Gas explosion victim learning to live after brushing with death

Ben D’Ath’s arms tell a story of survival.

They are discolored by skin grafts and severe burns, but they were also the only way his parents were able to identify him when they rushed him out of a rescue helicopter, unconscious.

In December, 28 percent of Ben’s body was burned in a gas explosion at his home.

With the help of his neighbor he managed to escape and was in critical condition at the Taranaki Base Hospital. He was then flown to Waikato and placed in an induced coma for what was expected to be six weeks of recovery.

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Somehow after only 10 days he was awake and last month they took him back to the hospital in New Plymouth.

For the past two weeks he has been home, still recovering but relieved to be out of the hospital bed.

“Mentally, it is quite difficult,” says the 26-year-old. “But I really feel lucky, overwhelmed by the support.”

That he’s even here is an unlikely survival story.

On December 29, Ben, his girlfriend Leticia Nixon, and their downstairs neighbor Kerry Roach were preparing for the night when their lives changed forever.

At around 10:30 p.m., Ben was caught in flames after he set off a gas explosion by lighting a candle in the bedroom of his 120-year-old rented cabin in New Plymouth.

The house caught fire in an inferno that could be seen throughout the city.

Now, back home to her parents, Taranaki’s photographer and videographer’s face is bright pink from burns.

He moves his hands gingerly, the skin taut from the skin grafts that extend past the elbows on both arms.

Ben’s back was the most severely burned part of his body. He still has bandages over the wounds on his shoulder blades. It is still causing you pain.

“I remember everything that happened and that they took me to the hospital,” he says. “But I don’t remember three weeks.”

And for that, and for the weeks that followed, as he lay helpless in bed, he has a debt that he wonders if he will ever be able to pay.

He saw his family and friends grapple with the trauma acquired by being next to his bed during his ordeal, he says.

“It’s been a pretty rough few months,” said Ben’s mother, Kathy D’Ath.

Kathy and her husband Rene were in Kinloch, near Taupō, on vacation when they received a phone call from the police.

“They said there was a gas explosion and Ben was badly burned,” says Kathy. “It’s probably the second worst phone call a parent can get.”

They reached Hamilton 20 minutes before the Taranaki rescue helicopter made it to Ben.

“They asked us to identify him, that was quite difficult.”

Ben’s face was puffy, his eyes were closed, and they were tattoos on his bare arm from which they recognized him, he says.

They spent the next five and a half weeks there next to Ben.

“We just sat down with him,” says Kathy. “We didn’t know what to expect.”

She is in awe of how far Ben has come and that he is now home with them, but knows that the road to recovery will not be easy.

“Dealing with the whole thing is huge and will continue for months and years.”

On the day of the explosion, Ben had been in and out of the house several times, but he only smelled gas on the street once.

He says he couldn’t smell anything when he and Nixon got home from dinner and got ready for bed.

“Actually, it was just another night,” says Ben.

It was a nighttime tradition for the couple to light a candle and, at 10:30 p.m., that’s what they did.

“It was just instantaneous. As fast as the lighter went, the whole room went up. “

His face and arms were burned by flames down to the line of his shirt, and his back caught fire.

He tried to open the front door, which was just outside the bedroom, but couldn’t, and he remembers running to the balcony. He was seriously injured, but says he didn’t feel any pain.

“We were just standing there, scared to have to jump for a while, then he went up the ladder.”

The downstairs neighbor, Roach, had been thrown back onto his couch by the blast, the roof crane falling around him before his house was also filled with flames.

When she heard screams, she spotted Ben and Nixon on the upstairs balcony and ran to find a wooden ladder, which was nearby while renovations were being done on the cabin.

Ben remembers standing on the street with Nixon before a neighbor called them and put him in a cold shower.

When the paramedics arrived, they told Ben that he would have to go to the Waikato hospital.

“I said ‘what do you mean I’m fine.’

It wasn’t until he got out of the cold shower and got on a gurney to go to the hospital that he felt pain.

“That’s a bit blurry.”

He doesn’t recall waking up from the coma, but his first memory was that Nixon and one of his friends came to visit.

You don’t remember what they told you or how you felt. He only knows they were there.

During his time in Waikato, he underwent multiple skin graft surgeries, one of which took six hours and the other had a hilarious result.

Ben got the names of his friends tattooed on his thigh at 16, now, due to the grafts, those names are on his arms.

Ben has returned to the house and examined his charred remains.

“That was good for me, it was a good closing,” he says. “It’s not that he’s chasing me, it’s the hospital.”

Her life is full of therapies and appointments with doctors and specialists.

He will go to Waikato Hospital for a follow-up next week, where he will meet the surgeon who operated on him, as well as the nurses, and they will show him the parts of the hospital that he does not remember.

Ben hopes it will help him come to terms with what happened.

Now all he wants is to get back to working with a camera, which thankfully he can still do, albeit more slowly than he was used to.

“I feel pretty good considering.”