Two local women who sustained critical burns when fuel was poured on a backyard fire earlier this year have returned home and face a yearlong recovery period.
Courtney Lake, 19, and Lynn Damewood, 32, were seriously burned on April 11 when a man poured fuel on a backyard fire. A can full of fuel exploded, splashing Lake and Damewood. Both were transported to the Oregon Burn Center at Legacy Emanuel Hospital in Portland.
“I feel OK,” said Lake last week. She undergoes physical therapy twice a week, and she works out at Steelhead Strength and Fitness gym in an effort to get the full range of motion back in her arms and legs.
She cannot take simple motions for granted any more, she said. For example, she cannot bend her legs fully.
Damewood said she started therapy this week. She will have therapy four days a week, including occupational, physical and speech, for the next year, with a doctor’s visit once a month.
Lake said she is through all of the surgery she will need. It will take about a year for Lake and Damewood to heal, and doctors have said that wherever they are physically in a year is where things will stand.
Lake suffered burns to her face, right arm, legs and torso. She had skin grafts to her legs, from the ankles up.
“My face healed up really well,” she said. Her face shows few signs that it was burned.
It will turn red when she gets hot, she said, but that’s about it.
Damewood’s face has healed as well but shows scarring. She also has scars on her chest, neck, arms, legs and torso, with grafts on both arms, legs, neck and chest.
Lake keeps ointment on the injured areas constantly, said her mother, Lois Lake. The ointment helped keep her face from scarring.
Damewood described the ointment she is using as thicker than Crisco.
“It’s bad,” she said, laughing.
Lake’s skin “was gone on her right arm,” her mother said. Her doctors anticipated skin grafts on her arm, but her arm healed well and did not need them.
Lake wears compression garments on her legs, waist and right arm, from the wrist to the armpit. Damewood wears compression garments on parts of her legs, hands and arms. Her neck also is covered with a compression ring to protect a band of collagen that is used to pull the skin in her face taut.
She may still require surgery on her neck, she said, but she is hoping to avoid that.
The garments are skin tight, Lake said. They are measured and tailored down to the quarter-inch so they will be tight.
Her hair will grow back, including bald spots on the back of her head. Her face shouldn’t have any scarring. She expects scars on her thighs and chest.
In addition to physical changes, Damewood was able to quit smoking.
She went through withdrawals while she was in a coma, she said.
When she woke up, she said. “I thought, no more smoking for me. I’m done.”
Lois Lake said she is simply happy to have her daughter back.
“We’re thankful that Courtney is good,” she said. After something like that, “you’re just thankful your child is OK.”
She’s still got a long road ahead of her, though.
“It isn’t like you’re home from the hospital and everything’s OK,” Lois Lake said.
Courtney and Damewood said they must be careful with the temperature. They have no sweat glands where they were burned. They cannot be out in the sun because they cannot get burned.
Both remain on pain medication.
“The pain is mostly in my legs. The nerve endings are trying to find their way back to the surface.
Some days, Courtney does well, Lois Lake said, but other days, she can’t get out of bed easily.
Her mom took the rest of the year off from her job at Hawthorne School, where she is a special needs assistant, to take care of Courtney.
Damewood’s husband, Jeremy, took a month off of work at Pace Heating and Air Conditioning following the incident. He takes care of her now, but when he must work, her mother, sister-in-law, mother-in-law and various friends fill in to care for her.
“I feel really confident and hopeful that my body pretty much gets back to normal after a year,” Damewood said.
She had to learn how to walk again, and she gets winded easily and cannot stay on her feet for long.
“But I’m alive and not in the hospital anymore, not a vegetable,” she said. “I have good friends and family around me. I’m happy to be home more than anything.”
The burn surgeon told the Lake family he could not believe how far ahead of the mark Courtney is for such extensive burns €“ 40 percent of her body, Lois said. All the grafts took, something that “never happens” with surgery that intensive.
The doctors anticipated she would be in the hospital for two or three months, Courtney said, but she exceeded expectations and was able to come home early, about a month ago.
Damewood suffered third-degree burns over 48 to 50 percent of her body, and she was expected to remain in the hospital for six months, she said. She was released early too, returning home on June 30.
“I woke up and started just wanting to get out of there,” Damewood said. “I missed my family and friends.
“All my grafts took. I’m healing really well.”
The folks at the Rehabilitation Institute of Oregon, where she moved after leaving the Burn Center, told her she was healing by leaps and bounds, she said, and they told her she was going home early.
Courtney, Lois and their family are grateful to the community, they said.
“It was overwhelming, the kindness that people showed to us,” Lois said. “God is good. The prayers of everybody are what helped heal Courtney so quickly.”
“Thanks to everybody for all the nice things they’ve done for us, the prayers,” Courtney said. “I really appreciate it.”
“It’s a really wonderful community we live in, a lot of kind, caring people,” Lois Lake said. She said she was especially appreciative of the efforts made by Figaro’s Pizza and anonymous donors €“ everyone who helped.
“You want everyone to know how overwhelmed and grateful you are,” she said.
Courtney Lake said the gathering where the accident happened involved about a half dozen people.
“There were two couples who had put the kids to bed and sat around a backyard fire pit visiting,” she said. She didn’t really know Lynn or Jeremy Damewood, who had recently moved to the neighborhood.
She was hanging around, waiting to give a ride to a friend. She waited about 4 feet from the fire. Her boyfriend, who lived nearby, had gone home.
When the fire splashed onto her, her whole body rolled up in flames, she said. It was hot and smelled bad. She wore a sweatshirt and had the hood up.
“I thought if I don’t get this off, it’s going to melt to my skin,” she said. She got her sweatshirt off, stopped, dropped and rolled, just like her father, Ron Lake, a firefighter with Albany Fire Department, had told her to do.
She kept rolling, but the flames wouldn’t go out, she said. Her cousin, Gabe Lindsey, who was at the gathering, lay on top of her to smother the flames, then he sprayed her with a hose to cool down the burns.
Damewood said the can, containing 2 1/2 gallons of ethanol, exploded.
“I saw a line of fire go straight toward me,” Damewood said. She heard a commotion and Lake screaming as she dropped and started rolling on the ground.
Damewood’s husband put his body over Damewood’s and smothered the fire, she said.
“You don’t know how much someone loves you till they put their life on the line for you,” she said.
He suffered second-degree burns on his hands, arms and spots on his torso.
Damewood stressed that the incident was accidental, and she holds no ill will over the accident.
“I didn’t get scared until they told me I was going to be Lifeflighted,” Damewood said. She also remembers what her hands looked like.
Riding in the ambulance, she faded in and out of consciousness, she said.
“I remember waking up and sucking a breath, my husband yelling at me to breath.”
Courtney’s sister, Allison, is a dispatcher with Lebanon Police Department, and she was first to hear about the incident in her family, Courtney said. She contacted her father at work in Albany.
Damewood, whose airway had been burned, was transported to Portland by helicopter. Courtney Lake waited at Samaritan Lebanon Community Hospital, after remaining conscious through the entire ordeal.
While waiting for her immediate family to reach her, her cousin, Linn County Deputy Jeff Schrader was on his lunch break at SLCH. He waited with her.
Courtney later rode with her mother by ground ambulance to Portland.
Damewood had her 32nd birthday while in a coma, she said. When she woke up, she had a mix of balloons in the room, some saying “Happy Birthday,” while others said, “Get Well.”
A 2006 graduate of Sweet Home High School, Courtney worked at Old Navy in Albany before the accident, she said. She was planning to start attending Valley Medical College in Salem on June 6. She intends to continue with her plans when she is able.
Damewood was a delivery driver for Figaro’s Pizza. She will be off work for the next year, possibly up to two, but she hopes to return to work at Figaro’s.
Courtney said she saw Damewood at the hospital, but she didn’t know what to say there, knowing the miserable pain Damewood was experiencing.
“She said, ‘Lynn do you recognize me?'” Damewood said. “I said, ‘no;’ turned over; and went back to sleep.”
Later, she said, she remembered that encounter and felt bad for her response.
Both said they are planning to contact the other and are looking forward to meeting now that they are out of the hospital.
Among the fund-raising efforts for the two women, the Albany Fire Department held a head-shaving event, raising some $9,100. Both of her sisters, Olivia and Allison, cut their hair as a gesture of support for Courtney, whose head had to be shaved at the hospital. The Lake family gave that money to the Damewood family.
At the Burn Center, Damewood said, she enjoyed the company of a volunteer from Corvallis who had been an emergency medical technician. He had known the Albany EMTs who held the fund-raising effort for Damewood.
“That connection was kind of cool,” she said. She also met many people from Sweet Home or who had family or vacationed in the Sweet Home area while staying at the Burn Center and the Rehabilitation Center.
Most recently, the Grants Pass Fire Department donated $500, and the Lake family passed that on to the Damewood family. Among other fund-raising efforts, Figaro’s donated the proceeds from a single day of business to Damewood, using volunteer labor, while a festival in the park area next door included a prayer time and music for both victims. The Elks held a spaghetti feed.
“Courtney felt really bad for their kids,” Lois Lake said. “And she said, let’s give it to Lynn and help out their family.”
Damewood found it hard to find words to thank the community and the Lake family.
Her parents told her about what the community did for her and her family after she came out of her coma, Damewood said. “I tell you what, I was so humbled. I don’t know how to thank everyone. It was so amazing to me. They made it so I could concentrate on getting better. It took a lot of stress off my husband so he could be with the kids.
“I have no idea how to thank everybody. I just don’t know who all to thank. When my parents told me about all the fundraisers, the prayers and services, I was just blown away. I couldn’t believe they got it going that fast.
“The biggest thing is to thank everyone who went out of their way to help us out.”
Damewood said she’s just grateful to be back on her feet.
“I’m just happy to be here,” she said, “more than anything.”