BY SHERRY CONOHAN
Staff Writer
CHRIS KELLY staff Above, fire inspector Rich DeFazio shows kindergartners at the Vetter School, Eatontown, the types of firefighting apparatus that equip a firetruck. At right, students man the fire hose during a demonstration presented by the borough’s Fire Department on Oct. 6. EATONTOWN — On Christmas Eve 2002, life changed forever for Pat Roof, her husband, Neil, and their two daughters, Moriah, who was on the verge of turning 2, and Mikaela, who was 51/2.
Pat Roof explained she had just arrived home from work at Earth Treasures, a jewelry store in the Office Max shopping center across Route 36 from Monmouth Mall, and her husband was making some hot chocolate for their older daughter, Mikaela. He had just poured a cup of hot chocolate when he pivoted around to answer a question from Mikaela.
Pat Roof said that in that instant, Moriah came up behind him and grabbed for the cup of hot chocolate. The hot liquid spilled down over her daughter’s face, neck and chest, scalding her severely and sending her to the hospital for weeks, and setting her up for plastic surgery operations still to come to reverse the scars she has incurred.
“When you’re in the kitchen, please be careful,” she admonished students in a fire prevention assembly at the Vetter School on Grant Avenue last Friday. “I don’t want to see any of you suffer like she has suffered.”
Roof, aware that too much information could upset younger children, adjusted her comments over a series of assemblies during the day to the age level of the classes participating.
She spoke during a series of programs on fire prevention put on throughout the day by Brian Denegar, second assistant fire chief in Eatontown and the borough’s fire educator.
Roof, who lives in West Long Branch but works in Eatontown, said in an interview that her mission is to educate parents on what to do if such a dreadful household accident should befall them and their family.
“People don’t know how to react,” she said. “I grabbed her and ran upstairs to put her in the bathtub. That was the worse thing I could do; her skin stuck to her sweatshirt.”
Roof explained that to console her crying daughter, she clutched the girl close to her body, which insulated the burn and made her skin stick to the sweatshirt.
Once she got Moriah into the dry bathtub, the child started to wipe her face, and layers and layers of skin came off, so, Roof said, she was afraid to turn on the water for fear that more skin would come off.
She said she then held her daughter with the burned front of her body facing outward, while waiting for the ambulance.
“What I should have done is, when we were in the kitchen, I should have taken her to the sink and hosed her down immediately,” she said.
“And I should have run the water in the bathtub.
“You don’t know it’s going to happen to you until it’s too late.
“All of our lives changed instantly,” she said.
Roof said she screamed at her husband to call 911, and the ambulance took her child to Monmouth Medical Center in Long Branch. But the doctors took one look at her and directed that she be whisked away to the burn center at St. Barnabas Hospital in Livingston, where she was kept in intensive care for three weeks.
After a couple of days in the step-down unit, Roof said, Moriah was allowed to come home, but she had to return to the hospital every other day to have her wounds cleaned and the bandages changed.
When Moriah saw the doctors and nurses coming, she threw up, Roof said.
“It took three months for the burns to close,” Roof reported. “She walked around all wrapped up. It was a painful experience. She got so scared that she was throwing up three and four times a day. She lost 10 percent of her body weight. It took a year for her to gain that weight back.”
She said her daughter had third-degree burns on 18 to 20 percent of her body.
Roof said Moriah wears a pressure garment called a “Jobe” around her face and neck today to reduce the keloid scars, which are very big and puffed up but can be reduced by this treatment.
“Her face has healed nicely,” she said. “She has rosy red cheeks, but you wouldn’t know they are burns.”
Roof said that through friends she was put in touch with the Shriners Hospital for Children in Boston, which eventually will perform plastic surgery on Moriah at no charge. She said it is one of four specialty hospitals for pediatric burns among the 22 hospitals for children operated by the Shriners. The other hospitals are in Cincinnati; Galveston, Texas; and Sacramento, Calif.
“She has to wait for the burns to mature before they will start plastic surgery,” she explained. “We go there every six months to see if she’s ready.”
“She will be left with a lifelong scar,” Roof said of her daughter. “We can lessen it, but we can never get rid of it.”
When she spoke to the children, Roof told them, “A lot of people don’t realize you can be severely burned in your home without a fire.” She said that scald burns are not caused by live fire, but by a hot liquid. A contact burn, she added, is when you touch an iron or a hot pan.
Roof told the students that children should not be running around and playing in the kitchen, particularly when cooking is going on.
“Don’t stand on a chair to look at what’s cooking. It’s too dangerous,” she said, adding, “If you play in the kitchen, you can trip on wires [to appliances] and bring hot food down on you.”
She also urged them not to use a microwave without adult supervision, and to ask their parents at what temperature level their hot water heater is set. She said it should be no higher than 120 degrees.
“If it’s set at 140 degrees, you can get third-degree burns” from the hot water, she cautioned.
When asked by Denegar what telephone number they should call in the case of an emergency, be it a fire or burn, the children nearly unanimously responded with a loud “911.”
The children were shown a film that advised them to get out of the house in the case of a fire before calling for help, and were shown, with the help of a demonstration by firefighter Brian Sanders, the gear a fireman wears.
Denegar encouraged the students to ask their parents to check the smoke detectors in their homes. If they don’t have one, he said, they should tell the school principal, Antoni Mrozinski, and he will give them one.
“That’s the most important thing you can have in your home today,” he added.
Denegar sent the children home with two pieces of literature from Roof — one with the story on her child’s ordeal and the other with safety tips on scalds and burns.
Roof said in the interview that she still has guilt because she wasn’t educated about how to react to the burn her child suffered and the severity of what a cup of hot liquid can do.
In the United States, she said, approximately 2.4 million burn injuries are reported each year with at least 200,000 children being hospitalized from them.
The materials Roof distributes includes these instructions from the American Burn Association on what to do when a burn occurs: Remove all diapers and clothing from around the burn area, and run cool — not cold — water over the burn area for a few minutes. The material also lists these “do nots”: do not apply ice to the burn, since ice can make the burn worse; do not apply creams, ointments or salves; and do not break any blisters until seen by a physician.
“People said, ‘I didn’t think a cup of hot chocolate could do such damage,’ ” Roof said.