A musical message restores a burn patient’s hope

It’s hard to imagine much that would be worse than suffering severe burns and undergoing multiple surgeries and a long, painful hospital stay to recover from them.

Except maybe experiencing that far from home, far from nearly all your family and in a country that’s not your own, where you need interpreters to help you understand what doctors and providers are saying about your care.

But that’s exactly what a patient of UCHealth University of Colorado Hospital burn technician Marysela Vigil experienced after he was severely burned on the job. After more than six weeks in the burn unit, enduring several skin grafts and surgeries, only to then have to battle infection, the middle-aged man had become lonely and discouraged.

“He seemed so depressed. And he was not advocating for himself,” Vigil said when interpreters came to share his concerns and wishes with caregivers. He was becoming passive regarding his recovery.

Vigil has worked in the burn unit for three years, starting as a unit clerk. Now, as a burn technician, she said it’s rewarding caring for patients, seeing them progress, heal and eventually leave the hospital. Most of them, though, have family and friends to help them through the ordeal. She couldn’t help but imagine a member of her own family in the man’s place, with almost no family or familiar faces around to keep him company.

As a burn tech, Vigil’s job entails bathing patients and then removing their dressing, cleaning the wound and re-applying the dressing. Medications reduce discomfort, but it’s still a long and painful process, and one they must endure every day. To help take their minds off the process and relax them, caregivers let the patients choose music to listen to. One of the bands her patient often wanted to listen to, La Maquinaria Norteña, was one Vigil had a connection to.

So, using that connection, Vigil arranged for the band to record a special video for her patient, and they even included a personal message, telling him that while he was in a tough spot now, he must keep fighting and he’d get through it.

The video arrived just in time for the man’s birthday. But Vigil didn’t stop there. She reserved a conference room and filled it with Feliz Cumpleaños banners – happy birthday in the patient’s native Spanish — and recruited other burn unit staff to join in throwing him a birthday celebration.

As burn unit caregivers sang to him and played the video with the message from his favorite band, Vigil saw tears in the patient’s eyes. And then, “He smiled for the first time since he’d been here.”

Not long afterward, he recovered enough to go home.