Trial by fire

FIREFIGHTER

Patterson, a firefighter for Dallas Station 44, had become trapped inside the house after the roof collapsed, but someone caught a glimpse of him through a window and pried it open to pull him out.

“I knew I was hurt, but I didn’t know how bad it was,” he says. “I thought I was going to die at one point in the house, but once I was out, I thought if I could keep breathing, I was alive.”

He barely remembers being loaded into the ambulance in May last year, and taken to the burn unit at Parkland, where he was in a coma for the first 42 days. Doctors determined he had third-degree burns across 45 percent of his body. He spent 107 days in intensive care, the majority of the 140 days he was hospitalized, during which his wife, Tina, rarely left his side.

Tina was at a party when men from

Station 44 showed up to tell her Jeff had been injured. “My husband always told me, ‘If the suburban comes and the man with the white shirts come to you, it’s not going to be good,’” she says. “So I started to panic.” She left her two children, Bryce and Georgia, then 5 and 2, with her friends at the party, and headed straight to Parkland.

“The doctor told me, ‘It’s not the burns that will kill him; it will be the fungus [on the skin grafts], the bacteria or pneumonia,’” Tina recalls.

Throughout his time in Parkland’s

ICU, Jeff had all those things. “He had the trifecta,” she says. “He had everything that could possibly go wrong. He kind of teetered, and then he would normalize.”

For months Tina lived in constant fear of knowing her husband could die any day.

Word of Jeff’s accident spread quickly throughout Dallas, and the Lakewood community came out to help the family however possible.

The first thing Tina did was go to her son’s school at St. Thomas Aquinas to tell the principal, Lauren Roberts, about the accident. Roberts sent out a school-wide letter, explaining Jeff’s condition and urging parents to be careful about what they said around their children.

“I was really afraid that Bryce might get information [about his dad] from other children,” Tina explains. “I wanted to create as normal a situation as possible for my kids.”

Roberts then created a volunteer babysitting schedule for the Pattersons, so that each day a different family was scheduled and available to care for Bryce and Georgia. If Tina wanted help, all she had to do was call the scheduled volunteer.

“St. Thomas was insanely awesome,” she says. “Our deacon would come to Parkland to pray with us, and the families created a meal train that lasted for nine months. Their help was huge.”

Jeff underwent several skin grafts. When the original skin grafts became infected after a couple weeks, Parkland staff had to scrape them off and start over.

To make matters worse, Tina was diagnosed with colon cancer in the middle of everything. Without telling anyone, her family included, she started radiation and chemo.

“I didn’t even know,” Jeff says.

“I thought he was more sick than I was,” she explains. “When people found out [about the cancer], it brought a whole new wave of support.”

That support took many forms, but the financial outpouring kept the family out of debt. The insurance provided by the City of Dallas didn’t cover all of their medical expenses, but money was coming in from everywhere.

A family friend set up a GoFundMe page that raised more than $58,000. Families at St. Thomas Aquinas Catholic Church and school offered financial sup- port, as did families at the First Presbyterian Church, where Georgia attended daycare.

Several businesses hosted fundraisers, including The Truck Yard, Studio Movie Grill, Fit Body Boot Camp and Angry Dog, to name a few. The Dallas Fire Department hosted a firefighter’s ball at the harbor in Rockwall. Casa Linda Estates in East Dallas hosted an event in December called Casa Linda Lights, during which they lit thousands of luminaries throughout the neighborhood to raise funds for the Patterson family. The Exchange Club of Lake Highlands also took up a collection.

On top of that, neighbors would leave money at the Patterson’s house or slip bills in Tina’s pockets when they saw her.

“People couldn’t help enough,” Tina remembers. “Eventually I had to start telling people, ‘We’re OK. We’re covered.’”

She used the money to help pay for medical bills and living expenses, and to purchase necessary additional expenses like airplane tickets so her family could travel from New York. They’d come to Dallas for weeks at a time to help her navigate the chaos, and were blown away by the generosity of the East Dallas community.

“One day my sister was crying, asking, ‘Where do you live? Who are these people coming to your house everyday giving you money and food?’ She was so touched by it,” Tina explains.

After months of battling lung damage, multiple rounds of skin grafts, and two bouts of pneumonia, Jeff was finally allowed to go home on Sept. 19.

“I thought I was just going to sneak out and go home,” he says, but the fire department coordinated a more formal homecoming with St. Thomas Aquinas Catholic Church and First Presbyterian Church.

“They picked me up on the fire truck and took me by there,” he says, tearing up at the memory. “We drove right by the school, and all the kids were out there with signs. It was awesome. When we went by the house, we had a bunch of family and friends there.”

Of course, his homecoming wasn’t the end of his trips to Parkland for surgery and rehab.

“I could barely walk,” he says. “With the scaring, I couldn’t put a fork in my mouth.”

“I was wiping his nose, brushing his teeth and shaving him,” Tina says. “And I was having to do wound care. I’m the most squeamish person in the world, so that was tough for me.”

“So we still needed that continued support,” Jeff says.

It has been a slow process, but Jeff has come a long way in a year. Even still he has routine surgeries to release the scars on his body to give him better mobility.

“It’s getting better,” he says. “I’m getting stronger. I just recently started going back to work and doing some light duties.”

“Now it’s the, ‘OK, what now?’” Tina says. “Just figuring out what’s next for him.”