Many families gather in the kitchen to spend time together. Rarely do we consider that the kitchen might be the most dangerous room in the house. According to the U.S. Fire Administration cooking equipment, most often a range or stovetop, is the leading cause of reported home fires and home fire injuries in the United States. Aron had made French fries for his family more times than he could count and had never had an issue… until a summer day in August that changed his life.

This time started out like any other… Aron poured some fresh vegetable oil from a brand new bottle into the pan on his glass top stove. As he began to slowly heat the oil he covered the pan. A few minutes later he lifted the lid to check on his oil and noticed that it was beginning to smoke. Not wanting to burn his new oil he began to move the pan across the stove. As he was moving the pan over to the cool side of the stove it flashed out and burst into flames.

Oil erupted from the pan and covered both of his hands. He heard sizzling sounds as his hands began to burn. Aron’s skin began bubbling up and melting off his hands as the oil ate its way all the way down to his tendons. He immediately ran both hands under cold water and called for help.

Aron’s surgeons said that the burns on his hands were quite severe. They commented that the extent of the grafting that needed to be done to repair the damage was extreme and very rare. Aron spent a full two weeks in the hospital burn unit until his hands were even able to be operated on. Following the grafting procedure to repair his hands Aron spent another two weeks in the burn unit recovering from the surgery.

Doctors cautioned Aron that he would probably not regain the full range of motion back in his fingers and that his hands would most likely function like two claws.

After being discharged from the hospital, Aron went home to begin the painful road to recovery. The medications he was given did little to mask the pain that he felt from the damaged nerves in his hands. Only a few days after returning home, Aron was in excruciating pain. His family brought him to Sara’s Garden to see if Hyperbaric Oxygen Therapy would aid him in his recovery.

As the family explained what had happened to Aron, he rocked back and forth and looked as if he would pass out. The pain and nerve damage was so severe that Aron’s brain began sending messages all over his body that his feet were in pain as well. It got to the point that he could not walk without shoes on his feet. He even had to go to bed and sleep with his shoes on.

Shortly after that, Aron began HBOT treatments at Sara’s Garden. Each time he received a treatment he commented that his pain level had diminished. After completing only 17 HBOT treatments, Aron is beginning to feel like himself again. The graft sites are growing hair and are demonstrating intact skin integrity. His hands are able to perform near normal opening and closing grasps and all of his open wounds have healed.

Each time Aron would return to the hospital for his routine checkups his therapists were amazed at how fast his burns and grafts were healing. They claimed that his recovery was in the top 1% of the cases they had seen.

As he met and talked to other clients in the burn center’s waiting room, they marveled at his progress compared to that of their own. Patients who had been burned over a year prior to Aron lamented the fact that they had not experienced the level of healing that Aron had received in only one short month. Even more, the other burn patients envied his lack of pain.

Thanks to Hyperbaric Oxygen Therapy at Sara’s Garden, Aron has his life back. No matter what you’ve been told, there is hope… for this and many other conditions. HBOT is treatment without drugs… without surgery… without pain.