On Ben and Courtney Argento’s wedding day, his mother safety pinned a tuxedo shirt to the front of her son’s hospital gown, while Courtney selected a white dress from a bag of donated clothes that the groom’s physical therapist brought to the burn unit.

A 3-D created wedding ring, as big as a tire from a child’s toy truck, took the place of a gold band and managed to fit over Ben’s bandaged ring finger. Courtney purchased her own ring a day earlier at a department store.

Ben and Courtney spent their first night as a married couple not in a honeymoon suite but in a hospital bed on the third floor of the UCHealth Burn and Frostbite Center at UCHealth University of Colorado Hospital. It was where Ben was recovering from an oil field explosion that had caused extensive and deep second- and third-degree burns over the front of his body, including his abdomen, chest, arms, hands, neck and face.

“I think we’ll win the battle for best wedding story every time. It’s a pretty darn good one,” said the 28-year-old groom. “Emotions were high that afternoon … it was happy and fun.”

His 27-year-old bride agreed.

“It was amazing. I was so happy. After everything we had been through, it meant so much,” Courtney said.

The weeks leading up to the couple’s wedding were anything but normal. By the time they exchanged their vows, they had already lived up to the “for better or for worse” and “in sickness and in health” portion of their oath.

“Courtney should get a degree in nursing with all the wound care she learned and with everything she has been doing for me,” Ben said.

She slept in his room for the entire 29-day hospital stay, along with an additional week after Ben was discharged that they spent in the Denver area for more wound care assistance.

“My focus was to make sure he was protected, and that there was someone to advocate for him because he was in so much pain and sedated for much of the time during those first few weeks. He was in and out of consciousness, so his family and I would communicate his needs to the doctors and nurses. They were so wonderful. His entire medical care team was great.”

That UCHealth team is part of the state’s premier burn care facility – the largest and most established in Colorado and a regional hub for patients coming from seven states. Heading it up is Dr. Arek Wiktor.

“It was a significant injury,” said Wiktor, the burn center’s medical director, who performed several surgeries on Ben. “Twenty-five percent of his body had been badly burned.”

A typical day at work turns terrifying after a gas explosion critically injures Ben and his co-worker

Ben and Courtney live in Gillette, a small town in northeast Wyoming known for ranching, energy companies and serving as a gateway to the Bighorn Mountains to the west and the Black Hills to the east.

Courtney is a preschool teacher, and Ben works for a small oil company. Both were born in Wyoming and met through a family friend who set them up on a date in November 2023. Avid movie goers, they also like to golf and were planning on a Dec. 20 elopement as they finalized plans to buy a home and begin their married life together.

But in the early afternoon of Dec. 11, Ben was in a field with a co-worker fixing a broken line – a routine task he had completed countless times – when something went horribly wrong.

As air pressure was reintroduced into the line through the valve, a malfunction caused a spark, an ignition and then an explosion.

“It was day-to-day standard stuff, and we had just completed the work. There was no real way for us to know it was coming … it was instantaneous,” Ben recalled. “All I saw was a flash of light, and then I noticed my sweatshirt had been blown off and that my shoulder was on fire.”

Both Ben and his injured co-worker staggered to a nearby puddle to put out the fire on their burning clothes while a supervisor rushed to the scene and got them in a company truck. Because cell phone reception was unavailable in the remote field, their boss didn’t wait for help and instead drove the hurt men toward Gillette as he simultaneously called for an ambulance. An EMT unit met them on the highway as they were heading to the local hospital.

“I was in shock after the explosion, and the only thing I felt was tingling in my hands like pins and needles. Then they sedated me and I really didn’t feel anything.”

Doctors in Wyoming stabilize Ben, then fly him to Denver burn unit for specialized care

Courtney got to the Campbell County Health hospital at about 2 p.m.

“I was scared to death,” she said. “The only thing I was thinking was ‘He just has to make it. He just has to get better.’ They told me it was really bad and that he needed to go to UCHealth.

I prepared myself for the worst.”

Ben was sedated and intubated in Wyoming, and after a few hours, he was airlifted to Denver International Airport, where a medical helicopter transported him to the UCHealth Burn Center. He arrived just before midnight. Courtney arrived soon after by car.

Burn center staff members quickly saw that Ben’s burns stretched over a quarter of his body, mainly on his chest and right arm, which had sustained the brunt of the explosion. Burn care nurses got to work immediately with wound care, placing him in a tub bed and gently stripping off the dead skin and then cleaning it.

“Like so many of our patients, there were a lot of hard days for Ben,” said ICU burn center nurse Andrea Balzis, who took care of Ben. “You have to remind them that they will get better, and that recovering from burns is sometimes one step forward and one step back. It can take years for a full recovery. This was just the beginning of a long journey for him, and part of our role is to ease patients like him into that.”

Burn care nurses play a special role as they deal with complicated and complex wounds. They provide immense comfort to their patients while also acknowledging that the treatment they are giving can be very painful.

“When I woke up the next day, I didn’t know the extent of my injuries. I still don’t remember a whole lot. I was so heavily sedated. There was just a lot of denial, and I felt like it was surreal. It was almost like it was a really bad dream, and I thought I was going to wake up and go to work again.”

Before undergoing surgery, Ben was tended to by burn care nurses who were instrumental to his recovery

During the next few days, there was a lot of music playing in Ben’s room. Burn nurses like to use a patient’s favorite tunes to try and distract them from their pain, which along with infection, are the top two nemesis for them.

Ben enjoyed several different types of musical genres playing during his treatments, with his favorite being country singer Zach Top.

One of the first things they did was perform an accurate count of his surface burns as compared with his entire skin surface. This is called TBSA, which stands for total body surface area.

The biggest part of their job entails daily wound care, or burn debridement, which is removal of dead or damaged tissue and debris from the wounds. Patients with large burns are placed in a tub with cool water during the treatment, and they can be moderately sedated to help manage pain.

Next, topical ointments and fluid-soaked gauzes are placed over the burns to protect them and prevent infection. The process is repeated once or more each day, with the dressings needing to be removed at the beginning of each session, which can take anywhere from a few minutes to several hours, depending upon the extent of a burn patient’s injuries.

“I know it’s the worst part of their day, so I can try to make them as comfortable as possible and make them laugh and distract them,” said burn care center nurse Marshana Coler.

She often dims the lights and puts on a filter that changes the sterile environment to one with an aurora borealis on the ceiling and walls to help create a more calming environment.

“We do all we can to take the time to make people feel comfortable, and yet we know sometimes they are still in pain.”

She said Ben was a “trooper” who excelled during his treatment with the support of his wife and family.

“Burn patients can feel very isolated, since their recovery can take such a long time. A serious burn can literally blow up their life and present challenging physical and mental dynamics. Every wound care can be a moment to cause PTSD, so we use consideration, compassion and humanity to make them feel human again.”

After his wounds had gone through four days of debridement, Ben would have his first surgery to try and repair the damage the explosion had wrought on his body.

Coincidentally, his surgeon, Wiktor, had recently worked with and educated the Gillette-area paramedics and hospital staff who cared for Ben before he was transported to UCHealth.

“We serve a huge area and do a lot of burn education outreach to ensure that referring hospitals have the support they need to take care of patients and stabilize them appropriately before they are sent to us,” said Wiktor, also an associate professor of surgery at the University of Colorado Anschutz School of Medicine.

“They did a great job with Ben,” he said.

Now it was his turn.

Ben receives cutting-edge surgical burn care to begin the healing process for his severely damaged skin 

The UCHealth Burn and Frostbite Center was established in 1976 and is one of 54 American Burn Association (ABA) verified locations in the country. It takes pride in using advanced technology, the latest wound care products and medical advancements in burn medicine to expedite healing, improve mobility and decrease pain for patients.

The center treated 650 inpatients last year and 3,500 outpatient visits with a multidisciplinary burn-specific team that includes surgeons, advanced practice providers, nurses, burn techs, social workers, psychiatrists, physical and occupational therapists, nutritionists, pharmacists and its own therapy gym to attend to the special needs of burn patients.

“It’s not only about saving lives but also giving patients as full and normal a life as possible when they are discharged from the hospital,” Wiktor said. “We provide care for every step of a burn patient’s journey to recovery.  It’s a tremendous team effort.”

Wiktor performed two surgeries on Ben. The first time was four days after his arrival when he put on a new type of biosynthetic wound matrix over his burns to help them heal, decrease the pain and improve the long-term mobility of his joints and limbs that had been affected.

By using these special types of wound dressings, Wiktor was able to decrease by half the size of what he would ultimately have to skin graft during Ben’s second surgery. A skin graft is when a surgeon takes healthy skin from one part of the patient’s body and transfers it to the site of the burn.

Ten days later, Wiktor performed the skin graft surgery, which involved harvesting healthy tissue from Ben’s right thigh and placing four skin strips onto burn wounds on his chest, arms and abdomen.

During the surgery, he also used an innovative “spray-on-skin” technology that decreased, again by another half, the amount of healthy skin grafts he needed to take from Ben’s leg. Called “epidermal autografting”, the procedure entailed using a small skin sample of Ben’s and then chemically and physically filtering out the keratinocytes, fibroblasts, and melanocytes, all which play critical roles in skin-tissue regeneration. Those end up in a solution that Wiktor sprayed over Ben’s burns.

Ben would end up leaving UCHealth nine days after his second surgery for a week at an out- patient facility for additional wound care assistance without having to go into an acute rehabilitation setting.

“From a historical perspective, eight years ago with the same injury he would have spent two months in the hospital and had three to four surgeries. Ben was able to discharge home in less than one month with only two surgeries, needing a fraction of skin grafts, and with much better outcomes,” Wiktor said.

But before Ben could go home, his burn care team had one additional and important goal for him to accomplish – marry Courtney in a hospital wedding which they would initiate and plan.

Ben and Courtney get married in the burn center three days after their original wedding date in a ceremony complete with cake, decorations and family

Ben and Courtney had planned on marrying Dec. 20 in Gillette with family members joining them for a nice dinner. With their wedding date fast approaching, Ben’s nurses started brainstorming. Why should Ben’s accident prevent the couple from exchanging vows?

“When the nurses found out we were supposed to be getting married, they asked us if we would like to go ahead and get married in the hospital. They were like, ‘There’s no better time than now.’ We had members from both our families there, so that’s how the idea started,” Courtney said.

Everyone in the burn unit assisted with the wedding, providing décor, refreshments, outfits and photos.

“I decorated the ICU conference room on the burn center with cut-out paper chains and streamers, and I used my best penmanship to write ‘Mr. and Mrs.’ and draw a heart on the white board there,” said Balzis. “We decorated everything and it was beautiful. We don’t always get positive situations here, so to be part of this was really uplifting.”

The hospital’s kitchen made some desserts. Another team member bought a cake from Cheesecake Factory and Courtney ran out to a local store to buy an inexpensive ring.

But what about Ben, since each finger on his left hand was individually wrapped in lots of bulky white cloth bandages? His physical therapist came to the rescue by using a 3-D printer to make a rubber ring that was large enough to fit over the dressings.

“It was so big it looked like the tire from a kid’s Lego set,” Ben said.

While marriage licenses can take up to two weeks to obtain, Ben’s cousin, who is a retired judge and performed the ceremony, was able to get a marriage license within 48 hours.

For their special day, staff made an exception in allowing Ben to have additional visitors. And on Dec.23, three days after their original wedding date, the couple exchanged their “I do’s” in front of family and his burn care team.

On their first night as a married couple, they watched Christmas movies from Ben’s hospital bed.

“Their love was really sweet,” Balzis said. “You could see it between them, and her caring for him the entire time was wonderful. The second they hugged I started tearing up. They were so young and beautiful.”

Balzis’ nursing colleague Coler agreed.

“To have a serious injury within weeks of getting married, that’s just something you don’t anticipate,” said Coler, who also stepped into the role of official wedding photographer using Courtney’s phone.

“But through it all, Ben really excelled during his treatments and sharing this moment with them and their family members. It was an honor to be a part of.  It was a good moment amid something terrible that had happened,” Coler said.

A new marriage, a new house and hope for a new life after gas explosion

In the future, Ben may need additional surgeries to break up the tough scar tissue that has grown over his skin grafts — a side effect for burn patients that his PT three times a week helps with as well.

He may need laser therapy too, to help his burn scars improve, and while he doesn’t yet have full mobility in his hands, he can make a fist as he continues to work on strength and stamina during his rehab.

In fact, his burns are mostly healed to the point that Courtney has handed off what little wound care is left to him, and a couple of bandages can take care of the job nicely.

“Certain movements are slower and while I have pain, it’s manageable pain,” he said, adding that he hopes to golf one day in the future.

“That’s the goal: to have him stretched out enough to get his swing back,” Courtney said.

The couple closed on a new house in Gillette the day after they returned home from Ben’s hospital stay on Jan. 9, and they are looking forward to a second wedding ceremony in the fall of 2027.

‘’We’ll take a real honeymoon then, and by that time, I’ll be allowed in the sun,” Ben said, adding that he must take extra precautions to protect his skin from the sun, especially where he has had skin grafts.

Courtney will make sure to protect her husband.

“I’ll see to it that he’ll be wearing lots of sunscreen, a hat and a long sleeve shirt. Until then, we’re taking a breath and learning that life is unpredictable. Right now, we’re both riding a wave of gratitude that is carrying us through.”