How would it feel to be a burn survivor? Posted by Elaine Walker in Blog Sep 02, 2010 | 723 views

More than anything else, Michael Mathis and the young people attending Camp Phoenix want to be treated with simple, common courtesy.

It sounds simple. Didn’t your mom teach you not to point or stare at people? To treat others as you would like to be treated? It’s the Golden Rule.

“We just want to be accepted in this world, without reaction,” Mathis said.

But he and his young campers and thousands like them, all burn survivors, repeatedly endure the attention of rude, insensitive people who gape or jeer.

“I hate the screamers,” one young man said, making my heart twist.

That’s definitely not how I would want other people to treat me.

But I had found my mother and grandmother’s training put to the test when I went to Cornet Bay to cover a Camp Phoenix kayak outing. I knew I would see children who had survived burns, but I was not prepared for how it made me feel.

As I glanced around at the young people enjoying their outing, my eyes stopped on a teenage girl scarred from a horrific accident. She saw me, too. I smiled to her and kept my eyes moving. Thank you for the good manners, Grandma.

In 20 years of covering people who were facing or overcoming adversity — cancer, organ failure, even flesh-eating bacteria, I’ve never felt so deeply for an interview subject. A while later, the girl came over and chatted with me. She’s my new hero.

A million thoughts have gone through my mind since then. We all want to be accepted. I felt like a victim of discrimination because I was teased for years as a chubby child. But that girl and others have been through a hell the rest of us can’t imagine.

The thought of it choked me up, but I kept it to myself. How would I feel if well-meaning, sympathetic people kept wanting to cry over me?

Another reaction, curiosity, rears its head. What happened to these folks? And a balancing thought, what if the worst thing that ever happened to me left visible scars? Would I like to have to describe it over and over, even years later?

Maybe wearing a T-shirt with a slogan would help. But what would it say? And would I want my clothes to perpetually trumpet some awful personal event?

Many burn survivors are so traumatized by people’s cruel or thoughtless responses that they don’t go outside. Mathis said they stay hidden — hundreds of thousands of them.

“We just want to be accepted in this world, without reaction.”

It seems such a small thing to ask.

So I want to emphasize Mathis’ advice: Let’s make the world better, one person at a time.

“You’re not going to be able to change society. You can only change yourself,” he said.

Take a moment or two and visualize how you will respond the next time you encounter someone with some unusual or obvious scarring or disability.

“The next time you see someone in public, prepare yourself,” he said. “Remember even as burn survivors, you are human too. We are all here on the same planet and need to love each other.”

For more about Mathis and Camp Phoenix, pick up this week’s Anacortes American, or visit Burned Children Recovery Foundation’s Web site at www.burnedchildrenrecovery.org.