ORANGE, Calif.—Inside the Regional Burn Center on the 5th floor at UC–Irvine Medical Center, two lines of doctors, nurses, and hospital staff formed a walkway to celebrate the return of 61-year-old Michael Zimmer—a former patient who they had nursed back to health after a propane tank exploded on him last December.
“I was dead five months ago,” Zimmer told hospital staff.
Last December, Zimmer, a carpenter, was working on a custom home in the hills of Fallbrook, California, when he went to refill the small green propane gas tanks inside his van, which he used to generate heat for the job.
That’s when he noticed that one of the tanks was leaking.
Before he could react, a raging flame combusted toward him, shooting his hair straight up while the skin on his arms, hands, and legs burned off.
“Something told me to keep my eyes closed when I was sitting in the flame cooking,” he said of when he searched for the door handle to escape.
But before he could escape, the tanks exploded and jolted him out of his van and onto the concrete, where he said he walked around deliriously until an ambulance rescued him.
He woke up from a coma inside the medical center’s burn unit two months later.
Before doctors discharged Zimmer from the hospital nearly two months after he woke up, he underwent seven surgeries, experienced multiple organ failures, and received tissue replacement from donors.
Zimmer also endured critical care treatments using ventilators and vasopressors—a medication used for treating critically ill patients with extremely low blood pressure—and dialysis to support his kidneys.
Doctors also had to keep an eye on Zimmer’s risk of infection because of the importance of skin regulating body temperature while keeping disease out and water and proteins inside.
However, the most “amazing technology” the hospital used to treat Zimmer, he said, was the regenerative autologous epidermal graft—a fancy way of saying the doctors sprayed skin on his face.
His recovery process has included learning to walk and talk again while maintaining regular exercise and therapy.
Zimmer said without the hospital staff, surgeons, and everybody that prayed for his recovery, he wouldn’t have had a second chance at life.
“Look at him now,” Dr. Theresa L. Chin, a trauma burn surgeon who operated on Zimmer, told The Epoch Times. “There’s no reason that he shouldn’t otherwise make a full recovery.”
Chin said when a patient returns to visit, it inspires the staff after seeing them at their worst.
“This is really a full team effort,” she said. “I’m just one piece of the puzzle. Something we really focus on in the burn ward is really getting [patients] back into society. We reintegrate them back into the community and back into the activities they love doing.”
Doctors said Zimmer is expected to make a full recovery.
“When you get a symphony all together with everybody trotting out their A-game, that’s how you save people,” Dr. James Jang, a burn surgeon at the medical center, told Zimmer. “Everybody on this team deals with a great deal of sadness, and not everyone has a happy ending, and when we have visitations from people like you, it keeps our batteries charged and keeps us in the game.”
Since his release, Zimmer said he enjoys swimming, playing golf, and shooting pool.
“Being cooked alive and blown out of my van was an experience I don’t ever want to go through again,” Zimmer said. “God’s not ready for me yet. So I go out into the world and tell my story everywhere, and it gives people more strength and hope. Don’t give up.”
