Written by Tanya Terry
Terry Liedel of Flint Township and his family were hoping to enjoy an end-of-summer outing with friends as well as family.
As a result, on August 10, he suffered severe burns covering 39% of his body due to a life-threatening chemical fire accident!
Liedel and his family were getting ready to have a barbecue. He had been smoking a brisket in the family’s charcoal grill all day. Liedel had a can of denatured (100%) alcohol that had been sitting out to sterilize and clean things. Because the alcohol was on a black table and also in the sun, it was getting overheated.
When Liedel opened the grill, the heat from it made the can expand. Once the can was opened, the fumes ignited and hit him!
“I was inside,” explained Olivia Guerrero, Liedel’s wife.
She continued: “I had just taken a shower, and I was upstairs getting dressed.”
Guerrero said she had heard a bang.
“I thought it was the cats,” she continued. “I just kind of stood there for a second, waiting for them to scurry from whatever room they had gotten into trouble with. Then I didn’t hear anything inside the house. I did hear a commotion. I looked out the back window, and that’s when I saw our youngest, who is 17, racing with the hose. As I followed her path, I saw that my stepson was helping my son get burning clothes off of my husband. I immediately threw my clothes on, and I was running downstairs. It’s 10 stairs. So, by the time I got my clothes on and was running downstairs, he was already out. My husband was walking across the backyard without any clothes on because they were all on fire!”
Liedel walked into the house and into the shower to apply cool water to himself. He thought he wasn’t going to need to go to the hospital, but his wife insisted he go.
“I was like: ‘You’re going to the hospital. Your skin is coming off.”
Guerrero said her stepson burned his hand while trying to get her husband’s pants off. Fortunately, their youngest child was able to help wrap his hand up.
On the other hand, Guerrero first took her husband to McLaren hospital, who called an ambulance to transport him to Hurley Medical Center.
Liedel was put under conscious sedation so that he would not go into cardiac arrest.
“…They clean up as much of the dead skin as they can. It’s a very, very painful process. That’s why they give him the medication.”
Liedel spent 19 days at Hurley in the Burn Unit.
When removing dead skin the second time, doctors realized there were parts on Liedel’s legs and abdomen that were deeper. These burns were close to fourth-degree burns, but they were not in the muscle yet.
“So, they actually had to take that skin and that tissue out…A week later, they did his grafting surgically. That’s probably more painful, according to what he said, than the actual burns! They take the first couple layers off his dermis off his legs. Then, they stretch it out and apply it to all of his burn areas.”
Last week, Guerro said Liedel had the remaining 100 staples out.
“We did find a couple more afterwards…It was the very first day that he was home, we both cried when we had to give him a bath. You want all of the bandages to be very, very wet so they just come off – as opposed to peeling them off- because all of the nerve endings are pretty much on fire and they’re right there at the surface.”
Unfortunately, Guerro said this wasn’t the case for all of the bandages.
“It had only been just a couple days since he had just had surgery. Everything was still very, very much electric.”
Rebandaging took about 2 ½ hours to do. Then, for about five days, it took an hour and a half.
There had been between close to 300 staples in all– all over Liedel’s body!
Guerro said the family has held multiple fundraisers for other families, such as food drives, but they never imagined needing to do one for themselves.
It was AngeLink that read Guerro’s social media posts and reached out to her.
They offered to put the family’s fundraiser on social media to get more exposure, and they also reached out to local media sources.
As of September 11, The Liedel Family fundraiser had raised over half the funds to reach its goal.
“We tend to deal with trauma and difficult situations with good humor. It’s never going to last. It’s always going to work itself out, as it has in the past. My husband’s family is super-goofy. They have been a blessing to us because they kind of made sure there was somebody here with us almost every single day. We’re also just blown away by our community reaching out and helping us any way they can. We’ve had friends to mow our lawn, and we’ve had other people to pick up lunch stuff for our kids. They drove 45 minutes just to drop it by! We’ve gotten tons of help we never expected. I work for Genesee County, and the Sheriff’s Office took up a donation. They’ve never met me! I can’t even tell you how much that touches my heart.”
To learn more about Terry Liedel and the fundraising efforts, visit https://angelink.com/fundraiser-public/b451c309-588a-4079-8281-03cf4ef03217.
