is an eighth-grade student and about four miles northwest of Topeka.
This process is repeated between 10 and 13 times a month on patients that come to the Center with severe burns, Mani said. About 25 percent of the surgeries are performed on children.
The burn center's team consists of four doctors, four resident medical students, one fellowship medical student, one intern, three technicians, two therapists and 12 nurses.
Justin Leeper, 15, was the youngest of the seven patients at the Center on Twickenham Street.
Leaper suffered burns covering 37 percent of his body when some friends he was playing with spilled
gasoline. It got on his clothes and caught fire.
"I feel pretty lucky getting burned like I did. There some people back there that are pretty bad," Leeper said, gesturing to the critical care area of the Center. "They've burned about 90 percent of their body. I can't imagine what kind of pain they're in 'cause I know I was in a lot of pain."
Pain is a part of the Center familiar to both the patients and the staff.
Wheeler said that many patients associate their pain with the staff, who forces them to endure their daily baths. The baths are painful and usually are followed by physical therapy to keep the patient's damaged skin and joints loose.
A patient shivers as he is lifted from the stainless-steel tank to a gurney covered with plastic. His back is a speckled mosaic of pink and white tissue, the result of skin grafts and healing wounds.
"How do you feel today?" the nurse asked the man.
"Well, I feel refreshed, but there's still a lot of pain," he replied in broken, staccato syllables. "Can you give me something for the pain?"
Each patient at the Center is regulated from the surgery room to critical care to complete recovery, Mani said.
For adults, this usually means therapy and additional care for about 18 months after they leave the Center. Children may keep tabs on him until he is an adult.
"I saw a patient yesterday that was here 14 years ago." Mani said. Long-term care is the key. We feel the patient from admission to release."
Another important part of caring for a burn patient is nutrition, Wheeler said.
"We make 'em eat like horses," she said.
She said that when people were burned badly, their metabolism sped up about three times faster. The patients are not allowed anything without calories because it does them no good.
"You're gettin' so skinny, Justin," Wheeler said, smiling to the blond, blue-eyed boy lying on the hospital bed.
He looked at her, shrugged his shoulders and nodded his head. His narrow frame and frail limbs made him ill-fashioned hospital, bed appear enormous.
"I know. It's hard sometimes. But I'm gettin' a lot better." Justin said, flashing a brace-toothed smile to his friend. "And I believe the warm conversation."
She said, "We need to fatten you up so you can go home."
Skin technician Louis Nicholson rewraps the dressing on a patient at the burn center
The center handles about 125 patients a year.
Nicholson helps Danny Clarke, Kansas City, Kan.
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