Courage Under Fire
With the diligent support of dedicated nurses, Phoenix Police Officer Jason Schechterle survives the pain and suffering of fourth-degree burns and brings inspiration to children coping with similar injuries

By Phil McPeck
August 13, 2003

There comes in every nurse's career a most unforgettable patient. Jason Schechterle is such a man. The Phoenix police officer came to the Arizona Burn Center on an ambulance gurney, more dead than alive. His arrival was announced by wailing sirens and flashing lights.

Schechterle had been buckled into his patrol car, responding to a call of unknown trouble the night of March 26, 2001, when his cruiser was slammed from behind by a speeding taxicab. The patrol car exploded into a ball of fire.

Providentially, a fire truck was at the same intersection, en route to the same call. But in the minutes it took firefighters and police officers to cut Schechterle from behind the wheel of his cruiser and pull him through the window, he had suffered fourth-degree burns to his neck, head and hands. His torso, arms and legs were seared, too.

Surgeons, who by published accounts doubted the wisdom of what they were doing, spent hours removing Schechterle's charred, dead skin. Layer by layer in the initial surgeries, they cut away his face in search of living tissue. No more eyelids, no cheeks, no nose, only a rough semblance of ears. In operation after operation, their scalpels and skin-grafting skills addressed burns over 40 percent of Schechterle's body. He ultimately would lose several fingers to the burns.

Schechterle has no memory of what happened, the crash or the fire, which he said is a good thing.

The biggest question

For more than 10 weeks, he lay in a drug-induced coma. The biggest question, as with all sedated burn patients, was, "When is he going to wake up?" said Kevin Marugaki, RN, of the burn center's intensive care unit. Schechterle's wife, Suzie, wanted an answer, and so did a brotherhood of worried police officers.

"You kind of have to remind them that this is very normal and reassure them that things are progressing the way they should when they are," Marugaki said.

Schechterle was a "one-on-one" in the early going in intensive care. He was Marugaki's only patient in shifts of repeated head-to-toe assessments, constant monitoring of systems function and pain management. Dressing changes typically ran upward of two hours and sometimes three. Bed turns required all of Marugaki's muscle.

"The Jason I had was unresponsive, so I never had a chance to hear his voice or get a view of his personality," Marugaki said.

But it was evident that the officer was not a typical patient in the hearts and minds of Phoenix residents.

"This guy was on the news, sometimes daily. He got a lot of publicity here," Marugaki said. "You've just got to shut that out and stick to what's going on in the room. He can't tell you when he's in pain, so you have to use your nursing judgment," gauging physical distress by variations in blood pressure, heart rate and respiratory status.

"The acuity just kind of comes with burn," said Marugaki, 29, who plans to strengthen his cardiac experience, but considers burn treatment to be his specialty. Integral to his practice is supporting and educating families with "Just the facts: What they need to know, what they can expect and possibilities. I don't deceive them in any way," he said.

Marugaki characterized his nursing as straightforward. No bonds beyond the nurse-client relationship. "My work stays at work," he said.

Nonetheless, he came to know Schechterle through post-discharge visits as "a very nice guy, very appreciative of what we've done. A really good guy."

A special relationship

Discharge was still months away when Schechterle was moved from intensive care. At hand, though, was the beginning of an enduring patient-nurse relationship with Sara Barron, an LPN. As a registry nurse, she had worked throughout Maricopa Medical Center. But she chose its Arizona Burn Center as a steady home when she began school full time to pursue an associate's degree and her RN license. "I knew I could get the best skills and get good training," she said of the burn center's team approach to care.

Besides physicians and other nurses, patient care incorporates physical and occupational therapists, social workers, psychologists, nutrition and pharmacy consultants, respiratory therapists, chaplains and volunteers.

As an RN since November, Barron has moved up to care for critically ill burn patients and said she plans to pursue a bachelor's degree and possibly a master's degree when her young daughter is older.

Schechterle was an education in himself. He characterized himself as a "baptism by fire" for Barron, then 21 years old. "I know she was very young and she was deeply impacted by me as her patient, as well as I was impacted by her. Now we've become lifelong friends."

He was no stranger to nurses. A year of patrolling the streets of Phoenix often took him to emergency rooms, where he witnessed the compassion of RNs. Barron reinforced his respect, admiration and understanding of the value of a good nurse and good care, he said. "I was seeing it from a different perspective. Witnessing it as a police officer is one thing; as a patient, she really drove home the power that they have over your entire recovery process."

His eyes and ears

Barron was Schechterle's everything. His eyes in the first few weeks out of the drug-induced coma remained sewed shut to protect them. "It was very scary for him to hear the door open and close and not know who was coming in and out of the room," Barron said. But the sound of the door and her voice at the beginning of her 7 a.m.-to-7:30 p.m. shifts came to mark each seemingly interminable day of recovery.

The week before he was moved to the burn center's medical unit, Schechterle was able to speak. Barron said they spent a lot of time talking, she trying to explain what had happened to him. "He had no concept of his injuries because he couldn't see himself," she said.

She changed his dressings, bathed, fed and dressed him, while also being assigned one or two other patients. After a couple of busy weeks as Schechterle's eyes and his narrow window to the tragic night he doesn't remember, Barron said she began to realize that "Jason is the most amazing man I have met. He is very humbling. He is very caring. And he is the reason that he is here.

"I think the biggest thing I always told him was that he is here for a reason," she said. "There is a purpose that he lived and survived the unsurvivable. He needs to remember that every day. He had this traumatic injury, but he can overcome it and better other people from this tragedy."

Schechterle said Barron took time with him, making him feel like a normal person and not just a patient in a bed.

Barron said they talked about attending Camp Courage together, a children's burn camp underwritten by the nonprofit Foundation for Burns & Trauma. Camp was not possible the first year after his injury, but last June they did attend together, in Prescott, where the Arizona daytime temperatures are cooler and more comfortable for burn patients. Schechterle shared his accident and recovery with young burn survivors who gathered for a week of fellowship and to deal with life-altering disfigurements.

"It wasn't the severity of Jason's burns that scared me," Barron said. "It was the stigma that would follow him that scared me."

When he finally was able to see himself in a mirror, Barron's patient stood face to featureless face with a stranger. The heart of a husband, father of two children and a police officer beat inside him. Outwardly, though, he was not himself.

Just before Memorial Day this year, Schechterle was undergoing yet more reconstructive surgery on his nose and ears at the Virginia G. Piper Cancer Center in suburban Scottsdale. Barron said her relationship with Suzie developed as mutual support and quickly blossomed into personal friendship. Their daughters are playmates.

"I kind of reassured her day-to-day that everything was continuing to be OK," Barron said. "She felt comfortable enough when I was here that she could go out and do stuff and be with the kids and not be right at his bedside."

And, Barron said, "She kind of reassured me that everything that I was doing was helping her."

The impulse to help too much

Slowly, the willfulness that saw Schechterle through death-defying surgeries also allowed him to do more and more for himself. "There are still some things he can't do, but mostly he does everything himself," Barron said.

He resumed his police career as a public information officer in November.

As a caregiver, patient advocate and friend, Barron said that to this day she has to resist the impulse to step in when she sees Schechterle struggling with tasks.

"There are lots of little things that I still think about and laugh about now," she said. But in separate interviews, both she and Schechterle recalled the importance of a burrito in their relationship.

"We have these health shakes that the docs all want the patients to drink," Barron said. "One night I said, 'Jas, just please try it.' "

"I'd lost about 60 pounds," Schechterle said, but "they were just terrible drinks. God, they tasted so bad. I remember one day I told Sara, 'I'm not drinking that stuff anymore. Please don't force me to.' I think she understood.

"The next thing I knew, she had gone out of the hospital and bought me a big burrito and was spoon-feeding it to me. I'll never forget that. I don't know if that's something [the medical staff] would have encouraged her to do, but I thought it was awesome. It meant a lot to me," he said.

"He was in heaven eating that burrito," Barron said.

Her voice betrays the emotion of the day in Schechterle's care that meant the most to her. "The biggest thing was seeing him the morning that he left," she said.

Schechterle admitted that for all he had faced, and continues to face in rehabilitation and as a public figure, "I was very scared to leave county hospital. I'd been there for five months. I was a very different person, very limited in my abilities. I was comfortable at county."

On Schechterle's last morning there, Barron said, "He told me, 'Sara, they brought me in here on a stretcher, but if they think I'm leaving on one, they're crazy. I'm going to walk out of here.' "

Suzie brought street clothes, and he put them on, Barron said. "His partner, Bryan Chapman, and one of his good friends, Shayne [Tuchfarber], were in full police uniform on either side of him and escorted him out of here. He walked all the way out of the center, all the way out of the hospital to the front of the trauma bay, and got on a stretcher and went to rehab.

"I was able to ride with him in the back of the ambulance," Barron said. It was staffed by the same firefighters who had pulled Schechterle from his burning car. "They came back and transported him to rehab."

"She got me situated in my room and tucked into bed," Schechterle said.

Contact Phil McPeck at getpjm@aol.com