Burn Survivor Terry McCarty Becomes a Firefighter (Full Transcript)

[00:00:00] Speaker 1: This burn survivor faced his fears to become a firefighter himself.

[00:00:04] Speaker 2: That first fire really kind of gave me a lot of throwbacks to when my accident happened.

[00:00:10] Speaker 1: When Terry McCarty was just six years old, an accident caused burns over 73% of his body after his brothers lit a bowl of kerosene on fire.

[00:00:18] Speaker 2: So the full bowl of flaming kerosene flew at me. It hit me in the chest and effectively caught me on fire. The neighbor came home, saw what was happening. He grabbed his sleeping bag that he had in his car, came over and tackled me and put me out.

[00:00:34] Speaker 1: What followed was a long physical and emotional road to recovery.

[00:00:38] Speaker 2: I would have 58 surgeries over a period of 10 years. It was really difficult because I'd missed a lot of school due to the surgeries and then also didn't have very good friend support because, you know, I wasn't constantly at school going to things like that.

[00:00:55] Speaker 1: Even as an adult, McCarty found employers unwilling to give him a fair chance.

[00:00:59] Speaker 2: I tried to get a job as an oil technician and the manager that was on duty that day told me that I would be a liability, that I wouldn't be able to go work for him. So that's why I went out and decided, what's the one thing I can do that would just stop everybody in their tracks?

[00:01:15] Speaker 1: This photo of McCarty captures the moment his training as a volunteer firefighter became deeply personal.

[00:01:20] Speaker 2: When the fire reached me in the training and it kind of went over me, it took any kind of remaining fear issues or anything like that that I really had with it.

[00:01:30] Speaker 1: Today, McCarty volunteers at the same camp for child burn victims that he attended, and he has transitioned to work in peer mental health counseling.

[00:01:37] Speaker 2: When people happen to have that same kind of internal trauma and they see me, you know, that really breaks down a lot of barriers for people to understand that, you know, I've been through some things myself. My job is to really just connect with people and help them realize that, you know, in their journey of healing, really they are in the captain's seat for this process. I'm just a navigator.