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The story of this young man touched our entire community. My daughter, who lives 200 miles away, was moved to tears when she read about it. I have thought about this boy and prayed for him more times than I can count for the past several months.
Usually when I see kids collecting money outside of a place of business, I pass them by without a glance, but a few months ago, two incredibly sad-looking, shivering teenagers stood outside of Kmart one frosty day and I had to stop and give to their cause. When I saw their little cups said "Jason Brown" I put away my $2.00 and gave them a twenty.
What wonderful kids they were.
They were friends of his and they told another lady and me that although he was doing better, he was still in very bad condition and would be in the hospital for some time.
This story was in our paper today. I am very happy tonight...
http://www.lockhaven.com/Express/index.asp
Homecoming
By MATT CONNOR - For The Express
]His spirits undiminished, burn survivor Jason Brown is back home in Farrandsville.
MATT CONNOR/THE EXPRESS
It’s every parent’s nightmare: You pick up the phone and the voice on the other end tells you that there’s been a terrible accident, and your child has been hospitalized in critical condition.
In late September 2006, Susan and Marvin Brown and Judith Cramer lived out that nightmare when authorities informed them that 14-year-old Jason Brown had second- and third-degree burns over 75 percent of his body and was now at the burn center at Lehigh Valley Hospital in Allentown, struggling for survival.
Judith, a Lock Haven resident, is Jason’s mother.
His dad, Marvin, lives with Jason’s stepmother, Susan, in Farrandsville.
Today, after four long months, six skin graft operations, many hours of physical therapy and 180 injections into the body of this formerly needle-phobic Central Mountain High School student, Jason is finally home.
And boy, is he happy about that.
“He’s like the cat that ate the canary,” said Susan Brown as she sits beside a smiling Jason in the TV room of the family’s modest ranch-style home on Farrandsville Road Thursday, two days after his hospital stay ended.
“I was treated very kindly,” Jason said of his 16-week experience at the medical facility. “They took good care of me. I never had a problem at all.”
Dressed in a striped bathrobe, the small-framed young man still seems a bit frail, with thickly- bandaged legs and a reddish complexion that gives him the appearance of someone with a bad sunburn.
But his eyes are bright, with a touch of mischief to them, and he and his stepmother laugh easily about the little absurdities of their daily lives (Jason’s appropriation of Susan’s favorite recliner chair, for example, or the fact that a portable urinal allows Jason to relieve himself during the night without having to get up to go to the bathroom).
He said he has almost no memory of the incident that left his arms, legs, abdomen and lower back scarred from the flames that engulfed him back in September. So far no witnesses have stepped forward to offer details.
Jason and his family say they almost prefer it that way. They really don’t want to know. They’re just happy Jason is soon going to be back on his feet again.
But something truly horrible happened on that otherwise beautiful early autumn September day.
At the time Jason was visiting his best friend Trey Guidos at the Guidos residence on Prospect Street in Lock Haven. Trey and Jason had been friends since kindergarten, and Jason said he practically lived over at the Guidos house.
Both teenagers were fans of PlayStation computer games, and were eager for Jason’s mother to drive them to the store to pick up a just-released game cartridge. But Judith Cramer was sick in bed that day, and Jason held out little hope that his mother would be able to provide the desired ride.
The boys were just hanging out, occasionally phoning Cramer to see if she was feeling any better.
There was some kind of grass fire on the lawn, accelerated by an open can of gasoline.
Later reports had Jason kicking the can away from a small child who had approached the flames, thus engulfing himself in the conflagration. He remembers none of this, and personally doubts the story about the young child. All he knows is that one moment he was fine, and the next he was on fire.
“I do know I went to put it out and I’m pretty sure I kicked the can and gas sprayed on me,” Jason said. “After that I remember running and diving into the dirt. I don’t really know much after that.”
Dressed in nothing more than leather sneakers, nylon gym shorts and a t-shirt, Jason threw himself to the ground to try to extinguish the blaze, but the gasoline that had splashed him made the fire difficult to put out.
Later he would suffer from bacterial infections from the earth and organic matter that became imbedded in his burning skin as he rolled about on the ground.
His nylon shorts literally melted into his legs as he ran for the back door of the Guidos house for help. He knows this because the Guidos’s back door and siding were scorched from the flames that were still raging on Jason’s body.
“I was like The Human Torch,” said Jason, who with typical light-hearted reserve refers to a comic book character who is a walking inferno. “Everything I touched was charred.”
Later, the Browns and Cramer heard all kinds of crazy stories about the incident.
They were told that Jason, for example, had an aerosol spray can in a front pocket of his shorts which, upon contact with the flames, exploded, rendering Jason unable to conceive children. Where this preposterous story came from, Jason and Susan say, is anyone’s guess. But it’s certainly not true. His doctors have given him a clean bill of health in that regard.
“We’ve had three different people say that they put him out, ya know?” Susan says of people claiming credit for saving Jason’s life. “We’ve heard all kinds of different stories. The investigating officers said we probably would never know the whole truth. And it doesn’t really matter at this point.”
Soon an ambulance was summoned. Jason retains a fragment of a memory of climbing into the back of the EMT vehicle and having some sort of coolant poured over his burns. He next recalls looking up from a stretcher into the faces of the strangers who surrounded him on the roof of Lock Haven Hospital, where a medivac team was about to fly him off to Lehigh Valley.
Arriving at Lehigh, Jason went into respiratory arrest and — after physicians got him through that initial crisis — was put into a drug-induced coma and placed in a respirator so his condition could be further stabilized.
Susan said some sort of medical device shook his young body on a regular basis to keep fluids from building up in his lungs. He swelled to three times his normal size.
At about 2 a.m., his parents and stepmother arrived at the medical center after a three-hour drive across Pennsylvania. A hospital chaplain met them outside Jason’s room.
“That scared us,” Susan said. “That was a scary thing, when the chaplain came over and introduced herself. We were afraid it might be over. His dad and I just looked at each other, and then she started saying she was just there for support and asked about Jason’s religion.”
Susan said seeing Jason for the first time in the hospital was enormously painful for his loved ones.
“You’re heart just sinks,” she said. “We were very upset. My husband was a mess. Jason’s mother and father went into his room first, and I stayed outside. But Marvin was walking ahead of Jason’s mom, and as he walked in the door, he saw Jason before she did, and he turned around and kind of blocked her view with his body and said, ‘Judy, you’re going to have to take a deep breath here, because you’re not gonna be able to keep it together.’ It took his breath away, and he was trying to prepare her.”
Despite appearances, doctors told the family that Jason’s prospects were good, and though there would be significant scarring, he would be able to live a normal, active life.
Jason says he doesn’t really remember waking up and that his early days at Lehigh passed in a kind of a haze. He was given very powerful pain killers, which he said altered his perceptions of what was going on around him.
“I just remember being there,” he said. “Everything’s all weird in my mind. I thought I had two TVs in the room, because some medication was making me see double. I didn’t tell anyone that at the time, because I didn’t want anymore medications. I was on enough as it was already.”
During the same period, he hallucinated an ominous insect dangling above his head, he said.
“I do remember seeing a clear purple spider hanging above me, and I wanted to get away from it so bad because it was coming down on me,” he said. “They said there was nothing there. Of course I didn’t believe them. And then during one dressing change I thought I was growing mushrooms on my legs.”
But eventually his head cleared, and he began to make steady improvement.
“He’s come a long way, he really has,” said Susan.
During his hospital stay, Susan set up an account for Jason at Jersey Shore State Bank. The community responded generously, and both Jason and his extended family are grateful for the good will and financial support they’ve received over the last few months.
Jason said he’s received over 100 cards and letters from friends and well-wishers.
Finally last week doctors told Jason that despite some lingering open wounds on his legs, he would be allowed to return home.
Today his treatment includes three prescription medications, regular dressing changes and twice-monthly appointments with doctors at Lehigh Valley Hospital. After the open wounds have healed, he’ll be fitted with pressure garments, which he must wear for 23 hours a day to help keep scarring to a minimum.
“The pain is a lot better than it was, of course,” Jason says. “I just have a basic day like anybody else now, except for the pills and the dressing changes.”
On the way home from the hospital for the first time on Tuesday, Jason said he had a craving for Chinese food, so his parents and stepmother took him to the Gourmet Buffet on Hogan Boulevard in Mill Hall.
He fixed himself a big plate of seafood.
“I wanted seafood – crab, shrimp and stuff – I had shrimp only once in the hospital,” he said.
Like many teenagers in his situation, Jason misses his friends, misses his dog. He hasn’t heard from best pal Guidos, for example, who now has an unlisted telephone number. Jason suspects his old friend’s parents may be concerned a visit from Trey would trigger bad memories from the fire. But he’s eager enough to hear from his buddy that he specifically requests that a mention of Guidos be placed in the paper.
“I want to say hi to my friends, especially Trey Guidos,” Jason said.
One other friend he hopes to see soon is his former pet, a little pug dog named Chewy. Doctors told Susan that because of Jason’s open wounds, it wouldn’t be healthy for him to be exposed to pet dander and shedding. So Chewy was adopted out by a friend of the family who has promised the Browns visitation rights.
Life is getting back to normal for Jason Brown.
He survived such a traumatic, life-altering experience before his fifteenth birthday and still retains a light-hearted outlook devoid of self-pity.
“I never really did feel sorry for myself,” he said, leaning back in the brown plaid recliner in the Brown’s TV room. “What happened happened. Nothing’s going to change that.” |
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