Help Dylan Seymour pay medical bills

‘Alone we can do so little, together we can do so much.’ -Helen Keller

Hi, my name is Dylan Seymour and a lapse in judgment put me in the hospital with third-degree chemical burns for over a month. I required multiple surgeries and several weeks of work to successfully recover. As of right now, the hospital has not fully billed me or my insurance, but I already owe over $1,800 in medical bills, my insurance deductible is $5,000, and my yearly out-of-pocket maximum is just shy of $7,000.

This $1,800 was billed before I even got out of the hospital. Due to multiple surgeries and what I have been billed so far, I believe it is safe to expect to pay my full out-of-pocket maximum, and I expect to have to fight insurance to make them even cover all of my acute care procedures.

Any and all money will be used to pay for medical expenses, and any and all leftover money will be donated to the American Burn Association (ABA) to assist in caring for others who have found themselves in unfortunate circumstances like myself. Burns, particularly chemical burns, are very painful and difficult injuries to recover from, often leading to permanent physical disfigurement and emotional trauma. As I roamed the halls of the Burn Care Unit at UMC, I realized just how lucky I was. Almost every other person in there appeared to be much worse off than I was.

This has been by far the most difficult and painful experience of my life, and I wouldn't wish this on even my worst enemy. Honestly, I am lucky to be alive and am grateful that I'm even here right now, capable of typing this for myself. Even having been through this experience myself, I can't fully comprehend what other, less fortunate individuals went through. I've spent a lot of time reflecting on this over the last month-and-some-weeks, and this is primarily what I am thankful for. If you would like to read my full story about what I have been through, excluding graphic imagery, you can find that below.

I've never been a very religious person, but I thank God that I made it out as well as I did. But, I still find myself saddled with thousands of dollars in medical debt, and anybody who offers help will have my utmost thanks. But, if you would instead prefer to donate to a charity, such as the ABA, instead, please do so.

On Friday, April 21st, after a long and stressful week at work, I signed off of our work Slack while joking with my coworkers about how "I promise not to die," before I put on my full set of head-to-toe motorcycle gear and go for a short ride down to the locally owned and operated hardware store (about 3 miles round trip). I had been having some issues with my bathroom sink draining slowly, presumably due to a buildup of hair from shaving and haircuts over the years, so I bought some drain cleaner, thinking I was being productive by checking an errand off of my list. I threw the bottle of drain cleaner in my backpack, because my motorcycle does not have any luggage space I could put it in, and walked out of the store prepared to go home.

Riding my motorcycle is one of the ways I like to destress myself. I'll play some music and just cruise around town at a leisurely pace until I'm calm. I am a new rider on a Kawasaki Ninja 400, a popular beginner motorcycle, and I enjoy practicing basic techniques such as shifting and slow speed maneuvers because that's what makes a motorcyclist a motorcyclist. But, because the trip to the hardware store was so short, and I was wearing full gear, I decided to ride further. It was a beautiful day with perfect weather at the start of spring! So, instead of turning left to go home, I decided to turn right and ride Highway 160 north, out of Pahrump, my hometown.

As with any road I've never ridden before, I was riding at a relaxed pace, following the speed limit and eventually came to the Highway 160/95 junction, and hung a right onto Highway 95 eastbound toward Lee Canyon Road. I pulled over to the side of the road to take a photo (see below) before continuing up Lee Canyon Road to Route 157 to ride through the scenic route in Mount Charleston.

I was having a good time. I have driven the 157/158 scenic route in my car before, and it is a pretty relaxed yet twisty and fun road with a low speed limit. I knew the turns, but being a new motorcyclist that has never really driven on a twisty road like that before, I was being quite cautious. I had intended to stop at the scenic overlook and take a photo, but since I approached from the north side of Mount Charleston via Lee Canyon Road, it was pretty much at the very beginning of the ride, and I was having too much fun to stop. I decided to continue through the route and take a photo on the other side of the mountain, much like how I stopped on the way up.

There was still some snow on the shaded areas of the mountain, and almost every corner is blind, so I was being cautious. One never knows when an overzealous car may approach from the other side, cutting the corner and plowing directly into oncoming traffic (me.) I rode carefully through the mountain pass, enjoying every moment of my first twisty road experience. Running low on gas, I decided not to turn around and make another pass through the mountain, and went down to Route 157 to head into Las Vegas.

As I was riding toward Las Vegas, I spotted a parking lot in front of a trailhead that I thought would be a good place to pull over to take a photo at. It is a gravel parking lot, but because I live on a gravel road, I have plenty of experience riding on surfaces like this and thought I would be okay.

Unfortunately, I thought wrong. At around 6:10 PM, I pulled off of the road and managed to get my rear tire stuck in a particularly deep section of gravel. The bike was "beached," unable to move forward or backward. And, if you know anything about motorcycles, you know that this means you're going to fall over; this is exactly what happened. I fell off of the motorcycle. Thankfully, I was only moving at about five miles per hour when the bike tipped over, so I sustained no injuries in the collision with the ground itself.

I got up off the ground uninjured, muscled the bike upright and got it started again, pulled forward into a parking spot. At this point, roughly 30 seconds after my tip-over, I noticed that my lower back was kind of tingling. I got off the motorcycle, saw some liquid on the tail end of the motorcycle and was just confused for a moment. After reasoning that it wasn't gasoline, because none spilled out of the gas tank, I remembered the bottle of drain cleaner that was in my backpack.

I ripped my backpack off, pulled the bottle out, turned my backpack upside down to dump the excess fluid out, tore off my jacket and t-shirt and used it to try to soak up any remaining fluid. Now, my back was really burning. Not just a tingle but genuine, burning pain. I saw someone pull in after me, and I went jogging across the parking lot trying to catch up to them. They stopped, and I asked them if they had any water. They did, and generously offered to pour what little they had over my lower back. I jogged back to my bike, where I happened to meet more very kind strangers at their van, a man and a woman loading their bicycles after a ride into said van, whom I also bugged for any water they had. They had a half-gallon or so worth of water, which they poured over my back. At this point, it had been about 5 minutes, and my lower back was in quite a lot of pain, and the burn was starting to get serious. They offered a towel to wipe up a bit with, helped me tuck it into my pants, and suggested I ride to urgent care. I never caught their names, but I honestly believe these strangers who offered me help saved my life.

On the suggestion of the couple whom graciously offered me help in my time of need, I decided to visit the nearest urgent care. I punched in "urgent care" on Google maps, and found the nearest one at UMC Quick Care on Centennial Parkway about 15 miles away. As I pulled out of the parking lot, the pain was rapidly ramping up, and at this point I was experiencing the worst pain I had ever felt in my life.

I don't generally speed very much, if at all, when driving and I do not condone riding recklessly, but I rode my little bike as quickly as it would carry me the entire way. I screamed, both figuratively and literally howling in pain down the freeway, agonizing at every stop in an area I had no idea how to navigate. Thankfully I managed to arrive at the UMC Quick Care in one piece, and I barged in the front door, stumbled over my words in pain in attempt to communicate what was going on, and they took me back. I pulled my clothes off and put on a gown, they put an IV in me, put some wet towels on me and immediately sent me via ambulance to UMC Lions Burn Care Center, the only accredited burn care center in the Las Vegas area, within about five minutes. The ambulance ride was probably about 15 or 20 minutes.

By the time I was in the trauma care department of the hospital and washed off, I had been in the worst pain of my life for a solid 30 minutes. At some point, I'm not sure when, it faded somewhat, either due to painkillers they put in my IV, or adrenaline, or due to the burns finally destroying my nerve endings in my skin. As the nurses in the trauma section were poking me, I noticed the feeling in my lower back was very numb feeling, almost like when your hands are super cold, and I couldn't feel much more than pressure. That's when it clicked how truly bad my injuries were going to prove.

In the end, I ended up sustaining third degree chemical burns to the majority of my lower back, the upper portion of my buttocks, and a bit of my left flank area. You can find my burn diagram from my medical records below. The process for recovering from burns gets harder as you go, rather than easier, as I'd find out over the coming weeks.

After a few hours of laying there, I was transferred from the trauma unit to the burn care unit. Come morning, they told me that due to the nature of the chemical I was burned with, it would take a few days for the burn to fully appear. Around this time, it sank in just how deep I truly was. This was going to be the trial of a lifetime for me, and not even the doctors could know exactly how it would go. Every morning, they had to change my bandages and wash my wounds to make sure they didn't get infected, a painful process. Did you know they have to scrub your wounds with a towel?

My first surgery, debridement - a general anesthesia procedure where they cut out all of the dead, burnt tissue from your body, did not happen until the Wednesday following the accident, about 4 days later on April 26th. This was my first surgery ever, and it was a stressful experience. Thankfully, I was fully unconscious for the procedure itself. During my surgery, they stapled BTM, basically a skin substitute to facilitate tissue growth, over my wound and put a wound vacuum over it. The wound vacuum sealed up the wound and made sure it didn't get infected, while also pressing the BTM into my body at the same time. When I woke up after my surgery, I was woken up on my back (my wound area) and the pain was unreal. I'm still not sure how I managed to not break down and cry.

I'm sure most people know that recovering from any surgery is difficult, and mine was no exception. Every 3 days they changed my dressing, which was extremely painful due to them having to rip tape off of very, very sensitive skin, pulling hair and such as well. My general resting pain level increased after the debridement surgery, maybe because they had now freshly cut into my body, and I developed an itchy rash due to the adhesive surrounding the wound, causing me to have a lot of difficulty coping with everything.

After about 2.5 weeks of this, I had finally grown enough tissue to be able to accept a skin graft, and the doctor took me in for the procedure on May 12th, three weeks after I was admitted to the hospital. The nurses had told me early on that the skin graft is the truly painful part of recovery, and I soon found out they were not lying. Because of the location of my burns, I found myself laying on my stomach most of the time. The doctor and I agreed that we should pull from the outer side of my left thigh and the back of my thigh for skin for the skin graft. They took the wound vac off for one day before the surgery, due to how the scheduling worked out, and it was shocking how my pain levels went up because there was no, for lack of a better term, "barrier" over the wound anymore. It moved, stretched and pulled like skin normally would, and even brushing up against something was painful.

When they graft skin, basically what they do is cut off half the thickness of your skin, and use the top layer of skin on your wound, then bandage up the part they skimmed from and let that part heal naturally. It's truly an incredible product of modern medicine, but the unfortunate side effect of this is that they cut deep enough into your skin to expose the nerve endings that would normally be deep inside your skin, causing intense pain to even the most minor of touches. This basically meant that my leg hurt a lot more than my back, which continues to be the case to today as both of my wounds heal.

When they do surgery to heal burns, they can't really generate something from nothing in most cases, so they do a skin graft which basically doubles your wounded area, to heal your original burn. The first few days after my skin graft, I could hardly even walk. I couldn't cover myself with my bed's blankets by myself, and it was difficult to even get in or out of bed to use the bathroom. I knew it would be difficult, but I had no idea how difficult it would really be. I had no idea that simply sitting down for fifteen minutes to eat a meal would be a test of endurance. It felt like I aged 60 years overnight.

8 days after my skin graft surgery, on May 20th I was finally discharged from the hospital after a total of 29 days. I was still in a ton of pain, as the day I was discharged was the first day that they had my donor site on my leg "open to air," where they took the big bandages and such off of my thigh and only had minimal covering on it such that my leg would scab up and heal up naturally. The first few days of that were pretty difficult to deal with, as walking causes your thigh's skin to stretch a lot more than you might think. Walking was quite painful, and I ended up using a walker for several days.

When I was discharged, I stayed with family in Henderson to be closer to the hospital for my twice-a-week follow-up appointments at the outpatient clinic at the hospital for dressing changes, and only today, May 27th have I been able stay in the comfort of my own home; after 5 long weeks, I finally got to sleep in my own bed. This is only a brief respite for a weekend, due to previously planned circumstances preventing me from having a place to sleep this weekend, but I am trying to enjoy it while I can nonetheless. Come tomorrow night I will be heading back to Henderson for my follow-up appointment at the hospital on May 29th, and I will be staying out there for another week or so.

So now that I've told the full story of what I've been through, minus some of the more... graphic details, only now have I really processed just how much I've been through in the last month. I don't think I would have made it through all of that, were it not for the support of my friends and family. I'm almost recovered now, though I still cannot work a full 8 hour day. The most I can work is about an hour at a time. It will be a few more weeks before I can begin going to the gym and working out again to regain all of the strength and stamina I've lost, as well as not being able participate in activities such as going to the water park with my family and nephews due to the long-term healing process of skin grafts.

My rational mind tells me I haven't lost much, only a few material possessions such as my tablet, backpack and my wallet; but my emotional mind tells me I've lost over a month of my life and long-term financial security. I went into the hospital at the very beginning of spring weather, and didn't see the sun, really, until I walked out on the day of my discharge at the start of summer. I lost an entire season, and experienced one of the worst things I think a human being can go through. I didn't really intend to write a pity-party story here, but I ended up steering in that direction anyway in the end... Sorry.

But thank you for reading my story. If you would like to donate to my fundraiser, or make a donation to a burn charity such as ABA, I greatly appreciate it. Having gained a title I never wanted of "burn victim," I can tell you that it's not a fun experience to live through, and any support you can offer to aid any one of us is greatly appreciated.